Wisconsin Senate: Fuck If I Know

Plus: Bonus Alaska!

Right now, Ron Johnson is (probably) losing.

I feel (mostly) okay saying this at this point, given that even Trafalgar has Mandela Barnes ahead and nearing 50% of the vote, and given the fact that the leads in Fox and Marquette are big enough to survive those pollsters’ Wisconsin specific polling errors if repeated again. But admittedly, part of the reason I haven’t written much about this race is that I had plainly written it off once Virginia and New Jersey happened, and so coming to terms with the logic that informed that choice, and the history, is harder than writing about Georgia (where I’ve done pretty damn well in recent years).

In the same way that Georgia is a fairly easy place for me to write about – a place where the contours are familiar, both from 2020, the runoffs, and now thinking about 2022 but also the fact that one of my unpublished novels is set there – Wisconsin is just a lot tougher to know what to think about it.

If you want to be charitable to Mandela Barnes, you lay out the case that starts this column – the pollsters in the field show big enough leads to sustain their 2020 biases, even Trafalgar has Barnes ahead, Johnson has staked out positions antithetical to the voters he needs on Social Security (in the Driftless) and COVID (in the Milwaukee collar), and he’s generally sorta gone off the deep end.

Johnson’s problem – and really, both parties have this problem, but just in the inverse – is that there are two Wisconsins, trending in completely opposite directions. You have the right-trending, working class, Obama-Trump base of voters in the west and in Green Bay, who agree with Johnson’s generally lax COVID politics and are economic liberals and cultural conservatives – the “more money for rural jobs and health care” voters who hate when Democrats go down culs-de-sac of (what they see as) irrelevant bullshit – but you also have the old GOP base in the suburbs. In 2008, the only Congressional District that voted for McCain was the 5th – the WOW collar based suburban seat – and the longtime bastion of conservatism in the state. The collar is like most other suburban areas – super left trending area full of white money.

The old 5th voted for Trump by 20% in 2016, 15% in 2020, and Scott Walker by 24% in 2018, so it’s a classic suburban or exurban area – more Republican downballot than at the Presidential level, and Trump is a particular cancer towards Republican ambitions in the area. In the same way, the old 3rd – located in the southwest Driftless area - was Trump +4.5 each time and then Evers +2, a classic right trending working class area where Trump’s appeal was singular. The problem for both parties is that the message that works in half of the state isn’t best designed for the other half.

Johnson’s messaging around COVID – vaccine skepticism, anti-restrictions and mandates, doubtful of the utility of preventative measures – is a very good fit for the Driftless, knowing what we know about education and views about COVID at this point. It’s also a very bad fit for the collar, because the collar are where well off white social liberals are likeliest to be seeking to still avoid infection, most likely to be wearing masks, most likely to still be testing, and generally caring at all about COVID. His calling for privatizing Social Security is the opposite – a policy that the well-off white social liberals of the collar might like, because they think they can do better with the money than the Feds, but it’s political suicide in the collar.

If you want to make the case for Barnes, it’s that Johnson’s alienated enough what should be his base in his feeble attempts to be everything to everybody that he ends up being nothing to nobody. It’s probably the answer that explains his truly dreadful favourables (38/47, per Marquette), if you’re looking for one, and it’s one that has a certain logic to it. Johnson has voted like, and spoken like, a Senator from a much redder state than Wisconsin, and it’s possible that, post-Dobbs, the environment isn’t enough to bail him out.

It's also the case that so far, Mandela Barnes seems to be running a decent campaign, focusing on the right issues and saying the words “middle class tax cut” a lot – a far cry from the Sanders-supporting leftie firebrand he has been painted as. Yes, he has previous acts and statements he will have to defend, but so far he’s running a more agile campaign than I (and many others) expected he’d be able to.

The other question is whether any of this fucking matters at all. If this was 2002 or 2006, then Barnes would probably be a fairly sizable favourite to win this seat, in all honesty, because a Senator this incoherent and unpopular would be a sizable drag on the ticket. Polarization and partisanship was fairly low, and I suspect that in such an environment, Barnes would be able to win, and maybe even easily. But we are not in times of low polarization and partisanship is very high.

The polls in Wisconsin were absolute dogshit in 2020, but in some ways both worse than we remember and not as bad. It was really, really bad – an 8% miss from the 538 average to the final result – but a lot of that error was locked into two highly rated pollsters having their heads entirely up their own asses, the NYT/Siena Biden +11 and ABC/WaPo’s +17. Take those out, and I won’t say the polls were good, or even not shit, but they’re substantially less shit – and I highly, highly doubt we’ll get anything that horrible again this cycle.

Then again, it might not matter – Wisconsin shouldn’t be competitive this cycle. A Biden +0.6%, right trending state in an environment that, overwhelmingly likely, will be at least 2%+ to the right of 2020, with an incumbent, should not be on the board. It shouldn’t be, and it’s entirely possible we will look back on this phase of the campaign and laugh that anyone thought it was ever on the board. But when even Trafalgar has the GOP down, I think it’s undeniable that it’s on the board – we just don’t know to what degree.

