What Francesca Hong’s Defeat Means for Democrats
Outside of Presidential elections, most political races—even those on which the future of a party is said to hinge—are fiercely contested by only a small number of people. Last night, in Madison, Wisconsin, I pulled up a little late to what was supposed to be a victory party for Francesca Hong, a democratic-socialist state legislator whose rise in the state’s gubernatorial primary was understood to portend a major breakthrough for the left. There was no trouble getting inside. A music venue had been rented for a crowd of around seven hundred people, and the event had the scale, and the feel, of a punk show in a college town. An activist I was talking with sounded a little amazed that there were so many reporters in the press section. Then, as the results came in, the crowd thinned.
That Hong’s candidacy was treated as a big political-news event reflected the momentum generated by left-wing candidates this year, and the electoral risks that they are sometimes said to pose for the Democratic Party. The left had built on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s mayoral race, with victories by democratic socialists over incumbents in a few congressional primaries this summer, in districts in New York City and Denver. The question this month was whether the left could also win statewide primaries in less progressive states, and polls showed both Abdul El-Sayed, running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, and Hong winning handily. Last Tuesday, El-Sayed, who is not a democratic socialist but who had campaigned with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren, narrowly won his primary. Yesterday, Hong, who is a democratic socialist but had none of those endorsements, narrowly lost her race to David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive.
The final days of the Wisconsin contest were dominated by the presence of Tony Evers, the sitting governor who declined to seek another term. He travelled the state, saying loudly and a little grouchily that Democrats were on the verge of a huge mistake and that their voters needed to get their acts together. (To be fair to the voters, the Party’s elected officials had struggled to get their own act together; Crowley had initially dropped out of the race, after drawing little support, only to reënter as two other candidates who had been running well ahead of him—Sara Rodriguez and Mandela Barnes—dropped out.) Evers, a seventy-four-year-old former science teacher, is not normally the loudest or most confrontational of politicians, so his forcefulness got attention. When a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Evers whether Hong, then seen as the front-runner, would be able to beat the Republican Tom Tiffany, a pro-Trump congressman, in the general election, the governor eschewed partisan protocol and said, “Probably not.”
Was Hong, who lost to Crowley by a few thousand votes, unelectable? She had an interesting mix of strengths and weaknesses that made her a little different from a generic left-wing candidate. Raised in Madison by Korean-immigrant parents, she had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and worked her way up in restaurants, from a dishwasher to the owner of a ramen shop, before running for the state legislature on a progressive platform supporting expanded unionization and a more skeptical view of the police. Early in the gubernatorial campaign, Hong had proposed a moratorium on data centers in the state, a politically perceptive choice that took advantage of public antipathy toward Silicon Valley billionaires and which reached far beyond her left-wing audience. (Politicians from the centrist Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, to the very conservative governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, have since taken up the anti-data-center banner.) But, unlike Mamdani, or El-Sayed, Hong wasn’t a natural on broadcast media, and, when reporters raised what seemed like performative old tweets of hers (she had denounced both Thanksgiving and fireworks), she could not straightforwardly explain or dismiss them. Instead, she wound up in the reduced and defensive position of insisting to Politico that, in fact, she loved Thanksgiving.
That the upper echelon of the Democratic Party’s left wing mostly stayed away from this race makes Hong’s defeat a little less significant; it also shows some savvy on the part of Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. And the remarkably strong turnout of Democratic voters across these primaries is a very good sign for the Party’s prospects in November. Even so, the final stages of the race in Wisconsin this week offered some clarity about why neither part of the Democratic Party has yet been able to decisively beat the other.
For all its avowals of awakening a broad working-class movement, the left remains mostly the faction of the young, educated, urban middle class, and its candidates have struggled among older, non-college-educated, and suburban and rural voters, both in races that they’ve won, such as in Michigan, and lost, as in Wisconsin. El-Sayed, a more obviously talented political performer than Hong, faced a minor scandal of his own this week, when CNN reported that he had made private more than a hundred YouTube videos he’d recorded between 2022 and 2024, which included some lightly embarrassing progressive posturing, notably an opposition to fireworks. On ABC’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez tried to excuse such statements as part of the social experience of the pandemic: “Woke 1 was crazy.” But the candidates she was defending were mature politicians when they made those comments—El-Sayed, a Rhodes Scholar and former Wayne County health director, had already run for statewide office—who, in general elections, will need to find a more convincing explanation for why they no longer believe in the bold-sounding remarks they made a short time ago.
The trouble for the rest of the Democratic Party is about newness. There are still only three sitting democratic-socialist members of Congress. That this tiny faction has been the major story of the midterm elections shows how much difficulty the rest of the Party has had in making a compelling case. Hong’s early capture of the data-center issue, which was not especially ideological, is a good example of how consistently the Party’s much larger traditional wing has been out-hustled. When I watched debates between left-wing and established candidates this spring, and heard the incumbents rattling off their accomplishments, I often thought, That’s it? (Anyone denouncing the upset victory of the democratic-socialist activist Darializa Avila Chevalier over Representative Adriano Espaillat in a northern Manhattan and Bronx congressional primary, for instance, should take in the meek case that Espaillat made for himself in their debate.) A decade into the Trump era, for incumbents to ask for voters’ support by promising that they are “fighters” and criticizing the right-wing agenda, as many did this cycle, won’t cut it. When CNN sent its feed to Wisconsin, even as the results went against the left, the cameras turned, again and again, to Hong’s “victory” party. Crowley, the winner of the primary and probably the slight favorite to be elected governor, was barely in the picture.
It is strange to go through a period of such apparent tumult in the Party and see a stubborn, unresolved status quo. And yet, as the primary season ends, that is the basic situation. In the half century since the civil-rights movement, a period whose main patterns have been the progress of cultural liberalism and the politics of conservative backlash, the Democratic Party has largely been shaped by two defining figures: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It still awaits a third. For all the interest and momentum that the left has generated this year, it is still probably the smaller faction. But those who stand outside of it—call them centrists, liberals, or traditional progressives—are undoubtedly the duller ones. In Milwaukee this morning, the summer haze was thick, the public biergartens in the parks were awaiting the post-work crowds, and most of Wisconsin’s population was left with the quizzical aftermath of a remarkably heated and only partly resolved argument that was contested by about an eighth of them. ♦