It turns out there is a limit to how far left Democrats are willing to go with a crucial swing state on the line.
Francesca Hong ran up against that wall on Tuesday, falling short in her race against Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin.
He’ll go up against Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican backed by President Donald Trump and closely associated with his MAGA movement, setting up a major contrast in a state where elections are often decided by paper-thin margins.
Had Hong won, she would have had a chance to become the first democratic socialist governor in any state in US history. And Hong was the story of the election for most of the last month: She led recent polls by a double-digit margin, and Crowley’s campaign was considered a last-second rescue mission by party leaders — he had previously dropped out of the race, and only rejoined it last month with Gov. Tony Evers’s encouragement after other candidates faltered.
Despite his earlier stumbles, however, Crowley managed to consolidate Democratic support amid widespread concerns about Hong’s viability in a general election.
Hong’s rise and fall showcased multiple trends in the party — the growing appeal of progressive populism, the struggles of center-left party leaders to contain it, and an ongoing debate about electability that ultimately proved too much for her to overcome.
The issue that helped propel Hong’s campaign
Hong, 37, is a chef by trade and first ran for state assembly in 2020 while struggling to keep her ramen restaurant afloat during the pandemic. She tapped into the same well of progressive activism that’s powered other insurgent campaigns this year, positioning herself as a candidate who would aim higher in office than her opponents.
“Incrementalism is irresponsible,” she told Vox’s Andrew Prokop last month. “Pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.”
But state political experts credited one issue in particular for helping her stand out the most: data centers.
Hong was an early and vocal opponent just as public opposition was beginning to surge. Running on a pledge to “Control-Alt-Delete” the AI buildout, she pledged to cut off tax incentives and implement a moratorium on new projects.
The rest of the field imploded
Though Hong’s populist-left politics dominated the headlines, the story of her rise was also about a cascading series of failures among the rest of the Democratic field.
Just as Democratic leaders hoped to consolidate behind a more conventional candidate to head off Hong, things started going off the rails in the final weeks of the contest, leaving them little time to course-correct.
In July, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez dropped out of the race just as her campaign was gaining some traction, citing campaign finance irregularities that made it impossible to continue.
That left former Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes, who lost a close Senate race in 2022, as Hong’s only significant rival. But Evers, concerned about Barnes’s viability, encouraged Crowley to reenter the race after he had already dropped out, and then endorsed his revived campaign.
Barnes and Crowley split the vote in polls while Hong surged — but then Barnes dropped out just as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel revealed it was investigating allegations of sexual misconduct.
Republicans, meanwhile, were happy to take advantage of the mess to try to build momentum for Hong, who they saw as a weaker opponent. A group associated with the Republican Governors Association spent over $3 million on “attack” ads to help elevate her profile with Democratic primary voters.
With just weeks to rally support, Crowley looked to assemble a coalition of moderates along with Black voters, a demographic that left-wing candidates have often struggled to win over in primaries.
“When people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American candidate,” Crowley said ahead of Election Day. “I have never run for office to protect the establishment. I’ve always been here to protect people.”
Hong’s campaign split the left
Even as Hong rocketed to frontrunner status, cracks began to show. Unlike Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, whose campaign became a massive rallying point for progressive leaders around the country, the lesser-known Hong was greeted with somewhat less enthusiasm on the left.
Most notably, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a frequent booster of left-wing insurgent campaigns, did not endorse her, saying he was not focused on the race.
Some of that may have had to do with electability concerns, a sensitive issue for the Sanders-led movement as it looks to prove it can win in swing states this cycle, something that has eluded them since 2016.
As Hong rose in the polls, she gave a series of interviews to national media outlets where she faced questions about old rhetoric, like a call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” and some past controversial positions, like abolishing prisons and defunding the police. While she eventually made clear she would not pursue either idea in office, her sometimes disjointed answers worried allies on the left, who publicly urged her to refocus her campaign on more friendly topics.
The divide over Hong ended up sparking a broader national discussion among progressives about how — and whether — to move past the more strident language and policies around social justice issues that hit their peak during the pandemic.
“I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said on ABC News on Sunday. “Woke 1 was crazy.”
The debate clearly resonated with voters in Wisconsin, who were looking to their nominee to be a bulwark against a Republican nominee who had sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Democrats have proven willing to break with tradition and embrace new arguments about what makes a candidate electable in 2026, but Hong wasn’t able to convince them she was worth the bet.
