Mandela Barnes’ Struggle To Run A Class-Based Senate Campaign
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Democratic candidate for U.S. senate in Wisconsin Mandela Barnes speaks to union workers at an event hosted by the Teamsters on the steps of the state capital building on Nov. 7, 2022 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo: Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
MILWAUKEE, Wis.— There’s a story Mandela Barnes likes to tell about the first time he ran for office. He was running against an incumbent Democratic state representative in his native Milwaukee and appeared before the board of a local Service Employees International Union chapter. They asked how they could be sure he would not turn his back on organized labor.
“If I ever turned my back on organized labor, I’d have to answer to my dad, never mind the SEIU,” said Barnes, now Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor.
Barnes told this story to a crowd of union officials who had gathered at a local brewery a few weeks before his victory in the state’s Democratic Senate primary in August. His father, a retired United Auto Workers (UAW) member, and his mother, a retired public school teacher, laughed in the crowd.
It was emblematic of the campaign he wanted to run — one tightly tied in with the state’s unions and full of economic populism, a contrast to the ultra-wealthy, far-right businessman he was running against and designed to win over working-class voters like his own family.
“It’s the reality,” Barnes told HuffPost in an interview. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for organized labor.”
Running that campaign was easier said than done. The biggest issue in Democratic politics for much of the summer and fall was abortion rights rather than economics. Talking about the economy is tough when inflation is around 10% and the president is a member of your party. Aligning yourself with unions in Wisconsin was far easier before manufacturing bottomed out, and the state became right-to-work.
Heading into Election Day, Barnes is a slight but decided underdog in his race against GOP Sen. Ron Johnson. Democrats do not need to win his race to hold the Senate, but a victory would make the GOP’s climb much steeper. A super PAC funded by two in-state mega-donors has battered him with $30 million in outside spending, forcing his campaign and allied groups to run multiple ads defending his record on crime.
Barnes’ struggle to get on the topics he wanted is a neat encapsulation of the Democratic Party’s flailing efforts around the economy and inflation, which was consistently the number one issue in public polling. Surveys generally indicated voters were receptive to Barnes’ message on the economy — support for unions and manufacturing, calls for increased taxes on the rich and lower taxes on the middle class. But it’s far from clear if enough people heard it to power Barnes to victory.
“We have too many disconnected, out-of-touch politicians who spend all their time making things better for people in their own tax bracket,” Barnes said at one campaign stop in October. “We have so much more in common with each other than we’ll ever have with self-serving politicians like Ron Johnson.”
In his final hours of campaigning Democratic candidate for U.S. senate in Wisconsin Mandela Barnes greets workers outside of the Molson Coors plant as the shifts change on November 08, 2022 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After months of candidates campaigning, Americans are voting in the midterm elections to decide close races across the nation. (Photo: Scott Olson via Getty Images)
“We’re still that group”
In late October, Barnes was in his element. He and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh were campaigning at a bar, The Cubby Hole, inside Green Bay’s AFL-CIO headquarters. The room, packed with union members, smelled like domestic beer and fried food. A chalkboard on the far wall advertised upcoming live music performances, food specials and Green Bay Packer games.
But there was also an elephant in the room, and Walsh acknowledged it. “Building trades in this room, Teamsters in this room, United Steelworkers in this room, you know we have friends of ours who are on the other side for whatever reason,” he said. “You know we need to go and explain to them what’s at stake.”
The “other side,” in this case, means Republicans. While the GOP had long been chipping away at Democratic support among white working-class voters, the election of former President Donald Trump in 2016 supercharged the problem. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which famously ignored Wisconsin, focused its attacks on Trump’s character rather than his economic agenda. Union members, especially male and white ones, defected to Trump en masse.
This shift among white working-class voters, who make up a majority of the electorate in Wisconsin, is the central problem facing the Democratic Party. Those voters are overrepresented in smaller states, giving the GOP a minor edge in the electoral college and a significant edge in the U.S. Senate.
Unions had long been one of the main ways working-class voters became Democrats, and support for organized labor was a pillar of the party from the New Deal era into the 1970s and 1980s. Their power was particularly prominent in Wisconsin. At one time, the city’s brewery workers had enough members that their union-wide votes needed to be held at County Stadium, the old home of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team.
But as manufacturing declined, unions dried up, and a key source of new Democrats went with it. Without unions to push voters and Democrats to focus on economic issues, the party and workers grew apart, partly because of social issues like abortion and gun rights. The consequences have been stark in mid-sized midwestern communities like Green Bay.
While the decline of unions has been a national problem for Democrats, an all-out GOP assault on organized labor in Wisconsin has added to their problems. When Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2010, he successfully gutted collective bargaining for most public-sector employees in the state, a move he claimed was necessary to fix the state budget but had the convenient side effect of hurting a major Democratic constituency.
