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In other closely watched races, Michael Alfonso won the Republican primary in the 7th congressional district in northern Wisconsin. He's the Trump endorsed son-in-law of transportation secretary Sean Duffy. The 7th has a strong Republican lean and if elected the 26 year old Alfonso will become the youngest member of Congress. He faces former state legislator, Frank Clark, who won the Democratic primary in the 3rd congressional district in western Wisconsin. Rebecca
Cook won the Democratic primary with more than 60% of the vote, setting up a rematch with Republican Congressman Derek Van Orden. Plenty to talk about with our political panelists, Republican Bill McCation, and Democrat Scott Ross. Thanks to both of you for being here.
Thanks for having us.
First, we have to talk about Crowley's win on Tuesday, Scott. How improbable was it to see a candidate drop out and then come back in less than a month and win the nomination?
Oh, it's something we haven't seen before. But, you know, David Crowley has a long record of delivering for the people of Wisconsin as the county executive of the largest counties cut property taxes. He's invested in small businesses. He's invested in community health. And he's invested in the things that really drive the economy and move things forward.
He's a formidable candidate against a very flawed candidate in Tom Tiffany, who has a 10 year record in the state legislature of making it harder for Wisconsinites. And he decided to go after to Congress on the next thing. And he's spent five years making it harder for everybody else.
So, Bill, Tom Tiffany, Republicans seemed very eager to face Francesca Hong. Will it be a shift for them to pivot to Crowley?
Yeah, I don't think there's any question about that. But to the original question, I think it's unprecedented what happened on Tuesday night.
I mean, we've never seen a candidate get out of the race and then get back into the race, get the sitting governor's endorsement, the sitting governor travels around the state with him and literally brings him across the finish line.
It's for your poker players and poker enthusiasts that are watching this show. This is like a royal flush. For that to happen, every star had to line up perfectly and I give Governor Evers credit.
I mean, he leaned into David Crowley and did everything he could. He put his legacy on the line.
And it worked. That, coupled with $4 million, adds at the end that trade unions were very much involved in. They get credit for that as well.
And there was some, finally, some contrast in the race. David Crowley ran some contrast. And it was on the biggest flaw that Francesca Hong made the entire campaign, which was the issue of Thanksgiving.
She said, she had all tweets that said cancels Thanksgiving. She went on both Fox News and CNN and had some unfortunate comments that lasted a whole week nationally.
It was a bad, it was the worst unforced era I've ever seen in statewide politics. That played into this as well. But it was an unbelievable comeback for David Crowley.
Would you ever thought Thanksgiving was going to be the deciding issue?
Well, I always joke that like, you know, Donald Trump hates Thanksgiving, too, because it means he has to spend more time with Donald Jr. and Eric.
I don't know if he spends any time with the second one from the second marriage or the, you know, anchor baby from the third, but that's, you know.
And again, this race now goes on to Donald Trump. This is about Donald Trump and Tom Tiffany. Tom Tiffany and Donald Trump lie about everything.
He has a long record of failing Wisconsin, whether it's cutting $300 billion from rural healthcare, whether it's a nationwide abortion ban, which he supports.
When he was in the state legislature, he cut public education by the largest in history.
This case now will be about Donald Trump, who's, you know, raiding is in the toilet, and the fact that Tom Tiffany votes with him, not 80% of the time, not 90% of the time, 100% of the time.
My God, if, you know, we usually see candidates out there on buses, if Donald Trump says so, Tom Tiffany is going to be riding around in a, you know, in one of those catering carts.
Well, Donald, Tom Tiffany was asked, would you like to see Donald Trump in Wisconsin and he hedged? He said, oh, he's very busy.
Well, let me just be very clear about this. No one in history has gotten more votes in the state of Wisconsin than Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump can turn out that 1.7 million voters for Tom Tiffany, Tom Tiffany will easily be the next governor of the state of Wisconsin.
So, yes, there is a role for Donald Trump in this election.
And whether that's town hall meetings like he did for Michael Alfonso, or it's mail, or it's phone banks, or whatever it may be, and maybe it's public appearances, we'll see.
But there's absolutely a role for Donald Trump.
So, I want to talk about polling. I know you have a long-standing beef with the media and how the media covers polling.
What should we take away from this, and what's your advice to the public when it comes to the avalanche of polls we're going to see in the next couple months?
Well, again, you know, when you're covering, when you make the race just about the horse race, you're not talking about the important issues that face the people Wisconsin, whether it's education, whether it's, you know, affordability, whether it's fact that gas prices are at record high, nearly $4 a gallon of state of Wisconsin.
All those sorts of things take away from what is the real issue here, which is what the candidates stand for, what they're going to do, what they've done in the past, and what they're going to do in the future for us.
And so, that's where I think we have to, you know, we can't just anoint people based on, you know, what is in a sample, because we've seen polling here.
I mean, you know, in April, we saw polling that said, Maria Lazar had a chance, and two weeks later, she lost by, you know, 20 points.
You know, so I, again, I think that the important thing is, is that people are transparent in the process and make sure that, you know, they get the information they need, and maybe polling isn't the way to determine.
It should be determined by who you think is going to be best for you and make your life better.
How much did it discourage Republicans? Because they were dead set. They were going to face Francesca Hong.
Oh, I think they were certain, including me, that she was going to win that primary, because on Friday before the Tuesday election, a poll came out that had her up 22 points.
Even Marquette's poll, the week prior, had her up 20 points, so all four of the last polls were 20 or more.
Marquette actually got her number right. They had her at 38, she finished at 39.3, that's well within the margin of error.
What they, they also got right was the undecided number, was probably around 34% two weeks out.
What nobody could have predicted. I don't think Scott could have. I certainly couldn't have, was that David Crowley would get almost 100% of the undecided.
That's unheard of. Fran Hong got one of the 34%. David Crowley got 32. One percent went others in their field.
That's absolutely unprecedented in Wisconsin politics, and it shows that the coalescing of Democrats behind a single candidate focused on electability worked.
Yeah, that was the thing. I mean, when you focused on that issue of electability, something was very easy.
You said the Thanksgiving thing, I think that was absolutely devastating to the Hong campaign.
And it showed rather than large, complicated policy pronouncements, if the issue is electability, it's pretty easy to understand that that might be a vulnerability, because a lot of people like Thanksgiving.
Yeah. So, the wrap on Tom Tiffany a year ago, when he was first being floated as a candidate for governor, was can he raise any money?
Well, he's had billionaires that have transferred money through the party to him. He's funded a lot of ads. He's already on the air right now.
Will he have enough, or do you think maybe the billionaire faucet gets turned off if they don't view this as as winnable a race with it Crowley versus Hong?
Oh, I think he's going to raise more money than any candidate history, and that includes the self-funders that we've had in the last couple of cycles on the Republican side.
I don't think money's going to be an issue for Tom Tiffany. I think they're going to do even more on the low dollar side.
That's out there. It's called low-hanging fruit and politics. They can easily go get that, but Tom Tiffany will not have a resource issue.
Well, Democrats have enough money. Ben Wilke is not there at the Democratic Party to bring in all that money.
He's helping with this. Yeah, I think he'll be helping out.
Yeah, the Democratic strategy is to raise a lot of money, right?
They've done a very good job using things like the loopholes created by Robin Vossen.
We've never been in on the graph.
May have some other instance of being hoisted on your own petard, and they have $5 million left to spend, of course, because the Republicans, what they wanted to accomplish was that Fran Hong not be the next governor of the great state of Wisconsin, and with their $5 million of spending have achieved their goal.
So I'm sure they're popping champagne bottles over that one.
This is going to be a wide open race. Clearly, as you pointed out, Tom Tiffany has raised $10 million of his money in 2026 from 3 billionaires, the 2 U lines and Diane Hendrix.
And on the day he got his last transfer, he promised on the radio he was not going to raise taxes on billionaires, so that was a nice timing for that.
This is the loophole that Democrats have used successfully under Ben Wickler for 10 straight years.
Republicans have finally figured it out.
We're leveling the playing field.
The irony of this is it was less than a year ago that Tom Tiffany was calling this the billionaire loophole that Democrats abused, even though he was part of the process of creating it, but now he's taking advantage of it.
Well, why wouldn't you?
It's a legal mechanism for raising money in the state of Wisconsin, and Republicans have failed to use it in the past.
