Wisconsin Democrats needed 5 seats to flip the Assembly. They flipped 8.
Incumbent Patrick Snyder won his previous three elections by an average of 10 percentage points. This time around he lost to his Democratic challenger by nearly 10 point. Another blue wave GOP casualty
Shereen Siewert reports:
Democrat John Kroll defeated longtime Republican incumbent Pat Snyder on Tuesday, flipping Wisconsin’s 85th Assembly District seat in a closely watched race.
Kroll received 12,377 votes, or 54%, compared with Snyder’s 10,512 votes, or 45.9%, according to unofficial Marathon County election results. Kroll’s margin of victory was 1,865 votes, with all 29 precincts reporting.
Snyder, first elected in 2016, was seeking a sixth term. He won reelection in 2024 by about 6.5 percentage points.
Kroll, 43, of Wausau, is a former Marathon County Board supervisor who works in energy efficiency. He campaigned on lowering costs for working families, increasing public school funding, expanding access to health care and addressing rising utility bills.
Kroll received 5,811 votes out of 5,823 cast running unopposed in his primary election. Snyder received 5,188 votes out of 5,206 cast in his primary election. Not enough of a difference to predict an easy win for Kroll with full assurance.
Original 9/12/2026 post, "Wisconsin 2026 elections: Democrat John Kroll challenges 5-term GOP incumbent Patrick Snyder in 85th Assembly District", starts here.
Before redistricting, the 85th Assembly District in the GOP gerrymandered 29th Senate District (see below) included eastern Marathon County, fingering its way into Wausau and Rothschild, but not Weston and Kronenwetter.
Redistricting created a more compact, Wausau-centric district. It includes the City of Wausau and Village of Weston, but not the villages of Rothschild and Kronenwetter. The population of Wausau and its suburbs is about 72,000, which is at least 12,000 residents too many to fit into a single Assembly district.
In 2024, Republican incumbent Patrick Snyder won re-election in the 85th District by his smallest margin to date: 6.5 percentage points. With Trump's approval rating in the toilet and a blue wave building its way to November, Democratic challenger John Kroll has a chance to flip this seat.
Shameless GOP-gerrymandered 29th Senate District (2011-2020)
Related reading:
Malia Jones explains:Two core concepts of gerrymandering were central to the arguments presented to the high court: cracking and packing. A third process, known as stacking, also crops up in gerrymandered political maps, but was not the focus of Gill v. Whitford.
Cracking and packing both refer to specific ways of drawing legislative boundaries with the outcomes of elections in mind. These two processes operate in tension with one another, but both can be implemented by a party in power seeking to maximize its electoral chances through gerrymandering.
Packing refers to the practice of drawing particular districts in such a way as to ensure that another party's candidate wins that seat by a tremendous margin. Although the opposing party is all but guaranteed the seat, packing makes surrounding districts less competitive, and thus tips the balance of power in the legislative body overall toward the ruling party.
Cracking involves drawing districts in such a way as to divide a concentration of specific types of voters across several districts such that they are a minority in each one, with practically no hope of achieving representation in any of the districts. This practice also helps make districts less competitive. [emphasis added]
Other Wisconsin 2026 election posts:
