A ‘Wisconsin story’ falters
Can Senate hopeful Mandela Barnes get his larger message across amid attacks over his stances on crime?
For Lang, the founder of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, an organization focused on mobilizing Black voters, the attack ads are both infuriating and a challenge to overcome.
“There is definitely a path,” said Lang, whose group has endorsed Barnes. “One thing that I mention to folks is that whether you’re from the north side of Milwaukee or you’re in the North Woods of Wisconsin, people see themselves in him and his campaign.”
The Wisconsin U.S. Senate race between Barnes, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, and two-term incumbent Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has become one of the closest and most contentious in the country.
Johnson and his allies have sought to tie Barnes and his policies to high-profile crimes in the state, characterizing his campaign as “radical” or “dangerous.” Though election prognosticators rate the race as a toss-up, polling suggests Barnes’ early lead has evaporated, particularly among independents and suburban voters.
The race may come down to whether Barnes, a longtime progressive, can appeal to a broad enough group of voters. In ads, he has described his path in life as a “Wisconsin story” — union jobs paved the way for his family to enter the middle class — and has focused on manufacturing jobs, protecting family farms, public schools and healthcare.
While that story has broad appeal, the specifics appear to resonate most with Black Milwaukee residents, whose support could make the difference and elect the state’s first Black senator.
Barnes’ grandfather was part of the Great Migration, one of 6 million Black Americans who left the South in the early 20th century in search of better job opportunities in the North and out West.
Racist housing covenants restricted Black residents to the north side of Milwaukee, and the legacy of segregation is still evident today. The factories closed and the jobs disappeared. The city’s 53206 ZIP Code, where Barnes grew up, has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.
“He’s not just talking to Black and brown folks,” Lang said. “He’s building a strong coalition of working-class folks, of farmers, of teachers, of grassroots organizers. And I haven’t really seen an intentional, broad coalition like that basically since [former President] Obama.”
For years Democrats have attempted to bring together the voting blocs — including young people, people of color, white college-educated and suburban voters — that propelled Obama to the White House in 2008 and 2012.
Even now, nearly six years after he left office, the former president is a popular surrogate for candidates seeking to win tough races in states he won. Barnes is one of a handful of Democratic Senate candidates for whom Obama is headlining campaign events in the coming days — he will be in Milwaukee on Saturday, and will also appear with John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and incumbent Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.
Democrats are hoping to maintain or expand their caucus’ 50 seats in the evenly divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris often casts the tiebreaking vote in their favor.
Though President Biden narrowly won Wisconsin in 2020, Black voter turnout did not reach the levels of the Obama era. Democratic strategists say that increasing their numbers is key this election cycle.
“In a 50-50 state where everything matters, if the Black vote materializes for Barnes in a way that it hasn’t for other candidates, that could be the ballgame,” said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic strategist who supports Barnes but isn’t working with his campaign.
Voter outreach groups note the systemic hurdles Black voters face, including being disproportionately affected by restrictive voter ID laws. Wisconsin also has the highest incarceration rate for Black people in the country, and people on parole or supervised release for felonies aren’t allowed to vote in the state.
Outside groups have spent over $46 million against Barnes, according to Open Secrets, largely on ads tying him to crime. The largest spenders in the race have been the Wisconsin Truth PAC, which has spent $26 million on the Senate race and $17 million against Barnes; and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that has spent $23 million opposing Barnes. Democratic groups have spent $33 million opposing Johnson, including $21 million from the Senate Majority PAC, which is tied to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Democrats across the country are facing a familiar challenge ahead of the November midterm election as Republicans attempt to cast their opponents as anti-police. Those attacks often feature comments Democrats made in the spring and summer of 2020, when the protest movement sparked by the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd led to conversations around shifting some law enforcement funding toward social services.
In response to the attacks, Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the “defund the police” movement and promote their efforts to invest more in policing.
That dynamic has been at play in Wisconsin, where Republicans have focused on an unsuccessful 2016 bill to end cash bail that Barnes sponsored while he was in the state Legislature; his past support for a proposal to reduce the state’s prison population; and comments he made in the past criticizing police and noting he was open to redirecting law enforcement funding.
Barnes and his staff have emphasized throughout the campaign that he doesn’t support defunding the police. In one ad he says he would “make sure our police have the resources and training they need to keep our communities safe.”
