Not Going Forward

The Senate election in Wisconsin looked to be the one that would finally send incumbent Republican Ron Johnson packing.  Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes (below) was ahead in earlier polls.  Now it appears that he's falling behind.

It appears that Johnson has - successfully, alas - tied Barnes to the rise in crime mainly due to the fact that he once voiced skepticism about policing and the fact that - hey, why don't I come out and say it? - Barnes is black.  Not to mention the fact that Barnes was named after the most famous black political prisoner of the twenty-first century, which makes for a pretty good dog whistle for Johnson to use in Wisconsin, the whitest state in the Great Lakes region.

Meanwhile, Johnson is on record as saying that the January 6 rioters were not in fact violent insurrectionists but in fact rioters who simply got a littel out of control. But hey, they stayed within the velvet ropes in the Rotunda, right? 

I can't believe that Johnson could be on his way to a third term on the issue of fighting crime when he's perfectly comfortable with the crimes the January 6 insurrectionists committed at the Capitol!

I gotta check my passport again . . . 

Forward or Backward?

Wisconsin - another pivotal state that could have implications for the 2024 elections and beyond - just had its primary for the general midterm election.  Tim Michels, a 2020-election denier with the support of Trump, defeated Rebecca Kleefisch, who had the backing of Mike Pence and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.  Michels faces incumbent Democratic governor Tony Evers in November.  Michels could win thanks to favorable trends for the Republicans nationwide, and Evers barely won his office in 2018, a Democratic year. 

On the one hand, I was happy to see a Walker-backed candidate lose, because I still hate Walker, who lost the governorship to Evers. On the other hand, a Trump-backed governor could send Trump electoral votes to Washington in January 2025 even if the Democrats carry Wisconsin in the next presidential election in a landslide.  Talk about getting the feeling of watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new Mercedes . . . 

Be that as it may, the Democrats just nominated Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes (below) to oppose Ron Johnson for the U.S. Senate in November.  Johnson is a two-term incumbent who may or may not deny the results of the 2020 presidential election but does question COVID vaccine repeatedly.  Barnes is a progressive who has supported the Green New Deal and has the endorsement of noted non-Democrat Bernie Sanders. 

A black progressive named for a black South African icon running for the Senate in a working-class state that's also the whitest state in the Great Lakes region.  Oh, yeah, that's a recipe for success!

Well, maybe it is.  The first polls for the general election show Barnes with a slight lead over Johnson.  And Barnes' chief qualification to oppose Johnson is that he is not Russ Feingold, who lost to Johnson twice.