The first debate between Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican, and his Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, was a study in contrasts between an unapologetic, older conservative and a younger liberal who appeared unafraid of his ideological roots.
Here are five takeaways.
Move to the center? Not in this race.
The debate put the two candidates’ ideological differences on full display. Mr. Barnes, a Milwaukee native who rose in politics as a progressive, has taken pains in his general-election campaign videos and advertisements to tour Wisconsin farms and present a bland, if earnest, image of wholesomeness. But in the debate, he did not pivot to the center, embracing marijuana legalization, defending Black Lives Matter protesters, and proposing school funding and job creation as answers to high murder rates.
Mr. Johnson, who has a long history of spreading misinformation on topics including the coronavirus and voter fraud, cast doubt on the established science of man-made climate change. He mocked federal efforts to regulate carbon dioxide and saying, “The climate has always changed, always will change.”
Mr. Johnson did punt on abortion, saying it was not up to Congress or the Wisconsin Legislature. The state’s residents, he said, should decide in a one-time referendum “at what point does society have a responsibility to protect life in the womb?” He did not say how he would vote.
Barnes had some friendly terrain.
Mr. Barnes seemed to receive more opportunities from the debate’s moderators, who allowed him to go after Mr. Johnson on some of the central themes of Democratic campaigns nationwide: abortion and the threats to democracy revealed by the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
With the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.
- Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.
- Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.
- G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.
- Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.
He was also able to press his portrayal of the incumbent senator as a wealthy businessman out to feather his nest and look after his well-to-do friends and benefactors.
“If you’re a multimillionaire, he’ll look after you,” Mr. Barnes said.
Negativity on the airwaves (mostly) continued in the debate.
To wrap up the debate, the candidates were asked to clear up any harmful impressions left by the cascade of negative advertising in the state. Mr. Johnson took up the challenge, but as he did, he sounded defensive, saying he had not, in fact, cut his own taxes or the taxes of his friends when he helped pass former President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which were skewed toward the rich.
Mr. Johnson called the assertion that he “got a tax cut only for myself and a few of my supporters” one of the campaign’s “grotesque distortions.”
Mr. Barnes took another tack. Political groups supporting Mr. Johnson have showered the state with advertisements on crime that play to white fears and grievances, in the process calling Mr. Barnes, who is Black, “different.”
“I embrace that,” Mr. Barnes said, trying to grab the mantle of change.
National battles over crime and abortion took center stage.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion has been a highly emotional issue in Wisconsin, home to a law from 1849 that bans abortion with almost no exceptions. Mr. Barnes sought to put Mr. Johnson on the defensive over the issue, describing the dangerous or heart-wrenching circumstances under which women sometimes seek abortions, and casting the senator’s opposition to abortion rights as “dangerous, out of touch and extreme.” That is a message Democrats are deploying in races across the country, and especially on the airwaves.
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Mr. Johnson was pressed for specifics, and he said he supported birth control and in-vitro fertilization, along with calling for a state referendum to determine “at what point does society have the responsibility to protect life,” something Mr. Barnes dismissed as unrealistic.
But Mr. Johnson also embraced an issue that is animating Republican ads in major races: crime. He repeatedly questioned Mr. Barnes’s commitment to funding law enforcement, and sought to conjure memories of protests that turned destructive in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Mr. Barnes emphasized his commitment to public safety.
‘Defund the police’ and Jan. 6 were cudgels in a fight over support for law enforcement.
Many Democratic officials and candidates rejected the “defund the police” slogan long ago. But Mr. Johnson sought to attach it to Mr. Barnes anyway on Friday, even as he conceded that Mr. Barnes does not embrace that language.
“He has a record of wanting to defund the police, and I know he doesn’t necessarily say that word,” Mr. Johnson said. “But he has a long history of being supported by people that are leading the effort to defund.”
He accused Mr. Barnes of using “code words” like “reallocate over-bloated police budgets.”
Mr. Barnes did suggest in a 2020 television interview that some funding be diverted from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services. Since then, he has said explicitly that he doesn’t support “defunding the police,” and has emphasized that law enforcement should have necessary resources.
“I’ve spent my entire career working to make communities safer,” Mr. Barnes said, emphasizing that “there’s so much more we need to do to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals.”
He also questioned whether Mr. Johnson’s support for law enforcement extended to the officers who were attacked during the Capitol riot, which Mr. Johnson has minimized.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
