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      Why Democrats Aren't Attacking Ron Johnson for His Outlandish Comments

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      Ron Johnson has a history of making outlandish comments. But Democrats aren’t focusing on those for now.If you don’t live in Wisconsin, you probably know Ron Johnson as the senator who has suggested gargling with mouthwash to ward off the coronavirus. Or, you might know him as the guy who has said Jan. 6 didn’t “seem like an armed insurrection.” Up until this weekend, he was also the Republican dragging his feet on whether to run for a third Senate term.On Sunday, Johnson finally jumped in. And Democrats responded immediately with a television ad that provided an early glimpse of their 2022 messaging.Noticeably absent from the ad, which was sponsored by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, are Johnson’s stances on two of the biggest issues that the country is facing: the pandemic and political violence. It doesn’t mention that he’s questioned the efficacy of vaccines, or has used his perch on the Homeland Security Committee to amplify Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen election. In fact, it doesn’t mention any of the incendiary comments that have landed him in the national spotlight.Instead, the ad begins: “Has Ron Johnson been looking out for himself, or you?” It cites an AP headline, “​​Report: Johnson pushed for tax break benefitting megadonors.”Cut-and-paste attacksIn Washington, Democrats bash Trump and his allies for elevating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and for sowing misinformation about the coronavirus. But if Wisconsin is an indicator of what’s to come, Democrats seem to be gravitating toward conventional candidate attack lines that have little to do with the political outrage of the moment.For the 2022 midterms, Democrats may be betting that the generic conventions that have worked in countless campaigns — attacking candidates’ voting records, elevating so-called “kitchen-table” issues — are more likely to move the voters they need to reach than righteous condemnation over fringe ideas. It’s a return to the plutocrat-bashing that was so successful for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election against Mitt Romney, and a rejection of Terry McAuliffe’s more recent efforts to anchor Glenn Youngkin to Trump in the Virginia governor’s race.They might be hoping to reach the surprisingly large group of Wisconsin voters who haven’t formed an opinion of Johnson — just over 20 percent, according to polling data from the Marquette Law School.Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, put it this way: “It’s what affects people more than what offends people.”Top targetWisconsin is one of the country’s most fiercely contested political battlegrounds. Since Trump won the state in 2016, shattering Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall,” Democrats have crawled their way back. In 2018, Tony Evers was elected governor and Senator Tammy Baldwin won re-election, both Democrats. In 2020, Biden won the state, by barely more than 20,000 votes.That makes Johnson a top target for Democrats, who are hoping that defeating him will help them hang onto their Senate majority. Republican primaries are still sorting themselves out in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona — which means that Johnson will be the Democratic Party’s chief villain for the next few months, too.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans are already poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s race will be at the center of the political universe this year, but there are several important contests across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.Multiple Democrats are vying to take on Johnson, though they all entered the race before they knew he was running again. Among them are Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, along with Alex Lasry, an executive with the Milwaukee Bucks, and Tom Nelson, a county executive.Did Trump change the game?Johnson isn’t the only candidate who has repeated misinformation on the pandemic. In Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor who has advocated for using unproven drugs to treat Covid-19, could become the Senate nominee for Republicans. Will Democrats attack him for that, or would they go after him as a wealthy carpetbagger who has been living for years in New Jersey?In the pre-Trump world, Democrats actively rooted for opponents known for making outlandish or false statements, because they made for easier targets. Take Todd Akin, a Missouri Senate candidate who was ostracized from the Republican Party in 2012 for saying: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Claire McCaskill, the Democrat who defeated Akin, later confessed to shotgunning a beer when Akin won the G.O.P. primary.Now, however, many Democrats doubt that comments like Akin’s would register with voters in the same way.“The difference would be that as soon as it happened, there would just be a chorus on the right that would just say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s true. A woman’s body can just shut that down,’” said Jason Kander, a Democrat who fell short in the 2016 Missouri Senate race.Candidates, taking their cues from Trump, have also learned to recast their gaffes as bold truth-telling. As Johnson wrote in his announcement in The Wall Street Journal, “Countless people have encouraged me to run, saying they rely on me to be their voice, to speak plain and obvious truths other elected leaders shirk from expressing — truths the elite in government, mainstream media and Big Tech don’t want you to hear.”Partisanship has also deepened since the pre-Trump era. Even if some voters find certain rhetoric to be unsavory, they would rather not vote for someone who would build the opposing party’s majority. They’re voting against not just the candidate on the ballot in front of them, but also Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.And then there’s the simple magnitude of the challenge: If Democrats are going to mention the things that they find to be the most outlandish, they then have to spend time explaining why it’s outlandish.