Wisconsin has quietly emerged as the latest front in the national redistricting fight — and a never-before-used legal process seems likely to determine the state’s congressional lines in the midterm election.
The saga unfolding in the critical Midwestern battleground has the potential to put more districts in play for Democrats ahead of next year’s midterms. But unlike in other states that have redrawn their congressional maps mid-decade in recent months, the push toward a new map in Wisconsin is now hinging on a little-known law the GOP-controlled state Legislature enacted 14 years ago.
Days before Thanksgiving, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a pair of three-judge panels to oversee two lawsuits that allege that the state’s current congressional map is unconstitutional and seek a redraw. Both panels will meet for the first time Friday for initial hearings.
And Friday’s opening moves are only the latest steps in a long, complex path.
Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a pair of suits seeking a redraw of the state’s eight congressional districts — the second time in as many years that the court had dismissed such an effort.
Those decisions sparked surprise among many court-watchers in the state. Liberals had regained their majority on the technically nonpartisan bench in an expensive and headline-making election in 2023 and retained the majority in an even more expensive 2025 race. Many Democrats believed that it was only a matter of time before the high court’s liberal majority allowed a redistricting case against the state’s maps to move forward.
But, in July, just two weeks after the state Supreme Court’s most recent rejection of the redistricting case, two parties filed fresh cases in Dane County Circuit Court — a lower state court — making the same arguments about the maps. Those cases effectively triggered a process created by state Republicans and signed into law by then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2011, which requires the state Supreme Court to appoint a judicial panel to hear cases related to redistricting.
In an 5-2 order issued Nov. 25, the state Supreme Court explained that it had utilized that process and assembled two panels — one to hear each congressional redistricting case. One conservative justice joined the court’s four liberals, touching off an unprecedented undertaking in the purple state.
In interviews with NBC News, nonpartisan experts on Wisconsin law and legal processes explained that even though the process hadn’t been used before in Wisconsin, the notion of a panel of three judges drawn from different courts convening over a redistricting case wasn’t unusual. In fact, it was modeled after federal statues requiring that a similar panel be arranged to hear most redistricting cases.
“Yes, it’s the first time a three-judge panel for a redistricting action has happened in Wisconsin state court. But a three-judge panel for redistricting challenges or Voting Rights Act challenges are what happens in federal court,” said Bree Grossi Wilde, the executive director of the nonpartisan State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “This is how redistricting battles played out in federal court.”
Grossi Wilde said that while she expected political criticism to mount, she emphasized that the process itself is not a novel solution created by a liberal-controlled Supreme Court.
“This isn’t a procedure that the [state] Supreme Court crafted to meet this particular moment,” she said. “This is a legislative procedure that the Supreme Court is required to follow.”
However, the process, the venue for the cases, and the accelerated timeline for review of these cases has led many court-watchers in Wisconsin to believe that there’s a high chance the state could have new maps in place before the midterms — and that they’d be all but certain to advantage Democrats compared to the current map, in which Republicans currently hold six of eight seats.
But it still might be difficult to do in the allotted time: The filing window in Wisconsin for candidates running for Congress and other offices opens in April, with a June 1 deadline.
“If you look at the judges on these panels, where they come from, who appointed them, it’s a biased panel. Call a spade a spade,” said Brandon Scholz, an independent political strategist in Wisconsin. “This is a partisan, political move by what’s supposed to be a nonpartisan court. It really seems like a push to have two partisan panels in place to determine redistricting on a congressional level.”
One of the panels comprises three judges who all endorsed liberal Supreme Court Judge Susan Crawford during her campaign earlier this year. The other panel had two judges who endorsed Crawford.
The process has already faced criticism from conservatives on the state Supreme Court and Republicans throughout the state. The court’s two conservative justices who opposed implementing the process in the latest order blasted the use of the panels in blistering opinions, specifically slamming their counterparts on the bench for picking the judges on them.
“Today, my colleagues — disregarding the United States Constitution, the Wisconsin Constitution, and fundamental legal principles — approve a collateral attack of our court’s decision by a panel of circuit court judges, unsupported in the law,” conservative Justice Annette Ziegler wrote in an opinion.
“Handpicking circuit court judges to perform political maneuvering is unimaginable,” she added. “Yet, my colleagues persist and appear to do this, all in furtherance of delivering partisan, political advantage to the Democratic Party.”
Elected Republicans have criticized the court decision, too.
“These folks care about one thing: power,” GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden, whose 3rd District would likely be affected in a new map, posted on X after the ruling.
In a statement to NBC News, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Devin Remiker accused the GOP of “throwing a temper tantrum because they lost their state Supreme Court majority, which had been vital in rigging the rules in the Republicans’ favor.”
“Now, Wisconsin Republicans are being forced to play in a far more fair and impartial system where they don’t have a judiciary to stack the deck for their candidates,” Remiker said.
Attorneys challenging the current congressional map in one of the cases said that it was a normal legal course to try a suit with a lower court after being rejected by a state Supreme Court.
“We followed the normal course — which is to bring a regular lawsuit in the lower court which is how often lawsuits typically proceed,” said Abha Khanna, an attorney with Democratic-aligned firm Elias Law Group, which filed one of the cases before a panel.
But many political figures in the state see the current process as a counter to Republican efforts in states like Texas to gain seats in their own redistricting fights ahead of 2026.
“There is a rush to change Wisconsin’s lines,” Scholz said. “And it’s because this has become a national story — everyone got all jazzed up over the summer. And the truth is there is a real opportunity for Democrats and for the liberals on the court, to possibly change those lines. So this is where we are.”