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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and today we're checking in on Wisconsin. A true swing state in the last four presidential elections, the Badger State went blue for Obama twice, swung red for Trump, and then turned blue again for Biden. The statewide races this year are also tight.

Democrat Mandela Barnes is trying to unseat Republican incumbent Senator Ron Johnson. A lot of the recent polls are showing that Johnson is holding on to a very slight lead. Here's Barnes hitting Johnson about his abortion stance during this month's debate.

Mandela Barnes: The senator called the overturning of Roe v. Wade a victory. He celebrated the Dobbs decision. He said that if women don't like the laws of their state, like the 1849 criminal abortion ban we have here, he said they can move. I can't think of more callous, out-of-touch, or extreme position to take.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Speaking of callous, ooh, just take a listen to how Johnson responded when moderators asked both candidates to say something they admire about one another.

Ron Johnson: I appreciate the fact that lieutenant governor Barnes had loving parents, a school teacher, father who worked three shifts. He had a good upbringing. I guess what puzzles me about that is with that upbringing, why is he turned against America? Why has he been fighting America awful?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here's the thing, that race is happening at the statewide level. That means all folks in Wisconsin who are eligible to vote get a chance to weigh in. Down ballot just a little bit, the big issue isn't just the campaign messages, it's also the question of where people have an opportunity to vote. We've been talking here a lot at The Takeaway about redistricting, gerrymandering, and the question of fairness in terms of casting your ballot.

Joining me now is Ari Berman, senior reporter at Mother Jones, who's just back from reporting in Wisconsin, and Georgia. All right, thanks so much for coming back on The Takeaway.

Ari Berman: Great to talk to you as always.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Talk to me about what is going on beyond that wild Senate race in Wisconsin.

Ari Berman: Well, Wisconsin really is a paradox because, as you said, it's a quintessential 50-50 swing state, has a very close race for governor and US senate, but things are completely different in the state legislature. Right now, Republicans have huge majorities in the legislature, and they're on the verge of potentially getting a two-thirds supermajority, which means they would have unlimited power to control state politics, and they could actually override the governor's veto if Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, is reelected.

It's a very strange situation that you have a state that's decided by 10,000, 20,000 votes in presidential and gubernatorial elections, but in the legislature, the only question is whether or not Republicans will get a super majority, meaning 66% of votes or more. That's basically entirely due to gerrymandering, to how Republicans have rigged the maps, they've drawn the maps in such a way that all but guarantees Republican control no matter what happens in other races. It's a very scary situation for democracy when elections are basically predetermined.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've talked about this before, Ari, this idea that when you talk about debates and issues, I think folks get that, and they get how people have differing policy positions and pick one candidate over the other, but this really is wild. The notion that this can be at the state level, so close, and then your point about a supermajority, really help us understand in basic terms, what in the world? Are these the same voters? How could it be that their preferences, turn out, represented so differently?

Ari Berman: What's happened is the districts are drawn in such a way that they basically guarantee total over-representation for Republicans. Democratic communities, their votes are diluted in such a way that more Republican areas have far more power in the legislature, and that allows them to ignore huge majorities when it comes to public opinion.

The governor, Democrat, in Wisconsin has called the special sessions of the legislature, or the legislature is compelled to meet on things like expanding Medicaid, expanding background checks for gun sales. These are policies that are supported by 80% to 90% of Wisconsinites but the legislature refuses to act.

Wisconsin has a 1849 abortion ban. I don't think most people know about this. It's an insane law. It was passed one year after Wisconsin became a state by an all-male legislature 70 years before women had the right to vote, makes no exceptions for rape or incest. 83% of Wisconsinites according to a recent Marquette poll oppose this law. Twice the governor has called special sessions to repeal the law and the legislature has refused to do anything.

You have 80% of voters opposing an abortion ban from 1849, and the Republican legislature refuses to change it. That's how gerrymandered they are. That's how out of touch they are on public opinion. Yet, they're only going to gain seats in this election because of how they drew the districts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you hear Mandela Barnes and Johnson in that debate talking about abortion, they're running to go off to the federal government, to go off to the US Senate. If Mandela Barnes were to be elected as the US senator from Wisconsin, would he even have the capacity to meaningfully affect whether or not abortion is available for Wisconsin residents?

Ari Berman: Well, what Mandela Barnes could do is if he joined the Senate, he could guarantee abortion rights on a federal level. That would be a very big deal, particularly in places like Wisconsin, where abortion is now illegal. President Biden has said, give me two more Democratic senators and we'll get this done. We'll codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. Mandela Barnes would be one of those two new Democratic senators.

It is a very difficult situation on the state level to try to change that abortion ban through state politics, because what Justice Alito said in the Dobbs opposition is we're returning the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives. What if the people's elected representatives don't represent the views of the people? That's the problem in the state of Wisconsin that you have 83% of voters who don't like the 1849 abortion ban, but the heavily gerrymandered deep red Republican majority has no problem with the law or doesn't feel a sense of urgency to change it, and it's diluted the power of communities that most oppose this law.

