Ron Johnson is building a national profile as a Trump-era lightning rod. Here's how it could affect the fight over his Senate seat

We don’t know whether Ron Johnson is running for re-election next year.

But we have a pretty good idea of who and what he’d be running against. 

“Don’t Let the Mainstream Press, the Fake News, the Social Media Giants and the Radical Democrats deny you your constitutional rights,” reads a recent fundraising letter for “Ron Johnson for Senate” in which the Wisconsin Republican assails the news media (including this newspaper and its editorial board) for its treatment of him.   

The fight over Johnson’s seat is shaping up as the mother of all Wisconsin Senate races.

It will be the first $100-million Senate campaign in the state’s history. It could plausibly decide control of that 50-50 chamber. It will command massive outside interest.

And if the two-term incumbent decides to personally defend his seat, the race will stand out in other ways, too.

While enjoying only modest name recognition in his own state, Johnson now has an emerging national profile as a Trump-era lightning rod.

His rhetoric about the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol has attracted a remarkable level of negative national attention — unlike anything we’ve seen involving a Wisconsin member of Congress for many decades.

Johnson’s recent comment that he never felt threatened by pro-Trump protesters that day but would have been more concerned had they been Black Lives Matter or Antifa protesters was condemned as racist by critics ranging from Democratic colleagues to op-ed columnists for national newspapers to anti-Trump conservatives.  

The New York Times ran a profile headlined, “Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government,” comparing Johnson to a Wisconsin predecessor, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy. 

Johnson has bitterly rejected the idea that his statements were racist, saying “there was nothing racial to my comment whatsoever,” and accused his critics of "McCarthyism."

While drawing fire for a variety of other views and statements on issues ranging from COVID-19 to the 2020 election, Johnson has embraced the role of media foe, echoing Donald Trump’s contempt for the press, claiming the Left is trying to shut him up, wearing the condemnation like a badge of honor and fundraising off it.

“That’s how you silence people. You relentlessly attack them,” he told a conservative radio host this past week, saying other conservatives don’t want to speak out the way he has because “they don't want the attention of the press turned on them.  Unfortunately, I’m kind of like roadkill. People go ‘ooh, that’s kind of ugly, I think I’ll look away from that and just kind of move on.’”

Johnson's conflicts with the news media also very much involve this newspaper, whose editorial board called for Johnson's expulsion from the Senate for threatening to challenge the Electoral College results and for his defeat after he disputed whether the storming of the Capitol was an "armed insurrection." 

The senator published a response in the Journal Sentinel calling its editorial "unhinged," and expressed outrage when the editorial board annotated his response with footnotes challenging his facts. 

How does it play in Wisconsin?

As a political matter, the furor around the Wisconsin Republican raises a series of questions about what a potential Johnson re-election race might look like in this exquisitely even-steven state. 

The first question is how all of this affects Johnson’s standing back home.  

It’s easy to imagine him attracting more intense support from his party’s pro-Trump base as a result of these battles as well as more heated opposition from Democrats and liberals.

But what about the rest of the Wisconsin electorate — the less partisan voters who follow politics less avidly?

While winning two elections, appearing with some frequency on cable news and talk radio, and being outspoken in the Trump impeachment fights, Johnson has never had an especially high profile in Wisconsin, surveys suggest.

In combined 2019-2020 polling by the Marquette Law School, 69% of registered voters knew enough about Johnson to form an opinion of the state’s senior senator. That is a significantly lower level of name recognition than that of the state’s junior senator, Democrat Tammy Baldwin (82%).  (When former Gov. Scott Walker was running for re-election in 2014 and 2018, his name recognition was 95%).

Baldwin’ name recognition is higher than Johnson’s even among very pro-Johnson segments of the electorate, including Republican voters and voters who get most of their news from Fox News, said Marquette pollster Charles Franklin.

And the gap in name recognition between Johnson and Baldwin is bigger among more casual voters than it is among voters who pay close attention to politics.  

We have little polling since the 2020 election to show whether Johnson’s standing has changed in recent months.  

But those pre-2021 numbers are a reminder that not every political fight in Washington or on Twitter filters down to voters who aren't steeped in politics. At the same time, they suggest Johnson’s public image in Wisconsin is susceptible to change between now and the fall of 2022 because lots of voters don’t have a firm opinion of him.

The Trump factor

A second question: If Johnson is becoming a more polarizing figure to voters along pro-Trump/anti-Trump lines, would his base of support look any different in 2022 than it did when he last ran in 2016?

Back in 2016, he was a sometime critic of Trump who initially balked at attending the Republican National Convention.  In the November 2016 election, when both Johnson and Trump were on the ballot, there were some pretty sizable differences in where the two Republicans drew their support in Wisconsin.

Trump out-performed Johnson by 5 points or more in 26 mostly small and rural counties where Trump did historically well.  Johnson outperformed Trump by double digits in suburban Ozaukee and Waukesha counties outside Milwaukee, where Trump did historically poorly for a Republican. (Johnson, for example, won very Republican Waukesha County by 38 points against Democrat Russ Feingold while Trump won Waukesha by 27 points against Democrat Hillary Clinton).

In some Milwaukee suburbs, the gap was even bigger. Johnson’s margin was 23 points better than Trump’s in Whitefish Bay, 19 points better in Elm Grove, 17 points better in Mequon, 15 points better in Wauwatosa.

In short, the Johnson vote looked more like the traditional GOP vote in Wisconsin. The Trump vote reflected a shift in the GOP coalition toward a more rural and blue-collar base of support. Overall, Johnson’s superior performance in more populous metro areas meant he ran ahead of Trump statewide.      

But those metropolitan suburbs have now shifted in a Democratic direction in the Trump era, and Johnson is today more closely identified with Trump and his message than he was four or five years ago. If Johnson runs again, will his support more closely mimic Trump’s electoral strengths (rural northern, western and central Wisconsin) and weaknesses (the suburban southeast)?  Would that be a good or bad trade-off for Johnson?

Be careful reading between the lines

A final question: what does the clamor and controversy over Johnson mean for the decision he is going to make about his political future?  Is his rhetoric and behavior a signal he’s going to run? Does the flak he’s getting make him any more or less likely to run?

I’d be wary of looking for too much strategy in Johnson’s rhetoric, for two reasons. One is that the cost-benefit calculus is pretty murky, politically. Johnson was already on very firm ground with the GOP base.

But does becoming a more outspoken and polarizing and “Trumpian” figure, or promoting COVID treatments unapproved by government agencies, or playing down the violence at the Capitol Jan. 6 (and drawing criticism even from some GOP colleagues), help or hurt Johnson in a general election? It’s not at all clear.

And two, Johnson’s rhetoric on COVID-19, on the 2020 election, and on the storming of the Capitol seems to genuinely reflect his own views, including a disdain for experts, establishments, Democrats, the political class and the mainstream media.

That disdain could take the form of running again despite it all, or it could take the form of walking away — and taking a whole lot of time making his decision.