NEENAH, Wis.—Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson was almost ready to declare victory over Democrat Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes just before 1 a.m. CST on Nov. 9, but he told supporters he will wait for the full vote count to declare “final victory.”
With slightly more than 93 percent of the votes counted, Johnson maintained a nearly 39,000-vote lead over Barnes.
Johnson amassed 1,322,922 votes (50.7 percent) to 1,284,189 (49.3 percent) for Barnes, a former state legislator from Milwaukee who won the race for lieutenant governor in 2018.
“We’ve looked very closely at the numbers,” Johnson said. “We feel very confident that there’s no way that they can really make up that gap.
“But I’m not going to declare victory until all the numbers are in, but I just want to give you guys a sense that this race is over.”
A packed ballroom at the Best Western Premier Bridgewood Resort Hotel watched the vote gap wax and wane during the evening. Staff from the campaign war room made repeated announcements that, while the vote was tight, Johnson should prevail when the dust settles.
“We'll wait till all the numbers come in before I declare final victory,” Johnson said. “But I do believe that this time, truth has prevailed over the lies and the character assassination.”
Johnson was a top target of Democrats, who poured millions of dollars from third-party groups to finance waves of attack advertisements against the two-term incumbent.
“They dropped $100 million into this state, the liberal third-party groups from around the state, they dropped $100 million in, starting in January,” Brian Schimming, former vice-chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and a Johnson campaign adviser, told The Epoch Times. “So Ron Johnson was the biggest target in the country.”
Schimming said Johnson overcame the negative attack ads once he hit the campaign trail.
“They spent $50 million in outside negative money against Ron Johnson before we bought our first yard sign,” Schimming said. “But we caught up. What was interesting about it is they said, ‘Ron Johnson will never catch up. His negatives are too high.’ And in six weeks, [Barnes] went from being seven up to six down. So the state, the voters of this state, saw through what was going on.”
