Mandela Barnes

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac DeVer.

In the Milwaukee airport, there's a space right past the TSA checkpoint that's called the Recombobulation Area.

It's where you go to get your shoes back on, get yourself back together before your flight, like in any airport, but there, it's the quirky twist on Midwest Nice.

You can even buy from a wide selection of recombobulation area t-shirts right by the gates.

When I was there a few months ago, I thought to myself, maybe I should get a shirt.

And then I thought, eh, I'm late for my flight.

It's okay.

I'll get one when I'm back for the Democratic Convention.

Of course, with the pandemic disrupting the conventions, Wisconsin didn't get its time at the center of politics.

Milwaukee was supposed to be the Democratic Party's own recombobulation area, where the mess of the primaries got stuffed into a neat package.

The choice of a site for a convention is never an accident.

If the 2020 race is about undoing the mistakes of 2016 for Democrats, Wisconsin is the obvious place to start.

Hillary Clinton famously never visited during the general election and then lost by 30,000 votes, making her the first Democrat to lose there since 1984.

Despite its Democratic history, Wisconsin has shaped national conservative politics.

Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, and Scott Walker, they're all Wisconsinites.

The battles over unions, courts, gerrymandering, and now policing have all centered in the state.

In the 2018 elections, Democrats won around the country and hoped to build a model for what the Trump-era Democratic Party looked like.

Wisconsin offered a template, an older, more moderate white guy, and a 31-year-old progressive black man.

That'd be Governor Tony Evers and Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who is my guest this week.

Even without the convention, the political world focused on Wisconsin anyway.

After Jacob Blake was shot seven times in Kenosha, the state has seen protests and now three more people shot, two dead, allegedly by a right-wing protester.

That's made Wisconsin the first real campaign stops of both candidates.

though of course they're not calling them campaign stops.

Donald Trump visited Tuesday, Joe Biden visited Thursday.

As you'll hear, I asked Mandela Barnes about all the developments in his state.

And by the way, if you haven't heard of him before, remember how this past week every major sport boycotted games to protest?

That began with the Milwaukee Bucks in a conversation with Mandela Barnes.

So here's my conversation with Mandela Barnes, talking about how things reached this point, how he got here himself, and where he thinks Kenosha and American politics are headed next.

Take a listen.

Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Hey, yeah, thanks so much for having me.

So, let's start with this.

Your parents named you Mandela after Nelson Mandela, obviously.

What's it like growing up with that name?

It was a little, you know, tough growing up with the name, honestly.

You know, I was a kid in school with the funny name.

It's like not a lot of my classmates knew Nelson Mandela's history, and I didn't know too much of his history, you know, between kindergarten and like first, second, third grade.

So

people would obviously make up whatever sort of nickname they wanted to make up.

And it was, it was tough, but it worked out in the end.

I grew to appreciate it the more I learned about Nelson Mandela.

And

it's something I carry with me very proudly.

Funny story, too, is that after my election to the assembly in 2012, my dad told me that I lucked out because if I was born about 45 years earlier, my name would have been Moamar.

That might have been harder to get ahead in politics with,

although, you know, Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein, so it's not just the name.

Yeah.

I wonder, when you look at the history of politics in America in the last 10 years, so much of it actually is caught in the microcosm of Wisconsin.

The rise of Republicans and the sort of new brand of Republicans, the losses of Democrats, the way that gerrymandering has happened, the way that issues like unions have been banging up against each other.

Of course, we all know the history of what happened in the 2016 election with Donald Trump winning by 30,000 votes.

But then there's also

what happened in the 2018 election, which was things pushing back the other way and you and your running mate, the governor, putting forward a different kind of ticket for Democrats and even from what Democrats in Wisconsin have had.

What do we still, with all the focus that people have had about politics in Wisconsin, what are we still not getting about the state, do you think?

Or is it just clear that things are a churning turmoil in Wisconsin the way that they are?

So much of the rest of the country?

Yeah, man.

Wisconsin is definitely a unique place in so many regards.

We can go anyway at any time, as evidenced by the 2016 election.

I mean, that even caught me off guard.

I would have never expected that to happen.

You know, a lot of people can look at the demographic breakdown of Wisconsin and consider us to be much more homogenous than we really are, but there's so much diversity even within our rural communities.

