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 Sean Johnson, here with my
colleagues Zach Schultz and Rich
Kramer in Eau Claire.
Hey guys. Hello.
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 gonna be the nominee.
Yesterday, he received 315,000
plus votes.
Sorry, Tuesday, he receive 315
thousand votes.
Around 40% of
the Democratic voting electorate.
Zach, I wanna hear how
he did this.
How did he pull off this one month?
Come back.
Well 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 in
this podcast about how endorsements
aren't everything but then he
followed up by doing the work with
him. Tony Ever's 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, and 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 change 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
uh...
Showing francesca hung way ahead
but i do remember you
know what's that just mentioned
reminded me of talking
with charles franklin and he
essentially said well there are a
lot of uh...
Undecided people out there but
you know with pop hung at the
know, 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 undecide 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.
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 gonna win this thing.
Zach, I mean, what would you say
to someone with
those qualms about the information
they were?
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 score
of a game in the third quarter.
They say, oh, well, 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 pre-season 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,
all right, this is not just about
who I like the most or who's
leading, this about electability.
Yeah, I think that 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
undefided voters or the people who
wouldn't commit in the presidential
race that year.
It'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
a 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 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 a million dollars in that
last those final days.
And I was talking with friend of the
podcast, Anthony Tragoski 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.
Tragowski 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
hit the right time for David Crowley
essentially
So Sean, 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
assent with everyone rallying behind
him, including the money, and then
the way Francesca Hung 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?
Well, I mean, the national window
for our race was just so
brief.
The 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 their 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 Crowly.
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 Carli, by
4,000 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, Sean and
Zach, did you see her campaign,
you know, at the 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 significantly below
what people were talking that she
would receive, then you could wonder
did some of those soft-hung
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 voter 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's 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.
Zach would you say That's the
effect that it had or did they
backfire in Republicans?
I think what 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 there, 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 and say, Democratic
socialists have no place in our
party.
Of course, he's not going to say
that. He's going to those Francesco
Hong supporters to support him.
But the ads were definitely
the opening for him.
Rich, I know a lot of political
observers Nationally, we're 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 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 workout.
And it came pretty close in the
effort to stop.
Um... The far left you know
progressive candidate in the senate
race in michigan the
closeness of that plus this maybe
it changed the conversation
It 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?
Oh man, 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 that Hong 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.
Crowley's beating Hong in this
county, but Crowley is, you know,
they were not expecting that.
And when Tiffany came
and he gave his speech at
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 Hong?
And 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 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 at against
Crowley trying to uh...
You know identify him to the rest
of the state but still then on
a campaign or election night
Unexpected.
So what are you watching for, Zach,
as the campaign gets going
here, week one 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 ad's 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.
And you mentioned the billionaires,
the U lines and Diane Hendricks,
they're not always united around a
Republican candidate or backing the
state party.
And they are this time.
For now.
I think one question you gotta 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 years 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 gonna have to
decide, do we wanna 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 Ben-Wachtendonck
will be back next week.
This has been Inside Wisconsin
Politics.
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