“Democrats are going to have to come up with some new messaging, because everything they’re talking about now is old,” said Brandon Scholz, a Republican and former strategist based in Wisconsin. “They have covered everything he’s said.”It might just be easier to discredit the messenger, rather than the message. As Wikler, the Democratic state chairman, explained it, the allegations about Johnson’s self-dealing are more likely to break through to ordinary Wisconsinites than his comments about the coronavirus or the Capitol riot.“For voters that aren’t paying attention closely to politics from day to day,” he said, “that’s the stuff that feels most extreme and disappointing.”What to read tonightA New York Times analysis of climate data by Krishna Karra and Tim Wallace found that temperatures in the United States last year “set more all-time heat and cold records than any other year since 1994.”The Justice Department is forming a unit to combat domestic terrorism, Katie Benner reports.“Harry Reid lived for the Senate floor. He also lived on it,” writes Carl Hulse in a remembrance of the late Senate majority leader, who will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday.BRIEFING BOOKIn his speech, President Biden pressed the Senate to alter the filibuster.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe New York Times covered every angle of Tuesday’s appearance by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta, where they delivered forceful, back-to-back addresses demanding the Senate act on federal voting rights legislation.“We’re here today to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle,” Biden said, connecting those imposing new restrictions on voter access to the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “The right to vote and have that vote counted is democracy’s threshold liberty.”Reacting to the speech, Spencer Overton, head of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the author of a book on voter suppression, told us: “Biden was not silent today. He drew clear lines that you’re either for democracy or you’re against democracy.”Here are some highlights of our coverage:Biden is pressing the Senate to alter the filibuster, an institutional rule that effectively requires a 60-vote threshold for most legislation, including two voting rights bills Republicans uniformly oppose.That’s leading to an angry pushback from Senate Republicans, Carl Hulse reports. “Republicans are going to be furious over those references putting them on the side of Southern racists like George Wallace and Bull Connor,” he predicts.In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, accused Democrats of pushing for a “federal elections takeover.”Georgia has become the crucible for the national struggle over voting rights, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Astead W. Herndon write.Nick Corasaniti explains what the battle over voter rights and elections is fundamentally about.One more thing…At a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Dr. Anthony Fauci was caught on a hot mic muttering under his breath after an exchange with Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas.Marshall had been pressing Fauci to share his personal financial disclosure forms, insinuating that the National Institutes of Health’s top infectious disease expert might be benefiting improperly from inside information.“Wouldn’t you agree with me that you see things before members of Congress would see them, so that there’s an air of appearance that maybe some shenanigans are going on?” Marshall said. His staff had been unable to find the forms, he added.Fauci replied that Marshall was “totally incorrect” and that his records were publicly available.“What a moron,” Fauci could be heard whispering afterward. “Jesus Christ.”Asked about the encounter, an NIH spokesperson replied, “Dr. Fauci’s public financial disclosure reports are releasable through the Ethics in Government Act.” She added: “Anyone can obtain them by submitting OGE Form 201 request, as described on the NIH FOIA portal website.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Republicans Attack Democrats as Liberal Extremists to Regain Power

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      As Democrats prepare to run on an ambitious economic agenda, Republicans are working to caricature them as liberal extremists out of touch with voters’ values.WASHINGTON — Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.“Will Axne Pack the Court?” was the headline on a statement the party rushed out, saying the move to expand the court “puts our democracy at risk.”The attack vividly illustrated the emerging Republican strategy for an intensive drive to try to take back the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans are mostly steering clear of Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, such as an infrastructure package and a stimulus law that coupled pandemic relief with major expansions of safety-net programs, and are focusing instead on polarizing issues that stoke conservative outrage.In doing so, they are seizing on measures like the court-expansion bill and calls to defund the police — which many Democrats oppose — as well as efforts to provide legal status to undocumented immigrants and grant statehood to the District of Columbia to caricature the party as extreme and out of touch with mainstream America.Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats’ push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.The approach comes as President Biden and Democrats, eager to capitalize on their unified control of Congress and the White House, have become increasingly bold about speaking about such issues and promoting a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule. It has given Republicans ample fodder for attacks that have proved potent in the past.“They are putting the ball on the tee, handing me the club and putting the wind at my back,” said Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.Democrats argue that Republicans are focusing on side issues and twisting their positions because the G.O.P. has nothing else to campaign on, as Democrats line up accomplishments to show to voters, including the pandemic aid bill that passed without a single Republican vote.