Inside Wisconsin Politics

Days before the Democratic primary for governor, it seems like two camps have finally emerged.

Why is the establishment more united now and is it too little, too late?

This is inside Wisconsin politics.

I'm Shawn Johnson here with my colleagues Anya van Wagtendonk Zac Schultz and Rich Kremer in Eau Claire.

Hey, everyone.

Hello.

Hey.

So it seems like just a few weeks ago on this show, we were all kind of wondering where all these candidates in this big primary fit, what were their political lanes?

It seems like the mainstream frontrunner at that point was less clear.

Zac, why is it sort of coming into focus now and is there enough time?

Well, I think you have to look at this primary in the context of the national political mood for primary voters, which are Democrats that are mainly angry at Donald Trump and his administration there.

If you look at it in that frame, the establishment's the bad guy.

The establishment is national Democrats who haven't done enough to stand up to Trump.

So tapping into those voters meant you couldn't be the establishment because then you were on the side of inertia.

So Francesca Hong clearly moved to the left.

She was going to fight, fight, fight.

And a lot of the other Democrats in this race were trying to outflank her, and they just could not.

Even as late as a few weeks ago, David Crowley was not happy to be called the establishment.

Mandela Barnes denied that there was any lane that he could be put into before he dropped out of the race.

No one wanted to be pinned as establishment, because that kind of denied them access to the voters that were upset and wanted change that looked like more of the same.

And so it is a little too late in the sense that if there's a lot of votes that have already been cast, but it is now clearly going that there has to be a centralized candidate of establishment power if they want to challenge the lane that Francesca Hong has already solidified for herself.

And Ana.

You've covered David Crowley.

I mean, it seems like he still doesn't want that establishment label for a variety of reasons.

Why is that?

Yeah, I mean, part of it is what Zac just described is that there's really a lot of anger towards the establishment for, I think what Democrats feel or some Democrats feel has been inertia and sort of not enough of a of a fight and not wanting the status quo.

But also David Crowley has a particularly kind of interesting personal backstory.

He comes from a really sort of impoverished, challenged background in Milwaukee.

And so up until, you know, he dropped out the first time in this race, he was kind of described as potentially not electable because statewide, there's there's sometimes, you know, negative feelings about Milwaukee.

There is, you know, always the racial element of the fact that there's never been a Black man elected to statewide office in Wisconsin.

So there were all these questions about him.

Then he comes back with the endorsement of Tony Evers, and all of a sudden he's described as the establishment.

One thing I've heard from a lot of his supporters is like, well, which one is it?

Is it that he's two Milwaukee or is he two establishment?

He can't be both.

Why is he being held to the standard?

And I think he's also trying to say, you know, I've really kind of had to fight to get everything that I've ever had.

I was not handed things.

I am not on this kind of gilded establishment path.

That said, I do have some of this backing and the resources that will allow me to win.

So again, it's a little bit threading the needle of I'm a viable candidate, but I will also stand up to the things that you're angry about.

You know, I always worry when we start putting candidates into camps like this, whether this is just sort of a media narrative that we've created or if there's something real to it.

But I feel like the fundraising numbers that came out this week, which do put some substance behind the idea that there are these camps emerging between Francesca Hong and David Crowley.

What did they show?

Well, they showed a couple of things that were pretty notable.

First of all, Crowley raised more than twice as much money during the month of July, the most of the month, most of the month of July, he raised $776,000 thereabout, and Huang brought in around $339,000.

So that is a big sign that, at least in terms of money, Crowley's campaign is getting some backing.

And the other sign that caught my attention was Governor Tony Evers, you know, who endorsed Crowley's campaign, which is definitely being framed as an alternative to Francesca Hong.

He also gave $20,000 from his from Evers campaign account to Crowley's campaign account.

That's not a lot of money, but I was talking with Anthony Chergosky, the political science professor over at UW La Crosse, and he said, you know, it's not a lot of money.

$20,000 doesn't buy you a whole lot.

But it could be a signal to Evers donors, Evers supporters that I'm not just saying I support this, I'm putting my money behind it.

