(Bloomberg) — GOP Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has won a third term, defeating Democrat Mandela Barnes and handing Republicans a chance to take control of the 50-50 Senate.
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With almost 99% of Wisconsin votes counted, Johnson is narrowly edging out Barnes, 50.5% to 49.5%. Barnes, the state’s lieutenant governor, told supporters at a Milwaukee event on Wednesday that he and Johnson had spoken.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t get over the finish line this time, but I know that this movement has meant so much to all of us,” he said.
Johnson, who declared the race over hours before networks called the winner, campaigned on the nation’s soaring inflation, voter dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden and rising crime rates. Johnson’s campaign and outside groups backing his re-election bid unleashed a flurry of TV ads as early as September that accused Barnes of being soft on crime. Democratic spending on ads defending Barnes caught up just weeks before Election Day.
Barnes campaigned on boosting Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector, middle-class tax relief and protections for abortion rights. The Supreme Court’s June decision overturning a constitutional right to abortion reverted abortion policy in the state to an 1849 law banning the procedure except to save the life of the mother.
Johnson’s win is the third for a senator who has always run in years that favor his party, including in 2016 when former President Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin. Johnson’s approval ratings were dismal throughout the campaign, but his poll numbers began pulling up as campaigning headed into the fall.
Johnson has held increasingly controversial views that have included questioning the push for Covid-19 vaccinations and masking mandates and advocating unproven treatments for the virus that include gargling with mouthwash. He has called the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol attack a “false narrative.”
Johnson, who founded a plastic-sheeting company, never held elected office before he entered the Senate. He first won the seat in a close 2010 race against former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, with Johnson spending $9 million of his own money on the campaign to win by 5 percentage points, powered in part by the conservative surge of the Tea Party movement. He and Feingold faced off again in 2016, and Johnson won 50% to 47%.
Johnson is a reliably conservative vote in the Senate and largely backed Trump’s agenda, including the 2017 tax-cut measure and the former president’s use of an emergency declaration to build a wall at the US border with Mexico.
He’s sometimes been a thorn in the side for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, threatening in 2017 to blow up the GOP drive to repeal Obamacare as he sought deep long-term cuts to Medicaid and denounced last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. He also has expressed some support for an idea advanced by Florida GOP Senator Rick Scott to sunset entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare so Congress would have to periodically vote on their funding. Critics say that could result in lapses to the programs with deep repercussions for beneficiaries.
(Adds comment from Barnes in second and third paragraphs. Adds more detail about Johnson in 10th paragraph.)
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