Ron Johnson has made a comeback as the race heads into the final stretch of the campaign, with polls showing the race to be a dead heat and Paul Ryan giving another boost to Ron’s already strong campaign.
A handful of recent polls show Johnson mounting a breathtaking last-minute comeback: The latest Marquette University Law School poll puts him just two points behind Feingold, within the poll’s margin of error, and campaign sources say this tracks with their internal numbers, which are calculated using the Wisconsin Republican party’s data machine, which helped Scott Walker fend off a recall and then got him reelected.
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There’s another interesting factor at work in the Johnson–Feingold rematch. This has been billed as the year of outsiders, with voters consistently saying they are fed up with politics-as-usual. Well, Johnson is actually a Washington outsider who worked his way through college at the University of Minnesota and went on to become the CEO of the plastics-manufacturing company founded by his father-in-law and brother-in-law. He calls himself a “citizen legislator” and he has pledged to serve only two terms.
Sen. Ron Johnson, all but abandoned recently by national Republicans, has debuted a series of positive spots that strategists on both sides of the aisle said have broken through the noise and that recent public polling suggests have improved his favorability ratings. He’s now within a couple points of former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, who has been favored for the entirety of the race.
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While big, national stories and trends made life increasingly difficult for Republicans across the country, the Johnson campaign broke through by going very, very small. One ad focuses entirely on the story of one family that Johnson helped to adopt a child from the Democratic Republic of Congo, while another points out a specific job-training project in Milwaukee that Johnson has supported. In a third, Johnson used a whiteboard setup similar to the ads that helped him unseat Feingold in 2010.
The Wisconsin Senate race has quickly turned into one of the most heated in the nation, and House Speaker Paul Ryan is putting strong emphasis on helping Sen. Ron Johnson fend off his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Russ Feingold.
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A source close to the Johnson campaign said Ryan’s popularity and respect within the state has made him an invaluable ally to the senator, with him acting as a sort of liaison to the political world.
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Despite Johnson’s race once being dubbed a long shot by a number of political analysts, he’s managed to close what was once a significant gap. He now polls ahead or within the margin of Feingold, a fight Ryan helped brace him for.