Wisconsin

Wisconsin has a plural executive of officials elected statewide and independently: the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and the State Treasurer. Notably, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor are nominated separately in the primaries but then run together on a single ticket in the general election, so the pair always ends up from the same party even though voters did not pair them up at the primary stage.

Wisconsin has steadily stripped duties from two of its elected offices — the Secretary of State and the Treasurer now have comparatively few responsibilities, much of their historic work moved to other agencies. The Governor appoints the heads of the executive departments that aren’t separately elected and leads the rest of the bureaucracy.

The Wisconsin Legislature is bicameral: a 33-seat State Senate (four-year terms) and a 99-seat State Assembly (two-year terms). It is a full-time, professional body with a base salary of $60,924 a year plus a per diem and dedicated staff, and there are no term limits.

The Legislature works on a two-year session cycle and meets close to year-round. Wisconsin has a strong good-government tradition dating to the Progressive Era — it created the first state legislative reference bureau and was an early adopter of nonpartisan civil service — and its Legislative Reference Bureau and audit institutions remain unusually robust.

A bill is introduced, sent to committee, and — if it advances — voted on the floor of each chamber, with differences reconciled before final passage. The defining feature is the Governor’s partial veto on appropriations bills, the most powerful of its kind in the nation. For decades a Wisconsin governor could veto not just whole line items but individual words, digits, and even letters within the budget — deleting text to stitch together entirely new sentences and dollar amounts the Legislature never approved. These came to be known as the "Vanna White" veto (deleting individual letters to spell new words) and the "Frankenstein" veto (splicing parts of different sentences together).

Voters have amended the constitution more than once to curb the practice — barring the letter-by-letter trick in 1990 and the sentence-splicing trick in 2008 — yet the partial veto remains extraordinarily broad, and governors have still used it to, for example, extend a funding provision by centuries by striking a hyphen and some digits. A veto override takes two-thirds of each chamber. Wisconsin has no statewide citizen initiative for ordinary laws; constitutional amendments are referred to voters by two successive Legislatures.

The Governor’s signature power is that partial veto, which makes Wisconsin’s governor unusually strong over the budget — able not merely to subtract spending but, within limits, to reshape budget language itself. Beyond that the Governor appoints agency heads, proposes the budget, can call special sessions, holds emergency powers, and holds the clemency power. With no term limits, a governor can also accumulate influence over time.

The checks are the independently elected Attorney General, the two-thirds legislative override (rarely reached when the Legislature and Governor are split), and — uniquely here — the voters themselves, who have repeatedly used constitutional amendments to claw back specific abuses of the partial veto.

Wisconsin elects its judges in officially nonpartisan elections, including for the state Supreme Court. Although the races carry no party labels, Supreme Court contests have become some of the most expensive and closely watched judicial elections in the country, because the court’s majority often decides high-stakes disputes over redistricting, election rules, and the scope of state power. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin sits at the top, above the Court of Appeals and the trial-level Circuit Courts; the Governor fills mid-term vacancies by appointment.