David Crowley (background) with Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (foreground). Fox News/AP.
DSA candidate Francesca Hong lost in a shocking upset against center left Democratic candidate David Crowley. Fox News. Crowley won by .4% and will face Republican Tom Tiffany in November. Crowley had dropped out but came back into the race as a "never-Hong" candidate and got the endorsement of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. Hong was polling 20 points ahead of Crowley and other candidates in the field, but suffered several major setbacks in her campaign, most notably not getting endorsements from prominent leftists like AOC and Bernie Sanders. She also had several controversies over her social media statements, such as wanting to cancel Thanksgiving or defunding the police.
My Comment:
I'm pretty conflicted about this one. Francesca Hong was almost beyond parody in how bad she was as a candidate and I didn't want even a chance of her winning. She's a DSA commie that would destroy the great state of Wisconsin assuming she got any kind of power. But I also think she would have been a lot easier for Tom Tiffany to defeat.
A big question of this race is how bad the polling was. They actually got Hong's level of support correctly, but they had absolutely no idea how popular Crowley was going to be. He barely won, but you would have thought that they could have detected the support gathering around him and at least given him a decent chance of winning. That didn't happen and it shows that polling is having a terrible moment. They missed several other primary races, most notably the Senate one in Michigan, and it makes the 2026 midterms very hard to predict.
It does make me wonder if I shouldn't have tried the "pied piper" strategy in Wisconsin. I voted yesterday for Tom Tiffany, but it was barely a contested primary and most of the other races in my district were uncontested. Perhaps I should have voted for Hong because she was easier to beat? But I also know that the potential for that backfiring is high, how many Democrats pushed Donald Trump in 2016, and look how that turned out for them?
As for Hong herself, she's everything wrong with the Democratic Party right now. She cares more about hating Israel than anything else and her actual policy positions (which were so toxic she had to back off of them) were so bad that it's insanity. Which makes sense because Hong was actually hospitalized for her bipolar disorder when she was 18. Indeed, she has all the worst qualities of the Democrat's younger voters and I am very glad that she is gone now.
Crowley seems like he's a lot more moderate and will likely be Tony Evers 2.0. That's not as bad as it sounds. Evers is probably the best of the Democrats Midwestern Governors, not because he's good, but because he's such a non-entity that he had little chance to screw up the state. Crowley seems to strike me as the same type, someone that could be elected, but wouldn't be able to get much done if he gets in, especially if Republicans retain control of at least one house of the state legislature. That's extremely likely so Crowley getting elected is more status quo antebellum than any kind of actual change.
But I should not that it's not a sure thing that Crowley will win. Tiffany is a strong candidate and I tend to think the idea of a "blue wave" in 2026 is overstated at best. The main difference is that Tiffany might be the candidate that "scares the normies" now that Hong is out of the race. Tiffany is pretty MAGA and how big of a deal that is will be the main question of 2026. I'm not going to go as far as the polling agencies (because they beclowned themselves enough in this race that I don't trust them at all), but I think Wisconsin is now a true toss up, and it's probably going to be a coin flip as to which party wins in Wisconsin.
No comments:
Post a Comment