Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu Won’t Seek Reelection

Senator Devin LeMahieu speaks to reporters after an address by Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

The Republican leader of the Wisconsin Senate has announced he’s retiring.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, announced his decision Thursday. It comes just weeks after Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, announced his own retirement.

LeMahieu called serving in the Senate “the privilege of a lifetime,” but said “the time has come for a new chapter in my life.”

“I am looking forward to spending more time with my wife in our new Madison-area home and, for the first time since 2006, rooting for bold conservative reform from the sidelines,” LeMahieu said in a statement.

LeMahieu was first elected to the Senate in 2014. In 2021, Republicans chose him to be their majority leader, then reelected him to that position in 2023 and 2025.

For LeMahieu, running for the Legislature meant following in his family’s footsteps. His father, Daniel LeMahieu, served in the state Assembly from 2003 until 2015.

In Devin LeMahieu’s tenure as GOP leader, he initially oversaw lopsided Republican majorities. He began with a 21-12 majority in 2021, and by 2023, Republicans held a 22-11 edge.

He flexed that power when possible. The GOP’s two-thirds supermajority meant Senate Republicans could vote to override governor’s vetoes, although the overrides never passed with enough votes in the Wisconsin Assembly. LeMahieu also held up numerous appointees of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, and voted to fire many of them.

But the dynamic changed under new, more competitive political maps passed by Republicans in early 2024 under pressure from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. With half of all Senate districts up for election that year, Democrats flipped four districts, shrinking the GOP majority to 18-15 and putting Democrats in position to potentially win control of the Senate in 2026.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, right, listens during floor debate Wednesday, June 9, 2021, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

During LeMahieu’s entire tenure as majority leader, he found himself negotiating with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as well as with Vos, the longest-serving speaker in Assembly history. Most of the time, Vos and LeMahieu teamed up to oppose the governor. More recently, LeMahieu found himself on the outside looking in, as Vos and Evers negotiated a deal on property tax relief.

LeMahieu also had to negotiate his own GOP caucus, where a handful of conservative Republicans could band together and make it difficult for him to get bills passed.

That became a factor in the closing days of this legislative session, when LeMahieu scheduled votes on bills to legalize online sports gambling and support the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s name, image and likeness program, known in college sports as NIL. At least a handful of Senate Republicans opposed both proposals, meaning LeMahieu needed to rely on help from Democrats.

It irked some of LeMahieu’s conservative colleagues, and it wasn’t the first time. In 2023, LeMahieu relied on Democratic votes to pass a massive overhaul of local government funding. In 2025, he relied on Democratic votes to pass a bipartisan budget deal with Evers.

LeMahieu’s district is likely to stay in Republican hands. President Donald Trump carried it by about 16 percentage points in 2024, according to an analysis by Marquette University Law School. Evers lost it by about 14 points in 2022, even as he won his statewide race for governor.

But his retirement, paired with Vos’s, leaves a power vacuum in Wisconsin Republican politics ahead of what could be a challenging 2026 midterm cycle for the GOP. When the next session begins in 2027, his replacement as the head of the Senate GOP could plausibly be the chamber’s minority leader.

Wisconsin Senate GOP Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu to retire was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.