“I embrace that,” Mr. Barnes said, trying to grab the mantle of change.
National battles over crime and abortion took center stage.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion has been a highly emotional issue in Wisconsin, home to a law from 1849 that bans abortion with almost no exceptions. Mr. Barnes sought to put Mr. Johnson on the defensive over the issue, describing the dangerous or heart-wrenching circumstances under which women sometimes seek abortions, and casting the senator’s opposition to abortion rights as “dangerous, out of touch and extreme.” That is a message Democrats are deploying in races across the country, and especially on the airwaves.
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Mr. Johnson was pressed for specifics, and he said he supported birth control and in-vitro fertilization, along with calling for a state referendum to determine “at what point does society have the responsibility to protect life,” something Mr. Barnes dismissed as unrealistic.
But Mr. Johnson also embraced an issue that is animating Republican ads in major races: crime. He repeatedly questioned Mr. Barnes’s commitment to funding law enforcement, and sought to conjure memories of protests that turned destructive in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Mr. Barnes emphasized his commitment to public safety.
‘Defund the police’ and Jan. 6 were cudgels in a fight over support for law enforcement.
Many Democratic officials and candidates rejected the “defund the police” slogan long ago. But Mr. Johnson sought to attach it to Mr. Barnes anyway on Friday, even as he conceded that Mr. Barnes does not embrace that language.
“He has a record of wanting to defund the police, and I know he doesn’t necessarily say that word,” Mr. Johnson said. “But he has a long history of being supported by people that are leading the effort to defund.”
He accused Mr. Barnes of using “code words” like “reallocate over-bloated police budgets.”
Mr. Barnes did suggest in a 2020 television interview that some funding be diverted from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services. Since then, he has said explicitly that he doesn’t support “defunding the police,” and has emphasized that law enforcement should have necessary resources.
“I’ve spent my entire career working to make communities safer,” Mr. Barnes said, emphasizing that “there’s so much more we need to do to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals.”
He also questioned whether Mr. Johnson’s support for law enforcement extended to the officers who were attacked during the Capitol riot, which Mr. Johnson has minimized.
