The Wisconsin Voter-- Polls, trends point to tough re-election fight for Sen. Ron Johnson

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/199775501.html

When Wisconsin voters were polled this month about U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, 30% said they viewed him favorably, 25% unfavorably.

But the biggest group -- 45% -- had no opinion at all.

After more than two years in office, the state’s senior senator is still apparently something of a question mark to many Wisconsinites.

And those polling numbers are emblematic of some broader uncertainties surrounding Johnson’s long-term political future.

Arguably, few Senate Republicans have a tougher seat to hold onto than Johnson does in Wisconsin.

Some reasons why:

Elected in the 2010 mid-terms, Johnson is almost sure to face a less favorable group of voters in 2016, a presidential year. Presidential electorates are bigger and more diverse than off-year electorates, and they have proven less friendly to Wisconsin Republicans. In the past 30 years, the GOP has won two U.S. Senate races in Wisconsin in mid-term elections (1986, 2010) and almost captured a third (1998). But Republicans have lost every presidential-year Senate race in that stretch. Only once since the 1950s has a Wisconsin Republican won a Senate contest in a presidential election year. That was Bob Kasten in the 1980 election that propelled Ronald Reagan to the White House and sent nine Senate Democrats nationally to defeat.
Johnson is a very conservative Republican representing a very competitive swing state. He’s the most conservative Wisconsin senator in many decades, according to one ideological rating system widely used by political scientists. Some senators are politically secure because their parties are dominant in their states, as Republicans are in Wyoming and Democrats are in Rhode Island. Johnson doesn’t have that advantage. Of the Senate’s most conservative members, only Johnson and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania represent states that have consistently voted Democratic for president over the past quarter-century.
Johnson’s polling numbers at this point aren’t very strong. That could change between now and 2016. And there’s not a ton of polling data so far to go on. But the numbers we do have raise questions about his public profile. In the Marquette survey of 1,060 registered voters taken March 11-14, almost half of those surveyed -- 45% -- were either unsure what they thought of Johnson or didn’t know enough about him to say. “I think that’s pretty high for someone who has been in office for two years and has been nationally pretty visible,” says political scientist Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. Compared to the 55% who had a firm opinion of Johnson, 75% had an opinion of newly elected Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, 82% had an opinion of GOP congressman and 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, and 93% had an opinion of Republican Gov. Scott Walker: ...

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