Category: Politics and American Democracy

Rolling Stone

After a Senate Loss in Wisconsin, Democrats Turn on Each Other

Kara Voght – November 13, 2022

In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Mandela Barnes’ supporters felt frustrated. They believed in Barnes as the best Democrat to take on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and election forecasts all but guaranteed a Johnson victory. That frustration gave way to fury, however, once the ballots were counted on Wednesday. Barnes lost to Johnson by a single point.

It was a performance far stronger than what former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) achieved in his back-to-back runs against Johnson in 2010 and 2016. It also shouldn’t have been a shock. “This was a result that tracks with what our model suggested might happen,” says Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. He’d spent the last few weeks explaining, both publicly and privately, that the race was tied — even as credible public polls found Barnes uncomfortably behind.

The unexpectedly sunny outcomes for Democrats on Tuesday night mostly staved off party 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 his reelection on Tuesday by more than 90,000 votes. The Senate race, meanwhile, had been the Democrats’ top target in 2022 as polls consistently deemed Johnson unpopular among Wisconsin voters. His reported efforts to help overturn Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results only made his ousting more desirable.

Barnes’ near miss has reopened intraparty wounds as Democrats lament the Senate seat that got away. At the root of it is a perennial question that follows high-profile losses: Was the candidate the wrong choice, or did he have insufficient resources to make his case?  Barnes’ progressive allies point fingers at the Democratic establishment, whom they blame for discouraging big money from stepping in to counter tens of millions in attack ads unleashed upon Barnes after the primary. Democratic operatives, meanwhile, blame the Barnes campaign for not doing enough to counter those attacks with his own messaging — and for not putting enough distance between himself and past progressive positions they believe are toxic to Democrats running in tight races.

Barnes had been the early favorite to take on Johnson. The 35-year-old Black lieutenant governor had been a Democratic rising star ever since he’d won a Milwaukee-area seat in the Wisconsin legislature at age 25. He shared the winning gubernatorial ticket with Gov. Evers in 2018, a victory that boosted his visibility statewide. Barnes didn’t fit squarely in any ideological frame; both progressive stalwarts like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and moderate Black leaders like Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) claimed Barnes as their own. 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 the job done,” Barnes told Politico of their very online bromance in July.)

He and Fetterman also shared a vulnerability: Liberal sensibilities to criminal justice reform. Barnes became the face of the Evers administration during the Kenosha riots that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in August 2020. He made frequent cable news appearances to demand police accountability. At one point, he suggested diverting funding from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to community programs. The sentiment seemed to align Barnes with the goals of “defund the police,” the left-wing rallying cry that had grown radioactive in Democratic circles. Barnes had also been photographed holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, another liberal slogan the GOP insisted on weaponizing.

Barnes tailored his campaign to neutralizing those attacks. He introduced himself as a candidate with a middle-class upbringing and a pocketbook-oriented platform. When asked about his criminal justice positions, Barnes would say he supported investing in both crime-prevention measures and law enforcement in equal measure. The strategy worked for the Democratic primary: He cleared a crowded field before any votes were cast as challengers, seeing Barnes as the clear frontrunner, dropped out and threw their support behind him.

The view from Washington, however, hadn’t been so convinced of Barnes’ obvious ascent. The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm had seen multiple candidates as strong contenders to challenge Johnson, declining to put its thumb on the scales for any candidate during the race. In the months leading up to the primary, a number of influential Democrats had privately raised doubts over Barnes’ electability — including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), according to several sources with knowledge of conversations. (“That’s ridiculous,” says a Schumer spokesperson, who noted that Schumer transferred $1 million from his own campaign coffers to Barnes’ efforts. “Sen. Schumer worked tirelessly to ensure Mandela Barnes and other Democratic candidates across the country had the resources they needed to run strong and competitive campaigns.”)

