and Now. >> 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. >> 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?
>> 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 it 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,
hangs campaign collapsed at the very final moments
because of the way she handled those media
interviews at the national level.
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. We talked on
this podcast about Francesca Hong 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 wave Francesca
Hong handled the amount of national attention she was
getting. >> Well, I mean, the
national window for our race was just so brief.
There were. 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 4000 votes, a
little less stuff like that can matter.
>> In other closely watched >> In other closely watched