Down Ticket #11: Balance of Senate could hinge on Wisconsin rematch

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There is a distinct feeling of déjà vu in Wisconsin’s Senate race.

Incumbent Republican Ron Johnson is trying to fend off a challenge from Democrat Russ Feingold in one of the most hotly contested races in the country. If that matchup sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it is: Johnson shocked Feingold, a three-term incumbent, by defeating him in 2010.

Six years later, Feingold is out to accomplish something that hasn’t happened in over 40 years: take back a Senate seat in the next election after losing it. He is running on a reputation as an iconoclast forged when Feingold was, in many respects, the one-man “progressive” wing of the Senate Democratic caucus.

The lone senator to vote against the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11, he was one of the most vocal supporters of the Affordable Care Act, and he put his name on the landmark campaign finance reform act he co-authored with Sen. John McCain.

But McCain-Feingold, which was intended to reduce the influence of financial contributions in elections, has been watered down by high court rulings, and Feingold was dragged down by a conservative wave in 2010, opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and his own flat campaign.

Is there still a place for Feingold in a state that has only become more purple in the years since his defeat, with Republicans driving up key statewide victories in midterm election years to balance the state’s liberal leaning in presidential elections. The 63-year-old visited every county in the state and was heartened by what he found.

“Sometimes, politicians get big egos,” Feingold told Politico last year, shortly after he entered the race. “My ego isn’t so big that I think it’s about me. It’s about what’s been done to the people of this state for the past four years.”

This time around, Feingold has held a lead in virtually every major poll since his announcement. An August Marquette University Law School poll has Feingold leading by four points, down from double digits just a few months ago. A Quinnipiac poll released from the same time has Feingold leading by 11 points, however.

There is no doubt that Johnson has an uphill battle merely by virtue of running in an election year in a state that hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential election since 1984. Republican senatorial candidates haven’t fared well in the Badger State in recent presidential election years. Former Gov. Tommy Thompson, perhaps the strongest possible candidate, faded down the stretch in 2012 and lost by four points as Rep. Tammy Baldwin rode Barack Obama’s reelection coattails to victory.

And the jovial Thompson had near-universal name recognition in the state, which Johnson, despite being the incumbent, still lacks.

“We’ve seen very little movement in the favorability and the name recognition of both Johnson and Feingold,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School poll.

The most recent version of Franklin’s poll showed roughly a third of those surveyed had no opinion of Johnson, a figure that has held steady for the duration of the campaign. Feingold is unknown to 26 percent of voters.

But Johnson has another, potentially more damaging problem in Donald Trump.

While some Republican Senate candidates have managed to run ahead of the controversial presidential nominee, most notably Rob Portman in Ohio and Joe Heck in Nevada, the political climate in Wisconsin makes Trump an especially tough sell.

“The biggest problem is there are a number of Republicans that don’t want to vote because they don’t like Trump. If they don’t vote, that hurts down-ballot Republicans such as Sen. Johnson,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who represents one of the most conservative swaths of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee.

Despite the (not very enthusiastic) support of Johnson, Gov. Scott Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan, many Wisconsin Republicans simply have not embraced Trump. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won a decisive victory in the state’s primary and, even after Cruz’s exit from the race, many prominent conservatives have remained firmly in the Never Trump camp.

“I’ve cautioned my fellow conservatives, you embrace Donald Trump, you embrace it all. You embrace every slur, every insult, every outrage, every falsehood. You’re going to spend the next six months defending, rationalizing, evading all that,” conservative talk show host and Never Trump standard-bearer Charlie Sykes told Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

But most Wisconsin conservatives, including Sykes, are united behind Johnson.

“I’ve been asked … over and over and over again by the media, ‘Is the party united here in Wisconsin?’ Well I want to tell you clearly, the Republicans in this hall and across this state are overwhelmingly united behind Ron Johnson to be our United States senator,” Walker told the state Republican convention in May.

But the question is how many of the voters who propelled Johnson to victory in 2010 will turn out this election. Johnson has complicated things by hedging his support of Trump. Despite initially saying he would remain in Wisconsin and campaign during the Republican National Convention, Johnson was a last-minute addition to the speaking agenda. In his remarks he mentioned Trump a grand total of once in what was hardly a full-throated endorsement.

Instead, Johnson took the unusual step of calling out Feingold by name, saying his national security record is weak in an era when strong defense is needed to combat terrorism.

“In Wisconsin, I’m running against Russ Feingold, who, even after 9/11, voted against giving law enforcement the tools they need to help stop international terror,” Johnson said in his speech. “During his 18-year senate career, he also voted against authorizing our military 11 separate times. And now he’s asking Wisconsinites to give him a fourth term.”

