Wisconsin State Representative Janel Brandtjen is a cancer on state politics and has become a pariah on both sides of the aisle. But given her greed and ambition and the support of a former president it wasn’t surprising that she ran for state senate to replace a retiring GOP stalwart. But given her issues with her own party and the lessening influence of said former president, the Democrats saw a less formidable candidate in Rep. Brandtjen than the others in the GOP primary….and…they spent considerable sums to support her primary run. And probably to their chagrin she lost. But Democrats shouldn’t have been mucking in the GOP primaries to start with. It may be good strategy. It may be effective strategy. It’s shameful politics.
The Democrats are helping a far-right election denier who has become a pariah within her party in her race against a less extreme, but still election-denying, conservative. They hope that with a more vulnerable opponent, Democrats can win a seat held for decades by Republicans and deny the G.O.P. a veto-proof majority in the gerrymandered chamber.
The Feb. 21 primary, and the April 4 general election to follow, will serve as the latest test of how much appetite Republican voters have for the flavor of election denialism that fueled the party’s grass roots after former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The twist in the Wisconsin race is that both leading Republican candidates took significant public steps to try to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat. One of them, however, Ms. Brandtjen, a state representative from Menomonee Falls, has so alienated members of her own party that she was kicked out of the State Assembly’s Republican caucus, leaving Democrats giddy about the prospect of facing her in a special election for a battleground district.
Well Rep. Brandtjen lost and we have a little known and unfamiliar Democratic candidate in lawyer Jodi Habush Sinykin running for the senate seat. It may have been more valuable to build her name recognition and define her positions than just run ads against a maybe candidate. So I think the Dems lost here too.
P. S. If my ideas about campaign finance reform were in place, this couldn’t have happened.
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