Barnes ‘22 Revisited

As Mandela Barnes flirts with another statewide campaign, it's worth reassessing his last one, which was both overrated and underrated at the same time.

The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.

Mandela Barnes’ 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate was both overrated and underrated at the same time. Screenshot via Barnes campaign ad.

---

The 2026 midterm elections are just over a year away, and the Democratic field in the first open race for governor in Wisconsin since 2010 looks to be very nearly set.

Attorney General Josh Kaul announced earlier this month he’d be running for re-election (instead of for governor, as many expected), and former WisDems chair Ben Wikler also said he would not be running¹. Those not-running announcements followed campaign launches from Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, State Sen. Kelda Roys, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, State Rep. Francesca Hong and former WEDC CEO Missy Hughes. After this flurry of decisions, there seems to be one more major decision looming over the race. That would be the one from former lieutenant governor and 2022 U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes.

While Barnes has not yet made an official decision either way, most signs now point to him joining the race in the coming weeks. Last week, The New York Times published a story with the headline, “This Democrat Lost a Big Race. The Party Is Uneasy About His Return.” In it, some expressed concern about a potential Mandela Barnes gubernatorial run. There was also a reference to a Twitter poll that I ran the day of Kaul’s announcement, asking people the question: “Should Mandela Barnes run for governor?”

Yes, a random Twitter poll of mine somehow made it into The New York Times, but that’s not really the issue here. The issue is the trepidation over a potential Barnes candidacy and it is quite obvious what this stems from: he lost.

Barnes lost what was the closest race for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin in more than 100 years, coming an agonizingly close 26,719 votes shy of unseating Republican Sen. Ron Johnson.

Were Barnes to run, he’d need to buck a trend in Wisconsin of repeat statewide candidates losing again in their second run. We’ve seen this with former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly (losing in 2020 and 2023), former Attorney General Brad Schimel (losing in 2018 and 2025, for Wisconsin Supreme Court), and Tim Michels (losing for Senate in 2004, governor in 2022) within the last decade. This has been a more prevalent trend among Republicans and GOP-aligned candidates as of late, but it also happened with Russ Feingold’s repeat runs for Senate in 2010 and 2016, and Tom Barrett’s repeat runs for governor in 2010 and 2012. The political comeback just hasn’t tended to work out well here.

So, since it appears Barnes is on the precipice of running statewide again, if he’s going to put himself in position to do what others haven’t and win this time around, his 2022 run for U.S. Senate warrants a fresh reexamination.

There’s been no Wisconsin election result that I have been asked about more than the race between Mandela Barnes and Sen. Ron Johnson. The what happened? and what if’s have not been in short supply. It’s not just that Barnes lost, it’s that he lost to Ron Johnson, of all people, and that he lost amid a stretch of time when Wisconsin Democrats have been on a bit of a winning streak. Starting in the spring of 2018, Democrats and Democratic-aligned candidates have won 16 of the last 20 statewide races. The only Republican or GOP-aligned wins came from Donald Trump in 2024 (by less than 1%), State Treasurer John Lieber in 2022 (by about 1.5%), Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn in 2019 (by about 0.5%), and Ron Johnson in 2022 (by 1%). So, Barnes’ loss does stand out.

The Barnes 2022 retrospective analysis has really run the gamut. Some think he’s just a flat-out bad candidate, and that any other Democrat would have defeated Johnson. Some think he was unfairly maligned, facing obstacles others did not, running in a Republican-advantage midterm to make history as Wisconsin’s first Black U.S. Senator. People have a lot of takes on this race, and as we’ve been seeing of late as he flirts with a run, the volume of those takes aren’t going to die down anytime soon.

So, here’s what I think about that race: Mandela Barnes’ 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate somehow managed to be both overrated and underrated at the same time.

Let’s break this down. First, the underrated.