By admin 
Last night, Francesca Hong lost the race to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. This is great news for American democracy.
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Sorry if that seems harsh—she certainly ran an energetic campaign and came close to winning the nomination—but Hong was a profoundly flawed candidate in an important race. Even the leaders of her own faction of the Democratic Party recognized it, and stayed away: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders apparently know a lemon when they see one. Her narrow loss is a positive reflection on the progressive luminaries’ judgment, as well as a demonstration that the party mainstream eventually managed to sort out a messy and dispiriting primary. The Democrats now have a better chance of winning a crucial swing state’s governorship, against a Republican nominee who, while in Congress, went along with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Hong’s loss yesterday was unexpected. Two weeks ago, the 37-year-old state legislator was the front-runner in the polls, largely because the Democratic primary had turned into a clown show. One mainstream candidate, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, suspended her campaign in mid-July because of financial irregularities. By the end of the month, with less than a fortnight to go before Election Day, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes bowed out too. At the time he did so, one poll had Hong 22 points ahead. In the interim, another candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, had returned to the race after previously withdrawing because of a lack of momentum. All the hopes of the Democratic establishment rested on Crowley’s Hail Mary pass.
Why were they so scared of Hong? Partially because she is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that calls for public ownership of large corporations, looser immigration laws, and the abolition of prisons. Hong has said that she does not agree with all of the DSA platform, but she entered the contest with an unscrubbed Twitter account, full of the most voter-repelling, peak-2020 statements you can imagine. In the COVID era, when joyless leftist platitudes were all the rage, she criticized Thanksgiving as a “colonizer holiday” and “the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women.” (Wait, does folx—a baffling attempt to make the already gender-neutral word folks even more inclusive—not include women?) Further searches of her Twitter account revealed that she also disliked Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and even Halloween, which she said was “not my thing.”
A savvier candidate than Hong might have been able to muscle through the inevitable criticism with an AOC-style acknowledgment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” We all lost our minds a bit during the pandemic shutdown: Remember when Gal Gadot and other celebrities posted that video of themselves singing “Imagine”? But Hong could not manage to distance herself from her comments back then. In what could have been her cleanup operation, an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, she explained that “Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” (For the turkey community, definitely.) She clarified a few days later that “I actually love it,” but that she was “kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.” The problem wasn’t just her previous statements, but her inability to back out gracefully from her own rhetorical cul-de-sac.
Despite the buoyant polling, I suspected that Hong was doomed after attending a rally she held in suburban Milwaukee earlier this month. She has an appealing backstory—restaurant worker, single mom, community organizer—and, as I saw from the rally, Korean immigrant parents who were proud as punch to see their daughter running for office. They sat right at the front, behind the television cameras, beaming throughout. Sadly, though, she also had a nervous, rabbity speaking style. At her own event, she looked like the support act to the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that America deserved 9/11, and who had turned up to read a short encomium to socialism from his iPhone. Afterward, she milled around uncertainly while he posed for selfies with a crowd that hungrily pressed against the security barrier.
Apart from their other skills, politicians need a bit of main-character energy. Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Senate candidate in Michigan, also carries a lot of baggage—his Muslim faith and Arab name, his advocacy for universal health care, some loose-lipped podcasts in his past—and, like Hong, he has campaigned alongside Piker. But in person, El-Sayed comes off as eloquent, combative, and focused. He is not going to spend the next three months talking about which national holidays he hates most. He also looks comfortable in all kinds of settings: appearing with his white step-grandparents in a campaign ad, campaigning against data centers alongside rural farmers, sparring with TV anchors over U.S. policy toward Israel. And he has boiled down his campaign to a simple three-part slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.”El-Sayed is a risky candidate, for sure, but a blue wave might well carry him into the Senate.
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That was not true for Hong. Swing voters? Never heard of them. Her campaign rally was pure crack for disaffected leftist Millennials. The emcee introduced every speech by appealing to “ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary,” while the back of the hall featured an activity zone with blank sheets of paper and crayons. Her volunteer-made campaign pins had slogans such as STONERS FOR HONG and FUCK ICE. If the offerings at the merch store were any indication, her most memorable campaign moment up to that point had come at a community grill, where she flipped burgers and told a bystander: “Reagan fucked us, Paul.” The group of 20-somethings behind me were wearing this slogan on their T-shirts. The crowd at the rally was enthusiastic and idealistic, and Hong might have gotten away with such an event in deep-blue Manhattan, but not in a state that Donald Trump won in 2024.
Notably, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders were happy to endorse and campaign for El-Sayed, but neither of them gave their blessing to Hong. Neither did Elizabeth Warren. (“I don’t know her,” the senator from Massachusetts said recently, as if channeling the famous Mariah Carey meme.) The left wing of the Democratic Party has had a great primary season, with unexpected wins in New York and even Colorado. But the refusal of its leading figures to endorse a subpar candidate in a purple state suggests that they are being judicious about where they put their time and on whom they stake their reputation. Ocasio-Cortez also declined to endorse Graham Platner, a progressive favorite whose campaign for the Senate in Maine imploded amid allegations of sexual misconduct. With candidates, quality control is everything.
In a last-minute intervention, outgoing Governor Tony Evers—who had pledged to stay out of the race—explicitly endorsed Crowley when the latter relaunched his campaign. The gambit worked. Crowley squeaked past Hong at the last minute. That is a nightmare for the Republicans, whose candidate Tom Tiffany was the only serious contender for the party’s nomination. In Congress, he is a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. He has been heartily endorsed by Donald Trump—great for the primary, but worse than useless in the general.
Tiffany very obviously wanted to run against Hong, whom he could have painted as a dangerous radical who loves illegal immigration and hates cranberry sauce. Her campaign spent virtually nothing on television advertising, while a super PAC linked to Republicans invested $2.2 million in ads depicting her as too liberal, in what the Times called “a counterintuitive strategy to grow her appeal among Democratic primary voters.” If anyone heard a loud thump in Madison last night, that was the sound of a huge opposition-research file hitting a trash can.
The final winner, however, is democracy itself. Who would bet against Donald Trump calling up swing-state officials in 2028 and asking them to find a few more votes for the Republican candidate for president? After all, that’s exactly what he did in Georgia in 2020. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just 21,000 votes that year, while Trump took it back by only 30,000 in the next race. For a decade, Trump and his allies have counted on Democrats to sound so out of step with mainstream voters on cultural issues that even his most authoritarian moves look tolerable by comparison. The Badger State is one of the most crucial places on the electoral map. Francesca Hong’s unexpected loss is America’s gain.
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