To lump us all in is the biggest political miscalculation that people can make.

And I also want to remind people too, because I used to get frustrated when folks would ask, they would say, well, how do Democrats plan to win Wisconsin in 2020?

As if we didn't just win in 2018.

Well, but I mean, think about it this way.

There must be some people, I'm curious how many people you think that this applies to, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, voted for you in 2018, and are now trying to figure out whether they're going to vote for Donald Trump again or for Joe Biden.

Who is that person?

Man, I honestly feel like that number is overstated.

Yeah.

I honestly don't think that that was the critical mass.

You know, the numbers in our race, we had one of the biggest turnouts for a gubernatorial in the state's history.

And Donald Trump also got 6,000 6,000 fewer votes than Mitt Romney.

So he's not some popular figure in the state of Wisconsin.

So it's not like there were a bunch of Trump voters that put us over the hump two years ago.

The fact that we worked diligently to engage people all across the state.

We left no stone unturned.

Me personally,

as a Milwaukee resident, as a person who represented with Milwaukee in the state legislature, I would have been very comfortable spending most of my time during the campaign in Milwaukee, but that's not what we want to do.

We want to do more.

And I remember getting phone calls from Tom Barrett, the mayor in Milwaukee, saying, hey, you know, we need you in Milwaukee.

And, you know, Tony's team with the candidate, Tony, now governor, Tony Evers, his team would call him like, hey, well, we need you in Hudson.

So I'd have to go somewhere else that was so far removed from Milwaukee.

But it helped me also.

And I think it more than the campaign, it helped us overall work to build some some bridges because we got to go to some places where, you know, people would be like, oh, well, you know, Democrats haven't come here to visit.

Nobody's really come here to visit for that matter.

And it was important for us to have those conversations because we truly want to represent this.

We wanted to represent this entire state.

And that is,

we are keeping steadfast with that mission.

There must have been some of those experiences where it felt, at least at the beginning, some level of awkwardness walking in as a,

when you were running you were 31 when you were running uh

black assemblymen from milwaukee coming into parts of the state that are very far from uh your assembly district even if not geographically then politically

socially everything yeah so far so so so different um

at times it felt like it could be tough but there would be no point in me running if I wasn't going to spend time in those places.

It would be truly ridiculous for me to think that I could get by

just

spending all my time at home in Milwaukee or going out to Madison or even Green Bay or racing or Kenosha for that matter.

I knew that

it wouldn't just be important for the campaign

for myself to grow, for myself to,

if I want to call myself a leader, I would have to have tough conversations sometimes.

You know, quite often you go to these cities, these towns, these counties that Democrats don't typically win.

You don't go there expecting to necessarily flip the counties, but you go there to talk to people because many of them don't vote for us because they haven't heard from us.

So if we can pick off people conversation by conversation by talking about what our values are and our shared interests, and it was something I had already known in my mind that there's so much more that united us as a state than divided us.

But being able to put into practice and actually

have that to be proven, not just through those conversations, but the election results is a takeaway that I hope people don't forget or take for granted here in Wisconsin.

Yeah, one of the things that Obama started saying after Clinton lost in 2016 is he came back to this a couple of times, talking about how when he ran for Senate in Illinois, he went to parts of Illinois far from any spot that a Democrat could could be expected to do well in, but to maybe try to lose by less, essentially.

And people thought that that was crazy.

But you and Governor Evers together, that your ticket and others that won in 2018 showed that there was something to that and that the way that Democrats had been approaching running and thinking like, we're just going to go after our people and run up the tally there was absurd.

Well, it was go after our people and simply malign the opponent because that's what we did in 2010.

That's what we did in the recall.

That's what we did in 2014.

And you see what the result of that was.

So it was important for us to show up, to not just show up and say, oh, man, Scott Walker's been such a terrible governor because could have got run out of town talking like that.

When Jacob Blake was shot, when the news of it came around,

you posted...

something that it's very simple, but I think was where actually a lot of people's minds were.

You just wrote, you've got to be kidding me.

And I wonder, were you surprised to see it happen in Wisconsin?

I mean, you just sort of, you've got to be kidding me is, is not actually shocked that this happened in America.

