Ron Johnson’s 2022 Squeaker Foreshadowed Donald Trump’s Romp

Donald Trump's Romp

It might seem absurd to call Donald Trump’s 30,000-vote victory over Kamala Harris in Wisconsin a romp, but, when you think about it, a romp is what it was, especially given his loss to Biden in the state four years ago and his 23,000-vote margin over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Especially given the razor-close elections we’ve had over the past decade or so, well, when you win Wisconsin by 30,000 votes, that’s a romp.

Nationally, of course, it was a real run-away, with Trump chowing down 76.8 million votes, while Harris choked on 74.3 million, some 2.5-million ballots behind. That was a decisive popular vote victory, and the 312-226 electoral margin was a bona fide landslide.

That’s what we call a romp.

Counterintuitively, in his election victory two years ago, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson had almost the same margin—his was a few thousand less, almost 27,000 votes—and yet I would tally that as less of a romp and more of a squeaker.

In one sense that characterization is a matter of individual relativity. Trump’s 2024 win was his largest in the state, but in 2022 Johnson saw his margin shrink drastically from his 2016 win over Russ Feingold, when he collected just shy of 100,000 votes more than the progressive Democrat.

Still, that tiny sliver of victory in the otherwise disappointing mid-terms was the harbinger of Trump’s win, both in the state and nationally. It told a story that virtually every Democrat missed, along with a substantial number of Republicans: the story not just of woke fatigue and economic discontent but of a resounding reaffirmation of the United States constitution and an equally resounding rejection of the government’s ongoing contravention of fundamental liberties.

With Johnson in 2022, and now with Trump, voters said it’s OK to be a patriot again.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

To most progressives, Johnson’s 2022 close call seemed like the dying embers of an almost extinguished conservative fire that had flamed brightly since 2010. All around Johnson was the burned out wreckage of Republican campaigns since 2016. In 2018, Tammy Baldwin prevailed in her Senate race while Gov. Scott Walker went down. Josh Kaul pole-vaulted into the Department of Justice that year, too. Biden took down Trump in 2020, and, in 2022, while Johnson was sweating it out, Evers knocked out Tim Michels with a whiffle fist.

State Supreme Court elections during those years, needless to say, were a mess.

So had Wisconsin turned blue? Hardly. In 2018, Walker went for a third term, which always raises the specter of voter fatigue, after making a bad bet with Foxconn and after undertaking his own presidential campaign, a decision that left some people, especially independents, with a bad taste in their mouths. Yet he still came as close as you can to winning without actually doing so.

As for Baldwin that year, she had the advantage of being a Senate nobody—meaning she didn’t make forever enemies like Walker had courageously done with Act 10, for which conservatives will be forever grateful—and she was running in a midterm where the party out-of-presidential power does historically well in federal elections.

But then came the pandemic, and with it Trump’s hopes for a second term went south. Trump, who had been heading toward a landslide re-election, got severely tangled up in federal Covid policy, letting Dr. Anthony Fauci and Company stay around too long, and they took advantage of it, working around the clock, burning the midnight oil, to undermine the president every step of the way.

And you know what they say: Nothing good ever happens after midnight. By day the administration was pro-liberty; by night, when the bureaucrats scurried around in the cabinets, it was pro-Fauci and fake science. In the end, it doomed Trump’s bid for re-election.

By the time the 2022 mid-terms rolled around, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and supposedly an army of angry women were going to make the GOP pay the ultimate price, forevermore.

The supposed evidence was everywhere: the highly anticipated and predicted GOP red wave failed to materialize; voters in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana approved abortion-rights-related ballot measures; and, in 2023, in Wisconsin, uber progressive and pro-abortion rights advocate Janet Protasiewicz whipped conservative Dan Kelly by 11 points in a spring Supreme Court race.

In federal elections, Trump-backed candidates were falling like dominoes. Stunned conservatives could only ask, whither Trumpism?, while triumphant progressives said the nation had turned the page on MAGA.

What about inflation? progressives were asked. And they answered: Voters listed inflation as a top issue in the mid-terms, but it didn’t hurt Democrats. Oh, nobody cared about free speech or civil liberties, either, and, by the way, you’re not allowed to disagree.

Missing the elephant in the room

Unfortunately for progressives, they forgot to factor in a few things in that analysis, but, in those heady days, who could really blame them? They were partying like it was 1999 and like Joe Biden was 60 and mindful again. Heck, the results even got old Joe to run for re-election. Oops.

But about those factors? For one thing, as it turns out, Republicans might not have run as well as pollsters expected in 2022—an organized pro-abortion vote likely helped some candidates, lame GOP Senate candidates hurt themselves as much as the abortion issue did—but the GOP was hardly dead or even losing.

