What to know about the District 8 Senate race and candidates Jodi Habush Sinykin, Duey Stroebel

In Wisconsin's Senate District 8, Republican incumbent Duey Stroebel will face Democrat Jodi Habush Sinykin Nov. 5 in one of the most competitive races in the state under new legislative maps.

This race won't be the first time Sinykin is challenging an incumbent Republican for the 8th Senate District seat, which now includes Port Washington, more of Grafton and now excludes the chunk of the old district west of Menomonee Falls.

During the 2023 special election, Sinykin ran against Republican incumbent Dan Knodl, losing by less than 2 percentage points.

That close race under the old maps has raised questions from Republicans and enthusiasm from Democrats over whether the seat will flip parties under the new maps, which shifted the district's modeled GOP lean from 55.6% in 2022 to 53% in 2024, according to an analysis by Marquette University Lubar Center research fellow John Johnson.

Ozaukee County, which contains the northern portion of District 8, has traditionally voted conservative but has been moving in a Democratic direction faster than any other Wisconsin county since 2018, according to research from Marquette University Law School poll director Charles Franklin.

Stroebel is technically the incumbent but not for the 8th District. He has represented the 20th Senate District encompassing most of Washington County, and northern Ozaukee County since 2015.

The new maps drew Stroebel into the 8th District currently held by Knodl who chose to run for the Assembly rather than force a primary with Stroebel.

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Who are the candidates, Duey Stroebel and Jodi Habush Sinykin? Read on to know more about the two people vying for votes in Senate District 8.

Who is Senator Duey Stroebel?

Stroebel has served in the State Senate representing District 20 since 2015 when he won a special election to fill Glenn Grothman's seat after Grothman was elected to Congress. Before that, he spent four years in the Assembly from 2011 to 2015.

He has been a member of the Joint Committee on Finance since 2019 and currently serves as the committee's vice chair, according to his state senator website. He’s also the Chair of the Committee on Government Relations.

Stroebel touted successes from the last legislative session, including the passage of Senate Bill 330, which he coauthored, and which increased funding per pupil in K-12 public, independent charter and choice schools in Wisconsin.

He also highlighted his support in 2023 for the $525 billion bipartisan affordable housing package and Act 12, which modified shared revenue formulas to boost funding to local governments and mostly repealed Wisconsin's personal property tax, which had long been a target of Stroebel's.

If reelected, Stroebel said he hopes to push a community solar bill that would help small, independent developers build solar farms, sell subscriptions and compete with investor-owned utilities, which he said would lower power costs.

Before serving as an elected official, Stroebel founded Terrace Realty, a residential and commercial real estate development and management company in Cedarburg. He has lived in Cedarburg for most of his life.

Who is challenger Jodi Habush Sinykin?

Because he ran unopposed in 2016 and 2020, Habush Sinykin is Stroebel's first challenger in almost a decade, according to reporting from Dan Shafer at Civic Media.

This state race will be Habush Sinykin's second after nearly pulling off an upset in the 2023 special election to fill Republican Alberta Darling's seat following Darling's retirement.

If elected, Habush Sinykin hopes to work across the aisle to address rising costs, find a solution that will protect reproductive freedoms and help direct more state funding toward local governments, schools, families and hospitals.

Habush Sinykin is an attorney who has focused on environmental law and has lived within the district for most of her life, according to her campaign website.

She worked with local, state and regional groups to help Wisconsin and seven other states enact the landmark 2008 Great Lakes Compact, which safeguards the Great Lakes' freshwater resources and largely curtailed diversions that would transfer water outside the basin. She was also part of the group that in 2018 unsuccessfully sued Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources over its decision to divert millions of gallons of Great Lakes water every day to Foxconn in the City of Racine.

She also worked with bipartisan legislators and advocates to get legislation passed in 2009 that would stop inhumane and unregulated conditions in Wisconsin's puppy mills.

Habush Sinykin and her husband Dan Sinykin also own a Janesville-based textile manufacturing company. She is the daughter of Bob Habush of the law firm Habush, Habush & Rottier.

Senate District 8's political lean has shifted to the left

Though Senate District 8's boundaries have evolved over the years, it has consistently been held by a Republican since 1992.

But District 8 is an empirically purple district now, per recent elections, polls and researchers like Marquette's Franklin who have documented Ozaukee County's gradual shift towards the left since 2018.

For instance, both Democratic Governor Tony Evers and Republican Senator Ron Johnson won the district during the 2022 midterm election.

In 2020, the City of Cedarburg became the first municipality within the WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) which for decades have been considered the Republican strongholds surrounding Milwaukee, to be won by a Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, in a presidential election since the 1990s.

Additionally, some areas just north of Milwaukee, including the villages of Whitefish Bay and Shorewood, have also steadily moved left. Almost a decade after 2012, when Whitefish Bay last had a slight Republican advantage in the gubernatorial election, more than 70% of residents in the village voted for Evers.

Stroebel acknowledges that the district is now significantly different, especially due to the new maps.

"But I look forward to the challenge. It's why we're working hard, meeting voters at the door, knocking on as many doors as we are," he said. "We feel very confident that with our work, we're going to earn it."

The race is "consequential," Stroebel said.

"All you need to do is look at some of the bills that the Democrats introduced at the end of the session, and it will make the state a very different state," he said.

"This is the must win seat," Habush Sinykin said. "It's the most competitive Senate race in the state, because if we are successful, we will have an opportunity to remove someone who has been an obstructionist and make changes at the state level that will really allow Wisconsin to be in a position to move forward."

Contact Claudia Levens at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @levensc13

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What to know about Wisconsin's competitive 8th District Senate race