Inside Wisconsin Politics

How Crowley won Wisconsin's Democratic primary for governor

Shawn Johnson:
David Crowley pulls off a political comeback for the ages how did he do it and what does it mean for November? This is Inside Wisconsin Politics. I’m Shawn Johnson here with my colleagues Zac Schultz and Rich Kremer in Eau Claire. Hey, guys.

Zac Schultz:
Hello.

Shawn Johnson:
So let’s go back just one month here. David Crowley was not a candidate for governor. He had ended his campaign, told us that it was because he knew he was not going to be the nominee. Tuesday, he received 315,000 votes, around 40% of the Democratic voting electorate. Zac, I want to hear how he did this. How did he pull off this one-month comeback?

Zac Schultz:
Well, I think most importantly is he didn’t do it alone. He did this with all of the team players. And I know he doesn’t like the idea of being the establishment, but the Democratic establishment is what pushed him over the line and pulled him all the way to this nomination. He certainly worked for it. But Tony Evers coming back with his endorsement and we talked before on this podcast about how endorsements aren’t everything but then he followed up by doing the work with him. Tony Evers campaigning bringing the media attention to every one of David Crowley’s stops along the way was critical because it got him on more television sets, more newscasts, it got people aware that there were contrasts in this race, that it wasn’t a runaway, and that if Crowley had a chance, voters needed to be thinking about it. I can’t tell you how many people I ran into in just the last week who said they had not made up their minds. They truly were still undecided going into the final few days, where they had a chance to decide this election, and it’s clear a lot of them went to David Crowley.

Shawn Johnson:
Rich, what’s your take on this dramatic comeback here by Crowley?

Rich Kremer:
Well, it was remarkable. It was not expected. I mean, I was fully on board with these polls that we were seeing showing Francesca Hong way ahead. But I do remember, what Zac just mentioned reminded me of talking with Charles Franklin, and he essentially said: Well, there are a lot of undecided people out there, but with Hong at the 20, 30 points ahead that we’d seen in some polls, it would take essentially every undecided person rallying behind one candidate. When he told me that, it wasn’t we still had other candidates like Barnes in the race. So it does appear that the undecided voters did make a decision and went out. So it was just something else. And being at a Republican event on Tuesday night was interesting because of the reactions that I saw from people.

Shawn Johnson:
Let’s talk about those polls just a little bit more, because I can imagine somebody sitting at home and thinking: Hey, the news presented this to me as Francesca Hong’s victory weeks ago, essentially, that there were these repeated polls that showed her leading, and that gave the clear impression that she was going to win this thing. Zac, what would you say to someone with those qualms about the information they were receiving?

Zac Schultz:
They are right to have qualms about polling. Everyone should always take polling with a grain of salt. Even the pollsters say that. But the thing that most people I think get wrong about what polls are even Charles Franklin will say it they are a snapshot of that moment. So, the mistake I think some people make is they think polling is like the score of a game in the third quarter. And they say: Oh, Hong’s up 21 points, it’s like the Packers being up 21 points, they should have this in the bag, if they lose it’s a complete colossal failure. But you have to think of those polls that came out a few weeks ago as more of like a preseason game. They were a snapshot of where the race looked at that time. The real game was on election night, and at that point, it was a toss-up, because so many more people had been changing their minds and moving to Crowley, and the polls weren’t updated to be able to reflect that. So if you think of the polls as a snapshot and not reality and not a score on the board, they are a little better guide path to what the situation may be. And, I think everyone should note, Francesca Hong’s polling said she was going to get 40%. She got 40%! And that was considering that primary polling has an even larger margin of error the polls really got her support correct. And they did reflect the amount of undecideds. It is rare to see all the undecideds go to the second-place candidate, but I think that goes more to what we were just talking about, of the establishment telling everyone this has to happen, in the context of what had happened in the Michigan Senate race and all these national figureheads coming to Wisconsin. It really got a lot of people thinking: Alright, this is not just about who I like the most or who’s leading, this is about electability.