You have a situation where Wisconsin, far from being a place where the elected representatives represent the people, is actually a case study for how disconnected our elected representatives have become from the people.

Merissa: Let's go down to Georgia where early voting has begun. As a result of early voting having begun, we can already begin to see patterns in turnout. What are we seeing?

Ari Berman: What we're seeing is that vote by mail has decreased massively. That's partly as a result of voting habits changing as we're in a different phase of the pandemic, but also it's because, in the new law passed by Georgia Republicans last year, they restricted vote by mail and all these different ways. A lot more people are voting early in person.

What's interesting about that is basically when Republicans pass this voting restriction law, SB 202, what Democrats did is as a response, they told people go vote early in person.

Well, now that they're voting early in person, Republicans are saying, oh, that means there's no more voter suppression in Georgia. What Democrats are saying is it doesn't mean there's no more voter suppression, it means that we've found a way to counteract voter suppression by using the few means we still have available.

I think the early voting turnout is great, but I don't think it should overshadow the fact that there's still a lot of issues in Georgia right now. It's much harder to vote by mail. Tens of thousands of voters were challenged in the run-up to the election. There could be challenges over eligibility after the election. Both the state board of elections and local board of elections have been reconstituted to give Republicans more control. Things are relatively smooth in Georgia right now, but it's a very uncertain climate when it comes to how to cast your ballot, and will it be counted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I understand that you fairly recently spent some time with the Democratic challenger for governor, Stacey Abrams, and with the current US Senator Raphael Warnock, who's in a hotly contested Senate race. What did you learn during your time with them about their perspective, specifically on this question of these new Georgia laws?

Ari Berman: Well, they are trying to recreate the huge turnout that existed in 2020 and 2021 in Georgia, and it's a more difficult climate in 2022. I think it's a difficult race for both of them. I think, with Stacey Abrams, she's really struggling with the fact that Brian Kemp certified the election in 2020. He has gotten a tremendous amount of mileage for "standing up to Trump", even though he has these very extreme positions on issues like abortion and guns and other things, and also the fact that he advocated for voter suppression, both as a secretary of state and also he signed the law that heavily restricted voting rights.

In a paradoxical way, Trump was supposed to end Kemp's career, but he may have actually saved it by the fact that he made Kemp look moderate, whereas otherwise Kemp would have looked extreme. I think that that's something that Stacey Abrams has been struggling to try to message against.

With Raphael Warnock, it's a situation where it's the opposite. He's an incumbent senator, but he's running against someone who's obviously completely unqualified to be a US Senator, yet it's still a race that's too close to call. It's like, how is Brian Kemp getting so much credit for doing one good thing, certifying the election? Raphael Warnock doesn't seem to be getting any credit for being an incumbent senator running against someone who's totally unqualified. His only qualification for the job is that he was a football star 40 years ago in Georgia.

The race is a very, very strange one down there. It's a lot different than 2020 and 2021, and it's getting overshadowed by some of the other states where more extreme Republicans are running places like Arizona, Nevada, et cetera. It's going to be interesting to see what happens if Georgia moved from a state that's in the background right now to, for example, the fate of the US Senate hinging on it if we go into runoffs once again.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me because at this moment, the next thing that happens, and if you live in a swing state as I do in North Carolina, you've seen it happen. We're in these final days and the final arguments, the closing arguments are being made. All the big heavyweights are coming to town. The campaign spending is visible and audible on your radio. What difference does it make to have a big high-profile visit from somebody like President Obama or even from President Trump?

Ari Berman: I think it makes a difference. You never really know in the final days if people start paying more attention or they just completely tune it out because politics is just so omnipresent. You just want to watch a football game or go on YouTube and suddenly you're seeing ads everywhere.

I live in a swing district in New York right now, and every time my older daughter's really in the Beatles tries to put a Beatles song on YouTube, she gets a political ad. I'm not that crazy about that either, Melissa, as I imagine you wouldn't be. I think, in particular, Obama's visit really matters because he is still someone that can really excite the Democratic base both in Wisconsin and Georgia, which is two states he's going to.

There's a lot of infrequent voters that need to turn out for the Democrats for them to be able to win younger voters, some communities of color that won't necessarily vote in midterm elections. They vote in presidential elections, but they won't necessarily vote in midterms.

Obama's message is going to be that this midterm is a uniquely important one, that the stakes are so high when it comes to reproductive rights, when it comes to voting rights, when it comes to basic rights that we've taken for granted for so many years. Those rights have been taken away or are in the process of being eliminated. We can't treat this like any other year where you skip the midterm and show up in the presidential.

What's going to happen in 2022 is going to determine, to a large extent, what happens in 2024. I think President Obama's going to try to make that message and really rally voters in places like Wisconsin and Georgia. These races could be extremely close. If Democrats can get 1% to 2% of voters to the polls, that could mean the difference between Republicans winning or losing in a place like Wisconsin or Georgia.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ari Berman is senior reporter for Mother Jones. Ari, always so good to talk with you.

Ari Berman: Thanks so much, Melissa. Great to chat.

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