Morry Gash/AP Photo
Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes concedes to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson at a news conference on Wednesday, November 9, 2022, in Milwaukee.
Huddled inside a call-time room in my Senate campaign office in downtown Appleton this summer, my staff delivered unwelcome news.
“We are $60,000 in debt.”
We were two weeks out from the August 9 primary to decide the Democratic nominee for the seat. I could relate to my six-year-old son’s impaled dinosaur drawing on the wall.
There was just one way out of this mess. I picked up my phone and dialed Mandela Barnes.
“I am dropping out and am going to endorse you,” I told him.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
When I entered the race, I knew that Barnes—who had not yet declared his candidacy but was likely to do so—would have the easiest path to the nomination. He had a strong following in Milwaukee and Madison, where 2 out of 5 Democratic primary voters reside. Being lieutenant governor gave him statewide name recognition, and his fundraising potential was unlimited.
However, I also knew that a Milwaukee-based candidate would have tough sledding in the general election. Except for former Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl, whose positive name recognition matched the brand recognition of the Kohl’s department stores across the state, no Democrat from Milwaukee had won a major statewide election in Wisconsin since World War II. (Like all candidates for lieutenant governor, Barnes had won that office in 2018 not on the strength of his own appeal but on that of the head of the ticket, state superintendent of schools Tony Evers.)
The median distance that Democratic voters live from a medium or large city center is 12 miles.
Barnes shared my values and positions on key issues: Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and labor rights. We each grew up in blue-collar neighborhoods, him in Milwaukee and me in a small town in the Fox River Valley. That was why I threw my support to him, instead of one of our self-funded opponents: Alex Lasry, whose billionaire hedge fund manager father owned the Milwaukee Bucks, or state treasurer Sarah Godlewski, whose venture capitalist husband was her campaign’s main source of cash.
But to think that 2022 would be unlike any other election year, and that Wisconsin’s so-called outstate voters would embrace a Milwaukee-based candidate, who was vulnerable to fearmongering attacks on crime, and whose team of campaign and media consultants were unprepared to handle an onslaught of ugly, racist Republican ads, all in a state that is only 6.5 percent African American, was asking a lot.
“We should not be distracted by [GOP dog-whistling], we shouldn’t spend any time on, even countenance this, we have to focus on the [economic] issues that matter,” I argued in Citizen Action of Wisconsin’s Zoom forum in November 2021.
“The United States of America is the wealthiest, the most powerful nation on Earth, and that is because of forced labor on stolen land. We have to teach the reality of where we are or most people will just assume it happened this way because of hard work, pulling up by the bootstraps,” Barnes responded.
Across the table, behind and just beneath my computer, a staffer was softly repeating the words, which were tailor-made for an attack ad by Ron Johnson. Ten months later, the Republican Party was attacking Barnes with those exact same words, along with a bevy of negative ads driving down Barnes’s favorable rating.
Barnes would come back, but not by enough to win the high-profile Senate race. While Tuesday was a good night for Democrats, there are lessons to learn, nowhere more than in Wisconsin.
TODAY, AMERICAN POLITICS MIRRORS maritime law. The distance that a country’s territory extends off its shore is 12 (nautical) miles. The median distance that Democratic voters live from a medium or large city center is 12 (land) miles. It’s a figure that professors Andrew Reeves and Bryant Moy of Washington University in St. Louis pinpointed in their research on the relationship between geography and political attitudes. By comparison, independent voters live a median distance of 17 miles, and Republican voters a median distance of 20 miles, from a city center. This holds in nearly every state in the country, particularly in swing/battleground states.
Outside the 12-mile limit in Wisconsin are many former Democrats who feel that big-city politicians’ agendas do not match up with their economic realities. Outstate Democrats once made Wisconsin a blue state. Their exodus from the Democratic Party turned us purple and made us the battleground state in the country.
My campaign was built on the premise that a progressive Democrat from the swing region of the state, 100 miles from downtown Milwaukee, had the best chance of beating a two-term GOP incumbent. Through good and bad Democratic years, I had won six times in a red assembly district and county over an 18-year period. Polling showed that voters preferred a candidate 5-to-1 who could beat Ron Johnson rather than champion a progressive agenda.
