Habush Sinykin is exactly the sort of progressive we need. She’s an environmental lawyer with deep roots in her community who helped enact the historic Great Lakes Compact to safeguard at-risk waters and worked to pass legislation to regulate cruel puppy mills. She will fight to lower healthcare costs, invest in education, and above all, protect abortion rights. Believe it or not, abortion is now illegal in Wisconsin thanks to a ban that dates all the way back to 1849—a time when slavery was still lawful in this country. Habush Sinykin will be both a voice and a vote against that ban.
Fortunately, Habush Sinykin has the field to herself, since she’s the only Democrat in the race. Republicans, however, have three candidates running, each worse than the last, and they are in for a messy, messy primary on Feb. 21.
There’s state Rep. Dan Knodl, who signed a letter to Mike Pence asking him not to certify the results of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Then there’s Van Mobley, president of the small village of Thiensville, who was the first elected official in the state to back Donald Trump and called efforts to halt the spread of COVID a “lie.” But the most special is state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a certifiable election conspiracy theorist who wanted fellow lawmakers to “recall” the state’s 10 Biden electors, has earned the endorsement of the top anti-abortion group in the state, and is so toxic that her fellow Republicans banned her from attending caucus meetings!
But whichever Republican emerges from this dogpile will still have a built-in advantage, because the GOP gerrymandered the 8th District to insulate itself from voters: While the previous version of this seat was almost evenly divided between support for Biden and Trump, the redrawn district would have backed Trump by a 52-47 margin. But Republicans are in a race against time, because this well-educated, affluent area has moved sharply away from the GOP during the Trump era and continues to do so. That alone gives us a fighting chance.
But Republicans know the stakes just as well as we do. They don’t want to relinquish their supermajority status because they want to be able to terrorize Democrats who might dare cross them. And while they fell just short in 2022, two years from now, they’ll try once more to seize a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, too, which would allow them to override any vetoes by Evers.
We can smash a hole in all of those plans by winning this special election in April, but Wisconsin Democrats need our help right away, because there’s going to be a torrent of dark money flooding into this race just as quickly as you can say “Koch brothers.”
