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Opinion | Meet Mandela Barnes, the 35-Year-Old Candidate Working to Oust Ron Johnson

As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large Midwestern city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot relate to, and he can do it through lived experience. He’s the son of a United Auto Workers father and a public-school teacher mother, who was born in a troubled, high-poverty area of Milwaukee.

Of course, Mr. Barnes has his flaws as a candidate. He has encountered several mini controversies. He was once photographed holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt and has worked alongside Representative Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota and called her “brilliant” — the type of thing that could irk centrist swing voters.

But some of Mr. Barnes’s controversies are actually reasons that he may understand where younger voters are coming from. He was delinquent on a property tax payment and had an incomplete college degree (both since rectified). He also drew negative headlines for being on BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s Medicaid program) while he was running for lieutenant governor in 2018. But encountering financial challenges and making some early career mistakes sounds like a typical millennial experience. Perhaps if more of our elected officials faced similar challenges, they’d have a better idea of how to help others find solutions to them.

Of course, one does not need to be a millennial to understand their problems, and age alone does not guarantee support from younger voters. Many in the demographic gravitated to Bernie Sanders over other, younger candidates in the last two presidential primaries. But Mr. Sanders’s popularity was rooted in the fact that the country he described mirrored the one that millennials had experienced — one in which economic precarity and wealth inequality had transformed the American dream into pure fantasy.

To be fair, plenty of other Democratic candidates are harnessing this kind of rhetoric. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is one example. But because of his relative youth, Mr. Barnes is uniquely well positioned to give voice to the anxieties and problems of his generation: We millennials were introduced to the horrors of school shootings through the massacre at Columbine in our adolescence; now our children go through active shooter drills in pre-K. Our country is not doing enough to address climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, rapidly eroding reproductive rights, diminishing voting rights or the skyrocketing costs of health care, child care and housing. The list goes on.

Wisconsin is more politically complex than it can sometimes appear. The idea that the state can’t stomach a politician as progressive as Mr. Barnes is pure fiction. Liberal candidates have won 10 of the last 11 statewide elections. Like Mr. Barnes, Senator Tammy Baldwin was also accused of being too far left for Wisconsin when she first ran for statewide office a decade ago, and in 2018, she was re-elected by an almost 11-point margin. And while slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police” have become unpopular, the Black Lives Matter movement — which Mr. Barnes is a vocal supporter of — is still quite popular in Wisconsin, with a higher favorability rating than almost any state or national politician, according to the most recent Marquette University Law School poll.



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