Shawn Johnson:
Yeah. I think the point you made there is something I want to impress upon myself and all reporters for future elections, that the undecided number is pretty significant. I think, even looking back and we’re going to talk about today but in 2016, there was a lot of talk about where the polls got it wrong. I think we didn’t talk about the undecided voters or the people who wouldn’t commit in the presidential race that year. That’s another one that sticks out in our mind, and this just underscores that a candidate can win all those, as David Crowley did. But for him to do that, Rich, you just do not see that level of surge at the end by one candidate. How big do you think was Gov. Tony Evers in this instance?

Rich Kremer:
Well, obviously it was a big deal, which is interesting because looking back to a poll that we had before the primary, the Marquette University Law School asked people: How much does Gov. Evers’ endorsement of David Crowley impact your decision? And a majority said it didn’t, but clearly it did. But what also might have impacted and probably did impact those undecided voters’ decision to get behind Crowley was a big surge of campaign TV advertising. So Ad Impact, which is a great service, and they put out a tweet and it showed a line graph of all the different candidates and what they were spending on ads right up to the election. And there’s just one blue line that goes straight up like Mount Everest and then crashes back down. Well, that is David Crowley. So it looked like something maybe upwards of $1 million in that last, those final days. And I was talking with a friend of the podcast, Anthony Chergosky, today, and he said TV advertising does matter. It still matters because there were discussions about whether or not Hong’s success in the polls without spending any money on TV ads I was seeing people saying, well, maybe this is the new way, maybe the old model is dead. Chergosky doesn’t see it that way, and he said that Ad Impact graph proves it.

Shawn Johnson:
And I think those ads came at a time or they came at a time when all these people who were not paying attention to this race started paying attention. They came at the right time for David Crowley, essentially.

Zac Schultz:
So, Shawn, I want to get your feedback here. So we’ve 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, questions about her past that really hadn’t been pushed on her early in the campaign, and certainly not by the other campaigns, as we saw a very friendly-only debate. So how much of an impact do you think that played with those undecided voters in the last week or two?

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. And she did have an answer about that tweet that came later that kind of shrugged it off and said: Look, I’ll be frank, I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to the holidays, but I love Thanksgiving. It’s not what she said at first. At first she kind of stood by it. And I know this stuff is sort of dumb, arguably, 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. Rich?

Rich Kremer:
If I could chime in, 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. I want to ask both of you, Shawn and Zac, did you see her campaign at the very final stages as a collapse or an implosion?

Zac Schultz:
I think it’s harder to say, because she did hit the polling mark that she was at. If she came in significantly below what people were talking about that she would receive, then you could wonder, did some of those soft Hong supporters disappear and leave her at the end? But we didn’t see that. 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’s 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 from that context.

Shawn Johnson:
And I think there are just choices in the way that she ran her race in the closing days. I mean, not going on television was a choice. I know TV is not free, and she didn’t have a ton of money, and the money really flowed to David Crowley there at the end. So it’s not like she could just snap her fingers and run TV ads. But she did run a campaign in different ways. When you’re trying to reach these kind of casual primary voters, maybe older voters in the closing days, she didn’t have a strategy for that or the resources for that in the way that Crowley did. It’s also a choice I know it’s her community and she felt passionate about it but it is a choice to go to the site of a shooting and call it an execution over a bullhorn, as she did in the closing days of the race. That gets attention. And she said in a debate she wouldn’t do that as governor. She did it as a candidate for governor, though. So those are choices. I think another debatable thing in this campaign is the role that these Republican ads attacking Hong played. These were run, backed by the Republican Governors Association, and the going theory among Democrats Democrats who didn’t want Hong to be the nominee was that these were there to prop her up, that they were going to run these ads in these Milwaukee and Madison media markets where all these Democratic voters are, and say: She’s too liberal for Wisconsin. And that Democratic voters would see that and say: Liberal that’s my choice.Zac, would you say that’s the effect that it had, or did they backfire on Republicans?

