Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican and one of the foremost spreaders of misinformation, won a third term, turning back a challenge from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.
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Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin addressing supporters at his election night party in Neenah, Wis., on Wednesday.
Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and one of the nation’s foremost spreaders of misinformation, won a third term, according to The Associated Press, turning back a challenge from his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.
Mr. Johnson’s victory, in what became one of the ugliest Senate races in the country and the most expensive contest in Wisconsin history, is critical to Republican efforts to win back a Senate majority.
Like his victories in 2010 and 2016 over Russ Feingold, a Democrat, Mr. Johnson defeated Mr. Barnes after initially trailing in public polls. In August, after Mr. Barnes won the Democratic primary as the clear favorite, Mr. Johnson and his Republican allies began a strident campaign to label him as a soft-on-crime, anti-American radical.
Democrats had criticized Mr. Johnson as a self-dealer who used his dozen years in the Senate to enrich himself and his big donors — a strategy agreed to more than a year ago by officials in Washington and Wisconsin. They largely did not stress to voters Mr. Johnson’s role in former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election or his pushing of discredited Covid treatments.
Now Mr. Johnson, 67, will return to Washington for a third term that he said six years ago he would not seek. He began to change his tune shortly before the 2020 election and formally launched his re-election bid early this year.
Mr. Barnes, 35, had cast himself as the voice of a new generation of Wisconsin Democrats, ending his stump speeches with a rousing, “It’s our time now.”
But Mr. Barnes struggled to win over the middle-of-the-road voters. Mr. Johnson’s September advertising blitz turned the race around, burying Mr. Barnes under a largely unanswered mountain of attack ads using his own words that called for a redistribution of law enforcement resources, criticized police practices and praised progressive officials. Mr. Barnes tried to distance himself from his past statements, but Mr. Johnson’s ads put him in a hole too deep to dig out from.
Mr. Johnson, a former plastics manufacturing executive, is the just the second Wisconsin Republican to win a third Senate term in the last century. Senator Alexander Wiley served four terms from 1939 to 1963, and Senator Robert La Follette, a liberal Republican known as “Fighting Bob,” spent the last 20 years of his life in the Senate. He remains one of the most influential and celebrated political figures in the state’s history.
Source: nytimes.com
