MADISON, Wis. — The governor of Wisconsin called a special session last week to debate gun legislation. It resulted in exactly zero new laws, and it lasted less than a minute.

Such is life these days in Wisconsin, a state that for much of the last decade was a laboratory for some of the nation’s most conservative policymaking and a hotbed of partisan fervor, but where pretty much everything has now slowed to a crawl.

Acrimonious deadlocks have become the new normal in Wisconsin, one of three Midwestern states where Democrats ended full Republican control last year by flipping governorships. Gov. Tony Evers’s defeat of Scott Walker, whose success at pushing Wisconsin sharply to the right prompted a brief presidential bid, has given Democrats a new foothold this year in a region where they had been mostly sidelined. Yet with attention turning to the presidential election, in which Wisconsin voters are seen as playing a decisive role, divided power has given way to frustrated impasse, with little chance for either party to hold up state policymaking as the showcase it once was here.

“There’s very few things that we have been able to find common ground on,” said Mr. Evers, the Democrat who, as the gavel-in, gavel-out special legislative session showed, has struggled to enact his agenda. Mr. Evers’s gun bills, which would have expanded background checks and created a way to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed dangerous by a judge, never even came up for debate.