EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Russ Feingold is quick to recall that bitter night when he lost his Senate seat nearly five years ago. He had just conceded the race to a first-time GOP candidate, Ron Johnson. And as he hopped into his van on his way to deliver a speech to his dejected supporters, his daughter made one plea.

“Don’t run again, Dad,” she told him.

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Feingold, composed, assured her that he’d take a few years off and would reassess his career.

“But I didn’t say never!” he recalled last month to a crowd of a few dozen at a coffeehouse here in western Wisconsin. The supporters erupted in joy.

After lying low since the 2010 loss — he wrote a book, remarried, witnessed the birth of his first grandchild, served as an envoy in Africa and taught at the university level — Feingold is now trying to do something no vanquished senator has accomplished since Rhode Island’s Peter Gerry in 1934: successfully win back his seat in the next six-year cycle. He is tapping into the progressive angst in a state roiled by years of bitter clashes with Gov. Scott Walker and conservatives who now dominate the state Legislature. Yet, he is also trying to portray himself as an outsider of sorts — despite having spent 18 years in the Senate.

The 2016 election cycle will gauge whether voters will give a spate of ex-Democratic pols — in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana — a new lease on political life. It also will measure the resiliency of first-term Republicans like Johnson — who were elected in the 2010 tea party wave but now face a more daunting presidential cycle in which streams of more moderate voters could tilt the outcome in critical battleground states.

For former lawmakers like Feingold, the key is to seize on the positive parts of incumbency — like fundraising prowess, their legislative accomplishments and wider name recognition — while avoiding voter antipathy for career politicians in Washington.

In an interview with POLITICO in Eau Claire, one of his first as a 2016 candidate, Feingold said he didn’t believe he was “being fired” by voters when he lost in 2010. It had everything to do with a political environment that greatly favored the GOP, he said.

“It was obvious that because of the economy and very difficult times people were going through, it was very likely people would vote against incumbents,” said Feingold, sitting outside on a warm day behind the Goat Coffee House. “It was a wave election. Everyone knows that.”

That race, like many others, turned on voter anger toward Washington, including the raw emotions over Obamacare, which Feingold voted to enact. “Oh no,” Feingold said when asked whether he would have voted differently on the law looking back at it now.

“I stood with my vote on the Affordable Care Act in 2010. I was one of the only candidates to do that,” Feingold said. “I understand people have been lied to repeatedly about what was in the bill. I regretted that, but it was fairly [stated] that over time that it would work out. That’s exactly what’s happened.” (The campaign later said that Feingold was referring to “lies” from Republicans.)

But Johnson believes the race will once again turn on issues like the health care law — and he’s not mincing words when it comes to Feingold, a sign of how bitter the battle will become.

“He’s a complete hypocrite, a complete phony,” said Johnson, accusing Feingold of backtracking on his signature issue of campaign finance reform and plotting his path back to power. “I think citizens of Wisconsin will kind of have a problem with that level of hypocrisy, that level of phoniness.”

Feingold, 62, was a leader of the Elizabeth Warren wing of his party before there was a Sen. Warren. He bucked his Democratic president, Bill Clinton, on a law that loosened banking regulations. He was one of nine Democrats to oppose the 2008 Wall Street rescue package. He was one of just 21 Democrats to oppose authorizing war in Iraq. He was the lone senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

On the campaign trail, he rails against “lousy trade deals” and whacks Johnson’s record on issues like student loan debt, while noting the Republican attended the University of Minnesota, prompting groans from the crowd. When Feingold called up Jim Camery, who chairs the Pierce County Democrats, to ask whether he should run again, Camery said: “Where have you been, Russ? You are what we need.”

“2010 was just so different, with Obama just having come in and a lot of the tea party people just kind of coming out of the woodwork — coming out of the trailer parks, essentially,” Camery said in an interview at a Feingold fundraiser in River Falls, Wisconsin. “There was a different mix of people at the polls.”

It’s hard to see how Democrats could take back the Senate if they lose in Wisconsin. Early polls have shown Feingold with a comfortable lead, though both sides downplay those results at this stage of the race. Despite serving since 2011, Johnson has not developed a strong public image in areas of the state, while Feingold maintains solid approval ratings. And in less than two months, Feingold hauled in a whopping $2.2 million, a sign of the energy from the Democratic base.

To win, Feingold will have to turn out the Democratic base in its hubs of Milwaukee and Madison and cut into GOP support in suburban Milwaukee — in addition to running about even in key battlegrounds in the northern part of the state. While Wisconsin has a politically active electorate, even in midterm years, there was a boost in turnout of about 800,000 from 2010 to 2012, when President Barack Obama carried the state and Democrat Tammy Baldwin won a hotly contested Senate race.

In many ways, the strength of the eventual GOP presidential nominee could go a long way to determining whether Johnson wins again in 2016, especially since Republicans have not won a Senate seat in Wisconsin in a presidential year since Ronald Reagan won his first term in 1980.

