Wisconsin Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate Mandela Barnes announced last week he was endorsed by just two active police officers, but one of the officers has denied he endorsed the “defund the police” Democrat.
La Crosse County Sheriff’s Capt. John Siegel’s name still shows up on some of the initial reports of Barnes endorsements.
“I do not,” Siegel told Wisconsin Right Now about whether he plans to endorse Barnes. “I have not endorsed anybody. I spent most of my day Friday trying to get a hold of people asking how did this happen.”
Deputy Sheriff Malik Frazier (Racine, WI) and Siegel were the only two active law enforcement officers who Barnes claimed had endorsed him. In the state of Wisconsin, 13,400 law enforcement officers are currently on the job.
Siegel spoke to Wisconsin Right Now:
“I am not on the list. I was mistakenly added…” Siegel said. “…I found out on Friday that I was on his endorsement list, and I was not supposed to be on his endorsement list. I talked with one of his staffers and agreed to talk with them when they were in town sometime, which I’ve done with everybody. They said there was a mistake within the clerical part of things. Somehow I got added to the list.”
Barnes’ list of police endorsements also included seven retired or former police officers. Barnes has now published an updated list of endorsements that total a grand total of 15 officers, but Siegel’s name has been removed.
Spokesman for Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) campaign Alec Zimmerman said in a press release that Barnes “has been lying about his positions and now he’s lying about who supports him.”
“This election is about who you can trust,” he said. “Mandela Barnes is hiding from his extreme support for defunding the police, releasing half the prison population, and abolishing ICE. Now he’s hoping voters won’t pay attention to his lies as he tries to play cover up.”
Siegel told the Wisconsin publication that he has demanded an asterisk next to his name “that shows I didn’t endorse him. That it was mistakenly done. I made them put that on there. I wanted to make sure that somewhere it was denoted that my name shouldn’t have appeared the first time.”
Barnes is one of the most radical candidates of the 2022 cycle. He has pushed for defunding “over-bloated” police departments and allowing felons to retain the right to vote. He also believes police do not prevent crimes from occurring.
“Police don’t prevent crimes from happening,” Barnes falsely stated on Real Talk with Henry Sanders. “We don’t live in a surveillance state, nor would you want to.”
Barnes’ condemnation of law enforcement follows his statement in a 2018 video that “reducing prison populations is now sexy.”
“Now that criminal justice reform and reducing prison populations is now sexy — it’s now a thing that leading candidates are talking about. … Because ten years ago people would have run away from this issue,” he said.
Barnes, challenging Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, is running for Senate, where crime is a major issue. According to a MacIver Institute, between 2019 and 2020, murders increased 62 percent, and violent crime rose 8.85 percent in Wisconsin.
The crime wave appears to personally worry Barnes, who is Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Barnes has “averaged more than 13½ hours of security protection a day — including weekdays, weekends and holidays — at a daily cost to the state of $660 for patrol officers’ wages. That’s more than 10 times the number of hours as his predecessor.”
Polling shows Barnes and Johnson are in a tight race. The latest survey shows Barnes up one, following polling last week that revealed Johnson was leading by one. Just one month ago, Barnes was leading Johnson by a substantial margin.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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