Slips are common in Mandela Barnes’s campaign speeches, and it can be hazardous to appear alongside him as a result.
Two gunslingers. Two visions for Wisconsin. Under the baleful eyes of the Cat in the Hat’s image on the Mead Library clock tower, Ron Johnson and Mandela Barnes took their paces along Eighth Street to decide to whom the lakeside city of Sheboygan, Wis. (pop. 50,000) would belong. A wedge of polyurethane styled like a chunk of cheese tumbled through the deserted streets as the contestants steeled themselves for doom. From the gutter, a Bird electric scooter took its measure of the men. The clock struck, the men turned, and two shots bifurcated the brat-fry haze on that dread day.
-A People’s History of Sheboygan, pg. 1848
Sheboygan, Wis. — While a sun-bathed duel on Eighth Street before the city’s brutalist fountains would have been more cinematic, it is nonetheless true that Ron Johnson’s and Mandela Barnes’s campaigns are sparring in the Sheboygan streets for votes — Barnes to the north of the Sheboygan River at Paradigm Coffee, and Johnson just to the south, beside the GOP offices.
First to the area was Ron Johnson, who passed through Sheboygan on Sunday night before the Packers’ loss to the Buffalo Bills. Introduced by a riffing Congressman Glenn Grothman, Ron Johnson made his pitch centering on decency and honesty — compared to the alleged lies of the Left. The event was relatively well-attended — 80 or so people. A decent turnout, especially given the time of day and the temulence of the general population. Most attendees fell within the category of Gen X — not the demographic I was expecting, though the cohort has been trending rightward. I chatted with a substitute teacher for the local Catholic grade school (an institution that routinely embarrassed my Reformed alma mater in basketball. Note: Papalists play without mercy rules when drubbing Protestants). “Debra” was most concerned with Democrats’ school policies and their unqualified support for abortion.
After the speech, I asked Johnson about Obama’s comments concerning his character, family’s wealth, and actions — ejaculated with force at a Saturday speech in Milwaukee. Johnson did not defend the points per se, instead providing a broad dismissal: “It’s unfortunate that the former president would lie as much as he does. . . . He spun a bunch of lies, just spewed them out. It’s disappointing.”
Mandela Barnes arrived in Sheboygan on a glorious Wednesday morning at Paradigm Coffee, the sort of coffee shop that sells “DYKE,” “BI,” and “QUEER” mugs next to the register festooned with pride imagery and where an upcycled glass-paneled door-half acts as a Covid screen. It’s cloyingly progressive, but the peppermint tea and pumpkin muffins were scrumptious.
It was the generations largely missing from the Johnson event — retired Boomers and Millennials that made up the century of congregants at Paradigm. Given the time, place, and invitation structures, I cannot make any objective claim, but it does seem that there is a generational partisan divide — at least in Sheboygan, historically a union town.
A current Senate colleague of Johnson’s, Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.), was there to get the people going, which she accomplished by sounding so much like a vice-principal that her introduction of Barnes was cause for tintinnabulation as the audience celebrated her relinquishing the mic, as well as their champion’s exit from his tour bus. His stump speech was unremarkable except for a prime example of his inability to riff without making a bit of a fool of himself or undercutting those around him.
When arguing that Ron Johnson is in the pocket of wealthy donors, Barnes said, “If you’re a wealthy donor, you might have two senators, but all the rest of us, we get one [Tammy Baldwin]. That has to change.” So Barnes unwittingly casts Baldwin as a woman of the people but also an advocate for the wealthy donor class. These slips are common in his speeches, and it can be hazardous to appear alongside Barnes as a result. As evident in Milwaukee, Barnes has none of the dynamism of Obama to whom he’s often compared. Yes, Obama was often fed lines, but he could at least appear quick on his feet. Barnes off-script is a bull in a hemophiliac ward.
From what I know of Sheboygan, neither candidate had any more than an average political stop. Turnout was average. The attendees were average, though the Army vet I spoke with had an incredible story. And neither captured a new segment of the population. I most wanted to see if either would make a play for the Hmong vote, a group that can always be found at the farmers market in Fountain Park — directly between where the candidates spoke — but without representation at either event. With over 5,000 Hmong Americans in Sheboygan County, it was puzzling that neither campaign bothered to make inroads there — likely a mark of how lazy parties can be, preferring to swap voters than develop new ones.
Sheboygan County went for Trump by double digits in 2020, and I don’t see that changing in five days. But for the future, there’s a great deal unplumbed in the region known as the “Malibu of the Midwest.” Gunslingers, be advised.