So Chergosky was saying it's potentially possible that it'll open up some more of that money from the more moderate, quote unquote, establishment wing of the party.

Yeah, I mean, I think anecdotally, I do see the message being received as some of these other candidates campaign signs in my neighborhood anyway in Madison that we're supporting people like Sara Rodriguez, for example, have have changed to David Crowley.

I guess my question, though, Zac, is, can Governor Tony Evers, popular governor, popular within the party, but a lame duck governor this late in a primary campaign kind of steer the ship like this?

Can he tell everybody at once at the last minute, hey, vote for this guy.

He can try.

But the evidence throughout history shows that endorsements don't do a lot, especially late.

Early endorsements show that a candidate has viability, early endorsements from unions or from old political people can really surge momentum early in the game when it's necessary for someone like David Crowley to have boosted his name in a crowded field late in the game, it has less impact because people have made up their own minds, and they're less likely to be swayed by one political figure.

They can say, oh, that's nice, you like him, but I've already had time to make up my mind, and we've seen it with the Michigan governor and her endorsement in the Michigan Senate race and her candidate losing.

We've seen it in other places where endorsements don't have the same power that maybe they did 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago when bestowing the next person as an establishment figure meant a lot more than in today's politics.

And the governor wants to frame it as sort of a binary choice, a two candidate race.

It's not that there are still other candidates in the race.

Senator Kelda Roys, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan Ana, how do they fit into this?

And, you know, what could they play?

What role could they play in this primary?

Yeah, I mean, we do end up kind of talking.

And we have, for the last couple of weeks about it as almost a Crowley Hong race.

And so they do end up kind of getting some some perhaps shafting in the conversation from the media, because I think there's a sense that this is Hong's race to lose is the phrase that you've used before.

And so it's kind of hung against everyone else.

And so Crowley has been sort of the anointed one.

But then Roys and Brennan are just kind of in the mix there.

And so I think it really is, again, when we talk about establishment versus progressive, the other three candidates just kind of get lumped together.

They're obviously trying to distinguish themselves.

Again, when we talk about endorsements, Kelda Roys got this really important teachers union endorsement that didn't seem to really shift anything early on.

Whereas, you know, ten, 15 years ago, that would have been a much more meaningful thing.

So again, I think it just kind of speaks to Francesca Hong is running a really unique, strange race.

She has not raised as much money, but it doesn't seem to matter.

She's making sort of headlines on her own, sort of organically rather than through these paid ways.

And then all these other candidates are just trying to kind of trying to to catch up.

And she's not putting herself on TV, but other people are.

You've had these Republican groups consistently putting her in TV ads, calling her liberal ahead of this primary.

She has spent $0 on television, which is just unheard of in any type of serious race.

And she's not running just a serious race.

She's running the leading race.

She's doing some, you know, digital media and things like this.

But a lot of her campaign is very grassroots, very kind of door to door.

And so you're right, when we see if you see her face on your TV or on your your YouTube, it is because these Republican groups are paying for ads trying to get her over the finish line because they think she's beatable.

But meanwhile, she kind of says, you know, thanks for for calling attention to my policies.

So our election is not happening in a vacuum.

There is kind of this wave of democratic socialists or democratic socialists backed candidates around the country who have done exceedingly well in this year's politics compared to in previous years.

This week in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate backed by Democratic Socialist allies, narrowly won a primary there for a U.S.

Senate seat over an establishment backed congresswoman Ana.

I guess everyone is taking the exact same message from this one, right?

Everyone's on the same page about what it means for here.

Yeah.

You know, in politics, everyone just reads everything in the exact same.

Way, same page.

So of course, you know, again, this, this overarching question this year is like, what direction are Democrats going in?

Are they going in this more progressive lane or not?

And so I think for people who want to see that DSA backing and these kind of more progressive leanings are are viable in a way that they haven't been before.

El-sayed's victory is a signal of that.

But David Crowley is saying, actually, the fact that it was so close gives me hope for my campaign because he had all of this outside funding.

He had all of this outside attention, and he still didn't run away with it.

And so even though, again, we see all these polling numbers and things like this that indicate that Hong is currently running away with the primary, he's saying, we actually might be really surprised on primary night.

