In June 2018, Barnes won the Democratic Party of Wisconsin straw poll with 80.9% of the vote, earning 617 out of 763 votes.[31] During the primary, his name was omitted from election notices in three newspapers in two different counties.[32] The day before the election, his picture was used in a local news report about a fatal motorcycle crash.[32]
Makes you wonder how much money the DNC deployed for this race? Not like it's above corpodems to sabotage prog campaigns in favor of closer aligned GOP.
Upon cursory digging:
But Wisconsin’s Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler has offered a different theory: that the national party fatally injured the Barnes campaign by underfunding it. The Barnes campaign did out-raise Johnson, but as Wikler noted in a recent New York Times story, Barnes was buried by Johnson in spending by outside groups, where Johnson had a stunning $26.4 million edge. And those outside groups generally take their cue from party leaders.
“If you were going to allocate resources for maximum impact,” Mr. Wikler told the Times, “you wouldn’t let Mandela Barnes be outspent by $26 million on independent expenditures and lose by 26,000 votes” (out of more than 2.6 million votes cast).
But while the airwaves were saturated, there’s no doubt that more of the fire — and spending — was coming from the Johnson campaign. I can’t recall a race in this state where a candidate got such a pummeling. Mailers sent by Republicans actually darkened Barnes’ skin color, while some TV ads from a Republican super PAC superimposed his name next to images of crime scenes. “There were weeks where we would get outspent two-to-one on TV,” Barnes told the Times back in October. “There has been an unprecedented amount of negative spin against me.”
I hate this kind of bullshit that I have to fact check.
Here is all the outside spending
https://www.opensecrets.org/races/outside-spending?cycle=2022&id=WIS2
Senate Dems spent 24.5 million, Senate Repubs sent 26 million.
Other groups basically spent in equal amounts against Barnes and Johnson.
The difference was the Wisconsin Truth PAC which was setup by three billionaires who spent 28 million
Three Billionaires Are Spending a Fortune to Re-elect Ron Johnson
https://perfectunion.us/wisconsin-truth-pac-ron-johnson/
And of course these three lifelong Republican billionaires took cue from Democratic party leaders. This has to be the biggest bullshit yet on this thread.
When it comes to lying and conspiracies, progs are no different to MAGAtards.