Yet, Republicans have shown their strength in recent state races, including Walker’s. And they plan to bank on that machine to help reelect the 60-year-old Johnson, who believes 2016 will look a lot like 2010, when he won by 5 percentage points.

“I think the issues are going to be very similar,” said Johnson, who owned a successful plastics company and dipped into his own bank account to win in 2010. “It’s going to be a professional politician against a citizen legislator; someone who considers himself part of the elite versus someone who is really a true outsider; somebody who is for Big Government versus someone who believes Big Government isn’t working so well.”

Feingold sees it differently.

“He’s living in the past,” Feingold said. “Anybody who thinks that people are going to vote in 2016 based on the issues in 2010 doesn’t realize what it is like to represent people. 2010 was a reminder to me that each election is different.”

Feingold added: “My opponent likes to lecture. I’ve never seen a guy become Washington faster. He bought his house, loves to go over to Fox News; he holds a hearing almost every day. The part about listening to people and representing Wisconsin isn’t part of the equation.”

Soon after the 2010 loss, Feingold took a brief reprieve from politics, spending much of 2011 and 2012 in Middleton, Wisconsin, and Milwaukee. He taught full-time at Marquette University Law School in 2011 and was a visiting professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Feingold also taught at Stanford University in California and will do so again this fall, when he’s planning to teach a legal course on the Senate.

In 2011, Feingold wrote a book, “While America Sleeps,” about the post 9/11 era, just two years before he served as a special State Department envoy to the Congo and Great Lakes Region of Africa, heading to the region 15 times over a two-year span.

“My life isn’t about running for office,” Feingold insisted. “I’ve been incredibly happy the last four years.”

Still, all the globe-trotting and teaching in Northern California has given Republicans some fodder.

“Has Feingold agreed to actually come back and actually live in the state of Wisconsin?” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I know he doesn’t like the state very much.”

Added Johnson: “Here’s a professor from Stanford, California, running for the Senate in Wisconsin, accusing his opponent of lecturing? Are you kidding me?”

What Republicans are trying to do is tarnish his image as a good government reformer, instead portraying him as a craven political opportunist.

In particular, Johnson and the NRSC are seizing on Feingold’s 2011 creation of a political action committee called Progressives United, which was intended to push liberal causes and back like-minded candidates. A number of the PAC staffers now work on his campaign, and Feingold drew a salary from the organization. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent to purchase copies of his book as gifts to supporters. And just a fraction of the money raised went toward helping liberal candidates.

Republicans say Feingold — whose claim to fame is the co-authorship of the sweeping campaign finance law that bears his name — created a campaign-in-waiting using the kind of outside group that he’s spent his career railing against.

“Mr. Campaign Finance Reform realizes that one of the first things he did when he left office was to set up a PAC, basically a shadow campaign to set up these lists that now his campaign can use,” Johnson said.

Feingold strongly denies this accusation. He said the group was active in promoting progressive causes, in addition to candidates and that it was meant to combat the big money influence after the Citizens United decision. The PAC’s purchases of his book did not personally enrich him, he said, noting that the book publisher agreed not to give him royalties from those purchases. And he says he drew a salary for part-time work because “I worked hard for the organization.”

In 2007 on Capitol Hill, Feingold was part of a group of senators who sought to limit the influence of lobbyists. But Federal Election Commission records from July show that he received nearly $36,000 in bundled contributions from a lobbying group, J Street, which advocates liberal-leaning policies on Israel and the Middle East.

“We don’t take money from lobbyists, but if it turns out that someone is a registered lobbyist, we would return the money,” Feingold said when asked about the donation.

Feingold’s campaign later said that the $36,000 does not violate his pledge because no one who contributed to that bundled amount was individually registered as a lobbyist.

Former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold greeted potential voters in The Goat Coffee House in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Tuesday July 21, 2015. | Rachel Woolf

To push back against the attacks, Feingold has called on Johnson to sign the “Badger pledge” so both candidates can call on outside groups to stay out of the state. Johnson has so far refused to do so. And when asked repeatedly whether he would do what he’s done in past races — demand Democratic outside groups stay out of Wisconsin no matter what his opponent does — Feingold demurred.

“I will continue to urge him to sign it,” Feingold said. “That’s the only responsible thing — to sign it.”

Despite amassing a populist voting record that has made him beloved by progressives, Feingold and his team are making a concerted effort to avoid sounding like he just wants his old job back. A secretly recorded video circulated by Republicans shows a state party official telling Democrats to avoid calling Feingold “senator” and to call him “Russ” instead.

Even though Feingold told his wife over a fish sandwich lunch last summer in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, that he wanted to run again, he cautioned that the personal decision was only “1 percent of the equation” — the rest being whether voters and party officials wanted him to run.

So he called the Democratic Party chairmen in all 72 counties, and virtually all urged him to run. Now Feingold has traversed the state, hitting more than 50 counties in just a few short months offering a consistent message: 2016 isn’t about him.

“Sometimes, politicians get big egos,” he told voters. “My ego isn’t so big that I think it’s about me. It’s about what’s been done to the people of this state for the past four years.”