The Democratic Party of Wisconsin absolutely, positively did not want to nominate Mandela Barnes for governor in 2026. Heck, most party insiders didn’t even want him to run.
While he was mulling a bid last October, multiple Democrats told The New York Times that Barnes had his chance in 2022 and blew it; losing a critical Senate race to Ron Johnson on the same ballot that Gov. Tony Evers won re-election relatively comfortably.
“He proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can’t run hard enough and give us a winning campaign on a statewide basis,” Barbara Lawton, like Barnes a former Democrat lieutenant governor, told the Times.
This sentiment was widespread in Democrat circles, as Barnes ran four points behind Evers in what national party leaders considered the most flippable Senate seat in the country. The reviews of Barnes’ performance in that race were brutal: He was lazy, unprepared, and generally incompetent.
Making matters worse, the party essentially rigged its own primary for him. Less than two weeks before Election Day (and while in-person early voting was taking place), all three of Barnes’ main challengers for the nomination–Sarah Godlewski, Alex Lasry, and Tom Nelson–suddenly and inexplicably dropped out of the race and endorsed Barnes. It could not possibly have been clearer that the fix was in: Barnes was the candidate and everyone else was told to step aside.
That decision was almost immediately regretted as Johnson hammered Barnes relentlessly for his constant anti-police rhetoric, socialist ties, and refusal to pay property taxes and parking tickets. Barnes was a deeply flawed candidate and even in a year that saw Wisconsinites elect a Democrat governor, he lost to Johnson in a tight race.
Democrats haven’t forgotten. The day after The New York Times story dropped this past October, The Milwaukee Courier–a local black-owned newspaper–published an editorial warning Barnes that he would not enjoy the automatic support of Milwaukee’s black community and should think twice about whether he really wanted to run for governor.
“In politics, you earn your next opportunity by delivering on the last one,” The Courier’s editorial noted. “And in 2022, Mandela didn’t. That Senate seat was ours to win. He had the national support. He had the resources. He had the attention. And still—he came up short.
“And what’s more telling: instead of spending the past two years organizing here at home, building bridges, and proving he learned from that loss, what we’ve seen is a campaign-in-waiting with no clear rationale other than a desire to try again.
“That’s not enough.”
Absolutely brutal, especially coming from some of his closest allies in 2022. Still, Barnes did jump in the gubernatorial race in November and predictably dominated early polling based solely on name recognition. As the campaign season started up in earnest, though, much of his left-wing base abandoned him for socialist Francesca Hong and Barnes floundered for months without doing or saying much of anything.
His strategy may have been to skate by on name recognition and avoid opening his mouth and saying something dumb and disqualifying and, given his history of saying dumb and disqualifying things, such a strategy might not have been a bad one. But it ceded far-left voters to Hong and she capitalized, building momentum and support that now seems unbeatable.
Democrats have to beat her, however, if they want to avoid a full-scale socialist takeover of their party. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are on the rise after big primary wins in New York and Colorado this summer and see Wisconsin as their biggest prize. If a socialist can win a statewide Democratic nomination in what most consider to be the ultimate swing state, then Democrat voters everywhere want socialists representing them and not more mainstream Democrats (most of whom are, mind you, still socialists but try their best to keep this fact from voters).
The DSA doesn’t just want candidates running under the Democrat banner; it wants a full-scale takeover of the Democratic Party. That means current party leaders and elected officials who are not DSA members face immediate expulsion in a hostile takeover that poses an existential threat to Democrats across the country.
And the only thing now standing in their way in Wisconsin is…Mandela Barnes. Sara Rodriguez’s epic implosion amid a campaign finance scandal presents her with no path forward and she will likely drop out of the race by the end of the week. She had been the establishments’ choice to consolidate around in the hope of stopping the socialists, and the party had just begun putting its plan for doing so into action.
Both Missy Hughes and David Crowley were convinced to drop their own gubernatorial bids and endorse Rodriguez, and some believed that Joel Brennan would have been next had Rodriguez’s scandal not blown up this week. He and Kelda Roys will now stay in the race in the desperate hope that the party will pick them as the anti-Hong candidate, but neither has been able to muster more than about two percent in any public poll.
The only candidate who now has a chance to defeat Hong? The one Democrats have wanted to avoid nominating since even before he jumped in the race last year. The one who blew a must-win race four years ago despite being handed every single advantage. The one who might give Tom Tiffany a better chance of winning the general election than Hong does.
It’s Mandela Barnes, Democrats, whether you like it or not.