Though the “defund the police” slogan has for some come to mean eliminating law enforcement, many advocates use the term to describe shifting a portion of police spending to social services to help prevent the factors that lead to crime. Republican groups and media outlets have unearthed old interviews in which Barnes said police funding could go toward community services.
On the issue of cash bail, Republican ads have zeroed in on the 2021 Christmas parade attack in Waukesha, Wis., where Darrell Brooks drove an SUV into a crowd — killing six people and injuring scores more — while out on bail set at $1,000. He was found guilty of all charges, including homicide, this week. The case sparked debate over cash bail in the state, where bail is primarily used to make sure people show up to court — not to prevent the release of people who could be dangerous.
“Between the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre and the soaring murder rates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin voters are seeing the firsthand effects of a soft-on-crime liberal agenda,” Alec Zimmerman, Johnson’s communications director, said in a statement to The Times. “Barnes and his allies in the media can’t defend the dangerous impact these policies are having on Wisconsin communities.”
The bill Barnes co-sponsored would have ended cash bail but allowed judges to block a person’s release if there was clear evidence of a risk to the public. Barnes has said the bill would have prevented Brooks from being released, which independent fact-checker PolitiFact rated “mostly true.”
Critics say several of the ads against Barnes have used racist tactics, such as darkening his skin tone in images or pointing to crime in Milwaukee, which has a 40% Black population, to drive up safety concerns statewide.
“Some of us are furious about it,” said Calena Roberts, a field director for the Service Employees International Union’s Milwaukee-based state council, which has held protests denouncing the ads. “It may be hurting [Barnes] from the suburban standpoint, but it’s not hurting him in our communities.”
Barnes and Democratic groups have gone on the offensive, attacking Johnson over his proposal to change Social Security funding from guaranteed to discretionary; his “A” rating from the NRA and his opposition to gun control legislation; and his support for restrictions to abortion access. Johnson has co-sponsored Senate legislation that would grant a constitutional right to life to embryos, as well as a bill to ban abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.
More recently, Barnes has countered claims about his record on crime by arguing that Johnson, who has supported former President Trump, isn’t supportive of law enforcement — pointing to the senator’s attempt to pass along a list of fake Wisconsin electors ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and his comments following the attack. Johnson told a conservative radio show in March 2021 that he wasn’t afraid of the group that stormed the Capitol because they were people who “love this country” and “truly respect law enforcement.”
In a recent Marquette University poll that asked voters whether they were “very concerned” about various issues, 74% of Republicans said they were concerned about crime, compared with 55% of independents and 38% of Democrats. Independents were more likely to say they were concerned about public schools, a top concern for 71% of them, while 81% of Democrats said they were concerned about abortion policy.
The same poll, however, found that support for Barnes had plummeted since he won the Democratic nomination this summer, from a 7-percentage-point lead in August to trailing by 6 points this month. Polling data compiled by FiveThirtyEight found that Johnson is now leading by an average of 3.4 points.
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), a longtime Barnes supporter who has represented the Milwaukee area since 2005, said the lieutenant governor’s allies are trying to counter the crime claims by reminding voters that Barnes has lived in those neighborhoods and has a better grasp of what voters there want.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do, these last closing arguments, is go out to our community and say, ‘You know, Mandela,’ ” Moore said. “He knows that everybody wants security and protection. He also knows that we want accountability, for our institutions to serve us as a community and not work against us.”
Kisha Shanks, a policy director at Milwaukee’s Black Child Development Institute who attended a Black maternal health roundtable hosted by the lieutenant governor’s campaign, said Barnes’ ties to the north side of Milwaukee are part of his appeal.
She grew up in the east and north parts of Milwaukee when the area’s major manufacturing plants were still open and providing jobs. Like Barnes, she witnessed the loss of those jobs and the effect that had on Milwaukee’s Black middle class.
“The community violence, as bad as it is, it’s not because we’re just inherently that way,” Shanks said. “The city of Milwaukee is a petri dish for every social issue you can think of.”
People who aren’t familiar with the city beyond its negative portrayal on the news tend to say the solution is to increase policing, she said. But she argued that the actual solution is to reinvest in the community.
“We need representation on the Senate floor that understands that,” she said.