Just the year before, businessman Glenn Youngkin’s anti-elite message resonated so much that he won the Virginia’s governor’s race in a stunning upset. His winning message was broadly anti-establishment—opposed to critical race theory and for parental rights and school choice—but underlying the broader themes was a disdain for federal Covid policy that brushed aside civil liberties in the name of emergency and that screamed government overreach, such as mask mandates and school closures.

Free will and choice were the signatures of his movement.

Then, too, despite the fiasco of the trumpeted red wave in 2022, everyone forgot that, on a basic grassroots level, Republicans actually won that election. The exit polls in November 2022 wrote the headline: 36 percent of voters identified as Republican compared to 33 percent as Democrats, the best ever showing for the Republican Party.

The exit polls were spot on, too. Everyone knows that Republicans won the House majority narrowly, but what many people don’t know is that the GOP House candidates won the national popular vote as well, winning 50.6 percent of all congressional House votes cast in the nation, to 48.7 per cent for Democratic candidates, a 1.9-percent advantage.

If that margin sounds familiar to you, it should, because it is very much akin to Donald Trump’s winning popular vote margin over Harris, which as of this writing (they will never stop counting ballots in California, apparently) is 49.9 percent to 48.3 percent—or a margin of 1.6 percent. Looked at that way, the 2022 midterms could be viewed not so much as the GOP’s swan song as an eerie preamble to the 2024 presidential election.

Need new glasses? Visit a palm reader

There were other tea leaves in the cup to read. As 2022 churned into 2023 and then into the 2024 election season, that historic shift to the GOP in party identification exit polls was showing up in other surveys, from the left-leaning Pew Research Center to the venerable Gallup organization.

In Gallup’s third-quarter 2024 survey, 48 percent of U.S. adults identified as Republican compared to 45 percent as Democrats. That was the first time since Gallup introduced the survey in 1992 that the GOP had an outright advantage, and only one other time, in 2004, were they tied.

In the Pew survey, Republicans led in party identification by 1 point in a 5,600-person survey. Gallup is one thing, but when Pew has the GOP ahead in party identification, progressives should have been sounding the alarm. It no doubt signaled serious discontent with Bidenomics and inflation—economic misery has to be underlined in every election analysis, to be clear—but overall those surveys exposed a deeper undercurrent of discontent that progressives did not see, or refused to see.

They failed to see America’s desire to be free again, to be able to breathe again, as filmmaker Justine Bateman said after the election. Instead progressives were running a campaign of pure joy. One also of pure nonsense, but joyful nonsense nonetheless.

Still, one must ask, what about that army of angry pro-abortion women voters—the ones whom Harris campaign door knockers reported to be standing out of view of their husbands, supposedly nodding and winking and mouthing that they were secret Harris voters?

What about all those abortion referenda passing in red states? What about Protasiewicz’s massive win? They can’t be discounted, can they?

Actually, they can. Sure, abortion rights measures have won in multiple red states (they have also now lost in multiple red states) following the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, but that doesn’t mean Republican candidates lost election after election. Some pro-life candidates lost, but by and large red states have remained red states and red regions red even when passing pro-abortion measures.

In fact, pro-abortion measures fared better than Biden did in 2020 in many areas. A Politico analysis showed that, in five states where abortion was on the ballot in 2022, pro-abortion ballot measures were running 11 points ahead of what Biden polled deep in Trump country two years earlier. So much for a broad realignment.

As for Protasiewicz’s win over Kelly, that can be discounted, too, and not because Dan Kelly was a bad candidate as some have suggested. He was a good candidate who articulated conservative judicial philosophy better than most, and translated it for average voters in a way most conservative legal scholars cannot.

That said, it was no spontaneous army of angry pro-abortion voters that did Kelly in. Rather, it was an organized, mobilized insurgency focused on an array of issues. Abortion might have taken center stage, but everything from redistricting to Act 10 to election integrity was on the ballot, and an outsized and massively funded special-interest mobilization aimed at establishing a far-left progressive majority on the state Supreme Court overwhelmed an outgunned Kelly.

Everyone can pick that election apart, but when Everytown for Gun Safety chips in nearly a half-million dollars for the progressive candidate—by itself—the election is no spontaneous voter rebellion. It’s no rebellion at all, in fact, it’s special-interest establishment politics, and it obviously was not organized around abortion alone.

It was also not countered by the other side.

A happy disillusion

Indeed, if one really analyzed all the abortion voting patterns, it’s more likely that the abortion issue, rather than representing an authentic uprising with the potential to realign American politics, temporarily masked and camouflaged what was truly happening in the nation—an actual realignment in the other direction.

While progressives were all excited about winning pro-abortion referenda in red states and incorrectly assumed it portended a shift to the left, voters, whether they were pro-abortion or not, were generally shifting to the right.

That fact showed up when GOP candidates continued to win in areas where abortion rights also won. It showed up in the 2022 national vote totals and exit polls; it showed up in the Pew and Gallup surveys. It showed up in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race.

