RON JOHN'S ROAD TO REELECTION IS GETTING BUMPY
At the start of this year, Wisconsin Republican strategists were hoping Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes would win the Democratic nomination for Senate, seeing the matchup between him and Sen. Ron Johnson as the GOP’s best shot at winning in November. Now, just months from the general election, Barnes is giving the Republican incumbent a serious challenge; the last four major polls in the state all show Barnes ahead of Johnson. Polling from Marquette University even showed Johnson down seven points against Barnes (more recent numbers from the Trafalgar group had Barnes with a two-point lead, within the margin of error).
And the political landscape of the next couple months could be hard for the conservative Republican who has positioned himself as a close Donald Trump ally and within the more fringe corners of the Republican party (like the many times he’s elevated conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines). Per a recent report in Politico, the Wisconsin senator is “under a microscope” for how he will vote on an upcoming same-sex marriage bill, which Democrats are hoping to get to the Senate floor before the November midterms. Johnson surprised colleagues when he signaled he’d likely vote in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage earlier this summer, though has since expressed more hesitation. Democrats see the vote as a winning issue for their base in the state.
Even if marriage equality doesn’t pan out to be a driving issue (per polling, it doesn’t appear to be top of mind for voters who are mainly concerned with the economy, crime and abortion) Democrats have plenty to campaign on. In the last two weeks, Johnson admitted to at least a “couple seconds” of attempting to overturn the 2020 election (his office tried to deliver Mike Pence a list of fake pro-Trump electors in the minutes before the certification of the election results)—which he argued was so small a role that he shouldn’t have to be questioned by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. His response to Democrats’ attack that he’s used his position in the Senate to enrich himself financially, to which Johnson accused Democrats of “playing class envy,” ended up in more attack lines against him. And perhaps most politically potent, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning federal abortion protections, Johnson's long anti-abortion record has taken center stage. As my colleague Abigail Tracy wrote, Johnson said he didn’t view the repeal of Roe v. Wade “as a huge threat to women’s health” and that anyone who does not like their state's abortion laws “can move.”
Johnson has escalated his attacks against Barnes. At a backyard political event this past weekend, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Johnson accused Barnes of "hiding his radical leftist positions" and claimed the Democrat was “hiding” from the press—an attack also being used by Republicans in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. The attacks, as the Sentinel’s Bill Glauber wrote, preview what’s likely to come in the weeks ahead as Republicans recognize this race isn’t going to be easy. “We don’t put much stock in public polls," Johnson campaign spokesperson Alec Zimmerman said in a statement. “In 2016, they were almost all wrong and Ron Johnson pulled off the biggest surprise in Wisconsin political history.” Zimmerman went on to call Barnes “a socialist" and said "voters will learn just how extreme he is in the coming months.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/ron-johnson-road-to-reelection-is-getting-bumpy-mandela-barnes
