Van Dyne, Wisconsin
It was off a strip of asphalt called Cemetery Road where presidential politics were buried for one Saturday in late October. Republican senator Ron Johnson, ending his first term at age 61, walked through Ruedinger Farms among some 1,420 of his Wisconsin constituents, 20 of which vote and the rest of which moo. He first inspected a dairy parlor with his fellow GOP senator Joni Ernst, who was in the state to help him stump for reelection against Democrat and former U.S. senator Russ Feingold.
“She did a few things with pigs every now and then,” Johnson would remind everyone, a reference to Ernst’s “cut pork” campaign advertisement two years ago, as well as her upbringing on a hog farm. Both lawmakers were comfortable among the cows.
The owner, John Ruedinger, invited Johnson, Ernst, and the other guests inside a meeting space near the farm’s entrance for a forum. Here, past the fog of Donald Trump’s campaign and whatever was left to cover the dewy countryside, the people asked questions about environmental regulations, infrastructure, and immigrant labor, all in the context of life from Oshkosh to Fond du Lac. So local was the discussion that one man complained about a three-hour wait at a railroad crossing, a grievance Johnson said should be directed to the state government. Still, “I’ve got it timed exactly when I’m going to be home,” Johnson said to relate with the man. “You know, it’s 11:23, and all the sudden it’s bam, I see the red lights go up on Indian Point Road, and I go, ‘Rats.’ But I have to say, the most I ever had to wait was five minutes. Which is annoying enough. I’d be grinding off the enamel if it was three hours.”
The voters in central Wisconsin have turned their attention to their own backyards. In Johnson’s view, their focus is his asset. He’s working to make his election about “what I’ve actually done—genuinely—as a United States senator,” he tells me, including for Wisconsinites. He partnered with a Milwaukee church to help match the unemployed with unfilled manufacturing jobs in the state, an initiative called the Joseph Project that has since expanded to Madison. He sponsored and enacted legislation with California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to help adoptive families in the United States expedite the transfer of their children from the Congo, which benefited a Green Bay family. He also touts his productivity as chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee: 83 pieces of legislation advanced, 28 of them signed into law since taking over in 2014. “Right below ‘You’re in our thoughts and prayers,’ the number one thing that Wisconsinites tell me is, ‘Why don’t you guys just get along and get something done?'” Johnson says.
Expanding on his message to the larger group, Johnson criticized both the lawmaking and rulemaking processes, as well as the individuals behind them, that hinder farmers and businesses. “There are a lot of young kids serving in Washington, D.C.: kids that are smart, hard-working, but they’ve never farmed. They’ve never run a business. They’ve never been in the private sector. They went from high school into college and right into Washington, D.C.,” he said.
Although Feingold, 63, is no such young kid, Johnson’s campaign has criticized him as ineffective and deceptive. An ad Johnson released in early October hit the former lawmaker for a pledge he made during his 1992 run for Senate but also “for the future” to raise a majority of his campaign cash from in-state. Feingold, a longtime critic of money in politics whose signature legislative achievement was a campaign finance law, has raised 70 percent of his donations from outside Wisconsin during this cycle. For Johnson, that level is 46 percent. (Feingold has hit back by criticizing Johnson’s big-money contributors; buckets of spending for both sides are pouring into the race last-minute.)
Johnson also characterized Feingold’s campaign as “ugly and negative, full of lies, distortions, and class warfare, and I think Wisconsinites are rejecting that.” One recent example is a radio appearance in which Feingold criticized the Joseph Project. “It’s not enough to pick people up in a van and send them away a couple hours and have them come back exhausted at the end of the day,” Feingold said. “That doesn’t make a community.”
But according to results from a Marquette Law Poll released Wednesday, voters view the two candidates similarly. Forty-three percent had a favorable opinion of Johnson, against 40 percent who didn’t; that split was 46 and 42, respectively, for Feingold. The Democrat led the race with 45 percent to Johnson’s 44, overall, which follows a tightening of the contest that the Republican’s bullish campaign says it has seen coming.
The incumbent will have to outperform Trump, however, who has only 40 percent in the poll to Hillary Clinton’s 46 percent. Johnson has been the typically tentative supporter of “our presidential candidate”—how he referred to him in our conversation—and on an issue like immigration, he strikes a milder tone than the GOP nominee. While he emphasizes that he’s a border-security-first Republican, Johnson responded to a questioner Saturday who was worried about mass deportation, a policy from which Trump has retreated, with tact. “Nobody’s ever asked me for citizenship. They just don’t want us to deport their mom, dad, husbands, and wives, and we won’t. We’re not gonna do it,” Johnson said. “You’re not hearing that rhetoric come out of my mouth. But it is true, just politically, if not practically, you have to secure the border first.”
Yet Johnson appeared at a rally with Trump for the first time on Tuesday night in Eau Claire, part of a unified front of Wisconsin Republicans that also featured Reince Priebus and Scott Walker as opening acts. (House speaker Paul Ryan was not among them.) He spent most of his brief remarks criticizing Clinton but also said both he and Trump understand “how much more difficult government makes it to grow a business and create jobs.” That’s standard rhetoric for Johnson, himself a small businessman.
He had one line that was more 2016: “What Donald Trump is talking about—cleaning up the swamp, draining the swamp—is what we must do.”
