Tony Evers Declines to Run for 3rd Term as Wisconsin Governor

Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, who led his state through a period of Democratic resurgence, will not seek a third term next year, he announced on Thursday.

A battleground-state governor who has never displayed ambitions for higher office, Mr. Evers, 73, presided over the end of Republican dominance of his state and will leave office as his Democratic Party has a chance to win a governing trifecta for the first time in 16 years.

“I spent 50 years in public service,” Mr. Evers said in a social-media video announcing that he would not run for governor again. “I’m damn proud I devoted my entire career — and most of my life — to working for you.”

Mr. Evers’s political legacy in Wisconsin will be more about measures he blocked than about signature progressive accomplishments. He vetoed hundreds of bills passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, including a package that would have restricted voting access after the 2020 election.

During the 2021-2022 legislative session, as he was running for re-election, Mr. Evers vetoed 32 percent of the bills Republicans had passed, a figure about 10 times above what is typical, according to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

While Mr. Evers held Republican state legislators at bay, his party won three critical State Supreme Court races that flipped the court’s balance of power from the conservatives to the liberals.

Fearing a potential redrawing of their districts by liberal justices, Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature in 2024 agreed to new maps proposed by Mr. Evers. Under those maps last year, Democrats flipped 10 State Assembly seats, and they are poised to compete for majorities in both statehouse chambers next year.

“Republicans better start getting used to Democrats being in power in this state,” Mr. Evers said in remarks last month at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s annual convention. “Because in 2026, it will be the first time in a generation that every member of the Legislature will have had to run under the new, fair maps I signed into law.”

Plenty of Wisconsin Democrats have long been weighing a run for governor once Mr. Evers steps aside. Among them are his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez; Josh Kaul, the state attorney general; David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive; Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee; and a handful of state legislators, including State Senator Kelda Roys.

“Wisconsin is a freer, fairer and more just place in a way that will touch the life of every Wisconsin kid because of Tony Evers’s governorship,” said Ben Wikler, the former Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman who has also been mentioned as a potential candidate to replace Mr. Evers. Mr. Wikler declined to address whether he might run for governor.

Wisconsin’s Republican primary for governor is just as unsettled.

Bill Berrien, a manufacturing executive, announced his campaign this month. Josh Schoemann, the Washington County executive, began running in May. Other potential candidates include Representative Tom Tiffany, whose district covers the state’s rural north; Eric Hovde, who has twice lost a Senate race in Wisconsin; and Tim Michels, a construction magnate who lost to Mr. Evers in the 2022 race for governor.

Mr. Evers was an unlikely figure to become a popular political leader.

A former teacher who served as the state’s public schools superintendent before he was first elected governor in 2018, he ended eight years of Republican control of the state government.

He is nobody’s idea of a dynamic politician. A pickleball aficionado, he peppers his remarks with darns, hecks and goshes. The governor’s office was as high as his political ambitions seemed to aim, and his name rarely comes up in speculation about 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls.

In recent months, Mr. Evers’s mild-mannered demeanor — at a time when many Democrats are itching to fight the Trump administration more aggressively — had led to much private and some public grumbling among Wisconsin Democrats about whether he should seek a third term. (Wisconsin does not place term limits on its governor.)

And there were quiet whispers in the state about his age, amid broader Democratic regrets about the partywide coalescence behind President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2024 re-election bid. In an interview last year, Mr. Evers suggested his political expiration date would come long before Mr. Biden’s.

“If I told you I was going to run at age 82, I’d tell you, ‘That’s not going to happen,’” he said. (“Would I win if I ran?” Mr. Evers asked in his announcement video. “Of course. No question about it,” he said, before adding that he wanted to spend more time with his family.)

At last summer’s Democratic National Convention, Mr. Evers visibly stumbled as he delivered Wisconsin’s roll call votes for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Traditionally, two terms has been plenty for a lot of Wisconsin governors,” Ms. Roys, who placed third in the 2018 primary that Mr. Evers won, said during a May interview with WisconsinEye.

A poll last month from Marquette University Law School found that 58 percent of Wisconsinites did not want Mr. Evers to run again, although 83 percent of Democrats said he should.

After he won re-election in 2022, Mr. Evers referred to himself — perhaps jokingly — as “three-term Tony,” a sly suggestion that he could seek a third term after all.

During his speech at the state party convention, Mr. Evers did it once more, adding, for good measure, a reference to a centuries-long expansion of public schools funding that he slipped past the furious Republicans who have controlled the Legislature since 2011.

“Heck, everyone’s stopped calling me two-term or three-term Tony,” he said. “Now, they just call me 400-year Tony because I used my constitutional veto power to provide a $325 increase per student every year for the next four centuries.”