Then, just two weeks after the primary, the predictable happened. Four Johnson-aligned super PACs blanketed Wisconsin airwaves with ten different ads tying rising crime rates to Barnes. The spots preyed on the trauma of the Kenosha riots as well as a violent scene in Waukesha, where a man killed five attendees at the city’s annual Christmas parade as drove his car in November 2021. Nearly $25 million was spent in TV, radio, and digital advertising against Barnes during that period — including more than $10 million from Wisconsin Truth, a super PAC founded by three billionaire Johnson backers.

Barnes led Johnson by seven points in the first Marquette University poll taken after the primary, a time when a third of the Wisconsin electorate still hadn’t formed any opinion of Barnes. By the beginning of October, the Marquette poll found that Johnson had pulled ahead of Barnes by six points. “They were able to make Mandela look like a scary black man,” says Angela Lang, the executive director of BLOC, a Milwaukee-based Black civic engagement organization. The crime-ridden messaging had even penetrated among the city’s older Black voters, according to Lang. As BLOC’s organizers went door-to-door, they’d sometimes be asked: “Is Mandela really trying to let all these violent criminals out?”

“If the GOP smears had been met with equal intensity, I don’t think the country would have lost track of the fact that he really did have the chance,” Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chair, says. But Democrats disagree on what meeting those smears should have looked like. To Barnes’ progressive allies, the major Democratic party organs didn’t hit back hard enough during the GOP’s August and September blitz. They blame the lack of pushback on doubts prominent democrats raised over Barnes’ electability, saying it discouraged key donors from investing in the race. That attitude, according to Barnes’ boosters, delivered his campaign a fatal blow at a key moment. “That window was such a critical window — Mandela was ascendant,” says Maurice Mitchell, the executive director of the progressive Working Families Party, which backed Barnes in the race.

Indeed, the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm had, by that point, viewed Fetterman’s race for Pennsylvania’s open seat as a safer bet and decided to focus its resources on winning that race. Even so, Democrats had thrown $11.6 million behind opposing Johnson in those post-primary weeks — including $3 million from the DSCC in airtime “with the hopes that our nominee would use the air cover during this period to get their own advertising plans in order,” says a DSCC spokesperson. But Democrats defending those efforts point out that no amount of anti-Johnson spending would be as effective as hearing from Barnes himself. Research from the Center for American Progress, shared with Democratic campaigns in September, had found that the most effective strategies for combating crime attacks came from the candidates deflecting allegations themselves. Democratic Senate strategists had relayed these finds to the Barnes campaign and encouraged him to be prepared to face attacks on his record.

The Barnes campaign, attuned to this, stayed on the air throughout August and September with a series of ads that featured Barnes refuting GOP claims. One from late August opened with Barnes in his kitchen in the midst of the quotidian tasks of putting away groceries. “Now they’re claiming I’m going to defund the police and abolish ICE,” Barnes said directly to camera. “That’s a lie.” It still wasn’t enough to counter the Republican onslaught with so many GOP attacks going unanswered; the Barnes campaign, still rebuilding its fundraising coffers from the primary, couldn’t match the spending. “We knew people needed to hear directly from him — ‘This is nonsense, this is what I believe,’” says Barnes campaign manager Kory Kozlowski. “The thing you can’t control is three of their ads for one of yours.”

Still, 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, a cofounder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic political organization that supported Barnes in the general election, admits money was a huge factor — as was race, especially given the 120,000-vote delta between Barnes and Evers. “But it also can be true that Barnes did not effectively put distance between himself and his positions,” Bennett adds. Other Democrats point out that Barnes never walked away from his support of ending cash bail, a vulnerability Republicans successfully linked to the Waukesha tragedy, which had been perpetrated by a freed felon. “Proof points like that become really hard to overcome,” says Navin Nayak, the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “That’s where good policy can bump up against scare tactics.”

But the Barnes campaign did find a potent strategy to crawl back into contention. Much of that was premised on hammering Johnson over his anti-abortion stances, a charge the Barnes campaign learned performed best against Johnson’s crime accusations. The Barnes campaign outraised Johnson in the final stretch and achieved a spending parity — and, at times, an advantage — as it got its own attack ads up in early October. Education among voters, too, softened the attack lines. “Naming the racism was important,” BLOC’s Lang says. “He’s talking about getting rid of cash bail, but that doesn’t actually keep our community safe.”