“That was very popular, and I can understand why Republicans don’t want to talk about it,” said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But we’re going to keep reminding folks who was there when they needed them.”The contrast is likely to define the 2022 races. Democrats will sell the ambitious agenda they are pursuing with Mr. Biden, take credit for what they hope will continue to be a surging economy and portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party pushing Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election. Republicans, who have embraced the false claims of election fraud and plan to use them to energize their conservative base, will complain of “radical” Democratic overreach and try to amplify culture-war issues they think will propel more voters into their party’s arms.A release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted what it called the “three pillars” of the Democratic agenda: “The Green New Deal, court packing and defund the police,” even though the first two are far from the front-burner issues for Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders and the third is a nonstarter with the bulk of the party’s rank and file.President Biden and Democrats have promoted a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesLast week Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, sought to thrust a new issue into the mix, leading Republicans in protest of a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the nation’s legacy of slavery. He has taken particular aim at the 1619 Project, a journalism initiative by The New York Times that identifies the year when slaves were first brought to America as a key moment in history.“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday during an appearance in Louisville. “I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that year 1619 was one of those years.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, has been explicit about his strategy.“Now what I talk about every day is do we want open borders? No. Do we want to shut down our schools? No. Do we want men playing in women’s sports? No,” Mr. Scott said during a recent radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.“Do we want to shut down the Keystone pipeline? No. Do we want voter ID? Yes,” he continued. “And the Democrats are on the opposite side of all those issues, and I’m going to make sure every American knows about it.”Democrats who have fallen victim to the Republican cultural assault concede that it can take a toll and that their party needs to be ready.“It was all these different attacks that were spread all over mainstream media, Spanish-language media, Facebook, WhatsApp,” said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic House member from South Florida who was defeated last year after Republicans portrayed her as a socialist who was anti-police. “A lot of it was misinformation, false attacks.”She said Democrats must begin taking steps now to combat Republican misdirection, warning that their legislative victories might not be enough to appeal to voters.“We can have a great policy record,” she said, “but we need to be present in our communities right now, reaching out to all of our constituencies to tell them we are working for them, that their health and their jobs are our priorities.”On the Supreme Court issue, progressive groups began pushing the idea of an expansion after Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices, including one to a vacancy that Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling in the last year of his presidency and another who was fast-tracked right before last year’s election.Hoping to neutralize the issue, some Senate Democrats who will be on the ballot next year have made it clear that they would oppose expanding the court, and the bill seems to be going nowhere at the moment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring any court bill to the floor until at least after a commission named by Mr. Biden to study the matter issued its report, which is due in six months. The president has been cool to the expansion idea as well.The office of Ms. Axne, the only Democrat in Congress from Iowa, did not respond to requests for reaction to the Republican attacks on her over the court plan. In an interview with MSNBC, Ms. Axne said that she, like Ms. Pelosi, would await the findings of the commission.But Republicans are not waiting to try to score political points. They say more moderate Republican voters and independents who broke with the party during the Trump years have been alienated by the call to enlarge the court and other initiatives being pushed by progressives.One key for Republicans next year will be winning back suburban voters while running campaigns that also energize the significant segment of their supporters who are fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump and want the party to represent his values. That may be a difficult balance to achieve, as evidenced this week when Republican leaders moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of the party’s No. 3 leadership post for calling out the former president’s false election claims.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said it would matter less what Republicans said about Democrats than what his party was able to accomplish.“The one thing that will win people over, no matter what they do, is whether we can deliver,” he said. “They are doing what appeals to their base, but the voters in the middle, including a good chunk of Republican voters, actually care about getting things done.”Instead of focusing on Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, Republicans are seizing on measures like a bill to expand the Supreme Court.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Peters said Democrats would be better positioned to rebut attacks such as those that falsely portray them as pressing to defund the police after voters had experienced two years of the party holding power.“President Biden and the caucus have been very clear that we are not about defunding the police, we are about making sure police have the resources they need to do their jobs,” he said. “Ultimately, it is about how it is impacting people’s lives.”Mr. Kaufmann, the Republican leader in Iowa, begged to differ. He said he believed the hot-button issues Republicans were homing in on would drive voters more than “the nuance of tax policy and who gets credit for the vaccine.” He is eager to get started.“Some of this stuff is really controversial,” he said. “These are all very bold and clearly delineated issues. I can use this to expand the base and get crossover voters.” More