Here & Now

Noon Wednesday with guest Hayley Sperling

Marisa Wojcik:
Welcome back to Noon Wednesday in 2019. I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia journalist with Here & Now on Wisconsin Public Television. So looking back at 2018, many hailed that year as the “Year of the Woman” when it came to electing women into office. But Wisconsin’s numbers fell behind, and joining us to talk about her reporting on kind of analyzing some of these numbers from our partners at WisContext is Hayley Sperling. Hayley, thanks so much for being here.

Hayley Sperling:
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Marisa Wojcik:
So to start, I thought it was interesting 1992 was also deemed the “Year of the Woman.” Did that year live up to its title more than 2018?

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, so a lot of big media organizations, national and local, have been hailing 2018 as the second coming of the “Year of the Woman.” In some places that is true, and in some cases there have been a lot of historic firsts happening, especially at the national level. But in Wisconsin, that really just wasn’t the case. We saw an uptick kind of in the number of women that were elected into office over this cycle, but it wasn’t a record-breaking year for us. It wasn’t really a historic year. The newly-elected class of state legislators will be comprised of about 27% women, but this is in fact lower than our historic years, which held at least 28% of women in the state legislature. So in Wisconsin, unfortunately, no, it wasn’t really the “Year of the Woman.”

Marisa Wojcik:
So, yeah, your reporting said that kind of we average hovering around a quarter of the seats, and a high of 28% from ’89 to ’90 and from 2003 to 2004. Do we know if there was anything to attribute to that or is it just kind of it happened that way?

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of factors that come into it when it comes to elections as a whole, and then again when it comes to electing women. It goes back to party divergences. It goes back to who is in control of drawing the election maps, and who the incumbents are. So a lot of the time, people tend to continue electing incumbent legislators, and in the past this has been men and it continues to be men. And now that more women have been running, the trend is upward but it’s still hovering around this same area where it’s been for the last 30 years.

Marisa Wojcik:
Yeah, so it’s been stagnant. It hasn’t really expanded very much.

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, definitely. And even back into the earlier years of the 1980s, which is basically as far as we went back in my reporting, there wasn’t really even a huge difference between the number of women that were being elected or brought into office by Republicans or Democrats, but that shift kind of came about after the first “Year of the Woman,” when Democrats started increasingly sending more women into office and trying to actually make that a priority for their party, whereas Republicans have still been in that pattern of stagnation, and not much has changed on that end for their party over the last 30 years.

Marisa Wojcik:
And so is that the definition of partisan gender divergence?

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, so that’s really what it comes down to. Now, I mean in this legislator’s makeup for 2019, 2020, the Democrats will in the Senate be almost at 50% women and then still at 50% women in the House. So you can see them making these gains and making these upward trends, whereas Republicans, only two out of 19 state senators will be women. And so this trend is still continuing. But again, that comes down to a variety of factors. And one of those being that there aren’t a lot of statewide organizations that are around to help elect Republican women. There are many more that do, their mission is to help left-leaning women get into office. So one of the groups that I talked to was Emerge Wisconsin, which is a national organization but also has an office in Wisconsin, and their goal is to help get Democratic women into office. And one of the familiar faces off of that organization is Sarah Godlewski, who ran a successful campaign for state treasurer in 2018. But it’s important to note that nothing really exists on the Republican side, at least in Wisconsin, on that end.

Marisa Wojcik:
And even though Democrats in Wisconsin had more women running for office, that didn’t necessarily mean that they had the same proportion winning those seats. And Democrats still only picked up one seat, right?

Hayley Sperling:
Right, yeah. So Democrats only picked up one seat in this last election cycle, and it’s interesting to see because 50-something women ran as Democrats in the past election, but barely more than half of them were actually successful in their runs, whereas there were far fewer Republican candidates, there were only 12 Republican women running for state office, but 11 out of those 12 were successful in their bids for candidacy. So it’s interesting to see–

Marisa Wojcik:
It’s super interesting.

Hayley Sperling:
The breakdown, yeah.

Marisa Wojcik:
Yeah, yeah. So they, does that get into the logic behind, so you spoke with UW Political Science Professor Barry Burden, and he talked about some of this is attributed to our legislative maps being gerrymandered. Is that a good kind of piece of evidence to point to?

Hayley Sperling:
Right. I think that definitely is a factor in this situation, and looking at these election results, you kind of get to see the results of what happens when the maps are drawn by certain parties. So in Wisconsin’s case, obviously the maps have been drawn by Republicans, and we can see that Republican women, despite the fact that not very many of them ran, still came out on top when it comes down to it. In states like Illinois, where the maps have been drawn by Democrats, many more Democratic women came out on top. And in states like Ill – not Illinois, Iowa rather, where the electoral maps are drawn by a nonpartisan organization, things were much more evenly split. So making these comparisons, you can kind of draw conclusions by what you’re finding. But again, there are so many factors that go into basically everything that happens with elections.

