Conservative vs Fascist In Waukesha
Waukesha County Assemblywoman Janel Brandtjen is more a Nazi than a Republican. In fact, she’s so far from any semblance for the mainstream, that the Assembly Republicans— who are already very, very far right— kicked her out of their caucus and stripped her of her committee chair. A friend of mine in Menomonee Falls, northwest of Milwaukee, told me that she was elected to the Waukesha Board of Supervisors in 2008 and lost her mind as she became consumed with conspiracy theories, racism and extremism. That made her perfect for even higher office in Waukesha County. My friend told me “she was a psycho gad-fly on the board of supervisors but really went batshitcrazy in Madison… She’s in severe need of mental healthcare. Her problem isn’t about politics. Something went wrong with her mentally. Everyone knows it but no one wants to say it out loud... She she’s going to cost the Republicans Alberta Darling’s Senate seat, which Darling has been sitting in since the year I was born.” (He 32 years old.)
Tomorrow, when most Wisconsinites are voting in the crucial Supreme Court primary, Brandtjen faces 2 conservatives— there are no moderates in the race— in a primary for a special election to fill Darling’s state Senate seat. She’s best known for her crackpot conspiracy theories, election denialism and for inciting a primary challenge against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos after he refused to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. Opposing Brandtjen is Thiensville Village President Van Mobley and fellow far right Assemblymember, Dan Knodl. Knodl is also from the neo-fascist wing of the GOP but not quite as loud and deranged as Brandtjen. Both Mobley and Knodl have seriously outraised her but Brandtjen has the name recognition, even if it is mostly negative name recognition. Last week, Trump endorsed Brandtjen and implied her opponents are RINOs, which is patently absurd. Whomever wins tomorrow faces Democrat Jodi Habush Sinykin in the April 4 general election.
The Senate district (SD-8), which is around 84% white, includes parts of Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties. Brandtjen and Knodl each represent a third of the district, which has trended purple in recent years. Trump won it by 12 points in 2016, but just 5 points in 2020. In 2018, incumbent Scott Walker won the district by 20.5 points, but last year the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tim Michels, carried it by just 4 points, one of the failures that cost him the election.
National NeverTrumpers are pushing Knodl. But Democrats— including Sinykin— are working towards getting Brandtjen the nomination, theorizing that she’s way too extreme and too toxic to win in even a district this red. Last week Reid Epstein explained what’s going on for NY Times readers yesterday: Democrats Meddle Again In A GOP Primary. “Last year,” he wrote, “Democrats spent millions of dollars elevating far-right candidates in Republican primary contests for governor and Congress— betting, it turned out correctly, that more extreme opponents would lose general elections. Now Wisconsin Democrats are trying to do it again, this time with mail and TV ads before a Republican primary in a special election for a State Senate seat that carries ramifications far beyond the district in suburban Milwaukee. 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 GOP a veto-proof majority in the gerrymandered chamber.”
“Janel Brandtjen is as conservative as they come,” reads a postcard sent to Republican voters from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which calls her “a conservative pro-Trump Republican.”
The February 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 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 Trump’s defeat. One of them, however, 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.
“If Janel Brandtjen makes it through the primary, it’s going to allow people in Wisconsin to have a clear choice of what it is that they’re voting for in the election in April,” said Melissa Agard, the Democratic leader in the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate, who said the race would be more winnable for Democrats if Brandtjen, pronounced Bran-chen, triumphed in the primary.
Some Republicans agree.
The Republican State Leadership Committee, the leading national organization that backs GOP state legislative candidates, is broadcasting digital ads promoting State Representative Dan Knodl before the primary. And Country First, a political action committee started by former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois— who retired from Congress after voting to impeach Trump— has bought digital ads calling Brandtjen “an embarrassment.”
Like Brandtjen, Knodl was among the 91 state legislators from several states who signed a letter urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. He shares Brandtjen’s vehement opposition to abortion rights.
…Asked Monday about his preference in the State Senate special election, Vos replied in a text message: “Lol. Let me quote Sarah Huckabee Sanders, ‘normal vs crazy.’ I would vote normal.”
A third Republican candidate in the race, Van Mobley, the president of the village of Thiensville, was among just a handful of Wisconsin elected officials who backed Trump’s 2016 campaign. He is far less known in the district than Brandtjen and Knodl, a bar owner from Germantown.
The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, a lawyer who is unopposed in her primary, is running television ads aimed at raising Brandtjen’s profile.
A parade of women in Habush Sinykin’s ads call Brandtjen “too conservative” and cite her opposition to abortion rights and her citation as “pro-life legislator of the year” from a Wisconsin organization that opposes abortion rights.
In all, Habush Sinykin has spent $166,000 on advertising, while neither Ms. Brandtjen nor Mr. Knodl has bought any television or digital ads, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm… Democratic polling of the race suggests that she could beat Brandtjen in a general election but would have a far tougher race against Knodl.
“We’re continuing to highlight Janel Brandtjen and how she would be a disaster in the State Senate,” said Joe Oslund, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “We’re going to continue to put her extremism front and center for voters.”
