Here & Now

Inside Wisconsin Politics: The Governor Primary Spotlight

Zac Schultz:
This week’s “Inside Wisconsin Politics” dug further into the governor’s primary, including the heightened national attention on Francesca Hong and the democratic socialist movement.

Shawn Johnson:
I know a lot of political observers nationally were looking to Wisconsin for a lesson in terms of whether democratic socialism that has played well in other states can play in a Midwest swing state. What lesson can they take away from our race?

Rich Kremer:
The obvious takeaway is it didn’t. It didn’t work this time. But all the caveats being the coordinated effort by establishment Democrats, moderate Democrats to make sure that it doesn’t happen, so I would say at face value, yeah, I guess it didn’t work out. And it came pretty close in the effort to stop the far-left progressive candidate in the Senate race in Michigan. The closeness of that, plus this, maybe it changed the conversation. I’ve seen some pundits online talking about well, Hong’s campaign collapsed at the very final moments because of the way she handled those media interviews at the national level.

Zac Schultz:
She hit the marks that all the polling said she had along the way. The difference is the people that hadn’t made up their minds chose elsewhere. I think those were about electability concerns. I think there are legitimate questions about how she answered those questions when the national spotlight was on her, and whether the people in Wisconsin that had been paying attention were starting to think more about electability than about policy. But I don’t know if collapse is the right word when she still got 40% of the vote or thereabouts and that’s a really strong showing from any candidate, especially someone from her background who doesn’t have a long track record of politics in Wisconsin and hasn’t spent a long time developing those relations around the state. So she had a very impressive showing for that context. We talked on this podcast about Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving tweets and some of the things that were coming up out of her past. Give me your impression of Crowley’s ascent with everyone rallying behind him, including the money and then the way Francesca Hong handled the amount of national attention she was getting.

Shawn Johnson:
Well, I mean, the national window for our race was just so brief. National media was paying attention to Michigan before us, and then all of a sudden, we were the next big thing. I think it’s fair to argue about whether or not people should focus on a tweet from 2020, but they did. I was visiting my dad the weekend before the election. He lives in Illinois. He watches all the Sunday shows religiously, and every one of them talked about that Thanksgiving tweet. My dad doesn’t know who Francesca Hong is or David Crowley or much about the governor’s race in Wisconsin, but he got an earful about that tweet that weekend. And if he’d been watching those shows in Wisconsin, he would have been seeing ads in between saying to vote for David Crowley. So that stuff matters and the timing matters. But it’s how elections are won and lost. And so in a race that was won in this case by David Crowley by 4,000 votes, a little less, stuff like that can matter.