Zac Schultz:
I think, well, Republicans saw those ads as a twofer. One, they did boost her with liberals, by giving her more name recognition than she would have otherwise had. And two, even in the Madison and Milwaukee television viewing areas, there are a lot of Republican voters out there. So it was working towards the election that’s still to come. If she was the nominee, it was weakening her and tarnishing her name, attaching her to these issues with Republicans that would vote, getting them aware of who she was. So, they definitely saw that as a great double by doing two things at once. It backfired in the sense that it really did alarm a lot of Democrats and it made it easier for Crowley to say: This is who Republicans want to face, and we should talk more about why and the vulnerabilities that lie within there boosting his credibility when it came to electability.

Shawn Johnson:
It was kind of his opening. I mean, it let him attack her without really attacking her, because Democrats had been hands off at that point, and David Crowley is going to want her voters in November. So he doesn’t want to attack her too aggressively and say: democratic socialists have no place in our party. Of course, he’s not going to say that. He’s going to want those Francesca Hong supporters to support him. But the ads were definitely the opening for him. Rich, I know a lot of political observers nationally were looking to Wisconsin as, 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:
Oh boy, that’s such a big question. I feel a little unqualified in answering, but the obvious takeaway is 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.

Shawn Johnson:
And I guess the counterpoint to that would be, if she picks up 5,000 more votes, then we’re having a different discussion here today. What does this mean for November? I mean, I think that Republicans were starting to expect it was going to be Tom Tiffany versus Francesca Hong. What does it mean that it is Tom Tiffany versus David Crowley? You were at the Tiffany campaign headquarters on election night, Rich. What’s your impression?

Rich Kremer:
Oh, man, it was this is what I was alluding to in the beginning. It was really interesting. So the spirits were high the whole night, because there was no doubt that Tiffany was going to be the nominee. And the other thing was, before the polls closed, I talked to a few people that were there and they said: Well, Hong being the nominee obviously makes it easier for Tiffany. And people were telling me Hong scares them, et cetera. And then what I noticed was spirits were still high, but people became more and more glued to the big screen showing cable news and their phones. And I went outside a couple times and there were some young guys that are like, I could overhear them talking: Crowley’s being run in this county, Crowley is you know, they were not expecting that. And when Tiffany came and gave his speech at about right around 10 p.m. and he talked with reporters after, the first question was: IIf Crowley wins, does that change your strategy since you’ve been spending so much time attacking Hong? And he’s been using a line where he says there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats. OK. And then the next line out of his mouth was: David Crowley never called out Francesca Hong for all those crazy things she said. Which is, it’s an answer, but it just seemed like he might not have had a whole list of talking points against Crowley ready to go, because it was a surprise for a lot of people that this happened. Tiffany’s campaign put out its first campaign attack ad against Crowley, trying to identify him to the rest of the state. But still, on a campaign election night unexpected.

Shawn Johnson:
So what are you watching for, Zac, as the campaign gets going here, week one of the general election campaign between Tiffany and Crowley?

Zac Schultz:
Right now it’s about money. Tom Tiffany has got a lot of money in the bank and he’s already spending it. His first ads are going out already. He’s got billionaires funneling money through the party to him, so he looks like he’ll be well financed, at least for now. Crowley did release a statement saying he raised a million and a half in the first 24 hours. The big question is, can he build on that? That might have been a lot of transfers from the Democratic Governors Association or the state Democratic Party waiting to give money to the nominee. So the question is, how fast can he get out and start running his own ads before Tiffany is able to define him among the voters in the state that haven’t heard much about him because they’ve heard so much about Francesca Hong.

Shawn Johnson:

And you mentioned the billionaires the Uihleins and Diane Hendricks they’re not always united around a Republican candidate or backing the state party. They are this time.

Zac Schultz:
For now.

Shawn Johnson:
I think one question you’ve got to have is that this is the first year we’ve had really, Rich, you alluded to this in a story you did but the first year since 2010 when you could say the Assembly and the Senate and the governor’s office are all kind of up for grabs, either party could win all three. And so big donors are going to have to decide: Do we want to spread this around or focus on where we think our money will go the farthest? That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us. Our colleague Anya van Wagtendonk will be back next week. This has been Inside Wisconsin Politics. Be sure to follow us on pbswisconsin.org, wpr.org, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.