As county executive of Outagamie County in northeast Wisconsin, I made common cause with the conservative Brown County Taxpayers Association against a proposed county sales tax, because of its regressive impact on low-wage earners. I served on the Bernie Sanders–aligned Our Wisconsin Revolution board to promote Medicare for All. I supported gay marriage, and granted the sheriff more authority over public safety. None of it fit neatly in any partisan or political box.
The solidarity I felt with Mandela Barnes on labor issues had lifelong roots. Many of the dads on Carol Lynn Drive in Little Chute, Wisconsin, where I grew up, worked at union paper mills, except for my dad, who was a Lutheran pastor. I went to the same schools, played in the same parks, and carpooled with the sons and daughters of union workers. I always kept this passage from the Bible close by: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed” (Proverbs 31:8).
In late summer 2017, when the paper mill just across the Fox River from my hometown came within a hair’s breadth of closing down permanently, I found a wrinkle in Wisconsin law that gave the union workers, and me as the chief local elected official, standing to challenge a receivership sale in court. The mill was saved. I wrote a book about it and ran for Senate in the workers’ name.
The policy agenda of my campaign was in sync with liberal Democratic primary voters in Milwaukee and Madison, while harking back to the Midwest populists of the past, from William Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the gold standard to “Fighting” Bob La Follette’s progressive battles against a corrupt Wisconsin political establishment. I had three policy areas: economic security (establish a $15 minimum wage; renegotiate bad trade deals; enforce antitrust law; tax the rich their fair share; repeal the Taft-Hartley Act), health security (Medicare for All), and the climate crisis (Green New Deal).
The lesson of winning in red parts of the state as a Democrat and beating back better-funded, better-known competitors was simple: hard work, hard work, and hard work. But it had its limits.
I COULDN’T KNOCK ON EVERY DOOR in the state, nor could I scale up a local or regional campaign operation. On Easter Sunday of 2022, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin told readers, “Tom Nelson reminds Democrats how populists should sound.” Her kind words led to the biggest fundraising haul of the campaign. But winning Wisconsin’s Democratic Senate primary required about $10 million. I raised $1.7 million over the course of a 21-month campaign. For a pastor’s kid from Little Chute, it was a big number. For a Senate candidate, it was a pittance.
For a major statewide campaign, a bare-bones budget runs at least $50,000 a month, covering staff salaries, consultant fees, research, compliance reports, and administrative costs. This so-called burn rate constituted 60 percent of our budget, which left about $600,000 for advertising in the final weeks of the campaign. With that amount, I could buy about 1,500 points of television in Green Bay, Madison, La Crosse/Eau Claire, and Wausau, and nothing in Milwaukee. Points measure how many times a viewer will see an ad. One hundred points equals one viewing. So our ads would be viewed 15 times by the average, targeted viewer.
On the other hand, Alex Lasry began airing spots before Halloween 2021, eventually totaling $9.4 million. Sarah Godlewski spent $2.3 million. Barnes only began to televise ads in May 2022, but his name identification as lieutenant governor was high enough to make up the difference.
On July 17, at a debate in Milwaukee, I felt my prospects for a breakout performance dimming. I thought I had my chance when I got a question on the Supreme Court. “If elected, what action should your party take to ensure women have the rights that were provided under Roe?” moderator Charles Benson asked.
“I am the only one up here running to expand the Court. Donald Trump was able to get three appointments to the Supreme Court because people in 2016 did not turn out to vote, including Sarah Godlewski,” I said. It was true—records showed that she did not vote that year.
“Well, as the only woman on this stage, I don’t need to be lectured by any men about how important the 2016 election was,” Godlewski said.
Sustained applause drowned out the few words I managed to get out.
Afterward, Sarah’s husband, Max Duckworth, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Nice job, Tom. Good effort.” It was a telegraph of her campaign’s next move. They were going to pour millions into new ads highlighting my failed debate exchange with her.
But without me in the race to split the progressive vote, neither Lasry nor Godlewski had a path to victory. After I dropped out to endorse Barnes, they folded up their campaigns a few days later. Max would not get a refund on his latest investment.
