Here in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, a businessman who has never before run for public office, appears poised to pick up a Senate seat for Republicans, defeating Democratic legend Russell Feingold and becoming the first GOP senator elected from the state since 1986.

Johnson has been ahead of Feingold for months; the RealClearPolitics average of polls puts the margin between seven and eight percentage points. In this time of voter unhappiness with Barack B.O. Obama and the Democratic agenda, Johnson is on the leading edge of what Wisconsin state Republican chairman Reince Priebus calls "the biggest D-to-R shift of any state in the country." And he's doing it as a businessman and would-be citizen legislator running on an elegantly simple platform.

"I've got two major items in my platform," Johnson tells a group of Chamber of Commerce members gathered for lunch at the Best Western hotel here in Neenah. "I want to repeal health care [reform], and I want to bring every ounce of my accounting background, my business background, my passion, my dedication, my seriousness of purpose, to do everything I possibly can do to control federal spending and debt, to limit the size and scope of the federal government."

A lifelong Republican, Johnson was appalled by the big-spending measures Obama and Democratic leaders enacted in the spring and summer of 2009. But it was the campaign for national health care that pushed Johnson into action. As he watched Senate Democratic leaders desperately making deals with Ben Cornhusker Kickback Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and others to win support of a health care measure the public opposed, something in Johnson just snapped. "When they passed that bill on Christmas Eve, with the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, that was the final straw," he tells the Chamber of Commerce.