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 Sean Johnson here with my colleagues Anya Van Wechtendank,
Zach Schultz and Rich Kramer in Eau Claire.
Hey everyone.
Hello.
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 front-runner at that point
was less clear.
Zach, 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.
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 Crawley 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 Anya, you've covered David Crawley.
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 Zach 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 fight and not wanting the
status quo.
But also, David Crawley has a particularly kind of
interesting personal backstory.
He comes from a really sort of impoverished challenge
background in Milwaukee.
And so up until he dropped out the first time in this race,
he was kind of described as potentially not electable
because statewide, there's sometimes negative feelings
about Milwaukee.
There is 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 too Milwaukee or is he too establishment?
He can't be both.
Why is he being held to the standard?
And I think he's also trying to say,
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 immediate 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, Rich, 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 there about
and Hong 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 Evers campaign account
to Crowley's campaign account.
That's not a lot of money, but I was talking
with Anthony Tragoski, the political science professor
over at UW-Lacross.
And he said, you know, it's not a lot of money.
$20,000 doesn't buy 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 Tragoski 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 Sarah Rodriguez,
for example, have changed to David Crowley.
I guess my question though, Zach, 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
and 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 and 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 Kelle DeRoyce, former Department of Administration
Secretary Joel Brennan.
Anya, how do they fit into this?
And 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 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 Hong against everyone else.
And so Crowley has been sort of the anointed one,
but then Roy's 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,
Kelle DeRoyce got this really important
teacher's union endorsement that didn't seem
to really shift anything early on.
Whereas, you know, 10, 15 years ago,
that would have been a much more meaningful thing.
So again, I think it just kind of speaks to you.
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 kind of trying to catch up.
And she's not putting herself on TV.
But other people are, you've had these Republican groups
consistently putting her on TV ads,
calling her liberal ahead of this primary.
She has spent zero dollars on television,
which is just unheard of in any type of like 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 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 calling attention to my policies.
So our election is not happening in a vacuum.
There is kind of this wave of Democratic socialist
or Democratic socialist 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,
progressive candidate backed by Democratic socialist allies
nearly won a primary there for a US Senate seat
over an establishment backed congresswoman.
Anya, I guess everyone has taken 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.
So of course, you know, again, 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 wanna see
that DSA backing in these kind of more progressive
leanings 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 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 it was that they were saying
that primary voters, because of past numbers
from Governor races before and Senate races, et cetera,
show that in a primary, it's generally the oldest group,
65 and up that vote the most.
And they're saying, Crowley is the only candidate
talking 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 Syed 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 second place?
I don't know.
Yeah, Zach, if you 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 gonna 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
as 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 Sarah 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 Fran
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 US 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 162021,
or 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 in that people are talking about it.
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 the man 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 has 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 a Hong 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 that holiday brings a lot of pain
to a lot of communities,
but she stopped short of giving a definitive answer.
And then on Wednesday she was asked by Politico
about that tweet, and 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 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
that she's running for now,
you get a different flavor of tweet from her,
or I guess in a post on X now, then 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 fun 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 can talk about social media
without mentioning dirt McGurk,
a 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 opposition dump
that came out after he re-entered 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 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.
And 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 10, 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.
But 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 an era when the president has been known
to say some stuff on social media frequently.
To govern through social media, yeah.
These are sort of tamed 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 pbswisconsin.org,
wpr.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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