Johnson Beats Feingold, Wisconsin Goes Red
- By Emily TamkinEmily Tamkin is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. She writes for FP’s The Cable, a real-time take on the news in Washington and the wider world. She has been at FP since the fall of 2016, before which she was an associate editor at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. She has a B.A. in Russian literature from Columbia University, an M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, and studied Soviet dissidence in archival centers in Moscow, Tbilisi, and, on a Fulbright, in Bremen — all of which means that at FP, she writes when she can on Russia and Central and Eastern Europe.
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For much of this election season, former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, like Hillary Clinton, was expected to win in Wisconsin.
But Feingold just lost to incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Trump took Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.
Foreign issues, as Foreign Policy reported, played a starring role in the Wisconsin Senate race, which threw Johnson’s hawkishness and Feingold’s dovish tendencies into sharp contrast. Feingold was the only senator to vote against the 2001 Patriot Act.
While in the Senate, Feingold was on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees. Johnson currently chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees and sits on Foreign Relations, Budget, and the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees.
He is the latest of many a Republican contender in a tight race to win as the GOP blocks Democratic dreams of retaking the Senate.
Photo credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images
