[As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large
Midwestern city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot
relate to, and he can do it through lived experience. ]
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MEET MANDELA BARNES, THE 35-YEAR-OLD CANDIDATE WORKING TO OUST RON
JOHNSON  
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Dan Shafer
August 9, 2022
The New York Times
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_ As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large Midwestern
city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot relate to,
and he can do it through lived experience. _

, Sara Stathas / Alamy

 

MILWAUKEE — Millennials came of age at a time of crisis. They are
the first generation in American history positioned to be worse off
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their parents, their economic trajectory forever altered by the
economic meltdown of the late 2000s, as the ladders to the middle
class were pulled up or broken by the crushing burden of student debt,
the decline of unions and skyrocketing health care and housing costs,
and as rapid technological changes proved more calamitous than
democratizing.

Mandela Barnes — who won the Democratic Senate primary in Wisconsin
on Tuesday night — understands the challenges this era has thrust
upon millennials better than most in his position. Serving under Tony
Evers as the lieutenant governor of the state, Mr. Barnes is just 35
years old, and if elected could be only the second senator born in the
1980s.

In many respects, he embodies both the flaws and the promise of his
generation. Running to be the first Black man to represent a Rust Belt
state in the Senate since Roland Burris, he is talented, charismatic
and passionate, a fresh face entering the national scene in a party
still dominated by an aging political establishment. But like many
other millennial politicians now considering higher office, his path
was a more progressive one. Mr. Barnes came up as a young State
Assembly representative on Milwaukee’s liberal North Side. This
fall, he will face challenging questions about his record, like
his position on bail reform
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the Evers administration’s response to the unrest in Kenosha
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But he has the tools he needs to overcome them — he can win this
race in part because he has endeared himself to mainstream Democrats
as a member of the Evers administration, and because he may be able to
tap into a new pool of Wisconsin voters.

The fault lines in American politics are sometimes generational as
well as ideological, and that is certainly part of the story unfolding
in the midterm elections in Wisconsin, where Senator Ron Johnson, the
incumbent Republican — a vulnerable one
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faces a Democrat roughly half his age.

Mr. Barnes is more than a decade younger than any of the other swing
state Democrats running for Senate this year. If elected, he and Jon
Ossoff of Georgia would be the only millennials in the upper chamber.

This generation is not especially well represented in Washington. Just
31 people born between 1981 and 1996 are currently serving in the
House. And the Senate is the oldest it has ever been. One-third of its
members are over the age of 70, and there are roughly as many members
of the Senate in their 80s (seven) as there are under the age of 50
(eight).

As Jamelle Bouie wrote recently
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the older guard lacks “any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense
that our system is on the brink.” Democrats have been delivering
legislative wins as of late, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the
Senate’s sweeping health and climate bill, but it’s been an
arduous process to get there, stalled by filibusters and
parliamentarians and everyday D.C. gridlock.

Mr. Barnes, for his part, seems to grasp what the old guard does not.
He has put eliminating the filibuster front and center in his campaign
and has, throughout his career, talked about the need for Democrats
to be bolder
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both in their messaging and on bread-and-butter issues like health
care, environmental issues and racial injustice.

As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large Midwestern
city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot relate to,
and he can do it through lived experience. He’s the son of a United
Auto Workers father and a public-school teacher mother, who was born
in a troubled, high-poverty area of Milwaukee.

Of course, Mr. Barnes has his flaws as a candidate. He has encountered
several mini controversies. He was once photographed holding an
“Abolish ICE” T-shirt
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has worked alongside Representative Ilhan Omar from neighboring
Minnesota and called her “brilliant
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— the type of thing that could irk centrist swing voters.

But some of Mr. Barnes’s controversies are actually reasons that he
may understand where younger voters are coming from. He
was delinquent on a property tax payment
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had an incomplete college degree
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since rectified). He also drew negative headlines
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being on BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s Medicaid program) while he was
running for lieutenant governor in 2018. But encountering financial
challenges and making some early career mistakes sounds like a typical
millennial experience. Perhaps if more of our elected officials faced
similar challenges, they’d have a better idea of how to help others
find solutions to them.

Of course, one does not need to be a millennial to understand their
problems, and age alone does not guarantee support from younger
voters. Many in the demographic gravitated to Bernie Sanders over
other, younger candidates in the last two presidential primaries. But
Mr. Sanders’s popularity was rooted in the fact that the country he
described mirrored the one that millennials had experienced — one in
which economic precarity and wealth inequality had transformed the
American dream into pure fantasy.

To be fair, plenty of other Democratic candidates are harnessing this
kind of rhetoric. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is one example. But
because of his relative youth, Mr. Barnes is uniquely well positioned
to give voice to the anxieties and problems of his generation: We
millennials were introduced to the horrors of school shootings through
the massacre at Columbine in our adolescence; now our children go
through active shooter drills in pre-K. Our country is not doing
enough to address climate change, economic inequality, systemic
racism, rapidly eroding reproductive rights, diminishing voting rights
or the skyrocketing costs of health care, child care and housing. The
list goes on.

Wisconsin is more politically complex than it can sometimes appear.
The idea that the state can’t stomach a politician as progressive as
Mr. Barnes is pure fiction. Liberal candidates have won 10 of the last
11 statewide elections. Like Mr. Barnes, Senator Tammy Baldwin was
also accused of being too far left for Wisconsin when she first ran
for statewide office a decade ago, and in 2018, she was re-elected by
an almost 11-point margin. And while slogans like “Abolish ICE”
and “Defund the Police” have become unpopular, the Black Lives
Matter movement — which Mr. Barnes is a vocal supporter of — is
still quite popular in Wisconsin, with a higher favorability rating
than almost any state or national politician, according to the most
recent Marquette University Law School poll
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What’s more, Mr. Barnes has chosen his moment wisely: The state
Republican Party is in disarray, riven with bickering over their
nominee for governor, mired in an endless battle over the results of
the 2020 election and saddled with Mr. Johnson, whose chaotic and
conspiratorial comments are already alienating swing voters, tanking
his favorability rating to just 21 percent among moderates.

If Mr. Barnes can deliver a new kind of message that both speaks to
the anxieties of younger generations and harnesses their hope, he has
a fighting chance. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s most closely
contested swing states, where elections are often decided by tenths of
a point.

If Mr. Barnes can turn out just a few thousand voters with promises to
enact big, bold changes in Washington, he may be able to pull off an
upset, beating Mr. Johnson in November. Colleges will be seeing their
most normal returns to campus since the start of the coronavirus
pandemic, and students could be more directly engaged in these
midterms than they were in other pandemic elections, especially with
heightened activism around abortion. And in Milwaukee, turnout has
never reached the levels it did during Mr. Obama’s second
presidential election. If Mr. Barnes can reach a sliver of young Black
voters and turn them out to the polls, it could be enough to tilt the
race in his favor.

Wisconsin can often be a bellwether of political change. The Tea Party
wave of 2010 made the state a Republican testing ground for hard-right
conservative policies that would soon go national. The 2018 election
of Tony Evers was in many ways predictive of President Biden’s win
two years later. A victory for a young Black millennial politician, in
this of all states, could be a sign that a generational shift in
American politics is well on its way.

_ Dan Shafer is a journalist based in Milwaukee. He writes a
newsletter about Wisconsin politics._

 

* Wisconsin
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* Senate race
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* Mandela Barnes
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* RON JOHNSON
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