Sen. Ron Johnson pushes racial divisions in his closing message to Wisconsin GOP voters

BLACK RIVER FALLS, Wis. - As he made his final pitch to voters in western Wisconsin last week, Sen. Ron Johnson told a story about a truck driver who got stuck while navigating a tricky road.

The senator said he was driving through Portage when he encountered a traffic snarl caused by the immobile truck. Johnson said he is typically impatient but was not in this case because he witnessed something “heartwarming”: The people of the small community in central Wisconsin sprang into action to help the truck driver get going again.

He ended the story with this reveal: “You know, one little point really - really doesn’t factor in the story at all. But the driver was an African American gentleman. So now why would I add that little detail? I happen to be running against Mandela Barnes,” Johnson said.

Barnes, currently Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, is Black, and has criticized the impact of systemic racism on society in blunt terms. Johnson has called attention to those remarks in recent days, along with the anecdote about the truck driver. His campaign did not respond to questions about what message Johnson hopes to convey with the story, but critics think it is intended to assure White voters that Barnes is wrong about systemic racism being a concern in Wisconsin.

Race has played a central role in the Wisconsin senatorial election, which is among the closest in the country and could determine the partisan balance of the Senate. Supporters of both candidates have accused the other side of unfairly injecting race into the campaign. For weeks, outside GOP groups have financed an onslaught of ads, including a spot that showed Barnes’s name styled in graffiti, and others that have labeled him as “dangerously liberal” and “different.” In some advertisements Barnes’s skin has been darkened.

At a campaign stop Saturday in Racine, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers criticized Johnson and the GOP for playing up race in the Senate campaign. “I think they’ve gone out of their way to make him look like a mean and angry man - making his face look darker. That’s baloney, frankly,” Evers, who is in a tight reelection race, told reporters after a rally with supporters.

“I think it’s racism when you’re - when you take a candidate who happens to be Black - and try to make him look blacker and angrier.” Evers said.

In his stump speech during the past several days, Johnson has repeated some of Barnes’s past comments about systemic racism and said the Democratic nominee has shown “contempt” for America. “That’s what he thinks about you. Literally, do you want him representing you?” Johnson asked a crowd in Black River Falls.

“No!” several people yelled.

Johnson continued: “Why does he want to represent people that he views are just systemically racist?”

A spokesman for Johnson’s campaign argued that Barnes’s past comments about systemic racism have made the subject fair game. “Sadly, Lt. Gov. Barnes is the candidate that inserted race into the campaign,” said Johnson spokesman Ben Voelkel.

Voelkel added: “Lt. Gov. Barnes wants to talk about anything other than his record as a career politician that supports President Biden’s inflationary policies that crush the economy and wants to defund the police and let violent criminals walk free.”

For the most part, Barnes has hesitated to engage on questions about whether Johnson and the Republicans are leveling racist attacks. When asked directly about Johnson’s attacks Friday, he compared him to the state’s infamous red-baiting former senator. Barnes said Johnson is “the worst senator in Wisconsin since Joe McCarthy” and that the current senator is “doing his best to emulate him.”

Others have not had any qualms about calling out the way Johnson and Republicans have campaigned against Barnes.

Actor LeVar Burton, of “Star Trek” fame, who campaigned with Barnes in Madison on Friday, said Johnson “is one of my least favorite human beings. He’s arrogant. He’s racist. Just look at the ads he runs.”

Earlier last week at an event at the Rotary Club in Milwaukee, Barnes was asked about Johnson’s comments questioning why he wanted to represent people he thought were racist. “I wouldn’t run for the U.S. Senate, I wouldn’t be here today, if any of these things that he said were true,” Barnes said.

Should he prevail, Barnes would be Wisconsin’s first Black senator. The state is 87 percent White, according to 2022 census data. It’s become one of the country’s key swing states, with most major elections in recent years decided by exceedingly slim margins.

Voters here backed Barack Obama twice in presidential elections, then helped send Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. Some political observers, including supporters of Barnes, say that focusing on race, especially on comments that Barnes has made on the topic, is intended to make some voters uncomfortable with Barnes’s views and uneasy with voting for him.

At the beginning of the year, Wisconsin was considered among the top Democratic opportunities to flip a Republican Senate seat, largely because Johnson, 67, was not popular in his home state. In February, just 33 percent of Wisconsin voters reported having a favorable view of Johnson, while 45 percent reported an unfavorable view, according to a Marquette Law School Poll. But in recent weeks, Johnson has appeared to gain an edge.

Barnes, 35, has been in public life for a decade and has given a number of interviews over the years on the topic of race and policing in Black communities. Many of those have been replayed in recent weeks by Republicans seeking to show him as having extreme views.