…

One of the things this site is (in theory) supposed to be is a form of journal – in the opening column for it, I wrote about how the greatest service I owe my readers is my honesty, and in one of my most prominent pieces, during last year’s election, I laid down what could be described as this site’s credo:

“If I’m wrong, there’s little reason anyone should take what I say with much seriousness. But if I am too cowardly to say in public what I say and believe in private, then nobody should give a damn what I have to say anyways.”

It’s been my mantra, through the ups (Canada) and the downs (Virginia and Ontario) that I am of zero value to anyone if I am unwilling to say what I think and if I unduly hedged compared to what I actually believe, The problem with this is that when I’m wrong, I’m not hedged and therefore look like a right idiot, but I don’t think falsely pretending that everything is actually a tossup is intellectually honest – I’m an arrogant person with a lot of opinions, for good or for ill. But here, in terms of takes, I have nothing.

We know that whoever wins this race will do so with a coalition somewhere between the 2018 Evers/Walker map and the 2020 Biden/Trump one. If Barnes wins, he’ll do so by outperforming Biden in the Driftless and underperforming Biden in the collar, and if Johnson wins he’ll underperform Trump in the Driftless and overperform Trump in the rurals. There’s a 9% gap between Walker’s margin in the old 5th and Trump’s, and a 6% one between Evers’ margin and Biden’s. Both candidates will probably live in those gaps, margins and coalitions that resemble halfway houses between the old guard and the new.

The other consideration is my biases – and the twin effects of my partisanship and my arrogance. I was slow to come around on Fetterman’s chances over Oz, even to the point of spending most of an appearance on the Politics Matters podcast in June shitting on Fetterman’s chances of victory. The reasons I could trot out for why I maintained a optimistic on Oz position for so long – partisanship, fundamentals, whatever – are reasonable, but bullshit. What it actually was was I thought I was smarter than everyone with my “actually Oz will be a good candidate” take, and I didn’t want to admit I was wrong – especially given that Oz was my way of left punching and showing I could be unbiased and not always a hopeless Democratic optimist.

In the same way, my dual biases – to read data in its most favourable light for Democrats, and to not ever want to admit I was wrong – are at play here, even if I can’t figure out which is more powerful or which is more important. Obviously I would love Johnson to lose, but I don’t know if I have the stomach to predict that and then watch him fuck me over for the second time running. My instinct, if I’m going to be honest, is to basically treat Wisconsin as a free bat – keep it as a Republican seat so I’m either right on election night, or Democrats win and I don’t give a shit about the fact I was wrong – but that’s decidedly not the right way to do election predictions.

Fear of Twitter’s reaction to something is not a reasonable way to set your projections, but also acknowledging that I have been wayyyyyyyy too high on Democrats in the Rust Belt over the years feels important. In my head, the path for Barnes to win makes completely logical sense – the share of the electorate in Madison, Milwaukee, and the suburbs of them spikes, rural turnout falls, Dobbs triggers well-off white social liberals to vote for Barnes, and the ancestrally Democratic heritage of the Driftless and the state’s north means Barnes loses them slightly less than Biden did. It’s a completely plausible path … that sounds like fucking liberal fanfiction after having gotten burned there in 2020.

The other path seems much more likely - Barnes does worse than Biden levels in the Driftless, Johnson does meaningfully better than Trump in the suburbs, and it’s a R+3 result. That sort of result is consistent with the fact that there’s been two internal polls of the new (Trump +4.7) 3rd that have the GOP up 9% on average (Dem poll R+5, GOP poll R+13), and consistent with what you’d expect in a neutral year for a right trending state.

Usually, not having a clue whether someone will win or not is because a race is close, but here, that’s not even it. I just have no fucking idea what to fucking think, and no idea what I believe. I’ve been a political addict for coming on 15 years, and in all this time, I’ve never been so unable to figure out what I think. I might often be wrong, but I never want for an opinion.

Here? Fuck if I know.

Bonus: Alaska Quick Takes

In no particular order …

·         The limits of what an election with Sarah Palin on the ballot means for individual House races is murky at best, and Palin is a truly horrific candidate. Whatever you think of the average House Republican candidate in swing seats, they’re nowhere close to as unpopular as Palin.

·         Begich would have won, yes, but the fact that he didn’t isn’t the fault of RCV, it’s the fault of the geniuses at the NRCC who decided to sit on their asses and not back the candidate who could win. If Democrats win the House, or even get it close, Tom Emmer’s complete incompetence is probably a decent amount of the problem.

·         Begich would have lost in a normal primary system, because it would have been a Palin/Peltola general election. If you want to argue that a traditional primary system would have allowed for Republicans to unite easier than RCV, maybe – but the real problem is that Palin’s popularity is somewhere just north of voluntary drinking of one’s own piss.

·         Palin still probably would have won before Dobbs, which is the other key takeaway – Dobbs’ effect here is not 14% or 16% or whatever we would have expected an April special with neutral candidates to have produced, but it’s also north of 0. Peltola needed 40% on first preferences to win, and she got it, in large part because of Dobbs. Hell, pre-Dobbs you can make the case she would have come third on first preferences as soft Peltola voters in reality went for Begich to stop Palin.

·         It is currently a slightly Democratic leaning environment. This sentence is not a prediction for the political environment in November, but right now, it’s a blue year.