A recall attempt failed in 2012, Walker won reelection in 2014 and finally lost to Gov. Tony Evers in 2018, with Barnes on the ticket as Evers’ running mate. But Wisconsin became a right-to-work state in 2015, and the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislative maps mean Democrats have zero hope to change that in the foreseeable future.
“There’s no question Scott Walker took collective bargaining and the unions head on and dealt it a blow,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin said after a stop campaigning for Barnes and Evers in Kenosha.
Unions are in the midst of a national comeback, and public surveys show they are more popular than they have been in decades: A Starbucks in Green Bay had voted to unionize just a few weeks before Barnes’ visit. And the power unions can still deploy was on display that afternoon at the Cubby Hole.
“Is our power diminished compared to 40 years ago? Yeah, that’s just a simple fact of math,” said Jack Kemper, an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers member. He was sitting at the bar with his friend Jim Ridderbush, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers. “But we’re still that group— a rising tide lifts all boats — that can help improve working people’s lives.”
Almost on cue, a younger union member clad in a sweatshirt bearing the logo of Brazzers, a pornographic website, came up to Kemper and Ridderbush. He said he had convinced one of their more conservative colleagues to soften their position on abortion rights, and he now supported exceptions for rape and to save the mother’s life.
Ridderbush, for his part, thought the case against Johnson was clear: “After the last year, people who haven’t looked critically at Ron Johnson are living in a bubble between his support the insurrection, his support for cutting Social Security. He’s not giving people many reasons to vote for him.”
But could Barnes win over the people who still do back Johnson?
“I really don’t know,” Ridderbush admitted.
Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin Mandela Barnes speaks at a rally on October 29, 2022 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Barnes, who currently serves as the state's lieutenant governor, is facing a close mid-term race. (Photo: Scott Olson via Getty Images)
A focus on abortion and a focus on crime
For much of September, Barnes crisscrossed the state on what his campaign dubbed the “Ron Against Roe Tour,” highlighting Johnson’s staunch opposition to abortion rights. It echoed what every other Democratic candidate was doing and was certainly a winning issue in Wisconsin. Just 37% of voters in the state supported the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, according to the last Marquette University Law School poll.
It was a message he echoed in television ads: “Johnson supported a ban on abortions. He co-sponsored a bill that makes no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the woman. And Johnson said if women don’t like it, they can move.”
At the same time, Republican groups and Johnson’s campaign began hammering Barnes on crime, arguing he had at least shown sympathy for defunding the police and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency amid a spike in homicides in Milwaukee. Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC controlled by allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, chipped in. But Barnes also had a unique problem: Wisconsin Truth PAC.
Wisconsin Truth ran some of the most over-the-top ads of the cycle, including one that seemed to suggest Barnes was present at a violent crime scene. Richard Uihlein, a billionaire packaging company owner, and Diane Hendricks, who owns a massive building supply company, have each given more than $1 million to the PAC, according to its last FEC filing in July.
Barnes initially responded with ads featuring him denying the charges direct to the camera while standing at his kitchen table, later rolling out spots featuring a retired police officer rebutting the charges. Some Democrats have privately argued these ads were a misstep and Barnes was not the right messenger to shoot down the GOP attacks. Or that they could have dealt with the issue of crime differently, perhaps by invoking Barnes’ roots in Milwaukee.
Barnes told HuffPost Johnson was “lying and distracting from his own record” with ads on crime. The direct-to-camera ads were necessary to introduce him to an electorate still unfamiliar with his history and political persona.
“We still needed to introduce me to large swathes of the voting public across the state,” he added.
The damage, however, seemed to be done. Barnes had led the unpopular Johnson in the polls after winning the primary. Democrats insist their private polls showed far less movement, but public surveys showed Johnson taking the lead.
Back to populism
In the final weeks of the campaign, Barnes’ campaign stops dropped the “Ron Against Roe” moniker. They became the “Win for Wisconsin” tour. His stump speech railing against Johnson was filled with talk about jobs, the economy, and the Republican senator’s support for tax cuts that benefited himself, the Uihleins and the Hendrickses contrasted with Johnson’s desire to cut Social Security.
In his final ad, Barnes went as populist as he seemingly could. “I see your hard work, everything you do to try to make it,” he says in the 30-second spot. “But people continue to be left behind. I’m running for Senate to put more money in your pocket. Ron Johnson has had 12 years to make things better. But costs are still rising, and all he’s managed to do is write a tax cut for himself.”
Still, some progressive Democrats have questioned why not all of Barnes’ economic populism made it into his television ads: Where were the jeremiads against bad trade deals? Barnes regularly attacked Johnson’s lack of reaction to Oshkosh Defense deciding to ship jobs building next-generation postal vehicles out of the state — the Republican said Wisconsin already had enough jobs — in his stump speech but never put the attack on air.
But Barnes said of his campaign:
“We’re hammering home that message. Ron Johnson has turned his back on working people in this state too many times.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
