Angela Major/WPR
Gov. Tony Evers did not take the stage at the Orpheum Theater until after midnight to declare victory over Republican opponent Tim Michels.
At the Orpheum Theater Tuesday night, a crowd of supporters of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers gathered to watch the returns. One veteran of such proceedings leaned over the back of her chair to explain to an acquaintance how they play out: “Basically you sit here, you wait, you kill time, until everyone’s screaming.” That pretty much describes the whole election.
It was a little past midnight when Evers’ Republican challenger, Tim Michels, conceded, saying “the math doesn’t add up” in a way that would allow him to win. In the end, the race was decided by about 85,000 votes. Dane County came through in a big way for Evers, giving him 79 percent of its roughly 300,000 votes.
Meanwhile, in the state’s other marquee race, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes declined to throw in the towel, even though he was trailing by some 40,000 votes with 93 percent of the votes counted. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson took to the podium at his election night gathering in Neenah at around 1 a.m. to tell his supporters, “I’m not going to declare victory until all the numbers are in,” something he expected would happen later this morning. But, he added, “This race is over.” (As of 9 a.m. today, Johnson’s lead had fallen to about 27,000 votes, with 99 percent of votes counted.)
It was a fittingly messy denouement for races that set new records for high spending and low blows. These were ugly and divisive contests. They demonstrated anew that Wisconsin is not so much a purple state as it is a black and blue one.
The two gubernatorial candidates and outside groups spent a combined total of $114 million through Oct. 24, breaking the previous spending record of $93 million in the 2018 election. Evers’ campaign parted with $43 million; Michels, a construction company exec, spent $24.5 million, including $18.7 million of his own money. Outside groups, not including those running “issue ads” that stop short of telling people how to vote, dumped at least $45 million into the race.
One ad from a conservative outfit called Restoration PAC which aired in the final days of the campaign accused Evers of racism — against white people. It said he “once headed an agency that suggested that white people wear ‘privilege wrist bands.’” This is apparently based on a claim in a 2013 column by conservative pundit George Will regarding the state Department of Public Instruction, which Evers headed at the time, that the nonpartisan PolitiFact rated as “Mostly False.”
A Marquette University Law School poll released less than a week before the election found that voters were nearly equally split on the question of whether Evers or Michels “better understands the problems faced by ordinary people in Wisconsin.” That’s a bit surprising, given that Michels is a billionaire who owns mansions in other states where he sent his kids to school while Evers is practically the definition of an ordinary guy.
Moreover, Michels has no experience in the political realm and seemingly little grasp of what the job entails. His appeal to the voters essentially came down to this: I’m a businessman. If elected, I will find out whatever is wrong and fix it.
In his one and only debate against Evers, in mid-October, Michaels was asked about the state’s formula for sharing revenue with municipalities. Michels gave no sense that he understood the topic, veering off into a spiel about “surging” crime. Reminded that the question was about shared revenue, he said:
“You know, there’s plenty of money in government. There’s $43.5 billion dollars spent every year. Those are the taxpayers’ money. I’m going to sit down with the Legislature and the smart people, my lieutenant governor, Roger Roth — we’re going to make sure that we come up with the right formulas, and we are going to adequately make sure that there’s funding for the issues that the people of Wisconsin are so concerned about.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, right, and his supporters were successful at pegging his opponent, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as a scary Black man who likes crime and wants to see more of it.
In pursuing the third term he promised not to seek, Johnson also presented as possessing a glaring lack of competence. He has spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19, called the science of climate change “bullshit,” and publicly cast doubt on the 2020 election result while privately conceding that Biden won. (He even took part in a scheme to present a slate of fake electors to Vice President Mike Pence.)
Johnson proposed stripping Medicare and Social Security of their status as entitlement programs, making them subject to the year-to-year whims of Congress. And he refused to try to prevent a manufacturer from moving jobs from Wisconsin to South Carolina, where the workers are cheaper, saying “It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin.”
But Johnson and his supporters were successful at one thing: pegging Barnes as a scary Black man who likes crime and wants to see more of it. Barnes was accused, among other things, of wanting to “defund the police,” something he has never called for and which is contradicted by the fact that the Evers administration directed $100 million in COVID-19 relief funds to law enforcement and public safety initiatives.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee ran an ad that branded Barnes as “different” and “dangerous” as it pictures him alongside three congresswomen of color who are members of “The Squad,” none of whom has campaigned with him. Meanwhile, the state Republican party sent out a mailer in which the color of Barnes’ skin has clearly been darkened.
“There’s definitely a racial overtone,” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, recently told The Guardian about the messaging that wiped away Barnes’ seven-point lead in the polls. “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.”
What made these attacks especially ironic, as Barnes pointed out, to no apparent effect, is that Johnson himself has a looming lapse in his crime-fighting credentials — his declarations of affinity for the mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that left 140 officers injured. Johnson proclaimed that the attackers were “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.”
Barnes seems to have lost his election while Evers won because a significant share of voters believed the scary Black guy messaging over the efforts to make Evers out to be a scary white guy. Even in Dane County, with 98.5 percent of the estimated vote counted, Barnes had 77.3 percent of the vote compared to Evers’ 78.6 percent, a gap similar to that in the state as a whole. Overall, Evers snared about 1,350,000 votes, compared to Barnes’ roughly 1,300,000.
Put another way, as many as 50,000 Wisconsinites may have, for some reason, voted for both Tony Evers and Ron Johnson.
Let the screaming begin.
