By admin 
Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.
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Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.
A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.
With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.
Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.
The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.
With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”
In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.
The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”
When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.
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“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”
Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”
The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.
Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we’re unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.
Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.
But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”
Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.
Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.
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