It's that like, just, it seems to me like you were just

exasperated, essentially.

Completely exasperated.

I'll start by saying that, you know, I was just sitting outside, man.

I had just got done reading a book by the lake, just sitting outside having having a great day getting ready to go into the week i was actually reading some some old bonnegate uh which one uh cat's cradle okay that's

so finished cat's cradle and then um

i i look online um you know open and twitter is always a mistake but open Twitter and I

you see Kenosha trending and you know I pull it up and it's like you know I just literally

I saw Kenosha trending I saw the video and I honestly thought like you have got to be kidding me this did not just happen after months of the largest movement for racial justice in this nation's history people in all corners of Wisconsin have been showing up marching holding demonstrations small and large and

It was like the audacity that

I saw in that video for an officer to to shoot a person in the back seven times after all of this,

after all the marching, after all the demonstrations, after all the protests, after everybody seemingly coming together to acknowledge that this is a crisis that we face and have faced for some time, that this could still happen.

And it wasn't that it couldn't happen in Wisconsin because we're no stranger to these sorts of incidents.

But right now, in this moment, I felt like there was a total disregard for the voice that people

have been putting on display.

And

it just,

it shook me, man.

It was a lot.

It was a lot to watch.

It was a terrible video.

I obviously wish I never had to see those videos at all.

But given the fact that I saw Kenosha, I...

There's no way I could not

see what was going on in my own state.

When you saw the video of Kyle Rittenhouse walking by the police with his gun, what did that do to you?

Oh, man,

that was another, you have got to be kidding me moment

because that's the dichotomy that we're talking about.

It's the reason why people show up to Mars that this armed

person who shot three people, killed two, was able to just

walk the street police didn't even give them a second look so it begs the question and it's very it's a very rhetorical question you know what are police officers actually threatened what what what threatens them in actuality is it a person who is walking the street who claims to be some sort of militia member with a long rifle, a soft-style weapon,

or is it somebody who is unarmed and black?

Like, who's more frightening to you?

You said that you didn't want Donald Trump to come to Kenosha like you did at the beginning of the week.

Why not?

Donald Trump has yet to condemn the killings of two people on our streets.

We see this young man who was transported across state lines by his own mother, killed two people in cold blood on our city streets, severely injured another, has not

been rebuked once by our president.

Yet the actions of this man have essentially been celebrated by the same president.

And you can't sit here and talk about lawlessness and these mobs who are coming in and try to create division and scare people when the actual guy that kills somebody is on your side.

Joe Biden came also this week in the end.

Both of them said,

okay, this is not about politics, it's not about the campaign.

But of course, they are both candidates for president who made special trips to Kenosha.

It wasn't a stop that they were making otherwise.

Is this about politics at this point, or is it beyond politics?

It feels like we

get it turned into a partisan thing, but there's nothing partisan about getting shot.

It is beyond politics, but it takes political leadership to fix this sort of moment.

And if you have a person

who is in power right now, now, who is only

making things worse, whether it's by his incendiary remarks, his statements about the protests in general, statements about what's going on and showing this total disconnect from reality, then yes, I mean, it does matter.

It matters who is in leadership.

It matters who we elect.

And Joe Biden's trip is a little bit different.

And I've gotten asked about it before.

And I maintain my statement.

Anybody who seeks to come to this state to create more division is not welcome.

People who want to be a part of Kenosha's healing, great.

Jesse Jackson was here.

He is a political figure.

And, you know, it's about your approach.

What are you bringing into our state?

We don't need more hate.

We don't need more fear because Kenosha is a city that is rebuilding right now.

We're going to take a short break, more with Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes in a moment.

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Do you think that there is anything to the idea that the Democratic Party has failed Black Americans, it's failed cities?

No, i won't say that because the same people who who show up and say well these democrat mayors are running these cities uh into the ground well first of all

what is your response and what's what what what is what is their answer they never have an answer it's always finger pointing and we're talking about cities with large populations if you have a large population you are going to have challenges we have a more diverse population when opportunities are are are fewer for people you are going to have these issues and all of these major cities in in america uh many of which especially in this area in the midwest were built on on an industry that doesn't exist anymore uh the manufacturing backbone of these cities and towns across um wisconsin illinois indiana ohio pennsylvania uh michigan you know once those factories left and closed their doors like it didn't just take the jobs they took the identity of these communities and we are dealing with the generational impact of that loss where people were able to come to places like Milwaukee and thrive.

