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Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson speaking at a Trump rally.
Imagine your fate resting in the hands of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson. That’s the jam Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell finds himself in, as he waits for the dumbest guy in the U.S. Senate to make up his mind on whether or not to run again.
The longer Johnson waits, the harder it is for other prospective Republican candidates to raise money and launch their campaigns. And the harder it gets for Republicans to win Wisconsin, the slimmer McConnell’s chances of taking back control of the U.S. Senate become.
Trump has been publicly urging Johnson to seek a third term—something Johnson himself promised not to do.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. McConnell, whose chief aim in life has been obstructing Democratic Presidents, even when it means opposing an investigation of the U.S. Capitol insurrection that threatened his own life, cares about nothing but power. So it’s amusing to see the Darth Vader of American politics tied in knots by Mr. Goofus Goes to Washington.
If Johnson, who has been one of Donald Trump’s most obsequious apologists, does run, he will be bringing along a lot of baggage with him. And that’s the last thing Republicans need in a swing state that went for Trump in 2016 but where Democrats won every statewide election in 2018 and Biden pulled off a critical narrow victory in 2020.
Johnson wasted countless hours of committee hearing time on Hunter Biden conspiracies and has called for a full investigation of “irregularities” in the 2020 presidential election, which he terms an “unsustainable state of affairs.” He avidly supports restrictive voting measures proposed by Republicans in Wisconsin and, despite the lack of evidence for any amount of voter fraud, claims that we don’t yet know how much fraud there was.
Some of Johnson’s most headline-generating statements to date have to do with the coronavirus, including his early insistence that preventing deaths from the pandemic was not worth the economic cost of keeping people home and his promotion of dubious alternative remedies. Recently, he opined that masks “have not been particularly effective” at stopping the spread of COVID-19. He also held a press conference with people who have had rare adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, in an apparent effort to spread fear and confusion—Johnson’s specialty.
The junior Senator from Wisconsin says he is not anti-vaccine, and describes himself as “a huge supporter of Operation Warp Speed,” calling the Trump Administration’s push to develop COVID-19 vaccines “brilliant.” But he has also warned against “indiscriminate mass vaccination,” and suggested, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to thousands of uncounted deaths.
Recently, Johnson made a splash by calling climate change “bullshit”—a remark President Joe Biden mocked, prompting Johnson to challenge him via Twitter to a debate on the subject. The President has so far not accepted; perhaps he has more important things to do.
Recently, a video of Johnson’s June appearance at a Milwaukee Press Club event was removed from YouTube because it contained so many inaccurate statements about COVID-19, including claims about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, and the unproven harmful effects of getting vaccinated.
No wonder an ever-growing field of Democrats in Wisconsin, including the dynamic state treasurer and popular lieutenant governor, are eager to run against him. He’s an opposition researcher’s dream.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s other Senator, Tammy Baldwin, has one of the most progressive voting records in the U.S. Senate and won her last re-election campaign handily by ten points. So Democrats know they can win statewide in Wisconsin.
McConnell is expecting that, as usual, the opposition party will pick up seats in the midterm elections. But Johnson could thwart that plan by turning the race into a referendum on Trump—who lost his re-election bid in Wisconsin, although he still won’t admit it.
Trump has been publicly urging Johnson to seek a third term—something Johnson himself promised not to do, back when he campaigned on the idea of term limits. (Reminded of his pledge not to seek another term by Craig Gilbert, Washington bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Johnson said, “When I made that pledge I meant that pledge.” Unfortunately, times have changed. Now he doesn’t mean it anymore.)
“I ran in 2010 because I was panicked for this nation,” Johnson declared in his press club appearance, adding, in a line he repeated at the state’s Republican Convention, “I’m more panicked today.”
Trump has said Johnson would have his “Complete and Total Endorsement” should he decide to run again. Presumably, the two of them would run around Wisconsin panicking together.
Never mind how this would complicate the race, in which McConnell wants to gin up a backlash against Biden and the Democrats. Though there are still Trump banners waving over the cornfields in the rural parts of Wisconsin, that doesn’t make Johnson a good candidate. He won last time with support from suburban voters who have been turned off by Trump. Those voters show no signs of appreciating Johnson’s panic.
And then there’s Johnson’s opposition to the child tax credit, which hit Americans’ bank accounts on July 15, and which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates will benefit 1,159,000 children in Wisconsin—92 percent of those under the age of eighteen.
“In general,” Johnson said, I don’t like to use the tax code for either economic or social engineering.”
Johnson had no problem engineering a tax break for his own business before he cast the deciding vote on the 2017 Trump Tax Bill—a $1.4 trillion handout for the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. As The Guardian reported, Johnson began the process of selling a company he partly owned in February 2018, just months after he insisted the Trump Administration change a portion of the tax law in a way that ultimately benefited the sale.
If Ron Johnson does run for re-election, it will be a test of Trump’s hold on Republican voters.
Johnson increasingly makes overt appeals to the crazy pro-Trump base. He went to Milwaukee on Juneteenth, the new federal holiday he tried to block, saying he didn’t think government employees deserve paid time off to celebrate the end of slavery, and later made a point of talking about how he was booed by African American residents in his speech at the Wisconsin Republican Convention.
He voted against a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and he has doubled down on statements that he wasn’t concerned about the pro-Trump protesters who stormed the building carrying weapons and plastic handcuffs, whom he described as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement,” saying he “might have been a little concerned” if they were Black Lives Matter protesters.
It’s not just Black Lives Matter protesters and Democrats who want Johnson gone.
James Wigderson, editor of RightWisconsin, the online “forum for conservatives to debate the goals and tactics of the conservative movement in Wisconsin,” recently told me that he is advising his fellow conservatives not to support Johnson, even if it means losing the election.
“If you’re given a choice in 2022 between Ron Johnson and any of the Democrats so far running, then don’t vote,” he said. “Don’t reward Ron Johnson with your vote. Maybe then the Republicans will learn a lesson.”
In the long term, Republicans are hurting their chances of winning elections by embracing Trumpism, according to Wigderson. He points to the drop in Republican voters in Waukesha and Ozaukee Counties in 2020, where suburban women, in particular, defected from the Party of Trump. “When the district that was once held by [former Wisconsin Governor] Scott Walker in the state assembly is now a solid Democratic seat, that should be a warning to Republicans that they need to straighten up their act,” Wigderson says.
These sorts of political calculations do not appear to trouble Johnson. His indecision about whether to run for re-election is not only tying up Republican candidates who will run for his Senate seat if he doesn’t, it is delaying the same field of Republicans who want to run for governor if Johnson decides to stay in the U.S. Senate—effectively tying up two races while he dithers.
Johnson, like Trump, is an embarrassing liability to a lot of Republicans. If he wins, so do the worst currents in Republican politics—the bullying, the boorishness, the racism, the contempt for democratic institutions. All of that has become part of the Republican brand since Trump won.
If Wisconsin shakes off Ron Johnson, it will be a sign the Trump era is finally ending.