And, finally it showed up on Nov. 5, 2024.

All of which brings me back to Ron Johnson’s squeaker of a victory in 2022. Again, not a big margin but a decisive one given that Republicans were falling all around him.

Obviously—at least it is obvious to me—Johnson’s red victory poking through the blue veneer of that election day was not the final burst of a dying populist conservative movement; it was part of the ignition of a populist conservative realignment that was already well underway.

The question is, why Johnson and what set him apart? After all, most every GOP candidate was busy fending off the abortion political machete; on the other hand, every GOP offering was boosted by Bidenomics, inflation, and by Biden himself.

And Johnson was especially targeted for take down after beating progressive legend Russ Feingold—not once but twice. The daggers were out.

The answer is, Johnson ran a campaign focusing on issues that surfaced more centrally in this year’s presidential election. He took on not only Biden’s economic failures but the broad overreach of government, especially the corruption of the FBI, and he channeled the nation’s smoldering anger at the Democrats’ bid to take away free speech and medical liberty.

The courage to take on the Covidians

To his eternal credit, during the pandemic Johnson called out the Biden administration for trying to label anyone who questioned the government’s Covid narrative as domestic terrorists, including parents concerned about the education of their children. It was Johnson (along with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) who courageously denounced the attack on civil liberties posed by vaccine mandates at a time when many other GOP candidates ran away from such positions, or stayed silent, making them equally guilty.

Indeed, while anti-mask and anti-lockdown rhetoric was at a fever pitch among Republicans in congressional hearings, that positioning rarely made it to the campaign trail. Republicans opted instead for then speaker Kevin McCarthy’s more neutral and nuanced approach, which was to blame Biden for failing to offer “a realistic response to the virus” but avoid more dramatic critiques about harsh Covid policies that were dangerous to both the nation’s public health and its constitutional fabric.

It was an approach Ron Johnson didn’t take. He offered his blistering critiques not only during hearings in the swamp, but on the high ground of the campaign trail in Wisconsin.

”The Biden administration’s decision to mandate vaccines for working Americans is an outrageous trampling of civil liberties and a dangerous precedent for what a U.S. president can unilaterally impose on the American public,” Johnson said in 2021. “No one should be pressured, coerced, or fear reprisal for refusing treatment, including the Covid-19 vaccine.”

During that same election season of 2021 and 2022, Johnson put the dangers of Covid oppression center stage again when he held a roundtable of doctors and scientists skeptical of the government’s Covid narrative. He repeatedly stressed medical freedom and exposed the government’s misinformation, and hammered away at those themes across the state:

“The President is doubling down on his same failed response to the pandemic,” he said in December 2021. “Other than coercion and freedom robbing mandates, what has this administration been doing? Why is Biden throwing money at testing and ventilators but not focusing on monoclonal antibodies or early treatment? Why not recognize natural immunity? Why do we have to rely on international data because our own health agencies have failed to collect data and have not been transparent with the information they have? Why are we firing first responders when we have a shortage of healthcare workers? Biden, Dr. Fauci and the Covid gods in federal health agencies have failed the American people miserably.”

In other words, America’s ruling elites had turned their backs on average Americans, and Johnson later said he decided to seek re-election to stand up to such government oppression, especially when it came to the vaccine injured.

Throughout the run-up to the election, the left labeled Johnson a super-spreader of Covid misinformation, which was nonsense. What Johnson offered was a lifeline to liberty, and voters grabbed hold of it. In 2024, Trump and the Republican Party in general offered that lifeline, and the nation has grabbed hold of it again.

The people’s resistance to the attack on their free speech, their civil liberties and medical freedom generally, is the untold story of this election year. Abortion was never going to be the issue this year, liberty was. Again, one cannot dismiss the economic concerns driving the electorate, but neither should the underlying diagnosis of why the economy was so bad be overlooked: It was driven by out-of-touch elites who disdain average Americans and who could not—and still cannot—understand why their divine leadership was not appreciated.

Wisconsin voters returned Ron Johnson to the U.S. Senate in 2022 because he dared to challenge global elites and their attack on constitutional values in the form of Covid oppression. He won not in spite of any outspokenness on civil liberties issues but because if it.

The American people have now returned Donald Trump to the White House for the very same reasons.

People might think inflation was the deciding factor, and progressives might contribute their election loss to a nation of floating garbage that knows no better, but really Johnson’s and Trump’s campaigns asserted another enduring reality: Americans quietly remember when you try to take their freedoms away, and they won’t let it stand for long.

When he first announced his presidential run, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said: “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.” I don’t think Kennedy would mind a paraphrase in the wake of the election: This is what happens when you try to take Americans’ constitutional rights away.

The lesson is pretty simple to grasp: It’s the constitution, stupid. Attack it at your own peril.