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 colleague Zac Schultz and
Rich Kremer in Eau Claire. Hey, guys.
>> Hello. >> 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?
>> 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 stops along the way was critical
because it got him on more television sets, more
newscasts, 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 to decide this election. And it's clear a
lot of them went to David Crowley.
>> Rich, what's your take on this dramatic comeback
here by Crowley? >> Well, it was remarkable.
It was not expected. I mean, I was I was fully on board
with these polls that we were seeing showing
Francesca Hong way ahead. But I do remember, you know,
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, you know, with hung at the, you know, 20, 30
points ahead that we'd seen in some polls, it would
take essentially every undecided person, you know,
rallying behind one candidate when he told me
that it wasn't, you know, we still had other
candidates like Barnes in the race. So it does appear
that the end of undecided voters did make a decision
and went out. So it was 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. polls just a little bit
more, because I can imagine somebody sitting at home
and thinking, hey, you know, the news presented this to
me as Francesca Hong victory, you know, weeks
ago essentially, that there were these repeated polls
that showed her leading and that gave the clear
impression that, you know, she was going to win this
thing. Zac. I mean, what would you say to someone
with with those qualms about the information they
were receiving? >> 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 is 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 the score of a game in
the third quarter. They say, oh, well, hangs 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 Pfaff to what the situation may be, and I
think everyone should note Francesca Hong polling said
she was going to get 40%, she got 40%. And that was,
you know, considering that primary polling has an even
larger margin of error, she 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,
all right, this is not just about who I like the most
or who's leading. This is about electability.
>> 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 Governor
Tony Evers in this instance? >> Well, obviously it was a
big deal, which is interesting because looking
back to a poll that we had before the primary, you
know, the Marquette University Law School asked
people, how much does Governor Evers endorsement
of David Crowley impact your decision? And 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, you know, 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 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, ad TV
advertising does matter. It still matters because there
were discussions about whether or not, you know,
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. >> And I think that those
ads come 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.
>> So, Shawn, I want to get your feedback here. So
we've 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 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?
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. And she did have
an answer about that tweet that came later that kind
of shrugged it off and said, look, I'll be I'll be frank.
I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to the holidays. But
but I love Thanksgiving. It's not what she said at
first. At first she kind of stood by it. And, you know,
I know this stuff is 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 4000
votes, a little less stuff like that can matter. Rich.
>> 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, you know, at the very final
stages as a collapse or an implosion?
>> I think it's harder to say, because she did hit
the polling mark that she was at. If she came in
significant below, significantly below what
people were talking 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. >> 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. And, you know, 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 that's my choice.
Zac, would you say that's the effect that it had, or
did they backfire on Republicans?
>> I think, well, Republicans saw those ads
as a twofer. One, they did boost her with liberals by
letting 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 their boosting his
credibility. When it came to electability.
>> 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
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 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? >> Oh boy, that's such a
big question. I feel a little unqualified in
answering, but I you know, 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 in the effort to stop the far left,
you know, progressive candidate in the Senate
race in Michigan, the closeness of that, plus
this maybe it changed the conversation.
>> And I guess the counterpoint to that would
be if if she picks up 5000 more votes, then, you know,
we're 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? >> 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, hang. Being the
nominee obviously makes it easier for Tiffany. And
people were telling me they hang, scares them, etc. 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 was some young
guys that are like, I could overhear them talking Crow
Crowley's being hung in this county, but Crowley is,
you know, they were not expecting that. And when
Tiffany came and he he gave his speech at about right
around 10 p.m. and he talked with reporters after.
And the first question was, If Crowley wins, does that
change your strategy since you've been spending so
much time attacking hang and he he's been using a
line where he says there's not a dime's worth of
difference between the Democrats. Okay. 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 you 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
has happened. Tiffany's campaign put out a its
first campaign attack ad against Crowley, trying to,
you know, identify him to the rest of the state. But
still, on a campaign election night, unexpected.
>> So what are you watching for, Zac, as the campaign
gets going here? Week one of the of the general
election campaign between Tiffany and Crowley.
>> 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 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
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. billionaires, the the you
lines, and Diane Hendricks. They're not always united
around a Republican candidate or backing the
state party. They are this time.
>> For now. >> I think one question you
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, you know, 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. wisconsin.org. WPR.org,
YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.