Here & Now

Inside Wisconsin Politics: Barnes Departs, Hong Up in Polls

Frederica Freyberg:
This week’s “Inside Wisconsin Politics” took up Barnes dropping out, this week’s candidate debate and also new poll results that helped inform Mandela Barnes’s decision to suspend his campaign. Here’s WPR’s Shawn Johnson, Anya van Wagtendonk, and “Here & Now” reporter Zac Schultz.

Shawn Johnson:
His departure kind of leaves the race in some ways, where it was, where there seems to be this growing consensus out there that this is Francesca Hong race to lose. She is a democratic socialist, which has sort of defined this campaign. Anya, you’ve covered her campaign. You profiled her for Wisconsin Public Radio. How is she presenting her brand of politics to primary voters and also potentially critics as this primary closes out?

Anya van Wagtendonk:
Yeah, I think she’s been really consistent, not just throughout this campaign, but throughout her political career. I think a little bit what we saw on the debate stage was her trying to nuance some of that, perhaps for a more general election, again, as she is this kind of runaway favorite at the moment. I saw some criticism actually from national DSA members on social media who were saying essentially, “Oh, she’s not socialist enough,” but I think she understands that there is going to be a pretty ready-made line of attack from Republicans based on some of her past statements, based on calling for defunding the police, based on aligning with certain, you know, sort of far left, more like agitated sort of online figures that that gives them easy things to kind of clip, which can really kind of be hard to oppose from a more kind of nuanced position. And so I think we saw her on the debate stage, kind of trying out some of these more bitable, clippable ways of approaching her politics.

Shawn Johnson:
Zac, we had a couple polls out this week. They both showed Francesca Hong with at least a 20-point lead. You know, one of them showed Mandela Barnes — Marquette showed Mandela Barnes in second, David Crowley down at about 7%. But in the Marquette poll, we’re looking at a third of voters still undecided. Now Mandela Barnes is out of the race. You got all those undecided voters. David Crowley is still there. Could this race shake up and change in the closing days?

Zac Schultz:
Well, every time we say no, we’re proven wrong. It does get shaken up by larger events than what we probably could have predicted on this show but the question is, is there enough room for anyone to gain enough ground to catch the lead that Francesca Hong looks like she has? Just talking about those absentee ballots that have been cast, they’re not getting counted back. The question will be, once this race is all over, will the margin of votes that Mandela Barnes and Rodriguez received add up to the amount that the second-place person took or will they have made a difference in some spoiling manner? That will be interesting math to see, but by then, we’ll have a winner.

Frederica Freyberg:
The full episode of “Inside Wisconsin Politics” is available wherever you get your podcasts.