After months of flinging mud, Senator Ron Johnson was finally obliged to admit that his Democratic opponent in the upper midwestern state of Wisconsin had never actually made a call to “defund the police”.
But that did not stop the Trumpist senator’s re-election drive from continuing to broadcast racially charged advertisements falsely claiming that Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, “rationalized violence” against the police and tying him to the most controversial positions of Black Lives Matter.
Barnes and his supporters dismiss the ads as evidence of Johnson’s desperation. But the campaign of “race and fear” has had an impact as an election that Barnes once looked to have in the bag is now too close to call.
Across the country, Republican strategists have ratcheted up attacks on Democrats over fears of crime as the midterm elections approach with predictable results in many races. But Barnes, who is running to become Wisconsin’s first Black senator and is named after South Africa’s iconic former president, is on the end of a particularly pointed campaign that has eaten into a once substantial lead in the final weeks of a race that could decide control of the US Senate.
“There’s definitely a racial overtone,” said Charles Franklin, director of the respected Marquette law school polling of Wisconsin voters.
“The massive amount of negative advertising attacking Barnes on crime more than anything else is surely the explanation for why he has seen the gap close since August, or a big part of it.”
Johnson won the seat, once held by the notorious communist baiter Jospeh McCarthy, in the 2010 backlash against Barack Obama’s presidency, unseating a three-term Democrat. He was re-elected in 2016 by a margin of just 3.4 points.
Earlier this year, the Cook Political Report rated Johnson one of the most vulnerable incumbent senators in part because of association with attempts to submit a slate of fake electors to overturn Biden’s election victory, his promotion of conspiracy theories around the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and for his support of a total ban on abortions. It now says the seat is a toss-up.
Barnes has seen a seven-point lead evaporate in recent weeks amid a barrage of negative advertising largely funded by two billionaires who the Democrat’s campaign say are rewarding Johnson for his support of tax cuts that benefited them by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Diane Hendricks, a rightwing billionaire businesswoman and Wisconsin native closely tied to Donald Trump, and Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, founders of the Wisconsin-based Uline packaging company who have a long history of funding far-right candidates, are the main donors to a political action committee, Wisconsin Truth, which until recently was heavily outspending the Barnes campaign.
Franklin said his most recent poll showed the two candidates both at 47% support among registered voters because significant numbers of independents, who were neutral on Barnes in August, turned against him amid the barrage of attacks ads over crime.
“When we look across our surveys, it looks like that wave of advertising from August to September raised the salience of the issue, especially with independents,” he said.
Wisconsin Truth has portrayed Barnes as supporting radical reform of the police and the scrapping of the US immigration agency because he is supported by groups that back those positions even though he has repeatedly said he does not. But key to the ads are their racial overtones.
One of them shows a picture of Barnes with three members of “the Squad” of congressional progressives, all women of color – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The text says: “Mandela Barnes, different”. The word different then changes to “dangerous”.
Criticism has also…