Because everybody points to the negative statistics, the negative rankings that Milwaukee always has.

But I want to remind people that Milwaukee was one of the best places for a black family.

That's when my grandfather came here.

This is after World War II.

He worked at a place called A.O.

Smith.

He was able to retire comfortably.

And for people who decide that college isn't for them, the opportunities to get gainful employment and to be able to work at the same place for 30 years is very rare, if not impossible.

When President Trump came to visit Kenosha, he was playing into a theme of his campaign, which is this is what Joe Biden's America would be like, or you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.

Of course, it doesn't make exact logical sense given that this is Donald Trump's America, that he is the president of now, and this is what is happening.

But it is this fear that he is trying to inculcate in people people that there's going to be more of this, that he's the only one who can keep order.

And

that is something that we have seen his campaign talk about as being to their advantage.

And the Trump campaign has done everything it can to highlight what's going on in Kenosha, the protests in the streets, the violence that's happened there, and elsewhere whenever they can, whether it's in Portland or anywhere else.

When you know that that is what is going on,

what do you think that that needs to do to inform the way that there's the activist response on the streets, the people who are doing that, and the government response from you and other leaders?

So, you know, my thing about that is what about the Trump campaign or presidency has made logical sense thus far?

And so we're not.

We're not operating.

in logical times right now.

And our response, you know, we try to still be very measured in our approach.

We still try to be very calculated in our approach.

We still try to be very appropriate in our approach.

But we are dealing with an unconventional

presidential administration and an unconventional time for campaigns where the president will say whatever he wants to do.

He will do whatever he wants to do.

And it is, it's tough.

And I thought about the presidential debates in 2016.

You know, you had Hillary Clinton who was

skillful in rhetoric and bringing up facts and talking about the things that matter, but it was like being in a boxing match with an unskilled fighter, somebody who's just going to throw haymakers, no real skills, somebody who's just going to get in there and just start spinning around and doing whatever.

And it throws you off track if you're trying to talk about things the right way.

So do you base what you're doing on

him

or do you just kind of,

as far as activism

and response, is it that you have to go and do whatever you think is the right way to do it and not worry about how he may try to filter that through his own politics?

Yeah, you can't worry about him.

And I was literally just talking to somebody about this, too, because I know that.

the activist community can get incensed when people are told to turn down their rhetoric or they're going about something the wrong way.

Meanwhile, they see the most ridiculous, divisive person end up becoming the president of the the United States of America.

So it is very difficult to tell activists that they're doing this the wrong way.

And

that is not a message that would be well received.

In the midst of everything that was going on,

the NBA suspended the playoffs with a sort of domino of conversations that began when the Bucs.

uh in Milwaukee were not going to play.

That roots back to you.

You were the one who caused the NBA to stop playing for a couple of days.

That is a lofty claim.

Well, why don't you walk through what actually happened there?

Yeah, so the Bucs decided that they weren't going to go into court and

they wanted to talk to somebody.

They needed to talk to somebody to figure out exactly what was going on and what was going to change.

I will let you know that I was not their initial choice to have a conversation with.

They wanted to talk with the governor.

So acting as the governor's secretary is

some people have come to expect.

I'm going to say, please don't do that for all the listeners.

But

I called the governor and I said, hey, some of the Bucks want to chat with you.

And at that moment, it was just a lot going on at that moment.

He just literally wasn't able to.

I mean, I didn't expect him to be able.

I didn't even expect him to pick up my call.

But, you know, I called the Bucks back and I was like, hey, governor's a little busy.

And they were like, oh, okay.

Like five, ten minutes went past.

And then they called me.

And I was like, oh, do you want to talk to him?

I'm like, oh, nice of you to ask.

And so,

but I had a chance to speak with them.

You know, they were, they are a team that's, you know, demonstrated their commitment to justice.

We did an event with Represent Justice back in December where we went to Racine Correctional Institution and we played basketball with inmates.

The Bucks served as the coaches.

And I was on the court, and Governor Evers was on the court.

We played basketball with inmates.

It was a real game.