In a wide-ranging July 2021 interview on Black Oxygen, a podcast, Barnes said that national parks “weren’t made for the enjoyment of people who weren’t White” and added that some of them are carved from Indigenous land. In the interview he also says the parks have “many positive benefits.”

In a 2018 radio interview, he said racism in Wisconsin is “a little more scary” because it’s “much more concealed” than in the Deep South and “can be institutionalized.” He quipped that the dynamic could be called “concealed-carry racism.”

Johnson has pointed out both those remarks in recent speeches, saying that Democrats - and Barnes in particular - want to fundamentally change the state and that Barnes’s discussion of racism in society is off-base.

The senator has his own history of comments that have drawn scrutiny. A few months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Johnson made a comment that was widely condemned as racist, with some even calling for him to resign. In an interview on a conservative news radio program, Johnson, who was in the Capitol when rioters broke in and ransacked the building, said he “wasn’t concerned” about his safety. “I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law,” he said, referring to the mostly White, pro-Trump rioters. But, he continued, “had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”

The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer; two other officers who were on duty that day later died by suicide. More than 100 officers were injured and the Capitol sustained more than $1.5 million in damage.

Johnson supporters downplay racism in the campaign. “Mandela Barnes’ inability to win over voters in Wisconsin, like his lack of achievements as our Lt. Governor is his fault, not the result of racism,” state Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican, said in a statement. Bradley, who is the first Black Republican elected to the state Senate, said that Barnes would have more traction with voters if he spent more time focused on rising crime, which he said is “an issue which disproportionately impacts black families.”

Johnson’s strategy of amplifying race on the trail is an attempt to appeal to GOP base voters, said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “We are in that very last push to mobilize every last possible partisan voter,” Franklin said.

The state’s western communities, where Johnson has unspooled his latest stump speech, are mostly White. There, race resonates even in a reference to Milwaukee, where most of the state’s Black population lives, and which can be painted to some voters as a “scary place, far away,” he said.

“When you’re as evenly divided a state as we are, turnout could make the difference,” Franklin said. “Maybe base appeals at this point are what the campaigns have decided to focus on.”

As he campaigned last week, Johnson told the story about the truck driver at least twice. Both times, he didn’t mention the driver’s race at first and instead led with the driver’s predicament: He had struggled to navigate a difficult turn and was causing a traffic delay.

“It had to be so embarrassing for this guy,” Johnson said at a Tuesday afternoon stop in Onalaska, a town of about 6,000 where 96 percent are White, according to census data. “He was in a horrible predicament.”

But locals stopped to help the man, Johnson explained. Some directed traffic. Others offered advice on how to best maneuver the truck. Finally, the man was able to drive away. “It’s just one of those moments of just sort of joy, right?” Johnson said, explaining how those who helped gave him a thumbs up and honked to cheer him.

Reggie Jackson, a historian based in Milwaukee, said it’s clear to him what Johnson is trying to do. “He’s trying to pander to White people’s idea that America isn’t racist,” said Jackson, who said he has not offered a public endorsement in the campaign.

The story about the Black truck driver aided by the White residents of the community is a “tried and true trope to get White people to feel good about themselves,” Jackson said. It’s a kind of sophistic logic, suggesting that a White person can’t be racist if they have once helped a Black person, he said.

Jackson also took issue with Johnson’s comments suggesting that Barnes is unpatriotic. “It’s just completely at odds with where Wisconsinites are. We love this country,” Johnson told reporters after the Onalaska rally.

That type of rhetoric comes from a long history of White people questioning the loyalty of Black citizens who complain about discrimination in the United States, Jackson said. “They used to say, ‘if you don’t like it, find another place to live.’”

“It’s another shameful attempt to placate White people. Because there’s been so much conversation about systemic racism,” Jackson said.

Johnson told the story about the truck driver while on a 10-day “get out the vote” tour of the state with more than 60 stops.

On Saturday, the GOP candidate stopped in Racine, about 30 minutes south of Milwaukee, where he gave an abbreviated version of his stump speech. The truck driver section was gone, but he continued to amplify race. He invoked Martin Luther King Jr. “Almost all of us - virtually all of us - didn’t we embrace, in the ‘60s, Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision?” He added: “Why can’t we celebrate that success and work toward further healing?”

But, he argued, that’s not the approach that’s been taken by Barnes and by former president Barack Obama, who was in Wisconsin recently stumping for the Democratic candidate. “Why would he want to represent a bunch of people who have institutionalized racism?” Johnson asked.

Some voters at Johnson’s Racine event agreed with his framing.

“Does racism still exist? Yes,” said Taylor Wishau, 33, of Burlington after listening to Johnson speak Saturday. “But I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it was.”

Wishau, who is White, said that if Barnes wins the Senate race he hopes that he “retracts” some of his comments about systemic racism. “If there’s so much racism in this state, how did he get elected lieutenant governor? Just stop with the divisive politics.”