Barnes’ poll numbers steadily climbed each week leading up to the election. “One more week and we would have won,” Kozlowski, Barnes’ campaign manager, laments.

Johnson’s victory has no bearing on Democrats retaining their Senate majority. The caucus will, however, fall short of the 52 senators they needed to kill the filibuster — perhaps just one short if Sen. Rapahel Warnock (D-Ga.) wins a December runoff election.

Rolling Stone

With Herschel Walker, the Stupidity Is the Point

George Chidi – November 13, 2022

About half of Georgia voters cast a ballot for Herschel Walker on Tuesday. Most of these voters wouldn’t trust Walker to run the check-out at a Family Dollar. But that’s the whole point.

Herschel Walker has repeatedly proven himself to be stupid. Herschel Walker’s voters aren’t necessarily stupid. That’s too easy.

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Georgia Republicans aren’t stupid. But they see safety in stupid politicians. The stupidity of Herschel Walker isn’t a problem for them. It’s a feature. And writing off Georgia Republicans as country idiots is a kind of smug, lazy thinking that oversimplifies a complicated political problem, not just in Georgia but across the country.

Herschel Walker was not nominated to govern. He was not nominated to bargain. He was not nominated to formulate policy. He was not nominated to exercise judgment. He was nominated to mash the R button whenever a vote comes up, no matter what.

“It could be Daffy Duck for all I care,” one such voter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at a Walker rally in Baxley, Ga. “Just get the Democrats out of Washington.”

Electing Walker is like replacing that check-out clerk with an automated self-scanner.

A smart man certainly wouldn’t have held up a fake badge during a debate after being accused of pretending to be a police officer. Rather than own up to the mistake, Walker started doing interviews with news reporters while wearing the badge. The number of children Walker was publicly willing to acknowledge were his has grown twice over the course of the campaign, surprising his own campaign staff with the revelations. Walker’s response to the revelations has been to argue that the children he doesn’t see aren’t campaign props, and please ignore the one who is shouting from the high hilltops about having to move six times in six months as his mother evaded Walker’s abuse.

Walker has argued for a national ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest in interviews as late as August. He denied that he ever said he held a position that extreme, in his first debate with Warnock, but the record of his comments is crystal clear. “I believe in life,” Walker said at a forum in August. “And I said, you know, if anyone wants to have an exception, I said, ‘Not in my book,’” Walker said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry. I feel bad for anyone that’s a victim of any kind of crime.’ I do. I feel like that. That is terrible and that’s horrible, but we deal with that as it comes.”

He’s plainly a pro-life candidate either way.

Two women have come forward to say that Walker pressured them into getting abortions. One, the mother of one of Walker’s (known) children, had a check signed by Walker and a receipt from the abortion clinic. Normally, this would fall into the category of career-ending political scandals. But Walker’s stupidity is an asset. Wisdom might prevent mistakes, but it also generates the kind of self-reflection that creates a conscience, and that’s a problem.

On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp earned roughly 200,000 more votes than Herschel Walker, out of about four million cast. Sen. Raphael Warnock earned about 140,000 more than Stacey Abrams. That means that only about 1 in 20 voters saw the trainwreck that Walker presented – a history of mental illness, violence against women, plain lies about his charitable work with veterans and his business dealings, an absolutist stand on abortion and his connection to Donald Trump – and bailed. Only about two-thirds of those voters who walked away from Walker were actually willing to cross the aisle and vote for Warnock.

If you want a clearer example of bipartisanship’s death, well… you’re not going to find it.

An introspective candidate with Walker’s skeletons would never have run in the first place. But an introspective candidate wouldn’t have had Walker’s skeletons. This may seem counter-intuitive, but for a lot of Georgians, these kinds of mistakes solidify the view among Georgia’s right that Walker must have never thought he would go into politics and hasn’t lived the sterile careerist lifestyle of the political elite … which is the best qualification they know for higher office.

