A fresh look at the 2016 vote offers yet more evidence of the huge partisan advantage Republicans built into Wisconsin’s legislative map, which the state was ordered to redraw by a federal court Friday.

Consider this:

Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton finished in a near tie statewide, with Trump prevailing by roughly three-quarters of a percentage point.

Yet Trump led Clinton in 63 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts, according to a review of state election returns.

And he led her in 23 of the state’s 33 state Senate districts.

Those numbers reflect the baked-in advantage — and virtual lock — the GOP enjoys in the battle for control of the Legislature, thanks to a one-sided map.

In effect, while the state overall is “purple” in its makeup, most legislative districts are “red.” Because Democratic voters are packed into fewer districts, the vast majority of seats are more Republican than the state as a whole. That means that whatever share of the vote the GOP wins in statewide races for president or governor, they are likely to win a much higher share of legislative seats.

This happened in 2012 when Republicans got only 46% of the presidential vote but still won 60% of the Assembly seats.

It happened in 2014 when Republicans got just over 52% of the vote for governor but captured 63% of the Assembly seats.

And it happened last fall when Republicans and Democrats virtually split the presidential vote, but the GOP won 64% of the Assembly seats.

RELATED: Will rural voters who swung to Trump swing back?

A three-judge federal panel tossed out Wisconsin’s legislative map two months ago for this very reason.

It found the maps were not only excessively partisan but were among the most heavily skewed to one party of any plan in the country in recent decades.

How is it possible to have a map in a competitive state in which so many seats skew Republican?

It happens when Democratic voters are highly concentrated or ”packed” into fewer districts, giving that party more votes than it needs in the districts it dominates, but fewer votes elsewhere. The result is a minority of seats that are lopsidedly Democratic and a majority of seats that have a smaller but decisive GOP edge.

Part of the GOP advantage in Wisconsin is natural: Democrats are more concentrated geographically in urban areas, such as Milwaukee and Madison, meaning their voters are less efficiently distributed across districts statewide. This effect was even more pronounced last fall, because the partisan gap between urban and rural Wisconsin was larger than usual.

But the federal court found that population patterns don’t explain away the sheer magnitude of the partisan tilt in the Wisconsin maps. And, in fact, the GOP advantage in legislative races was boosted considerably by the 2011 redistricting.

How big is that tilt?

There are different ways to measure it. Those challenging the map in court relied on a formula that calculates how many “wasted” votes a party has because its voters are concentrated in fewer districts.

But one simple way to illustrate the map’s lopsidedness is to use the presidential vote as a measure of how each district compares in its partisan makeup to the state as a whole.

Trump won statewide last fall by 0.76 of a percentage point. But he won by bigger margins in 63 of 99 Assembly seats and 23 of 33 state Senate seats, meaning those districts were more Republican than the state as a whole.

Something similar happened four years earlier when 60 Assembly seats were more Republican than the statewide vote, based on the Barack Obama-Mitt Romney presidential vote.

And it happened two years earlier when 62 Assembly seats were more Republican than the state as a whole, based on the vote for governor.

If 60 or more Assembly seats are redder than the state as a whole and fewer than 40 are bluer than the state as a whole, than an election in which both parties get the same number of votes statewide would typically result in at least a 20-seat GOP edge in that chamber. Democrats can win many more votes statewide without winning legislative control. Republicans can have a "down" year (as they did in 2012), win a minority of the state's voters and easily retain control.

The other big takeaway from these numbers is the pronounced lack of legislative competition at the local level.

While the state as a whole was ultra-competitive in 2016 — decided by less than a percentage point in the presidential vote — hardly any of the state’s 132 legislative districts reflect that overall partisan balance.

For example, the difference between the Democratic and Republican presidential vote was 10 points or more in 26 of 33 Senate seats; it was 5 points or more in 30 of the 33 seats.

In the Assembly, 77 of 99 seats were “decided” for president by 10 points or more, and 91 were decided by 5 points or more.

In other words, in a state in which three of the past five presidential races have been decided by less than a percentage point, only a small handful of legislative seats are balanced in their partisan makeup.

The rest are virtually locked in for the party that currently holds them. And in the clear majority of cases, that means the Republican Party.

The data show that for Democrats to win just a bare 50-seat majority in the Assembly under the current lines, they would have to capture at least 14 seats that voted for Trump, and nine that voted for both Trump in 2016 and Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. In some of those seats, the built-in GOP advantage is not just a point or two, but 5 to 10 points.

On Friday, a federal court ordered the state to redraw its maps by Nov. 1 to ensure their use in the 2018 elections. The state is expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is a test of how partisan a legislative map can be before it is unconstitutional. That legal question hasn’t been settled.

But there is less of a question when it comes to the political effects of gerrymandering.

In ruling against the Wisconsin map last fall, the federal court concluded that one of the goals of the GOP’s redistricting plan “was to secure Republican control of the Assembly under any likely future electoral scenario for the remainder of the decade, in other words to entrench the Republican Party in power.”

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