In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Mandela Barnes’ supporters felt disillusioned. Barnes was believed to be the best Democrat to take on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and the election projections were all but guaranteeing a Johnson victory. That frustration gave way to anger, however, once the ballots were counted on Wednesday. Barnes lost to Johnson by a single point.
It was a far stronger performance than former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) pulled off in his back-to-back runs against Johnson in 2010 and 2016. It also shouldn’t have come as a shock. “This was a result that tracks what our model suggested would happen,” says Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. He had spent the past few weeks explaining, both publicly and privately, that the race was tied — even as reliable public polls found Barnes uncomfortably behind.
Unexpectedly sunny results for Democrats on Tuesday night thwarted the party’s soul-searching — with one notable exception: the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin. It wasn’t as if Democrats couldn’t win statewide there. Gov. Tony Evers won re-election Tuesday by more than 90,000 votes. The Senate race, meanwhile, has been a top target for Democrats in 2022, as polls consistently show Johnson unpopular with Wisconsin voters. His reported efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin made his impeachment more desirable.
Barnes’ near miss has reopened intra-party wounds as Democrats mourn the Senate seat that got away. At its root is a perennial question that follows high-profile losses: Was the candidate the wrong choice, or did he lack the resources to support his case? Barnes’ progressive allies point fingers at the Democratic establishment, which they accuse of discouraging big money from stepping in to counter the tens of millions in attack ads they unleashed on Barnes after the primaries. Democratic operatives, meanwhile, accuse the Barnes campaign of not doing enough to counter those attacks with its own messaging — and of not putting enough distance between itself and progressive positions they believe are toxic to Democrats who they run hard races.
Barnes was the early favorite to face Johnson. The 35-year-old black lieutenant governor has been a rising Democratic star since winning a Milwaukee-area seat in the Wisconsin legislature at age 25. He shared the winning gubernatorial ticket with Governor Evers in 2018, a victory that boosted his visibility across the state. Barnes did not fit neatly into any ideological framework. Both progressive stalwarts like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and moderate black leaders like Rep. Jim Clyburn (D.C.) claimed Barnes as theirs. It was a seemingly winning quality he shared with Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, another Democratic lieutenant governor trying to flip a U.S. Senate seat. (“Just two tall bald dudes trying to get their job done,” Barnes told Politico of their very online presence in July.)
He and Fetterman also shared a vulnerability: Liberal sensibilities on criminal justice reform. Barnes became the face of the Evers administration during the Kenosha riots that followed the August 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. He made frequent cable news appearances to demand police accountability. . At one point, he suggested diverting funding from “overbloated police department budgets” to community programs. The sentiment seemed to align Barnes with the goals of “defund the police,” the leftist rallying cry that had become radioactive in Democratic circles. Barnes was also photographed holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, another liberal slogan that has insisted on arming the GOP.
Barnes adjusted his campaign to counter these attacks. He ran as a candidate with a middle-class upbringing and a pocketbook-oriented platform. When asked about his positions on criminal justice, Barnes would say he supported investing in both crime prevention and law enforcement equally. The strategy worked for the Democratic primary: He cleared a crowded field before the votes were cast as challengers, seeing Barnes as the clear front-runner, withdrew and threw their support behind him.
The view from Washington, however, was less convinced of Barnes’ apparent rise. The Democratic arm of the Senate had seen several candidates as strong contenders to challenge Johnson, refusing to put their thumb on the scale for any candidate during the race. In the months leading up to the primary, several influential Democrats had privately raised doubts about Barnes’ electability — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), according to several sources with knowledge of the talks. (“This is ridiculous,” says a Schumer spokesman, who noted that Schumer has funneled $1 million of his campaign funds into Barnes’ efforts to run strong and competitive campaigns.”)
Then, just two weeks after the primary, the expected happened. Four Johnson-aligned super PACs flooded Wisconsin airwaves with ten different ads linking rising crime rates to Barnes. The spots evoked the trauma of the Kenosha riots as well as a violent scene in Waukesha, where a man killed five attendees of the city’s annual Christmas parade while driving his car in November 2021. Nearly $25 million was spent on television, radio and digital advertising. against Barnes during that time — including more than $10 million from Wisconsin Truth, a super PAC founded by three billionaire Johnson supporters.
Barnes led Johnson by seven points in the first Marquette University poll taken after the primary, at a time when a third of the Wisconsin electorate had not yet formed an opinion about Barnes. In early October, the Marquette poll found Johnson trailing Barnes by six points. “They could make Mandela look like a scary black man,” says Angela Lang, the executive director of BLOC, a Milwaukee-based black social engagement organization. The crime-based messages had even penetrated the city’s older black voters, according to Lang. As BLOC organizers went door to door, they were sometimes asked, “Is Mandela really trying to let all these violent criminals go?”
“If the GOP smears had been met with the same intensity, I don’t think the country would have lost the sense that it really had a chance,” says Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman. But Democrats disagree about what those smears should have looked like. For Barnes’ progressive allies, the GOP establishment didn’t hit back hard enough during the GOP blitz in August and September. They blame the lack of momentum on doubts raised by prominent Democrats about Barnes’ electability, which they say has discouraged key donors from investing in the race. That stance, according to Barnes’ boosters, dealt his campaign a fatal blow at a crucial time. “That window was such a critical window — Mandela was up,” says Maurice Mitchell, the executive director of the progressive Working Families Party, which endorsed Barnes in the race.
Indeed, the Senate Democratic campaign arm had, by that point, considered Fetterman’s race for the open Pennsylvania seat a safer bet and decided to focus its resources on winning that race. Even so, Democrats had thrown $11.6 million behind Johnson’s opponent in those weeks after the primary — including $3 million from the DSCC in airtime “in hopes that our candidate would use air cover during this period to arrange his own advertising plans. ,” says a DSCC spokesperson. But Democrats who defend those efforts point out that no spending spree against Johnson would be as effective as a hearing from Barnes himself. Research from the Center for American Progress, released to Democratic campaigns in September, found that the most effective strategies for combating criminal attacks came from the candidates themselves preventing the allegations. Democratic Senate strategists had relayed those findings to Barnes’ campaign and encouraged him to be prepared to face attacks on his record.
The Barnes campaign, tailored to that, remained on the air in August and September with a series of ads featuring Barnes countering the GOP’s claims. One in late August opened with Barnes in his kitchen amid the routine business of putting away groceries. “Now they’re claiming I’m going to defund the police and abolish ICE,” Barnes said directly to the camera. “That’s a lie.” It still wasn’t enough to counter the Republican onslaught with so many GOP attacks still unanswered. the Barnes campaign, which is still rebuilding its fundraising coffers from the primary, couldn’t keep up with the spending. “We knew people needed to hear directly from him — ‘This is bullshit, this is what I believe,'” says Barnes campaign manager Kory Kozlowski. “What you can’t control is three of their ads for one of yours. .”
But other Democrats point out that the attacks would have lost their sting if the candidate hadn’t held controversial positions in the first place. Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic political organization that backed Barnes in the general election, concedes that money was a huge factor — as was race, especially given the 120,000-vote delta between Barnes and Evers. “But it may also be true that Barnes did not effectively put distance between himself and his positions,” Bennett adds. Other Democrats point out that Barnes never abandoned his support for ending the cash bail, a vulnerability that Republicans successfully pounced on…
