So yet, no Republican has announced their intention to seek Baldwins’ seat.
Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin pushed through a law protecting same-sex and multiracial marriages last year. On Wednesday, she announced that she will be seeking reelection in the swing state of Wisconsin.
In a statement, Baldwin, now 60 years old, vowed to keep fighting for the middle class and families struggling with inflation. She also vowed to keep challenging the state of Wisconsin’s abortion restrictions.
Keeping control of the Senate is crucial for Democrats, and no Republican has announced they will run in Baldwin’s place.
Baldwin was just 24 years old when she won her first municipal election. When she gained a seat in the House of Representatives in 1998, she made history as the first woman to represent Wisconsin in Congress. In 2012, while Barack Obama was seeking reelection, she was elected to the Senate. For former Republican governor Tommy Thompson, it was his first defeat at the state level.
Baldwin is running for a third term in an election year where turnout is predicted to be high for all major parties.
In 2012, Baldwin won by a margin of over 6 percentage points. She maintained her position as a state senator in 2018 by a margin of 11 points against her Republican opponent. Baldwin maintained the support of Democrats and won over independents in that contest, which took place two years after Donald Trump won Wisconsin.
Democratic candidates who also won, including Governor Tony Evers, who was re-elected in 2022, studied her victory in the swing state. She was a tireless worker on the stump. Her strategy was to fight for votes outside of Madison and Milwaukee, which are Democratic strongholds, by running narrowly targeted internet commercials on a variety of issues.
Baldwin made history when she was elected to the Senate as the first openly homosexual person and the first openly gay person to be elected to Congress. She made history in the early 1990s by becoming Wisconsin’s first out lesbian lawmaker. She was also among the first openly LGBT persons to be elected to public office in the United States.
She has always been out in the open about being homosexual, but it wasn’t a central part of her previous Senate campaigns.
Baldwin noted after her 2012 Senate victory, “I didn’t run for office to make history.” As the saying goes, “I ran because I wanted to make a difference.”
Baldwin, however, was in the forefront of the movement to create a law protecting the rights of homosexual couples when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion, in 2022. The news of this spread across the country. She fought for months to win over Republican lawmakers, and finally, in December, she was successful.
The GOP has been trying to paint Baldwin as too far to the left for Wisconsin, a state that narrowly supported Trump in 2016 and narrowly rejected him in 2020 but chose to retain Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in office in 2022. Johnson is often regarded as one of the Senate’s staunchest conservatives.
Baldwin, despite her support for policies like “Medicare for All,” has managed to win over important split votes in the state.