Wisconsin: How Conservative Talk Radio Weaponizes Whiteness

Racism may have compelled split-ticket voters to show up for both Sen. Ron Johnson (R) and Gov. Tony Evers (D).

“What starts as sadness, anxiety, grief and worry is carefully manipulated into political rage" -Michael Kimmel, in his book Angry White Men

Topline Takeaways

• Sen. Ron Johnson (R) shocked many with his re-election win as his campaign was defined by controversial statements and outright lies.

• Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also won re-election, proving the prevalence of increasingly rare split-ticket voters.

• Wisconsin’s split-ticket voters are best understood through dissecting the impact of conservative talk radio: Johnson’s preferred method of voter outreach.

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82% of Wisconsin’s residents are White Americans. While that makes the state the 12th Whitest state in the nation, it holds a larger population of White Americans than all of the 11 states that rank above it. Wisconsin also has a fairly old population: 1 in 4 residents are currently over the age of 55 and well over 90% of that population identifies as White. This fairly old, very White population is spread out over expansive rural landscapes with low population densities.

Old? White? Rural? Sounds like the target audience for Fox News.

Outrage Media Is No Joke

While most of us are familiar with the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham the network did not pioneer the format of outrage media. Most of Fox News’s most prominent talking heads got their start in conservative talk radio. To my surprise, conservative talk radio does not have a long and storied history dating back to the birth of AM radio broadcasting. In fact, the vast majority of popular conservative talk radio shows only began broadcasting in the post-9/11 era. One of the few conservative talk radio shows that predates 9/11 was none other than the Rush Limbaugh Show, first broadcasting in 1988. Since many of today’s conservative pundits got their start as guests on the program, it’s fair to call Rush Limbaugh the father of the conservative radio.

“Rush Limbaugh is a master at this translation of emotional vulnerability or insecurity into anger. All that he needs is that shared sense of aggrieved entitlement—that sense that ‘we,’ the rightful heirs of America’s bounty, have had what is ‘rightfully ours’ taken away from us by ‘them,’ faceless, feckless government bureaucrats, and given to ‘them,’ undeserving minorities, immigrants, women, gays, and their ilk.”

-Michael Kimmel

Conservative talk radio is structured to act as a proving ground for the Republican party’s radical viewpoints. The vast majority of listeners to conservative talk radio are elderly white men, an audience predisposed to right-wing talking points that flirt with white supremacy. Many of these shows lean on a caller-driven format: inviting listeners to call-in to the show and provide topics for the host to comment on. This creates a false sense of populism and allows these hosts to position their shows as the “voice of America.”

The sad reality is that many of these callers are unwittingly manipulated by their beloved hosts. Many of the issues they call-in with are topics that their hosts told listeners to worry about in previous broadcasts. Yet, these hosts use their callers’ pleas as evidence of how they’re in touch with “real Americans,” unlike the coastal elites that run major television networks and publishing companies. And worst of all, hosts regularly manipulate their listeners’ fear into anger and influence them to act on their aggrieved entitlement. Some call this the “push and pull effect” as it is a circular pattern where listeners enable hosts to platform extremists viewpoints while the hosts encourage listeners to get angrier and take extreme, often violent actions. (Many researchers argue that this effect directly led to the Jan 6 insurrection.)

“This movement was born 20 years ago out of a sense of victimization and voicelessness by a reasonably large segment of the population, and clearly Limbaugh and the people who followed him tapped in to some real sentiments of people who felt they weren't being heard… It's a large niche audience but there is no way a majority of the people agree with him. But does it make a difference? Yes. They succeeded so widely that the conservatives they backed ended up controlling the [Bush] presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court." -Rory O'Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio.

Ron Johnson: Radio Regular

In 2022, incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson made over 325 radio appearances, more than half of them on Wisconsin talk radio stations specifically. (The New York Times calculated his time spent on radio broadcasts in 2022 and it would take a grueling four days to listen to all of his appearances, in comparison he spent just four hours speaking in Congress this past year.) What matters most about his commitment to conservative talk radio is that his lies are almost never challenged or corrected by the hosts. Throughout 2022, Johnson was caught lying regularly on conservative talk radio. To list just some of the lies Johnson spread: he claimed that his opponent wanted to defund the police, he continued to spread misinformation about the 2020 election and he even claimed that the coronavirus could be killed by a “standard gargle” with mouthwash.

“In a rural state, people are listening to this… Those no longer become viewpoints. They become facts and they become repeated facts and they’re part of allegedly what’s reality here.” -Rep. Mark Pocan (D, WI-2)

The Evers-Johnson Voter

Understanding this media backdrop is essential when dissecting Wisconsin’s 2022 election results. While split ticket voting has been declining rapidly across the country, Wisconsin still sees this behavior due to the way conservative talk radio can both feign a sense of populism and hide a candidate’s racist tendencies. Despite Ron Johnson’s background as a millionaire CEO of a global plastics manufacturer, many of his voters believe he’s a “man of the people” due to the way he calls in to these shows just like they do. Despite his routinely racist comments about Black people, he has a deep bench of radio hosts that help recast his racism as an honest concern about crime. This matters a lot when Wisconsinites endured significant racial unrest in 2020 and when Johnson is campaigning against a Black man.

For anyone asking, “How did Democrat Tony Evers get votes from radicalized Johnson voters??” it’s past time to say the answer out loud: racism. The governor’s race between Tony Evers and Tim Michels never had to deal with issues of racism because that election was between two white men. Evers almost never addressed racism directly on the campaign trail and showed a general unwillingness to stick his neck out in defense of Barnes. Meanwhile, Ron Johnson routinely made racist attacks to bait Barnes into a battle he could never win in White-as-hell Wisconsin. Barnes figured that the way to appease this enormous White constituency was by ignoring Johnson’s comments, keeping the dreaded “r-word” out of his mouth and espousing a sense of “grace and poise” akin to the Obamas’ “when they go low, we go high” philosophy. Even that didn’t work.

The reason why is because Wisconsin voters have the privilege to be ignorant on racism as they don’t have to interact with it on a daily basis. Barely 6% of the state’s population is Black and much of this community is concentrated in and around Milwaukee. So when coastal elites parachute in with their DEI programs and anti-racist language, voters here fundamentally don’t understand the purpose of these types of reforms. “The white hoods are gone, so what are y’all squawking about?!?”

When someone attempts to pry open your eyes to the ugliness that surrounds you, it’s easier to blame them for taking away your ignorance and handing you responsibility. And when a candidate knows how to manipulate aggrieved entitlement into action, that’s how you get a bunch of well-meaning White voters to support Sen. Johnson.’s racist campaign.

I want to be very clear: Wisconsinites have reason to be upset about their circumstances. Their hospital system is struggling, their rural areas are hollowing out with the disappearance of family-owned small farms and their centralized urban hubs are struggling with concentrated poverty. But politicians like Ron Johnson don’t provide any solutions to these problems, they only point fingers, shift blame and manufacture enemies.

Leftover Links

• For anyone wondering about “progressive” talk radio (the left’s rebuttal to right-wing talk radio), a 2007 study showed that the average weekday broadcast contains roughly 256 hours of progressive talk and over 2,570 hours of conservative talk - a ratio of nearly 10-to-1 in favor of conservative talk shows. (Remember this the next time you hear conservatives complain about being ‘censored.’)