On a recent autumn afternoon, Greta Neubauer picked up a stack of campaign flyers and signs at the Democratic Party headquarters in Kenosha and drove her car, loaded with election paraphernalia, to a middle-class street with neatly trimmed lawns and no sidewalks. Neubauer is a Wisconsin state legislator and the leader of the Democratic minority in the State Assembly. That day, she wasn’t campaigning in her own district. She was knocking on doors for Tip McGuire, an incumbent Democrat, whose seat the Party almost certainly must hold if it hopes to prevent Republicans from winning a super-majority in the state legislature on Tuesday.
As Neubauer walked along Daisy Lane, she consulted a printout with the names and addresses of prospective voters, and discussed an election that is as unpredictable and high-stakes as any in recent memory. Four of the past six Presidential contests in Wisconsin were decided by a margin of less than one per cent, and Tony Evers, the Democratic governor, running in a close race for rëelection, won four years ago by barely twenty-nine thousand votes. “These polls are saying someone’s up one, down one, or down two,” she said. “The reality is, we do not know. And it’s just incredibly hard to know who’s actually going to show up on Election Day.”
Neubauer, who is thirty-one, was first elected to the State Assembly at the age of twenty-six. She has watched Republicans gerrymander legislative districts in a way that makes it all but…