Yeah, I mean, Rich, we haven't reported on this.

And, you know, we typically don't talk about these internal polls.

But this one was interesting from the Crowley campaign where they said, hear me out.

This is actually exactly what we want to hear for Wisconsin's primary.

And it sort of stepped through, I guess, all of the qualifications that you'd need to get there.

But big picture, what is Crowley's camp saying in terms of why Michigan could mean good things for us?

Well, for one, they're saying this memo was saying that the primary polling that's been done in Wisconsin also just isn't the kind of polling you want to do to really know where candidates are at.

They said it was top line and not looking at people who actually vote in these sorts of primaries.

The other thing was that they were saying that primary voters, you know, because of past numbers from governor races before and Senate races, etc.

show that in a primary, it's generally the oldest group, you know, 65 and up that that vote the most.

And they're saying Crowley is the only candidate talking to directly to those people right now.

So as you mentioned, there were a lot of qualifiers to get to the part of the memo from the Crowley camp that said, this is essentially a toss up between the two of them.

So it will be interesting because what I've also noticed is some Pollers pollsters have said there's like this 10 to 13 point error rate kind of built into primary polling.

I mean, that's what we saw in Michigan.

El-Sayed was was leading by 19 points in one of these polls.

And the race came out to be really close.

He won, but not by those sorts of numbers.

So what does that say for the polling that we've been relying on in Wisconsin to kind of get a sense of who is in the front and who's, you know, second place, I don't know.

Yeah, Zac, if help me walk through this, you had like basically four things you had to suppose one was that the primary electorate is not what the polls show.

It's more like 2018, 2020 that those are older voters and that they're going to go for David Crowley and that if you really boil it down to a two candidate race, which is not, he does even better.

And when you inform them of David Crowley that his numbers get even better and put him over the top.

Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions built into this best case scenario that even then only puts it as a toss up for David Crowley, but that is the odds that he's got against him in this scenario.

Given all that we know about the campaigns as they stand right now, and things that are different from Michigan is Michigan didn't have multiple candidates that had already secured absentee votes and then dropped out of the race.

We don't know how many votes have already been cast for Sara Rodriguez for Mandela Barnes, but I know there are some because I've talked to voters who said I already voted for them.

Those votes aren't coming back.

They are gone.

They will not impact the winner.

Other than the margin of difference and questions of, hey, would that have made a difference if they had dropped out earlier, or if those voters had waited, or if they could have spoiled those ballots and recast them?

Those are all things we won't know.

A lot of this is in hindsight.

It'll all make a lot more sense.

Right now, it's a lot of projection and it's Crowley saying, hey, don't count me out.

Don't just front runner away to Franco because she's in the lead right now.

I have a legitimate chance.

So if you believe this talk about establishment and I'm the man, then vote for me.

All right?

As our election becomes the next big thing in U.S.

politics, we're seeing more national attention and scrutiny of Francesca Hong.

That includes scrutiny of her social media feed, old tweets, including one where she talked about Thanksgiving in a since deleted tweet from 2020, she said, quote, Cancel Thanksgiving should have done this in 16, 20, 21, 1621.

If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original super spreader event that killed indigenous folks and women, so be it.

An open question to the group here.

Is this tweet relevant in 2026?

It is, and that people are talking about it.

It's we're talking about it here.

It's made national news, national headlines, and you know, who loves to hear about this?

It's the Republicans in Tom Tiffany.

So I think the context that can be added to this tweet is 2020 is when Francesca Hong was first running for the assembly, running in a very liberal district in Madison in an open primary.

So everything she was saying, whether she believes it now or wants to talk about it now, she was saying to a liberal primary audience in Madison in 2020, coming out of the George Floyd protests, coming out of Covid, all the situations around that, when you put it in context, her tweets look like a candidate running for that office at that time, the fact that she is a different candidate running for a different office today, we've seen this from lots of politicians who say, yeah, let's not talk about that.

That was my race for state Senate.

That was my race for assembly.

Not every politician will always love the stuff that's dug up from past votes or past campaigns, but she does have to deal with it.

And so that is what her campaign is having to handle right now.