We had the audience were other inmates as well.

Who won?

Who won?

So they split up the team.

No, no, no, no, they split up the teams, man.

Come on.

I was on one team.

The governor was on a different team.

So who won between you and the governor then?

Well, the governor's team.

But Giannis was the coach.

yannis was the coach they got coached by the league mvp man that's that's you know all right that's fair that's fair

it's very fair um

so you know this has been a team that's been committed to justice issues and so they were really concerned about what was going on and what had changed and george hill straight up he asked well he said what has changed since the death of george floyd and i said honestly not a whole lot and he's like what do you mean i was like well not a whole lot i said we introduced a package of bills in the wake of George Floyd's death two months ago.

And the Republican controlled legislature has refused to even have a debate on these bills.

I said, now a couple of school boards got police officers out of schools, but that's about the most meaningful thing that's happened since George Floyd.

And so they were, they were shocked.

They were genuinely shocked.

And they just wanted to know what could they do?

Because they were getting ready to put out a statement like right away.

And it was like, well, what should we say?

And I said, well, you know, whatever you say, the two main points I want you to hit on are that the legislators need to respond.

They need to come into the special session that the governor has called for.

They need to meet and have a debate on these bills.

They need to take up this legislation and also just remind people to vote.

Well, so then let's end on that.

Voting, which is going to be pretty important and pretty complicated all over the country this time around.

Wisconsin, for people who maybe don't remember, had an early experience in pandemic voting in April with a presidential primary and there was a state Supreme Court race that day where the vote turnout was actually really high,

but it was complicated by the fact that there were a lot of polling places in Milwaukee that were not open, by

long lines that existed, by people showing up in their own homemade PPE, a lot of them.

It was raining that day on top of everything.

It ended up going pretty well for

the Democrats in the won a state Supreme Court seat that was not expected to go for the Democrats.

We have a non-partisan court system here in Wisconsin.

That was the Democratic-backed candidate, I guess I should say.

And Joe Biden won that primary by a lot.

At that point, it was just Bernie Sanders.

Do you think Wisconsin is ready for the vote in November?

It's going to be more people turning out and voting by mail than was the case in April, just inevitably, because that was a primary.

Are you going to be able to do the voting?

Are you going to be able to count the votes?

Yeah.

And let me rewind too.

So I said, you know, this is a podcast.

So for all the listeners, I had air quotes around nonpartisan courts because I do believe that these nonpartisan courts are still a fallacy.

I do believe that we will see a much smoother run election in November than April.

April was the rough draft that no one should have ever seen, and people put their lives at risk.

Again, Republicans in the legislature took us to court because they didn't want to delay the election, which would have been the responsible thing to do,

just given the fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic and we wanted to send out ballots to all registered voters.

That would have been a responsible way to carry out an election, but they didn't see it that way.

So the election happened,

lots of hiccups, a lot of ballots

didn't arrive on time.

Our Democratic leader in the state assembly, he didn't even get to vote because his ballot didn't get to his house in time.

I think it got to him the day after the election, and he wasn't going to go in person and put his wife's health at risk.

And so a lot of complicated factors there.

It was a disaster.

And the woman who actually won that race for Supreme Court wrote an op-ed saying as much.

She won and was very graceful in her victory saying that this election should not have happened this way.

But are you ready for it to be different?

That was a rough draft that nobody should have ever seen, but have the edits been made to the rough draft?

Has it been put in shape?

Well, one, it happened and everybody saw it, so everybody got to be critical of it.

Two, we are sending out absentee ballot request forms to eligible voters, and there are going to be smart codes on the ballots, on the envelope, so people can track their ballots to make sure that they are where they're supposed to be.

And then we got some CARES Act funding to help support clerks across the state to make sure that the process is much smoother.

All right.

So

let's just end with, do you have the next Vonnegut book that you're going to read now that Cat's Cradle has done?

But given what's gone on the last couple of weeks and months?

And the next Vonnegut book is going to be, if this is a nice, what is.

You see,

my favorite is Bluebeard, but I could think that Mother Knight could be good reading for for this next couple of months, too.

Yeah,

there's a lot of content, man.

All right, Mandela Barnes, thank you for being here with us on the ticket.

Thank you for having me.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, please email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.