You might call Ron Johnson the invisible senator. He has been in office for more than four and a half years, and yet a plurality of voters have no opinion of him. That’s extraordinary.
The latest Marquette University Law School Poll found that more than 44% of respondents said they “don’t know” or “haven’t heard” enough to have an opinion of the Republican U.S. senator from Wisconsin. Another 25% have a negative opinion of him, and just 30% have a favorable opinion.
The MU Poll has now surveyed voters nine times on Johnson, and the percentage that approved of him has averaged just 32%, compared to 28% who were negative and 40% who had no opinion. Those are dismal numbers.
Compare that to Democrat Russ Feingold, who has been out of office and under the radar for the same period, yet only 26% say they don’t know or haven’t heard enough to have an opinion of him; 44% have a favorable opinion and 29% have a negative opinion.
Feingold, who’s announced he will run against Johnson in 2016, served for 18 years — from 1992 to 2010 — in the U.S. Senate and was relentless about meeting with constituents. He held listening sessions in all 72 counties every year: That’s 432 sessions per term, and 1,296 sessions during his entire tenure as senator.
Johnson, by contrast, has held telephone conferences that constituents can sign up for, which do allow for questions, but tend to be more about listening to the senator. Feingold has already jumped all over Johnson’s style, telling Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Craig Gilbert the senator interacts with constituents by “lecturing” rather than listening. Johnson likes to do PowerPoint presentations on the federal government’s long-term deficit, and that’s probably the issue he’s best known for — to the extent he’s known at all.
Feingold, on the other hand, was known as a maverick Democrat willing to take dramatically unpopular stands.
The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 put in place campaign finance reform that members of both parties disliked. Feingold was the only one among 100 senators who dared to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001 — and can now he can point to the result, the wholesale collection of data on Americans through their phones. (Johnson continues to support this data gathering, saying it’s “information that we’re going to need to keep this nation safe.”)
Feingold was a fierce critic of the war in Iraq, long before the Bush administration conceded there were no weapons of mass destruction there, which was the pretext for the war. Feingold brusquely broke with President Barack Obama, opposing expansion of the war in Afghanistan.
In the 1990s, Feingold opposed the law backed by President Bill Clinton to loosen federal regulations of banks, which helped lead to the 2008 financial meltdown. He voted against the bailout of the banks under President George W. Bush and bashed Obama’s financial reform bill, arguing its restrictions were inadequate to protect America from a future banking crisis.
Feingold looks pretty farsighted on all these stands, but he also looks like he’s on the side of average voters. In a Senate where 69 members were millionaires, Feingold was strictly middle class. He opposed free-trade agreements like NAFTA, arguing they would reduce good-paying manufacturing jobs in America, which is exactly what happened. Johnson is a business owner who supports more such agreements, and that could easily make him look uncaring.
Johnson defeated Feingold in 2010 by attacking his support of Obamacare. This was before the program’s launch, so scare stories were easy to peddle. But Obamacare will be harder for Johnson to demonize now that it’s in effect and has a constituency of supporters. Similarly, Johnson ran in 2010 against the Obama stimulus plan before it had much impact, but the revived economy could make Feingold’s support of it look much wiser today.
Johnson is going to hammer Feingold as a big-government Democrat and career politician, but that argument doesn’t work as neatly when you are now the representative of government and have a voting record, most of which involves some kind of government spending. Feingold, however, has provided an opening for Johnson on this issue with the news that he has been maintaining a PAC since leaving office that seemed designed to continue employing his old senatorial staff.
For his part, Feingold will portray Johnson as one of the many millionaire senators whose voting records show they don’t care about the middle class. Such arguments will be easier to make because Johnson has failed to really connect with voters, and has instead projected a sense that he knows better than them. “I realize a lot of people don’t pay attention,” he told Gilbert. “I think the voters of Wisconsin...if they take a look at things objectively, will start realizing that big government...isn’t working so good.”
Voters, however, don’t typically take the “objective view,” but vote for what they think is in their best interests. And right now, less than a third of them seem to approve of how Johnson is representing the state. Which is why experts have tabbed him as one of the country’s most vulnerable Senate incumbents in the 2016 election.
Bruce Murphy is editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com.
