Milwaukee Bucks exec announces run for Johnson’s Senate seat

Alex Lasry, a chief executive of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, announced on Wednesday that he is running for Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) Senate seat in the 2022 midterms, joining a growing field to take on the incumbent senator. 

“We need a new way of thinking and a new perspective,” Lasry said in his announcement on YouTube. “We’ve lived through three systemic shots to the system over the last 20 years: 9/11, the Great Recession and now this pandemic.” 

“And we still haven’t fixed things,” he continued. 

Lasry highlighted a number of policy areas through the over 4-minute announcement video, including infrastructure, the economy and social justice. 

Lasry, a Democrat, is the senior vice president of the Bucks and the son of the team’s co-owner Marc Lasry. The Bucks made headlines last year when the team declined to take the floor during their playoff series in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. The move led the NBA to cancel the games scheduled for that day. 

“Some things are bigger than basketball. The stand taken today by the players and org shows that we’re fed up. Enough is enough. Change needs to happen. I’m incredibly proud of our guys and we stand 100% behind our players ready to assist and bring about real change,” Lasry said in a tweet last year. 

Lasry joins fellow Democrats Gillian Battino and Thomas Nelson in the Democratic primary to take on Johnson. Nelson made news in the state last week when he put up a billboard in Oshkosh calling on Johnson to resign, and referred to him as “Senate Treason Johnson.” 

Johnson has not said whether he will run for reelection. 

Johnson, who has been vocal supporter of former President Trump, came under fire from critics on Tuesday after he said the violent attack on Capitol Hill last month, which left multiple people dead, “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection.”

“This will get me in trouble, but I don’t care,” Johnson told 1130 WISN radio talk show host Jay Weber.

He argued that “groups of agitators” are to blame for the Capitol riot and not “tens of thousands of Trump supporters.”