Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson’s opponents accuse him of being a young man in a hurry, and at the Independence Day parade on July 3, the charge is in a literal sense true. Dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt with “USMC” emblazoned on it, Nicholson scrambles to shake hands along the route winding around Lake Winnebago. Occasionally, he has to jog to catch up to his campaign RV, which is adorned with red, white, and blue lights on the hood to resemble the flag and a picture of Nicholson and his family on the side along with his campaign slogan, “Send in the Marine.”
The reactions from the crowd are as mixed as you’d expect in a state where politics are polarized. Some parade watchers thank Nicholson for his service; another refuses to take the campaign flyer until she’s sure he’s a Republican. At one point chants of “Baldwin! Baldwin! Baldwin!” erupt from a small group cheering on the incumbent senator: Democrat Tammy Baldwin.
The GOP primary in Wisconsin pits Nicholson against state senator Leah Vukmir. It is a contest of personalities, not policies. Each candidate has a good story to tell. Nicholson grew up in a Democratic family and was national president of the College Democrats while at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not just one moment. It happened over time,” Nicholson tells me of his journey to the right. Nicholson says his turn to the GOP was aided by his college girlfriend (now wife) Jessie; his disillusionment with identity politics; a year he took off from school to figure things out while working on a ranch in Wyoming; and his experience as a Marine officer in Iraq and Afghanistan (where he earned the Bronze Star).
“In ’07, I was in Anbar as a part of the Surge, and my platoon was seeing it shift from bad to good. I was furious with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson. Go back and look what they were saying about the Surge and how it wasn’t working. It was working. I saw it with my own eyes,” Nicholson tells me. “By saying the things they did, they were undercutting our support. And it made me angry. So I came back between my deployments: I donated to McCain, I went to rallies, put up lawn signs.”
The August 14 primary remains a toss-up: a June Marquette University Law School poll found Nicholson leading Vukmir 37 percent to 32 percent, with 30 percent of voters undecided. While Nicholson is running as an outsider, Vukmir is emphasizing her own record as a conservative who has fought right alongside Governor Scott Walker for years. Vukmir was a nurse who got her start in politics as a “mom with a cause”—concerned with her children’s school curriculum. She became an advocate for school choice and won a seat in the state assembly in 2002. She has racked up the endorsements of many Republicans in the state, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Representatives Sean Duffy, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Glenn Grothman.
Neither Nicholson nor Vukmir can think of any policy differences between them. Nicholson, instead, focuses on telling me about their “dramatically different life experiences” and the fact that he’s running from “outside the political system.” Vukmir says: “The biggest difference is definitely that I have a proven track record as a conservative.”
While it may be hard to detect a difference between the two candidates on policy now, Nicholson is under fire in super-PAC ads for his past liberal views. In a 2000 speech at the Democratic National Convention (and in an MSNBC appearance), Nicholson backed a right to abortion. He says he wrote the speech without any reference to abortion, but the DNC “inserted that line—a laundry list of Democrat platform issues, including comments on abortion.” Jessie, “being more mature and intelligent than me, said: ‘You don’t believe that, don’t read it.’ I was a dumb kid who wanted to be on TV, and like a lot of young men who had never thought about this issue critically—by that issue I mean life, and the importance of protecting innocent life—and she was right, and I was wrong.” Nicholson says seeing lives lost in war and having three children of his own helped him “understand I have a duty to protect innocent life.”
During an interview at a café in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Vukmir says she is grateful for Nicholson’s service to the country: “I’m a military mom myself. My son just finished Army Ranger School a few months ago.” She doesn’t question the story of his political evolution. But, she adds: “Even Ronald Reagan, who [Nicholson] uses in his ads and we all know was a Democrat—Ronald Reagan gave us 20 years in the conservative movement before he ran for one of the highest offices in the land. So I think that’s a question that a lot of people are asking: Why are you running for this particular office?”