IF YOU HAD TO PUT ONE NUMBER on the good fortune of Barnes’s opponents dropping out ten days before the primary, it would be $2,900. Federal candidates have two fundraising accounts: primary and general. They can raise up to $2,900 in each fund, per individual, for a combined $5,800. However, once the primary is over you can only raise funds in the general account. So Barnes got a double bump. He didn’t have to spend down his account to win the primary, and he could raise twice as much from each donor until August 9.
According to FEC reports, about one-half (45 percent) of Barnes donations came in unitemized donations under $200. That gave him a deep base of small-dollar donors that he could go to over and over before the end of the primary. (It was not uncommon for his campaign to fire off three fundraising emails a day.)
As a bonus, one of his primary opponents, Alex Lasry, who had purchased $600,000 worth of presumably nonrefundable airtime, switched up his ads and ran negative spots against Johnson that would benefit Barnes.
And as a double bonus, one week before the primary vote, Johnson actually suggested putting Social Security up for renewal every year. You could build an entire campaign around that one quote.
This is all to say that money was no problem, nor was time—and his opponent continued to feed the meter with dumbass comments. Johnson was the most vulnerable senator up for re-election. Democrats had no trouble raising money and beat expectations for the election cycle.
But the day after the primary election, I predicted that GOP “dog whistling will become Klaxon air raid sirens by Labor Day.” It didn’t take that long.
The state’s, and the nation’s, sad history of race relations has normalized a racist public discourse in politics.
An onslaught of racist ads that made the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad seem like an honest policy discussion on race and criminal justice immediately jumped onto Wisconsin TV screens. Familiar attack refrains flashed in front of voters: “Defund the police.” “Release criminals.” “Open America’s borders.”
Johnson and his dark-money allies pounded Barnes day and night. This didn’t go unanswered. Total ad spending on the election amounted to $144 million according to AdImpact and was close to parity: $77 million for Johnson, $67 million for Barnes. But the timing was clear; in the crucial two-week period before and after Labor Day, Johnson spent a lot more than his opponent. Johnson defined Barnes in August, and only afterward did Barnes answer. By the time the Democratic Party began pumping real money into the race, the damage was done. The final result would be 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent; close, but no cigar.
A bio ad reintroducing Barnes to the general-election audience would have made a lot of sense in those early days. Barnes’s team didn’t do it. His fundraising in that ten-day period wasn’t that impressive either, not really capitalizing on the good fortune.
Johnson’s negativity was off the charts. But you could see that play 80 yards downfield.
THE ISSUE OF RACE WAS OMNIPRESENT well before the ugly, racist ads. Working the crowd at a Democratic Party picnic in the western part of the state in early summer, Barnes was speaking with a pair of Democratic activists near a beer cooler. He grabbed the hand of a particularly enthusiastic Democratic booster: “Hi, I’m Mandela Barnes.”
“I know, you really stand out!” the picnic-goer responded with a smile.
Wisconsin is one of the worst states for African Americans to live in. The Milwaukee metro area is the second-most segregated area in the country. Wisconsin has the highest incarceration rate of Blacks. The student achievement gap between whites and Blacks is the greatest in the nation. And Wisconsin has the highest Black infant mortality rate in the country. We don’t prioritize desegregating our cities, improving health or education outcomes for African Americans, or reforming our criminal justice system.
The state’s, and the nation’s, sad history of race relations has normalized a racist public discourse in politics. Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and Capitol insurrectionists are a symptom. The modern-day Republican Party is the dark place that feeds our darker angels.
There is a saying in politics. If something is working, you don’t take your foot off the gas. Expect even more racist ads in 2024 and beyond.
At the end of the day, a political party has one job and one job only: get their candidates elected. How do you campaign in a day and age when racism courses through the body politic and your values are at odds with devastatingly effective campaign strategies?
Democrats must reach beyond the 12-mile limit. Republicans can win elections by ginning up their base and suppressing Democratic turnout. Democrats cannot do the reverse. Democrats must win well beyond city centers. Outstate Democrats are a dying breed, not only in Wisconsin but across the country, and we may be extinct before long. Winning them back means speaking to outstate voters’ sense of economic fairness, and supporting the kind of policies that we don’t see very much out of both parties.
My getting out before the primary was the right decision for the party. “This one is for all the marbles. We have to win this race,” I told every gathering of Democrats for 21 months.
Too bad the Republicans figured it out first.
