While all the elections to fill the 5 seats in the U.S. Senate in the midterm election year are important, Wisconsin’s Senate election is likely to draw more attention compared to others. Wisconsin is numbered among the six states in the country that currently has one Democratic and one Republican Senator representing them in the chamber. Along these lines, one central event will be the battle between Incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson and the Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.

Mandela Barnes is the current Lieutenant Governor of the State of Wisconsin. Before that, he served for four years as a representative in the Wisconsin State Assembly. Barnes and seven other candidates threw their hats in the ring for the Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate before he became the official nominee on August 9, 2022, with a landslide victory. If elected into the office, Barnes has a long list of priorities. These range from marijuana legalization to improving public safety, empowering Wisconsin family farms, boosting small businesses, and fighting for reproductive justice.

Ron Johnson is a former businessman and accountant who became a U.S. Senator in 2010 when he defeated the then incumbent Russ Feingold of the Democratic Party. He won his re-election bid in 2016, and went up against Feingold again, defeating him by almost the same margin as before. He’s served on several prominent committees in the Senate, not least of which is the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and the Committee on Budget. He won his party’s primaries comfortably on August 9, 2022. Upon emergence in the coming general election, he’s promising Wisconsinites stronger agricultural programs, a better defense and military system, and improvements in the trade and transport sector.

Voters in the state are now asking the question, who would make a better representative to the Senate from Wisconsin, Democrat Mandela Barnes or Republican Ron Johnson?