Bukiewicz Picks Up Critical Assembly Seat for Democrats

Dan Bukiewicz. Photo courtesy of Bukiewicz’s campaign.

Oak Creek Mayor Dan Bukiewicz defeated Republican Dylan Pfaffenbach in Assembly District 21 on Tuesday, picking up a seat for Democrats that had been held by Republicans since 2013.

The purple district includes portions of the southern end of the city of Milwaukee surrounding Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport and the city of Oak Creek.

With all in-person votes counted, Bukiewicz won the seat with 59% of the vote. The seat had been held by Republican Jessie Rodriguez since 2013, following a partisan gerrymander in 2011 that entrenched Republican control of the state Legislature. But redistricting recently made the seat highly competitive.

Bukiewicz entered the race for state office with an existing political base, having served as mayor of Oak Creek since 2017. As president of the Milwaukee Building & Construction Trades Council, Bukiewicz also has deep ties to organized labor. The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 420 and the Plumbers Union Local 75 were among the top contributors to his campaign.

But they did not come close to the money spent by the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee (ADCC), controlled by Minority Leader Greta Neubauer. The ADCC spent $1.2 million in its bid to pick up the critical seat. The Republican Assembly Campaign Committee — among the beneficiaries of enormous political spending by conservative billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Diane Hendricks — provided Pfaffenbach’s campaign with more than $314,000.

Pfaffenbach, 21, went into the general election with endorsements from outgoing Rodriguez and local elected Republican officials, including state Rep. Bob Donovan, state Sen. Julian Bradley and conservative Milwaukee County Supervisor Patti Logsdon, as well as endorsements from the Milwaukee Police Association and the Milwaukee Deputy Sheriffs’ Association.

Pfaffenbach’s campaign pitched him as a moderate in an era of extreme partisanship. Democrats attempted to tag him as an extreme right-wing candidate, pointing to tweets Pfaffenbach erased that attacked abortion rights supporters and referred to a congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “criminal board.”