Tommy Washbush
Among the most interesting tidbits of information in the latest Marquette University Law School poll — the gold standard among political polls in Wisconsin and the nation — was Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes’ strength among independent voters.
The conventional wisdom is that Barnes — Wisconsin’s youthful, progressive lieutenant governor who is the first Black person to hold that office — must drive turnout in Milwaukee, where young urbanites and people of color can shift Wisconsin’s close election outcomes when they get energized by a candidate.
But the August Marquette poll tells a different story. Sure, Barnes animates millennials, as Milwaukee’s Dan Shafer convincingly wrote in a recent New York Times opinion column, contrasting Barnes’ sense of urgency on climate change and economic justice issues with the lethargy of older politicians like his opponent, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who seems not to care at all about the plight of the planet or the working-class voters in his district. But it turns out that it’s not just the Democratic base that is excited by Barnes’ message. The same is true of independent voters all over the state.
In the Senate race, while party loyalty is running high on both sides, with 95 percent of Democratic voters supporting Barnes and 92 percent of Republicans supporting Johnson, Barnes has a seven-point advantage over Johnson overall because of his considerably better performance among the independent poll respondents divided about evenly between those who lean to the right or left. Altogether, the independents preferred Barnes by a 14-point margin.
Mobilizing less reliable voters will, as usual, be the key to winning a close Wisconsin election for both political parties, the Marquette poll’s director Charles Franklin says. However, digging into the numbers, Franklin notes that, in the Senate race, Barnes’ seven-point advantage remains the same whether pollsters are talking to the respondents who are totally committed or less reliable voters.
Franklin’s conclusion: “Turnout still matters, but at the moment it doesn’t seem like results are so heavily pegged to turnout in the Senate race.”
It’s a bit of a surprise that more than half of Wisconsin’s independent voters (52 percent) prefer Barnes compared to 38 percent for Johnson — a change from June when the two candidates were tied, with 41 percent of independents preferring each of them.
But this is a phenomenon our state has seen before. Sen Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat and one of the most progressive members of the U.S. Senate, has consistently defied expectations, winning in red counties that voted for Trump and racking up an 11-point reelection win in 2018 when the other Democrats in statewide races were squeaking by with 1 percent margins of victory. Baldwin, like Barnes, is a good listener, has a warm, down-to-earth style, and is genuinely interested in wonky policy topics that matter to her constituents. How many times have you seen her wearing a plastic eye shield and touring a factory before giving a speech about protecting Wisconsin manufacturing or announcing a new federal grant? Not for nothing has Barnes been touring the state recently with Baldwin, making stops in communities in the northern and western reaches of Wisconsin.
No candidate can afford to be complacent in our closely divided state. Not even one whose opponent announced, just before the primaries, that he doesn’t believe Social Security and Medicare should be protected federal programs, and instead should be subject to annual budget haggling, with all payments stopped during any future government shutdown.
Johnson is formidable, and a lot of voters like what they perceive as his candor, whether it’s on alternative remedies for COVID or sunspots or his Ayn Randian economic views — the things he’s always saying that Barnes sums up as “wacky stuff.”
But the latest Marquette poll gives you a view of a real path for Barnes, not just as the energetic young progressive who can get out the vote in Milwaukee, but as a serious student of statewide issues who actually cares about Wisconsin voters and is earning their confidence.
Not surprisingly, more people told the Marquette pollsters that they think Barnes “cares about people like me” (50 percent) than said the same about Johnson (41 percent). Conversely, only 27 percent said they didn’t think Barnes cared about them, compared with 49 percent who were pretty sure Johnson doesn’t give a rip about them.
That’s not a huge surprise, considering Johnson’s assertion, early in the pandemic, that there was no need to shut down business because “only” about 3.4 percent of the population would likely die, and that programs like unemployment insurance make people too lazy to work.
From the national media’s perspective, the November election is interesting because Johnson, like GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels, is closely tied to Donald Trump. But there is more to our state than that.
A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that 20 percent of Wisconsin Trump voters are at least somewhat concerned about the revelations of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
And there is a big war going on within the state Republican Party over how Trumpy it really wants to be. Right now the less Trumpy faction is still hanging on — barely.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the most powerful Republican in the state, barely survived a Trump-supported primary challenge. Heading into November he continues to try to split the difference between Republicans who are demanding “election integrity” and the full-on election deniers who insist voter fraud robbed Trump of the presidency in 2020.
Vos says Republicans need to focus on the “real threat” posed by Democrats and Evers, who have vetoed all the “election integrity” bills the Republicans lobbed at him as they try to make voting harder and fan the flames of paranoia about “massive fraud” in state elections.
The problem with playing footsie with election deniers is obvious as Vos’ primary challenger, Adam Steen, who came within 260 votes of toppling him, has announced he’s running again, this time as a write-in candidate against Vos in the general election.
These people are not easy to control, and it’s going to be hard for Vos, or anyone else, to control them.
But Wisconsin’s independent-minded voters, as a group, are hard to control, too. And right now the candidate they’re gravitating towards is Mandela Barnes.
Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
