Fuck yeah!
Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes raised more than $20 million in the third quarter of 2022, according to details from the Wisconsin lieutenant governor’s campaign, dwarfing what he raised throughout his entire bid for Senate.
Barnes is aiming to unseat Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent who is seeking a third term, in what has become one of the most closely watched Senate campaigns of the midterms. With an evenly divided Senate, every race this November could tilt the balance of power in the legislative body, but Barnes’ race against Johnson represents one of the best chances for Democrats to flip a Senate seat this cycle.
The race has been tight for months. A Marquette University Law School Poll, released in mid-September, found 49% of likely voters in Wisconsin supported Johnson, compared to 48% who backed Barnes – a statistical dead heat. But the poll was an improvement for Johnson: The same poll had found Barnes at 52% in August with the incumbent at 45%.
Barnes’ fundraising haul should help Democrats level the advertising playing field in the race after being outspent in September.
According to AdImpact, Republicans spent nearly $22.5 million on ads in September, compared to $16.5 million for Democrats. The biggest spenders in the race over that time was Senate Leadership Fund, the Republican super PAC with close ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The group spent nearly $8 million in September. Senate Majority PAC, the predominant Democratic super PAC focused on Senate races, spent just over $6 million.
This is great news because there is still momentum for Barnes and has the resources to take down Johnson. It’s just a matter of what’s the best thing to hit him on:
“One of the challenges with a candidate like Johnson is it is such a target-rich environment… there is just so much to work with,” said Wisconsin Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki, who added it can be difficult with candidates like Johnson to choose “which of those narratives are the ones that are going to have the most profound impact.”
“In this point in the cycle you can no longer throw the kitchen sink at [Johnson]… the information environment has most Wisconsin voters hiding under their couch cushions,” Zepecki said.
It’s true there’s much for Democrats to discuss when it comes to Johnson’s public statements alone.
He has spread conspiracies about Covid-19, pushed against mass vaccinations and insisted the human immune system can handle itself just fine. He’s suggested the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an “armed insurrection,” despite the fact that it was an insurrection, with weapons. And though Johnson’s declined to sign on to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) latest national abortion ban proposal, he’s supported national abortion bans in previous renditions.
That all, of course, is on top of Johnson’s typical Republican chops, like supporting cutbacks to Medicare and Social Security, which Democrats in races nationwide love to chomp at.
Scot Ross, a second Wisconsin Democratic strategist, said of Democrats’ various talking points, “I don’t think any of those are not effective,” but that Democrats could surely benefit from having “one message” across the board.
Instead of focusing on a narrow set of talking points, Democratic messengers have loosely fashioned Johnson into a Republican boogeyman.
Ads, some launched before Johnson even formally announced his re-election bid, have pinned the senator on gun control, taxes, abortion, outsourcing jobs, Social Security and Medicare, being a Washington insider and his lackadaisical response to the Jan. 6 riots. His Covid antics, including suggesting that gargling mouthwash can cure a Covid infection, have largely been left out of advertising, but have still percolated in the conversation.
Here’s some context here about the state of this race:
The Wisconsin race is uniquely important though. If Barnes were to win, he would be the first African American senator from Wisconsin. Johnson, meanwhile, is a two-term senator who likes to indulge in some of the most widely debunked conspiracy theories. On January 6, 2021, he almost facilitated passing a set of fake electors to then Vice President Mike Pence (an aide to Pence was the one who stopped the handover). Johnson has also used racial dog whistles, or arguably language more outright than just a dog whistle, before. Of the January 6 rioters, he infamously said: “Now, had the tables been turned—Joe, this could get me in trouble—had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
Depending on the outcomes of a few other races across the country, the Wisconsin Senate race could literally decide control of the Senate. “We always knew this was going to be a difficult race and this one has enormous national significance,” Democratic State Senator Kelda Roys told me.
For much of the cycle the Wisconsin Senate race was considered one of Democrats’ best pickup opportunities, behind only Pennsylvania. But even the most optimistic Democrats I’ve talked to this cycle concede that outlook has changed. In his last election, Johnson beat former Senator Russ Feingold in a rematch of their 2010 race by about four percentage points after many Republicans left him for dead. He was first elected by a similar margin despite being labeled as an underdog through most of the 2010 election cycle.
A month ago, the situation was much the same as in those races. Barnes had been leading Johnson at one point in August by seven percentage points. That’s basically an unheard of margin in a state that almost always has tight elections. But after the pro-Johnson group Wisconsin Truth PAC began hitting Barnes on policing and the support he has received from groups that have also backed the liberal “defund the police” platform, that lead has flipped to Johnson. Barnes’s campaign tried to counter by airing ads laying out how Barnes hoped to keep Wisconsin communities safe. But polls kept moving Johnson’s way.