When Trump visited Green Bay at the height of the controversy over his attack on the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Afghanistan, Johnson declined to attend, citing scheduling conflicts. In recent weeks, he has tried to spin his campaign as a potential check on a Hillary Clinton presidency, seemingly distancing himself from Trump.

“Wisconsin will need me to be a check and balance on her,” Johnson told the Washington Post last week, adding that “from my standpoint, you’ve got another six years of failure of liberal progressive Obama-Clinton-Feingold policies.”

Johnson’s side has tried to focus on his opponent’s record and allegations of campaign improprieties. Republicans have charged that Feingold began laying the groundwork for his run while still serving in the U.S. State Department, as special envoy to Africa. That would violate federal law.

Feingold has hit back, playing up Johnson’s support of Trump and a series of curious missteps, including his suggestion to economize on education by showing students documentaries in place of instruction by live teachers.

“If you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject,” Johnson said. “Or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’ “Civil War” tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done?”

The campaign, which has stretched for almost a year-and-a-half, has been a brutal fight, with TV ad after TV ad attacking the record of the opposition. Because of the pivotal nature of the race in the Democrats’ nationwide effort to take back the Senate, over $4 million has been pumped into the race from outside groups, including $2.2 million boosting Johnson from the Koch Brothers’ Freedom Partners Action Fund.

In more traditional fundraising, Feingold has a narrow edge over Johnson, with $7 million cash-in-hand, compared with Johnson’s $5.7 million.

Most pundits have pegged a Feingold victory as likely, citing Trump’s unpopularity and Wisconsin’s liberal tendency in a presidential election. But Johnson will be hoping enough voters turn out to split the ticket and propel him to a second upset victory and a welcome sense of déjà vu for Wisconsin Republicans.

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State legislature races: Down Ticket digs deeper

By Chris Wilson

Our twice-weekly look at nonpresidential races, hasn’t yet touched on more than 5,900 elections for offices that will directly affect most Americans: state legislature seats. At stake is not just influence over state lawmaking, but district maps that can decide who controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

Because many states turn the every-10-year process of redistricting over to legislators, control of that process allows the majority party to draw maps to their advantage — otherwise known as gerrymandering. Consider North Carolina, where Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 80,000 more votes in total than their Republican opponents in 2012. The result? The GOP retained nine of the 13 seats thanks to the maps it drew after the Republican wave in 2010. At the national level, Democrats won 47 percent of major-party votes for the House of Representatives in 2014 but just 43 percent of House seats — partly because Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in a relatively few, generally urban, areas, and partly a result of how district lines were drawn by Republican legislatures.

Democrats know it will be impossible to take back a majority of state legislatures — Republicans hold 69 of the 99 chambers — but even a small blue wave could help flip a few of the closer contests or make progress toward achieving majorities in the future. According to reporting from The Hill:

Democrats have decent chances to win 11 Republican-held legislative chambers. Six of those chambers, state senates in Colorado, Nevada, New York, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, would change hands if Democrats are able to win only a single seat.

There is also pressure on Democrats to hold on to embattled blue footholds in states that would otherwise be all red. Take Iowa: Republicans have the governor’s mansion, both Senate seats, three of the four U.S. Representatives and 57 of the 100 state House seats but find themselves at a slim 26-23 disadvantage (with one independent) in the Senate. The Democrats have an advantage in fundraising – they’ve collectively raised $515,000 to the GOP’s $147,000 — but in many of the closest, most critical races the party affiliation of registered voters is extremely tight, usually within a few hundred.

These smaller races are particularly susceptible to the influence of outside money and super-PACs, which can flood a market at the fraction of the cost of affecting a bigger ticket race like one for the presidency or Senate. With most legislature seats not on the ballot in 2015, millions were dumped into mayoral races in Philadelphia and other cities, but it’s likely we’ll see huge bumps in outside spending in 2016. In Connecticut, outside donations in 2012 reached around $750,000. In 2014? $7.5 million. And even less prominent races can attract large sums of money. Two years ago, a campaign to replace several members of a New Jersey school board spent $150,000 on the task, succeeding in ousting two incumbents.

While direct donations to state legislator campaigns are generally under tight limits(typically around $2,000), super-PACs can spend as much as they choose. So it’s easy to see how the smaller advertising budgets of the actual people in the race can be quickly swamped bylarge donations that could come from outside the state. Because while outside groups may not care much about, say, sales taxes in Virginia or road projects in Colorado — they care a lot about which party controls the House of Representatives.

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