So rather than slink into a corner and collapse after the abortion stories, Walker simply denied everything and threatened to sue The Daily Beast for its reporting on the abortions he allegedly paid for. (So far, he hasn’t followed through on the threat.) He has continued to campaign on an unapologetically pro-life platform.

Wednesday, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America announced it would back Walker with $1 million in spending on the runoff.

A senator who stops to consider the personal or political consequences of his actions might vote for bills that don’t “own the libs.” For many Republican voters, this alone is enough reason to vote for Walker.

For example, Georgia did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The state contributes extra money into the national treasury for medical care that it does not receive, for no real reason other than keeping doctors away from poor people. Hospitals are closing across the state, mostly in communities with poor white residents, though the most significant recent closure was of a major Level 1 trauma center in downtown Atlanta.

The policy is profoundly stupid. It also hurts more Black people than white people in Georgia, so many Republicans support it. A smart politician would be looking for a policy workaround that brings that money to Georgia. But Republicans don’t want a smart politician. They want Walker.

Before you start feeling superior about your choices, the tribal desire to beat a political enemy is also the fundamental political motivation for most Democrats. Even Raphael Warnock has had issues surface during the campaign which might give voters a pause.

Warnock was arrested in 2002 and briefly accused of obstructing an investigation into child abuse at a summer camp. The charge was dropped once it became clear to a judge that Warnock was trying to prevent children from being questioned by police without parents or a lawyer. Walker’s campaign ran ads showing police body camera footage from a domestic case, where Walker’s ex-wife told cops he ran over her foot after an argument in 2020. Paramedics found no injuries on her.

Warnock’s church, the famed Ebenezer Missionary Baptist of Atlanta, owns a nonprofit which owns Columbia Tower at MLK Village, a senior residential housing complex. Some of its tenants have been served eviction notices for paltry sums in recent years, a point that Walker gleefully made during their debate. Warnock replied that no one had actually been evicted.

As a practical matter, none of these attacks mattered. Democrats voted for Warnock anyway. Politics have become tribal in Georgia.

That means a government that’s more dysfunctional, where there’s no incentive to agree to help people. That’s the whole point.

Tucker Carlson and others on the far right have been steadily reinforcing fears of the “Great Replacement” in the hearts of America’s white middle class. The threat of demographic change – and the concomitant political change – is the heart of this message. Sooner or later, they tell white conservatives, you’re going to be outnumbered. Once that happens, white nationalists argue that white people will become the targets of discrimination (instead of Black people.) They’re already arguing that in Georgia: Steven Miller’s team flooded TV and mailboxes with ads reminiscent of Jesse Helms’ “White Hands” ad with White people need not apply messages on jobs. The less functional and less legitimate that government is when the turnover happens, the easier it will be to fight.

Disabling the government is fundamental to white nationalist politics, and those politics have an audience in Georgia. But they can’t say that directly, because most voters reject that message and don’t like who is delivering it.

To be clear: most white Republicans are not crypto-white nationalists. But virtually all white nationalists will vote Republican, and they form a large-enough bloc within the party to influence primary contests in Georgia.

Ironically, Walker’s ethnicity is an added asset here. It’s harder to describe a Black man as a shill for a white nationalist agenda. Win or lose, it amuses the 4Chan wing of the party to amplify all the things they can’t say aloud in the voice of a Black man.

Usually, that play doesn’t work this well. Vernon Jones, a former CEO for majority-Black DeKalb County turned MAGA provocateur, ran for Congress with Trump’s blessings. He made it to a runoff and was thoroughly trounced.

It didn’t used to be like this. Georgia has produced highly educated, politically savvy, even smart Republican leaders over the years, from Newt Gingrich to David Perdue. The problem for the common Republican voter is that these guys – and they’re usually guys – have also tended to be corrupt. Elites are part of the problem. They know how to save their own skin if the ship is sinking. Georgia’s Republicans have decided it’s better to send in someone who wouldn’t know better.

And given the choice between a crooked brainiac and a simpleton, today’s GOP has made its preference clear.