(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Wisconsin Democrats look to pick weakest possible GOP foe in key special election [1]

['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-02-06

Habush Sinykin is hoping for something similar here. Brandtjen and another member of the state Assembly, Rep. Dan Knodl, are the two frontrunners for the GOP nod, but there's no question which of them would make for an easier target.

While Knodl is no moderate—he signed a letter to Mike Pence asking him not to certify the results of Joe Biden's victory—Brandtjen is so divorced from reality that even her fellow Republicans have shunned her. She is, unsurprisingly, an election conspiracy theorist, but her gravest sin (as her colleagues see it) was supporting a primary challenger to the speaker of the Assembly, Robin Vos. After Vos narrowly beat back his Trump-backed rival and won another term as leader last year, Republican lawmakers voted to eject Brandtjen from their caucus meetings, explicitly telling her that "continual issues from the past have led our caucus to lose trust in you."

Republicans have made the exact same calculations that Democrats have and know their better bet by far is Knodl, which is why the Republican State Leadership Committee has spent $150,000 on mail and TV ads so far to promote him with just two weeks to go before the Feb. 21 primary, according to WisPolitics. (There's no word yet whether the corresponding group on the other side, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, will likewise get involved, and the size of Habush Sinykin's buys have not been reported.)

Last year, Democratic gambits to pick weaker opponents were met with widespread pearl-clutching bordering on hysteria by those claiming that such efforts would damage democracy. But they worked out brilliantly: Daily Kos Elections identified 17 such efforts at varying levels of the ballot, eight of which resulted in a more extreme candidate winning the GOP primary. Democrats wound up winning all eight of those races. If Habush Sinykin can emulate that success, she, too, would strike a huge blow for democracy by rolling back the Senate supermajority Republicans just won in November thanks to gerrymandered maps.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2151462/-Wisconsin-Democrats-look-to-pick-weakest-possible-GOP-foe-in-key-special-election

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.