Nicholson’s answer is essentially the same as Vukmir’s: to advance a conservative agenda on judges, health care, deregulation, spending, and so on. He says it will take an outsider to beat Baldwin and “push back on leadership” in Washington. “If leadership’s doing the right thing, heck, I’m the first guy there to support them any which way I can. If they’re not, on things like multi-trillion dollar omnibus bills dropped on people’s desks with 48 hours notice, I’m the first guy pushing back,” he says.
What is unlikely is that you’d see either candidate pushing back against Donald Trump if elected.
The president’s steel and aluminum tariffs are opposed by Wisconsin’s most prominent Republicans: Ryan, Walker, and Senator Ron Johnson. “If President Donald Trump wants to protect good-paying, family-supporting jobs here in Wisconsin, I respectfully ask that he reconsider tariffs on steel and aluminum,” Walker said in March. But both Vukmir and Nicholson support Trump’s tariffs as a negotiating tactic, and they both promise to eventually bring them back down.
“What the president is doing—clear as day, and anybody can see this—is saying, ‘I don’t like tariffs. You want to get rid of tariffs? I’m happy to move to free trade.’ And we should. But that doesn’t mean following through on the status quo,” says Nicholson. “The goal is a world with no tariffs.”
“I’m a free trader, but like the president I also believe in fair trade,” says Vukmir. “We’ve got to give the president time to negotiate.”
The Marquette poll found that Wisconsin voters, by a two-to-one margin, think the steel and aluminum tariffs will hurt the economy. “Twenty-nine percent think increased tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will improve the U.S. economy, while 55 percent think tariffs will hurt the economy,” pollster Charles Franklin wrote on June 20. “On free-trade agreements in general, 51 percent think these agreements have been a good thing for the U.S. economy, while 28 percent think they have been bad for the economy.” But Republican primary voters back the steel and aluminum tariffs 50 percent to 31 percent, and neither Nicholson nor Vukmir wants to get on the wrong side of Trump.
Both Nicholson and Vukmir declined to criticize Trump in July when he attacked Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson—which had announced it was moving some production to Europe to avoid retaliatory tariffs. Tammy Baldwin, who has generally opposed free-trade deals, responded to the Harley move by calling on Trump to target China and not Europe. When I asked Vukmir and Nicholson if there was anything at all they’d criticize the president for, neither candidate had a negative word to say. “I think we can all sit around and argue stylistically what we’d do differently, but at the end of the day what he’s doing is amassing an incredible record,” says Nicholson. “Unlike many in the media, I’m not looking for ways to bring the president down,” says Vukmir.
One of the flashpoints in the race has been Steve Bannon’s endorsement of Nicholson. Both candidates had sought Bannon’s endorsement last fall, but then Vukmir denounced Nicholson for not disavowing Bannon in January after he criticized Donald Trump Jr. for meeting with Russians who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. “Certainly, had he endorsed me and then I found out about his comments and the way he brought our president down, I would have backed away from that immediately,” Vukmir says.
According to Nicholson, “I sat down with Steve Bannon once in my life. We had a conversation for about 90 minutes, no different than you and I just had about trade, economics. We talked about immigration.”
I asked both candidates if they were concerned about Bannon’s efforts to promote the “alt-right,” and both avoided the question, noting they were just trying to get as much support as possible. Bannon may have backed bigots like Paul Ryan’s primary challenger Paul Nehlen and Alabama’s Roy Moore, but he is after all a former chief strategist for President Trump.
Right now, the Wisconsin Senate race doesn’t rank as competitive on anyone’s list. The Wisconsin GOP has lost two strongly Republican state senate districts in special elections this year, and in the June poll, Baldwin led Nicholson 50 percent to 39 percent and Vukmir 49 percent to 40 percent. But those numbers could change.
Tammy Baldwin herself points out that Wisconsin was one of the states where the polls were off in 2016. On election day, Trump was trailing in the state by 6.5 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. He won by 0.8 points. Scott Walker will be at the top of the ticket in November. He has a narrow lead over all the potential Democratic challengers, and there’s a chance he could help sweep another Republican senator into office.
