Voters in Wisconsin may be surprised to learn they haven’t had an incumbent U.S. senator in Washington during the six years Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has been in office.
And they don’t have to take my word for it.
That’s actually a boast made by Johnson’s campaign organization in a recent memo attempting to draw a distinction between Johnson’s lack of accomplishments in Washington and the far more substantive record of his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Russ Feingold.
“Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump. Ted Cruz,” reads the memo reported in The New York Times. “They all have one thing in common: They are all considered outsiders. And so is Ron Johnson. Ron continues to be the outsider in this race—and Senator Feingold is still essentially the three-term incumbent.”
It has to be the first time in election history a sitting United States senator has ever publicly denied being an incumbent senator representing the interests of the voters in his state.
But the memo also is surprisingly truthful. Johnson really hasn’t represented Wisconsin for the past six years. The only interests he’s represented in Washington are his own as a wealthy right-wing businessman.
The little-known Johnson upset three-term incumbent Feingold in the tea party backlash election of 2010. It was the midterm protest by right-wing voters livid over the election of the nation’s first African American president.
And that was pretty much the last many Wisconsin voters heard of Johnson. Six years later, Johnson remains relatively unknown in his own state like many of the other extremist Republican senators elected that year.
Who Is Ron Johnson?
Morning Consult, a national polling operation, recently reported Johnson and eight other Republican senators up for re-election this year are among the least-known members of the United States Senate in their own states.
When voters in those states were asked whether they approved or disapproved of the jobs those senators were doing, roughly 30% said they didn’t know enough about their senators to form an opinion.
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That’s why Johnson, along with Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey and North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, are considered among the incumbents most likely to be defeated and flip control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats.
The fact that so many Wisconsin voters know so little about Johnson is surprising in a state so polarized by recalls and the divisive, extreme policies of Gov. Scott Walker that voter participation and intensity are among the highest in the nation.
Yet in the most recent statewide Marquette Law School poll on the Senate race, less than a third, 32%, had a favorable impression of Johnson and a nearly equal percentage, 31%, had an unfavorable impression. The greatest percentage, 36%, didn’t know enough about Johnson to respond.
That bizarre Johnson memo denying he’s an incumbent senator is part of a phony cover story Republicans use to explain Donald Trump winning their party’s presidential nomination: This is the Year of the Outsider.
But Trump didn’t win the presumptive nomination because he’s an outsider. Trump won the nomination by openly feeding upon the racial and religious bigotry that establishment Republicans themselves intentionally welcomed into their party to gain votes from uneducated whites opposed to civil rights.
Party leaders just tried to be less obvious in their racist appeals to avoid alienating anyone who wasn’t an uneducated white male bigot. But Trump had no such qualms about openly courting white supremacists. “I love the poorly educated!” Trump crowed.
The 12th of Never has come early as Republicans now scamper to support their vile candidate like rats running the wrong way to board a sinking ship. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s public show of withholding support from an unqualified, unprincipled nominee lasted less than a month.
Johnson continued reinventing the English language, announcing he “supports” the reprehensible Trump, but that he doesn’t “endorse” him. It’s Johnson’s version of Alice’s Restaurant, where you can get anything you want.
The problem with Johnson’s fraudulent claim about being a Washington outsider, of course, is that outsiders don’t get anything done. But then as an anti-government right-wing extremist, Johnson actually takes pride in not doing anything during his six years in office to ease economic suffering in Wisconsin.
Johnson has consistently voted against job creation, unemployment benefits for people thrown out of work and food assistance for hungry families.
One of Johnson’s few independent actions as a U.S. senator was to file a lawsuit to try to deny the benefits of Obamacare to his own office staff. A Republican-appointed federal judge quickly threw out the lawsuit, noting the absurdity of Johnson’s claim he was somehow harmed by his employees receiving a government benefit.
Johnson is so eager not to be an incumbent senator, Wisconsin should do its part and end Johnson’s six-year Senate vacancy. Re-electing Feingold would once again give Wisconsin two U.S. senators serving their constituents like all the other states have.