Yeah, I guess.

I mean, I think about politics as sort of a the customer is always right business, the customer being the voter, where even if you don't think they're right, you're in the business as a candidate of winning votes.

And so if enough people want to pay attention to a tweet about Thanksgiving, you got a choice to make rich.

Do you either kind of hope it moves on to the next news cycle or you say something about it?

How is Francesca Hong been handling it?

Well, to me, it seems like she's tried both.

She's initially she was saying things like, well, if Republicans want to focus on that sort of stuff, you know, we're busy reaching out to voters and building up our support.

ET cetera.

ET cetera.

So she was kind of waving it off.

But this week we saw hung kind of backtrack on that tweet in particular, and a whole other slew of tweets calling for from the past, calling for abolishing police, abolishing Ice, abolishing the US Senate.

ET cetera.

ET cetera.

So but with regard to the Thanksgiving tweet this week, she said to CNN, she didn't really say whether or not she still supports, you know, canceling Thanksgiving.

She said it's a that holiday brings a lot of pain to a lot of communities.

But she stopped short of of giving a definitive answer.

And then on Wednesday, she was asked by Politico about that tweet and she said, or they they asked what her favorite holiday is, and she said, Thanksgiving.

She said, I don't want to cancel it.

I love it.

So that's obviously kind of backtracking.

Whether that's because she saw this as a liability or she's trying to put it to rest, I don't know.

But that and also she said, you know, in the televised debate not long ago and in these media interviews at the national level, she said, well, I as governor can't defund the police.

And, you know, she she essentially walked back those as well.

So it's been really interesting to see, not surprising for a person in that position, but always notable.

And, you know, you alluded to the office she's running for now.

You get a different flavor of tweet from her or I guess a post on X now than you did then.

She's made recent posts about Thanksgiving, this one from last year where she talked about supporting the Goodman Center in a fund drive.

A crucial note there she is dressed up in one of those pictures as a turkey.

So seems like fully embracing the Thanksgiving holiday right now.

Anya, we cannot talk about social media without mentioning Dirt McGirk social media account.

Run by David Crowley circa 2010.

Has his social media past come back to haunt him?

I mean, it was kind of the first like, opposition dump that came out after he reentered the race.

And so these are old tweets, as you mentioned, from about 15 years ago, very reflective of a 24 year old sort of out in the world with this new technology where you get to just announce every single thought that you're having as you're having it.

If we all recall what Twitter was like in the year 2010.

So that was a short news cycle.

I don't think it was a fairly significant one.

He certainly said, you know, I was a knucklehead.

I don't stand by some of the more problematic parts of those tweets.

And, and I do kind of, you know, to play devil's advocate about how voters feel about tweets.

I have this question of whether, you know, voters sort of see what they want to see in these.

If you want to oppose David Crowley, you can point to these tweets as a reason why you don't trust him or like him or approve of his character.

And likewise with Fran Hong, if you do like them, then you can it's very easy to kind of dismiss it.

I saw some of Fran Hong's supporters pulling out other times that she has knocked other holidays.

She's talked about how in restaurants she wants to kick out everyone who shows up in Halloween costumes, that she hates Valentine's Day, like working those shifts in restaurants.

So making more of a joke about it that this is just learning more about their personality and their character.

And I think, you know, we've spent ten, 15 years now having so much exposure to politicians through social media in a way that they don't need to be mediated through kind of traditional media, that I think a lot of voters are kind of used to these more human sides.

I mean, we also saw with Graham Plattner what I would describe as like really kind of horrible social media posts about rape victims and other things that voters really kind of excused because they wanted to see the best in this politician that they really admired and supported his policies.

And so I think to a certain extent, we're going to see how important these kinds of things are.

And I don't really know that it moves your average voter other than to sort of put them in the camp that they might have been going to either way.

Yeah.

In a, in an era when the president has been known to say some stuff on social media.

To govern through.

Social media.

Yeah.

These are sort of tame by comparison in Wisconsin.

That's all the time we have for today.

Thanks for joining us.

This has been inside Wisconsin politics.

Be sure to follow us on PBS, wisconsin.org, WPR.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.