Marisa Wojcik:
So you did try to reach out to both the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the Republican Party of Wisconsin to kind of see what the response is. What did they tell you?

Hayley Sperling:
So Democrats were really excited to talk about the female candidates that they’ve run and excited to talk about them reaching parity in the state legislature. But I unfortunately wasn’t able to hear back from the Republican Party. But it is important to note that there have been multiple very high level Republican women running for office and who have successfully held office. Rebecca Kleefisch is one, who served as lieutenant governor to Scott Walker. And then in this last election cycle, Leah Vukmir who ran against Tammy Baldwin, that was a pretty competitive race as well. So it’s not to say that, again, Republican women aren’t running or aren’t being valued, it’s just not necessarily at a louder rate than the Democratic women are.

Marisa Wojcik:
So you did an analysis where you looked at Midwestern states near Wisconsin. And Wisconsin was at the bottom of the rankings when it came to electing women?

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, when it comes to this year’s state legislature breakdown, Wisconsin is at the bottom of the pack. So what we did was look at Wisconsin’s state legislative breakdown and then we also looked at Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa, just to get a sampling of our neighboring states. And we did take into account that some state legislatures are much larger than Wisconsin’s is. Minnesota and Illinois and Michigan are both much larger than Wisconsin’s, but when it comes down to the percentages, even balancing everything out, yeah, Wisconsin still came in at the bottom of the pack where Michigan was much higher up and even that is one of the most, or has been called one of the most gerrymandered states in the US. So it’s interesting again to make those comparisons and see where Wisconsin falls compared to its neighbors and even compared nationally, where the average statehouse holds about 28, 29% women. Wisconsin is again much lower.

Marisa Wojcik:
I think your reporting said about 23 or 24, 23% for Wisconsin. Michigan was 36%. Do we know what can be attributed to that? Did they have a huge push for electing women there? Do we know what was happening in Michigan?

Hayley Sperling:
You know, that is a really interesting question. I’m not quite sure if there was a much bigger incentive for women to run or if the party was just looking to run and elect more female candidates, but again, it just comes down to the matter of who’s advocating for who and what resources are at hand and available for candidates in each state. And some have more than others and some have maps to their advantage where others don’t.

Marisa Wojcik:
And gerrymandering is still very much a hot button issue in Wisconsin. And again, Barry Burden said that even if Wisconsin was to redraw its maps, it would be difficult to redraw them in a way that would promote electing more women. Why is that?

Hayley Sperling:
So even if – the thing it comes down to is that women are typically more likely to run as Democratic candidates, and right now, the maps are drawn in favor of the Republican Party. But what Professor Burden was saying was that even if the Democrats were able to take control and redraw Wisconsin’s electoral maps, they still wouldn’t necessarily have as big of an advantage as Republicans do right now, because Democratic voters are so often very concentrated in urban areas. So you look at the big concentrations in Madison, Milwaukee, and Eau Claire, but that’s not necessarily the case with the Republican Party, where their voters are spread out more evenly among suburban districts. So–

Marisa Wojcik:
And rural?

Hayley Sperling:
And rural, definitely. So it’s much easier for them to be able to draw maps that give them more of an advantage over the Democrats. And again, even if Democrats could draw the maps, they wouldn’t have as big of a head start as the Republicans do. But it’s interesting to see like in a state in Minnesota, their elections really prove that the Democratic vote was possibly spreading out beyond these urban areas. There was a lot of turnover, and with Minnesota’s House seats especially, where they flipped a lot of suburban districts that were red to blue.

Marisa Wojcik:
And that was another thing Burden referenced, is that in order for more women to be elected, and you mentioned this earlier, more incumbents have to kind of give up their seats and there needs to be more turnover, just because if the trend is more males and they keep getting reelected, then they will continue to shut out women.

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, if things don’t change, history will repeat itself and these candidates will keep getting elected. And there’s nothing wrong with electing incumbents, but when people don’t necessarily step aside, there’s no room for these newcomers, it’s harder for women to run, again, and it’s really hard for people to be a newcomer, be a female newcomer politician and face these incumbents who have been in office for potentially decades.

Marisa Wojcik:
Well Hayley, thanks so much, this is super interesting. I really appreciate you telling us more about it.

Hayley Sperling:
Yeah, definitely.

Marisa Wojcik:
If you want to read her whole story and see all of the stats and tons of amazing bar graphs and charts, go to WisContext.org. And for more from Here & Now and Wisconsin Public Television, visit wpt.org, and thanks so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.