On Tuesday, voters across America handed Democrats big majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. In Wisconsin, the wave hit almost everything Republicans had.

They lost the governor's race. They lost two U.S. House seats. They lost both chambers of the Legislature, which they had run for 16 years. The three Republicans on this site who did win kept their seats by less than two years ago.

But Republicans didn't leave empty-handed. Before they lost power, they put three changes to the state constitution on the ballot. Voters passed two of them — and one is aimed squarely at the new Democratic governor.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: governor, two House seats and the whole Legislature

Tom Tiffany lost the governor's race to Democrat David Crowley, 46.0% to 54.0%, in NBC News' count with 99% of the vote in. Crowley will be Wisconsin's first Black governor. Four years ago, Republican Tim Michels got 47.8% against Tony Evers, so Tiffany did worse than the man Republicans lost with last time.

Tiffany had all the money he could want. More than $24 million of the $26 million he raised in August and September came from just three billionaires, routed through the state Republican Party. It didn't help.

When he conceded in Wausau, Tiffany didn't mention Donald Trump, the Wisconsin Examiner reported. He blamed himself, and gas prices. "It's clear voters have said, 'You're the party in power, and we're gonna try something different,'" he said. Trump had not stayed out of it: on Election Day he posted that Tiffany had "always been at my side." In October, 61% of Wisconsinites told the Marquette Law School poll they disapproved of the job Trump was doing.

Two Republican House members lost their seats:

• Bryan Steil lost the 1st District, which covers Kenosha, Racine and Walworth counties, to ER nurse Mitchell Berman, 48.0% to 52.0%. Two years ago Steil won with 54.1%. Berman will be the first Democrat to hold the seat since Republicans took it in the 1994 election — and he did it while Steil outraised him $6.4 million to about $2 million. Steil campaigned on his stock-trading bill. Read closely, it lets members hold onto the stocks they already own, and it came bolted to strict new voter ID rules.
• Derrick Van Orden lost the 3rd District in western Wisconsin to Rebecca Cooke, 45.8% to 52.4%. In 2024, he beat her with 51.4%. He spent the campaign calling her "commie Cooke," the Examiner reported, and appearing with more than a dozen Trump officials while defending the tariffs and the Iran war that voters blamed for higher prices. He also posted AI-made videos putting words in Cooke's mouth, without the label Wisconsin law requires.

Then the Legislature. Starting in January, Democrats will hold 53 of 99 seats in the Assembly and 18 of 33 in the Senate. With Crowley, that is the first time in more than 16 years that Democrats run the whole state government. It was possible because the old maps — which the state Supreme Court found were an unconstitutional gerrymander — were replaced in 2024.

Some of the seats that did it:

• State Senate. Rep. Robyn Vining won the open seat around Wauwatosa, 57% to 43%. Trevor Jung won the open Racine-area seat, 58% to 42%. And Rep. Jenna Jacobson led Sen. Howard Marklein 53% to 47% with more than 95% of the vote counted.
• The Assembly. Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, who sat on the Legislature's budget-writing committee, lost to veteran and teacher Kevin Knoke, 47% to 53%. Rep. Bob Donovan lost to Army veteran Ben Brist, 44% to 56%. Rep. Todd Novak lost to conservation warden Ben Gruber, 43% to 55%. Reps. Patrick Snyder, Benjamin Franklin and Clint Moses all lost too.

Republicans also lost the one statewide office they had won in 2022 besides Ron Johnson's Senate seat. Democrat Yee Leng Xiong beat Treasurer John Leiber, about 52% to 48%. Afterward, Leiber told WisPolitics he doesn't see a "future for the Republican Party with Trump in it." And Republicans failed to take the secretary of state's office: JoCasta Zamarripa won it, 50.6% to 45.6%, becoming the first Latina elected statewide. More on the man she beat below.

Why the Legislature matters: for eight years, Republican lawmakers could block anything Evers wanted. State Sen. Mary Felzkowski, a Republican, said it plainly on election night. With Democrats in charge, she said, "the brakes are off." Republican Rep. Karen Hurd said her party had tried to tell voters "we don't have anything to do with the war in Iran" or gas prices. "It's very hard for people to separate that," she said.

The bad: they won, by less

Three Republicans on this site held their seats. Every one of them did worse than in 2024. The shares below are from NBC News' count.

• Glenn Grothman won a seventh term in the 6th District, between Milwaukee and Green Bay, with 52.8%. In 2024 he won with 61.3%. His Democratic opponent, Brad Smith, got 43.3%. Grothman is one of the 180 House members on this site who voted against ordering U.S. troops out of the Iran war — the war JD Vance now says is the reason Republicans lost.
• Scott Fitzgerald won a fourth term in the 5th District, west of Milwaukee, with 59.0%, down from 64.5%. He is leading the push to rewrite the law that lets NFL teams share their TV money — the law the Green Bay Packers say is why they still exist.
• Tony Wied won a second full term in the Green Bay–area 8th District with 53.9%, down from 57.3%. At an Oct. 22 debate, his opponent, Army veteran Rick Crosson, said Wied hadn't held a single in-person town hall since he was elected. Wied said in-person town halls bring out a "left-wing mob," the Examiner reported. He defended his vote for Trump's budget bill, which cut billions from health care — the same bill hitting his district while he writes Fox News op-eds about socialism.

