More than 300,000 Wisconsin voters backed a democratic socialist’s gubernatorial bid. That’s the measure of the strength of a new kind of politics.
Francesca Hong at a primary election night watch party at Atwood Music Hall in Madison, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (Talia Sprague / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This week, Francesca Hong won one of the highest vote totals ever recorded for a Wisconsin Democrat in a seriously contested primary for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Her tally—around 312,000 votes—was almost 90,000 votes more than Democratic Governor Tony Evers won when he was first nominated in 2018.
Evers chose not to seek reelection this year. He remained aloof from a chaotic multi-candidate campaign to replace him, before finally endorsing a last-minute bid by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who on Tuesday finished a little over 3,000 votes ahead of Hong.
Election analysis is often an exercise in managing expectations, and that it certainly the case in Wisconsin, where pre-primary polls put Hong in the lead. When she didn’t prevail, pundits and political insiders rushed to declare a definitional victory for the Democratic Party’s embattled centrist wing.
“Democrat establishment strikes back as socialist candidate downed in battleground primary,” read the Fox News headline, while CNBC announced, “Hong’s defeat in Wisconsin deals blow to rising Democratic socialists.” And, of course, The New York Times presumed that “A Stunning Loss in Wisconsin Shows the Limits of the Left.”
Seriously? A little-known legislator with a scant campaign treasury, whose candidacy was actively opposed by the sitting governor and faced a hair-on-fire national media onslaught, finished in a virtual tie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the ultimate swing state. And we’re supposed to believe that the result has defined the limits of the left?
History suggests differently.
Movements are built over time. Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive governor of Wisconsin in the early 20th century, lost repeated bids for his Republican Party’s gubernatorial nomination. He was labeled too radical, too unprepared and too unfit to govern. And then he won. The transformational figure in the modern Democratic Party of Wisconsin, William Proxmire, was dismissed as a gadfly. He lost bids for governor in 1952, 1954 and 1956. Then, in 1957, he won a special election for what had been Joe McCarthy’s US Senate seat and ushered in a new kind of politics in a once-rigidly Republican state.
In the heat of an election season, results are measured in raw vote totals. But they should also be measured by the potential they reveal. That is what Hong did on election night. “We have built something that will change politics forever,” she told a cheering crowd of young supporters. “What we have done will be remembered. I don’t even know how the final results will end. But what I do know is that we are ready to keep fighting, and I feel confident. More importantly, I am so deeply, deeply grateful.”
Hong had every right to be grateful, and every right to be confident about the future.
With an outsider campaign that defied expectations and conventional wisdom, she came within a whisker of winning one of the highest-profile contests of a volatile election year. Even as she promised to fully support Crowley, Hong reflected, appropriately, on what her own run had accomplished. “This campaign was not about getting one person into office,” she said. “It is about building a movement and a government that puts working people first. Our movement is strong, and the work isn’t done.”
The map of Wisconsin confirms that assessment. Hong’s support was not narrowly defined, nor regionally constricted. She won 20 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, carrying wide swathes of northwest and western Wisconsin, as well as much of the industrial Fox Valley. She won Green Bay and surrounding Brown County, as well as Democratic strongholds such as Eau Claire and La Crosse. She carried Menominee County, the home of the state’s Menominee Indian Reservation. Her highest percentage of the vote came not from liberal Madison’s Dane County but from Ashland County on the far shores of Lake Superior. She even came within 2,400 votes of winning Crowley’s Milwaukee County.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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While much of the national coverage of the Wisconsin campaign had focused on Hong’s democratic socialism and her old tweets about Thanksgiving and the best place to sample cheese curds, the secret to her statewide viability was not a novel new approach developed by strategists in New York or Washington.
Rather, Hong practiced an old-school version of Wisconsin Democratic politics—recognizing the importance of building a coalition rooted in the progressive heartlands of Madison, the diverse precincts of Milwaukee, and the rural regions that Democrats have so frequently neglected. In building that coalition, Hong did something that is so rare in politics that it confused many of the national reporters who began following her as her campaign as it surged in the polls: she engaged in real conversations with Wisconsinites, joking with them, showing off her Milwaukee Bucks tattoo, and paying close attention when they talked about things like their concerns about AI data centers.
Long before most Democrats nationally took an interest in the issue, Hong called for a moratorium on construction of major data centers. But she did not stop there. She recognized that the widespread opposition to data centers is just one expression of a deeper anxiety over the threat that artificial intelligence poses to jobs, privacy and the frameworks of our lives. So—in addition to plans to tax the rich and fully-funded public education, break up agribusiness monopolies, establish public banking and strengthen unions—she proposed a detailed agenda that promised “no tax breaks or state funding for AI layoffs” and said that, when it came to AI regulation, “Wisconsin will step in to protect workers if the federal government won’t.”
Hong’s determination to build a campaign based on her interactions with voters—as opposed to demands from campaign donors and talking points from out-of-state consultants—set her apart. And it built a loyalty that saw her through the turbulent close of a campaign in which candidates with more money and name recognition stumbled and, in many cases, dropped out. Even amid claims that Hong could not beat a Republican “culture wars” crusade that would attack her as a holiday-hating Marxist, hundreds of thousands of Democratic primary voters stuck with the 37-year-old progressive, who proudly identified herself as “a mom, service worker, chef, and community organizer”
Just as Hong stuck with them. While most of the media’s attention to the last days of the campaign focused on some ill-advised appearances on national cable shows—where the commentariat could talk about nothing but old tweets on police funding and Thanksgiving—the candidate spent most of her time on the road, traveling along blue highways and county roads from Viroqua (population: 4,504) to Siren (population: 1,554) and to historic manufacturing centers such as Kenosha, and, of course, to Green Bay. She frequently mentioned the latter city in response to questions about her supposedly “radical” ideology: “When people ask about my style of progressive politics, I always start with the three Ps: fixing potholes, fully funding our public schools, and our community-owned Green Bay Packers.”
“At some stops,” Hong noted, “we’ve even had to change venues because so many people [were] showing up.” They wanted pictures with the former chef and restaurant owner from Madison who so many national commentators portrayed as “too radical” or “too woke” to connect with voters in a swing state such as Wisconsin. In fact, Francesca Hong connected with more than 300,000 of them, as she laid the foundations for a movement that is far from finished.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.