The recent polling has found both candidates are viewed more unfavorably by the electorate than favorably. The problem for Barnes is that while he enjoys very strong support among Black Wisconsinites, according to 2020 exit polls, Blacks only made up 6 percent of the electorate then. Barnes should win that small vote overwhelmingly, but he trails Johnson among white voters by 10 percentage points, according to a September AARP poll. That’s the type of voter who would be most susceptible to an ad blitz focused on crime. It’s also the part of the electorate Barnes needs at this point.
Barnes’s pivot to abortion makes sense, even if the national discourse has somewhat moved away from the topic only a few months after the Dobbs decision. The same polling shows that persuadable voters, who play a crucial role in closely divided states like Wisconsin, view abortion as a far more important issue than crime and gun control, behind only inflation and rising prices. The AARP poll found 16 percent of those surveyed listed inflation and rising prices as the top issue, followed by abortion at 15 percent (a statistical tie). And law and order and crime? Just 4 percent said that issue is the most important topic for them.
Johnson has been trying to brush off the focus on abortion:
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson released a sample referendum question for Wisconsin's abortion law Tuesday, the same day the state's Republican legislators shot down an attempt from the Democratic governor to make such an initiative possible.
Johnson himself did not support Gov. Tony Evers' special session aimed at creating a pathway to amend the state's 1849 abortion ban, calling the effort a political move by Democrats ahead of the Nov. 8 midterms.
The Oshkosh Republican's office told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that voters are more concerned with crime, illegal immigration and record-high inflation.
"We’ve seen poll after poll showing Wisconsinites primarily concerned with record inflation and rising crime," Johnson spokeswoman Alexa Henning said. "Instead the Democrats seek to divide the public by exploiting the issue of abortion by politicizing it before an election that should be focused on the disastrous results of their governance."
When asked by reporters earlier in the day why he didn't support Evers' special session, Johnson said: "I don't know what he's proposing in terms of (a) referendum."
Johnson's sample ballot aimed to answer the question: "At what point does society have the responsibility to protect the life of an unborn child?"
It listed 10 options, from banning abortion at the moment of conception, to each month of pregnancy up until the eighth month or "never — an unborn child has no right to life."
The ballot did not include options for exceptions, but the senator's office noted the proposal was just a sample, and such questions could be added. Johnson has said he supports abortion exceptions for instances of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is in danger.
Johnson in a statement suggested the single-issue referendum could be proposed in other states to "inform elected representatives on how 'we the people' would balance the rights of a mother with the rights of her unborn child."
In Wisconsin, however, voters cannot change law by a statewide referendum. Rather, a constitutional amendment is required. The legislature can, however, submit questions to the public through an advisory referendum, which gauges public opinion but does not change law.
Still, the Republican-controlled legislature is unlikely to act.
On Tuesday, both the state Assembly and Senate gaveled in and out of Evers' special session in a matter of seconds.
FYI:
Something to notice about how the GOP candidate for Governor is handling this issue:
Republican Tim Michels was talking to a roomful of party activists in early September when he fielded a question about his position on abortion. Michels vowed he would never change, and said he was “winning” his race against Democratic Gov. Tim Evers precisely because people saw him as “a man of conviction, a man who doesn’t waffle.”
It wasn’t the first time Michels changed course on a significant issue. Since getting into the race in April, Michels endorsed Donald Trump for a 2024 run, after first declining to support anyone; said the state’s bipartisan election commission should be eliminated, after first saying he wanted to keep it; and began welcoming big-dollar donations after earlier saying he wouldn’t take any larger than $500.
Michels and Evers are in a close race with broad implications for national politics in 2024 and beyond. Evers has highlighted his status as the only barrier to total GOP control, including his vetoes this year of Republican legislation that would have made it more difficult for some voters to cast ballots in the key battleground state. A Michels victory would give the GOP free rein to pass those changes and more.
It’s the most expensive governor’s race in the nation in terms of ad spending, with both sides spending about $55 million on TV so far, according to AdImpact Politics, which tracks spending by major campaigns.
Michels declined an interview request. But when asked about his change in position at a campaign stop Tuesday, Michels said, “I’ve been very clear and consistent throughout that I am pro-life, and I make no apologies for that.”
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Health and Democracy are on the ballot next year and we need to keep Wisconsin Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Mandela Barnes (D. WI) and his fellow Wisconsin Democrats campaigns:
Wisconsin Democratic Party
Minocqua Brewing Company SuperPAC
Tony Evers for Governor
Mandela Barnes for U.S. Senate
Brad Pfaff for Congress
Josh Kaul for Attorney General
Doug La Follete for Secretary of State
Aaron Richardson for Treasurer