Earlier this week, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson appeared on local radio to declare his “loss of confidence” in the state’s elections commission and assert the need for its legislature to take control of future elections. The context for Johnson’s remarks is important, coming as they do in the wake of a nonpartisan report that found no significant evidence of fraud during the 2020 election — the upshot being that if actual evidence of foul play cannot be found, Republican lawmakers will simply continue to assert that it has occurred as a pretext for continuing to meddle with election rules. Johnson’s intervention also follows a Republican-led push for a partisan redistricting of the state that passed its senate earlier this month.

Taken together, both represent different thrusts in a wider GOP strategy to consolidate power by rewriting election laws and empowering state legislatures to toss out results in future contests. The two efforts are, of course, mutually reinforcing. With greater control of state legislatures, Republicans wield more power to rewrite rules and redraw district boundaries, thus ensuring false majorities that will, in turn, be empowered to act in the GOP’s favor in the event of future disputes in presidential elections — particularly if the results are close.

In the case of Wisconsin, it’s already quite apparent how effective such rigging efforts can be. Whether Johnson’s push ultimately succeeds or not, and whether the latest GOP-led attempt at redistricting eventually finds a way around Democratic governor Tony Evers’s subsequent veto, the state’s gerrymandered boundaries have already rewarded Republicans with 64 percent of the seats in its assembly on only 46 percent of the vote. In many ways, it’s pertinent that such efforts are happening in Wisconsin to begin with. A longtime progressive fortress and onetime bastion of American socialism, the past decade has seen the state transformed into a kind of laboratory for the Right’s wider assault on unions, voting rights, and other pillars of democracy.