Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) might be about to face the exit door for his time in the U.S. Senate.
A second poll of the race in which he’s running for re-election against Democratic challenger and Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes found Johnson losing, per numbers released this week. This time, it’s Fox News polling that was jointly conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company, which is a bipartisan team, and Johnson was down by four percent. Barnes nabbed 50 percent of the support, while Johnson had 46 percent. These numbers reflect the responses of registered voters. It’s only the second major survey in the Wisconsin Senate race since the state held its primaries. The first, from Marquette University Law School, showed Johnson losing to Barnes by seven percentage points when including those who indicated they merely “leaned” towards one of the candidates.
Barnes also led by seven percentage points when excluding so-called leaners, according to rounding provided by the pollster. As for the Fox survey, more of Johnson’s supporters than Barnes’s prospective voters indicated they were “enthusiastic” about their choice. For Johnson, 66 percent of his backers shared that feeling, but with Barnes, it was 57 percent. More of Johnson’s supporters, however, indicated they harbor “reservations” about their candidate. With the Republican incumbent, supporters indicating reservations were 23 percent of the total. For Barnes, it was 15 percent. Notably, Barnes’s overall support is buoyed to a significant extent by voters 65 and up who are evidently sick of Johnson’s antics. The Democratic contender leads by 23 percentage points among 65+ voters, although that age group is sometimes considered as leaning more conservative. “Suburban women,” meanwhile, went for Barnes by 30 percent over Johnson.
Over one-fourth of the registered voters questioned in the survey named inflation as their top priority, and among the 28 percent of total respondents who did so, Johnson was in the lead — by 56 percent. Barnes, however, led among voters whose top priorities were abortion and “election integrity/ voting rights.” The phrasing of the latter topic in the poll seems designed to artificially elevate election integrity concerns. In a previous survey from The New York Times, just 3 percent of Republicans named election integrity — on its own — as the main issue facing the U.S. Meanwhile, more voters hold a favorable view of Barnes than an unfavorable one, with the opposite true for Johnson, although the portion sharing no opinion was higher with Barnes than Johnson. The Cook Political Report calls the Wisconsin Senate race a toss-up. (It also recently changed its rating for the Pennsylvania Senate race to “lean D.”)