Tiffany's not going to make that mistake.
You can spend all the money he wants, but he can't erase his record.
He did scrub his website right before he got in saying all the really radically extreme policies, but that again yesterday he was photographed with his lit in his back pocket, which says MAGA extremist Tom Tiffany.
So we'll have to see how he explains that one away.
gubernatorial races are all about the future.
What are you going to do for me?
What's in it for me as a voter if I vote for you?
Scott Ross or Bill McCoschner in this case, Tom Tiffany or David Crowley.
Tom Tiffany is already out with positive ads talking about his agenda for the future of the state of Wisconsin.
And I think it's very, very positive.
You're also going to see sharp contrast between him and David Crowley, which you did not see until the very end of the Democratic primary.
And I think that was a mistake for all the other candidates who ran against Francesca Hong.
David Crowley figured it out at the right time, and it worked.
Switching to congressional races, we've got a rematch in the third with incumbent Republican Derek Van Orden against Rebecca Cook.
Scott, does this race follow the national environment or the top of the ticket?
Or does it stand out on its own, particularly for Democrats and independents in the third?
Well, I would say that because Tom Tiffany supports the $2 billion slush fund for terrorist insurrectionists,
that he is the biggest January 6 terrorist insurrectionist in Wisconsin.
But we actually have a January 6 terrorist insurrectionist as the candidate and current Congress person from the third congressional district, Derek Van Orden.
He is unhinged.
People criticize me sometimes about my speaking online, but this guy is totally unhinged.
And Rebecca Cook brings a real experience of what people in the third congressional district have to deal with, affordability, gas prices, working two jobs.
And I think that translates much better for what the public is going to want in this election,
especially given the record that Trump has in the state, whether it's with Tom Tiffany or Derek Van Orden, of really hurting people in Wisconsin.
And in midterms, which are historically bad for the party in power, and in this case it's Republicans,
87% of incumbent Congress people get reelected.
So the advantage is going to be to Derek Van Orden.
Rebecca Cook has already lost that seat twice.
I think she's going to lose the rematch.
It's going to be a hat trick of losses for her.
But it'll be a competitive race right down to the end.
And that's one where we may see Donald Trump in La Crosse real clear.
So Derek Van Orden need to adjust his behavior.
Already on Twitter this week, he was saying Democrats stole the primary election.
Or is it just be who he is?
I think he is who he is.
I wouldn't have said that.
I don't think that's accurate.
I don't think we should care how your primary played out.
At the end of the day, Francesca Hong didn't care.
She had the ability to ask for a recount.
She chose not to.
Spoke volumes about her character, I think.
So we should focus on the future.
What voters want us to talk about is what are you going to do to help us balance our checkbook every month here?
So in the seventh congressional, Michael Alfonso used his father-in-law's money and the Trump endorsement to Cruz to the nomination.
Ordinarily, the seventh is an in play.
Could it be with someone of his particular reputation and this being an open seat?
If ever the sauce was there to be sampled by the Democratic voters, it might be there because this is a guy who has absolutely no experience.
He's a carpet bagger.
He got there by essentially financed by Sean Duffy's corruption.
So yes, I think that if Fred Clark can get the resources to be able to articulate that, then I say it's entirely possible whether or not he'll be able to get it.
It's going to be tough because, again, Republican failure all over the country, the Democrats are all over the place in terms of being able to spend in races they might not otherwise have been able to get.
Very clearly, Democrats will have the control of the Congress come after this election.
This is like Tom Tiffany's home place and there's a lot of legacy there.
There's legacy.
Listen, Michael Alfonso and his family moved to Land of Lakes when he was three years old.
I know this because I coached him in hockey when he was ten years old for a team out of an aqua.
He then they moved to Wasau when he was in middle school, which is where he met Sean Duffy's daughter.
He's a Wisconsin.
I threw it through.
I like the notion of having someone young on our side finally running for a major office and I think he's going to do well.
He surprised me by how much he won a highly competitive primary by.
That was an impressive win considering the amount of money that was spent in that district.
All right.
That is all the time we have.
Bill McCosh and Scott Ross.
Thanks again.
Thanks to be here.
He's entertaining.