Tiffany's old seat, the 7th District in northern Wisconsin, stayed Republican. Michael Alfonso, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's son-in-law, won it with 56.4%. Two years ago, Tiffany won it with 63.6%.

The ugly: they rewrote the constitution on their way out

Republicans lost the governor's office and the Legislature on Tuesday. On the same ballot, voters wrote two Republican bills into the Wisconsin Constitution, where a new Democratic majority can't simply undo them.

How they went around the governor

A normal bill needs the governor's signature. For eight years, that meant Evers, who could veto what Republicans passed.

A change to the state constitution doesn't need a governor at all. The Legislature has to pass it in two back-to-back two-year sessions, and then voters decide. Republicans have used that route again and again. Counting Tuesday, voters have approved nine of the 12 amendments put before them in Evers' eight years, according to Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin Watch noted that those were Republican proposals Evers presumably would have vetoed if they had come to him as bills.

Voters don't always go along. In August 2024, they rejected two amendments that would have taken away the governor's power to spend federal money without the Legislature's OK. And on Tuesday, they turned down a third, which would have barred the state from closing places of worship in any emergency, 52% to 48%. That one began as a bill Evers did veto, after the COVID-19 shutdowns.

What passed Tuesday

A limit on the new governor's veto. Wisconsin's governor can veto parts of a budget bill, not just the whole thing. Governors of both parties have used that power in creative ways. Republican Scott Walker used it to turn a one-year freeze into a 1,000-year one. In 2023, Evers used it to let schools raise their revenue by $325 per student per year for the next 400 years. The state Supreme Court upheld that veto, 4–3, in April 2025.

Republicans called it the "400-year tax." Tiffany made getting rid of it a major part of his campaign. The amendment bans any future governor from using a partial veto to raise taxes or fees. It passed 50.7% to 49.3%. It doesn't touch Evers' old veto. The first governor it binds is David Crowley.

A ban on programs that help specific groups. The second amendment bans state and local governments, schools and the University of Wisconsin from "preferential treatment" based on race, sex or ethnicity. It passed with 56.4%.

Supporters say it's about fairness. But the conservative law firm that spent six figures campaigning for it, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, has already listed programs it believes the amendment outlaws, Wisconsin Watch reported. They include state health grants aimed at closing gaps for non-white residents, equity training for teachers and Milwaukee's Office of African American Affairs. Opponents warned it could reach women's health programs and Head Start, and stop the state from working on problems like Wisconsin's high rate of Black mothers dying.

California passed a ban like it in 1996. Research afterward found that gaps in hiring, contracting and college admissions stayed and even grew, especially for Latinos and women. California is now making its fifth attempt to narrow it.

What it was worth on Tuesday

Democrats won the governor's office by 8 points. The amendment limiting that governor's veto passed by about 1.4 points.

To undo either amendment, the new Democratic Legislature would have to pass a repeal in two separate two-year sessions and then win a statewide vote. That takes years. So Republicans lost the power to pass laws on Tuesday, and on the same night they made sure that some of what they wanted will stay in force no matter who wins.

The rest of the ugly

• The secretary of state candidate who wanted to run elections. Republican Jay Schroeder ran on taking control of Wisconsin's elections away from the independent commission that runs them, the Examiner reported. When he ran in 2022, he indicated he wouldn't have certified Biden's 2020 win in Wisconsin. The day before the election, the Green Party candidate filed a complaint charging that Schroeder had sent text messages that weekend pretending to be the Green campaign, to split the vote against him. He still got 45.6%.
• Billionaires were the campaign. Most of Tiffany's money came from Diane Hendricks and Richard and Liz Uihlein, through a 2015 loophole that lets donors give unlimited sums to a party, which can then pass it all to a candidate. Tiffany himself calls it the "billionaire loophole." As a state senator, he voted for the 2015 law that created it.

What the results show

Wisconsin Republicans lost the governor's race 54% to 46%, lost Bryan Steil's and Derrick Van Orden's seats in Congress, and lost both chambers of the Legislature for the first time since 2010. Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald and Tony Wied all won with smaller shares than in 2024; Grothman fell from 61.3% to 52.8%. And on the same ballot, voters wrote two Republican bills into the state constitution, including a limit on the next governor's veto that passed 50.7% to 49.3% — about one-sixth of Crowley's margin.

Source

Democrats win control of Wisconsin Legislature, cementing first Democratic trifecta in 16 years — Baylor Spears, Wisconsin Examiner, November 4, 2026.