DEMOCRATS SEE RON JOHNSON'S ABORTION RECORD AS THEIR PATH TO VICTORY
Senator Ron Johnson’s political shenanigans have ranged from the absurd (like when he said it “may be true” that COVID vaccines cause AIDS only to later deny ever believing that) to the potentially illegal (coordinating an effort to serve up fake Donald Trump–supporting electors to Vice President Mike Pence, allegedly in an effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in 2020). Democrats are amplifying these issues, but the strategy to defeat the incumbent Wisconsin senator also has another clear target: his record on women. The Supreme Court decision overruling the landmark Roe v. Wade Friday—and Wisconsin’s 173-year-old state law banning abortions now in effect—has the potential to make this strategy more politically potent than ever, making Johnson a clear test case in Democrats’ promise to make women’s rights a winning issue at the ballot box.
Johnson is an easy target in that respect. The two-term senator said he didn’t view the repeal of Roe v. Wade “as a huge threat to women’s health” and that things would be “fine.” He said anyone who does not like Wisconsin’s abortion laws “can move,” has advocated for a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks—despite arguing that the matter was a state’s issue—and supported a Mississippi law to ban abortions after 15 weeks. The Wisconsin Democratic Party regularly blasts out fact sheets highlighting Johnson’s work to “strip reproductive rights.” The state’s Democratic candidates for Senate have all targeted Johnson’s record on women and reproductive rights across various mediums, including paid campaign TV ads (Sarah Godlewski cut an ad outside the Supreme Court in Washington), social media posts, and official statements.
It’s a strategy seemingly based on lessons learned from the last three election cycles. In 2018 Democrats energized their base to deliver Tony Evers the governorship, despite Trump winning the state two years prior; in 2020, Biden managed to flip the state from red to blue by siphoning off key votes in Milwaukee suburbs—Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties notable among them—and chipping away at historically landslide margins in traditional Republican strongholds like the Mequon, Elm Grove, and Brookfield suburbs. Alex Lasry, a Milwaukee Bucks executive running in the Democratic Senate primary, stressed in a phone call that to win the state, Democrats need to replicate the victories of Barack Obama, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Evers, and Joe Biden by paying attention to “places that Democrats neglect and Republicans take for granted.”
Republicans concede this could work; one GOP strategist who has run numerous campaigns in Wisconsin explained that Johnson can’t win by plucking from the MAGA playbook alone. “The people who are going to walk through walls to vote so that they can vote for Ron Johnson, they’re gonna show up anyway. But that isn’t gonna be enough to get him elected,” the strategist said. “They either have to figure out a way to make him passable to those people that probably would vote for Ron Johnson but might not.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/democrats-see-ron-johnsons-abortion-record-as-their-path-to-victory
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