Chris Larson

Wisconsin had an anti-red wave last month, but no one has told the Republican state legislature. Democrats ousted Republicans Scott Walker and Rebecca Kleefisch and elected Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes as governor and lieutenant governor, reelected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S.

Today, voters are at the polls in Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut. (In 2 weeks, on August 28, Florida and Arizona.) The most important state to watch-- and to vote in-- today is Wisconsin. Most of the contested primaries are on the Republican side. The Republicans hope to take on U.S.

Trumpanzee, of course, had to make the primaries all about himself by tweeting an endorsement against South Carolina's Congressman Mark Sanford, whose voting record is pretty pro-Trump (73.1%) in a district where Trump only won with 53.5%-- has called Trump out now and then.

The Wisconsin Republican Party has worked damn hard to gerrymander the state in such a way as to take a 50/50 purple state and produce a state Assembly with 64 Republicans and 35 Democrats and a state Senate with 18 Republicans and 14 Democrats.

A couple of weeks ago, Wisconsin's far right governor, Scott Walker, warned that Patty Schachtner's upset win over state Rep. Adam Jarchow in a deep red state Senate district was a "wake up call" for the GOP. And he's now figured out how to answer that call. He's refusing to allow special elections to fill vacant seats in the state legislature.

What kind of mentally deranged parents think a philandering, lying bigoted pig like Trump would make a good role model for their children? Republicans. In a new Quinnipiac poll released yesterday, we saw that the vast majority of Americans agree that Trump is not a good role model for children. Republicans disagree.

When I first saw North Carolina state Senator Jeff Jackson's tweets (above), ny eye was drawn to the graphic. Maybe because of the hues or the simplicity of the forms, it rang some Fernand Léger bells in my mind. Turned out, though, that Jeff was talking about gerrymandering, not art criticism.

Antonin Scalia once wrote that "Political gerrymanders are not new to the American scene" and noted there were allegations that Patrick Henry attempted, unsuccessfully, to gerrymander James Madison out of the First Congress.

There are 16 House Democrats with perfect scores from ProgressivePunch for the current session-- a score of 100. One, Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is a freshman, which means her lifetime crucial vote score is also 100. The other freshmen with eye-popping great scores are Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA).

Remember when the Wisconsin state Senate ground to a halt to put a break on Scott Walker's anti-union jihad?