FRANKLIN, Wis. — The first, second and third questions for Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong at her meet-and-greet Thursday night revolved around her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America.
Voters described a “real fear” she can’t win a general election for governor, questioned whether she’d tailor her policy platform to reach swing voters and asked for a primer on “what we can say to others when that concern comes up.”
This standing-room-only event captured Hong’s appeal — a packed, generationally diverse crowd, surrounded by dozens of hand-drawn signs for the once little-known state legislator — but it also reflected the angst of voters here. At times, it bordered on group therapy, with voters airing their concerns over Hong’s ability to win the governor’s race in a closely divided state that President Donald Trump won two years ago.
“In a super, super purple state, I’m worried she’s not going to catch the people on the fence,” said Faith Casselman, a 32-year-old medical education coordinator who attended the event.
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This anxiety has defined much of the primary itself, as Hong’s opponents insist the state assemblymember would be unable to beat Rep. Tom Tiffany, the likely GOP nominee. As DSA candidates rack up victories in blue cities and districts, tapping into a deep discontent within the Democratic Party, Hong’s candidacy is the first test of it in a battleground state. The results, say Democrats in Wisconsin and Washington, will offer clues for how the party’s electorate might assess a potential DSA-aligned candidate, like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the 2028 presidential primary.
“The Democratic brand is struggling. The Republican brand is struggling,” Hong told NOTUS in an interview. “The democratic socialist brand is starting to rise, especially among the voters who are hardest to reach, which are Gen Z and millennials.”
That isn’t a satisfactory answer, though, for some Wisconsin Democrats.
“If you’re trying to explain what DSA is or isn’t, you’re losing,” said a Wisconsin Democratic consultant not working with any of the gubernatorial candidates, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, one of Hong’s opponents in the Aug. 11 primary, is left trying to make the argument that Wisconsin is not like the heavily Democratic places where the DSA has flourished this year. “New York City and the state of Wisconsin” are “different,” he told a dozen voters in the town of Baraboo, many of whom nodded along.
But as has been true in other major races this year, from Colorado to Maine to New Jersey, the Democratic establishment has struggled to fend off the rising far left. Wisconsin has turned into the most vivid showdown of those competing wings. Democrats in the state have seen a cast of traditional candidates rise and fall over the past month — all while that wing of the party has failed to coalesce around a single alternative.
In early July, Crowley dropped out and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, when it appeared she was uniting moderate support. But Rodriguez dropped out just over a week later, after her campaign acknowledged widespread campaign finance irregularities. Crowley opted to get back into the race with an endorsement from Gov. Tony Evers, who had previously said he’d remain neutral; backers of another candidate, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, decried the move as fracturing the center-left bloc again.
But then Thursday, Barnes, who’d been polling second-highest behind Hong, dropped out. In a video, he said the “front-runner is clear,” but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel soon after published a story about concerns within the party that Barnes had allegedly used his political role to facilitate sexual relationships.
Crowley, along with state Sen. Kelda Roys and former Evers administration official Joel Brennan, were all polling in single-digits, while Hong hit 38 percent support in a Marquette University survey conducted in late July. About a third of voters were still undecided.
“It’s a collapse of the establishment combined with the bumbling of a bad situation,” said Steve Schale, a national Democratic consultant. “The socialist doesn’t have to get to 50 percent to win. It requires the normie class — mainstream, establishment, whatever it is — failing to recognize that threat and rally around one person.”
In Wisconsin, several voters described the primary campaign as “chaotic” and “unsettling,” or “basically a reality show,” as Caitlin Hapsel, a 38-year-old Greendale resident at Hong’s event in Franklin, put it. Nyaga Kariuki, a 25-year-old Milwaukee voter, said “the moderates just did not get themselves together.”
Moderates’ disarray is worrying Eleanor Chiquoine, a 72-year-old voter from Sauk County who was happy to learn at Crowley’s event in Baraboo that Barnes had dropped out — “Oh, that’s good,” she said. She worries that Hong is “unelectable” but she hasn’t been able to settle on another option.
“Whether it is fair or not, being labeled, in this state especially, as a democratic socialist, then that might be a harder sell than you think, and that’s my concern,” Chiquoine said. She left with a Crowley yard sign, but she said she planned to keep it in her dining room until she finally picks a candidate.
Those are the kinds of voters Crowley needs to win over in less than two weeks, a tall order for a candidate who’s still trying to build his name recognition outside Milwaukee and with early voting already underway.
Crowley, in an interview with NOTUS, said he sees a “clear path to consolidate these undecided voters” that’s “based off of my experience” leading Milwaukee County and as a state legislator.
He’s now making an all-out sprint to introduce himself to voters, helped by a surge in fundraising since he jumped back into the race. Another Wisconsin Democratic operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly and not affiliated with a gubernatorial candidate, argued that 60 percent of the electorate “doesn’t want to vote for Fran,” giving Hong a “hard floor and low ceiling” of support.
“There are enough voters out there, and if Crowley can muster enough resources and reach them, he can really do something here,” the operative said. “But that’s a narrow path.”
Republicans, Crowley said, have picked Hong as their preferred candidate, pointing to the $3 million in TV ad spending the Republican Governors Association has dropped boosting her. In a post on X last week, Tiffany previewed his own line of attack on Hong, describing her as “a card-carrying socialist committed to abolishing the police, the Senate, and prisons.”
“That should make us pause a little bit, right?” Crowley said at his meet-and-greet in Baraboo. “If they have an opportunity to pick our nominees and say, ‘Oh, this is what communism looked like, or this is what socialism looks like,’ what does that do [to] defining who we are?”
Hong, a single mother and restaurant worker, has already started to define herself with voters, particularly younger, more liberal ones. Like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Hong has tapped into a potent organizing network, activating 7,000 volunteers and campaigning aggressively online. In answer to the voters who wanted to know how she’d combat labels of communism, Hong said her campaign has put out “clarification videos on our positions” and urged voters to zero in on Tiffany’s record.
“Bringing it back to policy is how we combat that word that, you know, they called Joe Biden and Tony Evers,” she said. “We don’t even have a $10 minimum wage in our state, let alone $19, so what makes you think we’re going to make socialism happen?”
Eddie Phanichkul, a Democrat who is running to flip a state Assembly district in suburban Milwaukee and attended Hong’s event in Franklin, acknowledged that “the socialism and the communism part is going to be a challenge.” But he said he believed they could “overcome that challenge because we just have to talk to people.”
In an interview with NOTUS after speaking to a few dozen voters at a community garden in Milwaukee, Hong said, “Wisconsin is ready for a democratic socialist governor because we’re fighting for the things that people are asking for” and “a growing number of voters who feel left behind and unheard.”
“Electability is the person who wins the most votes,” she said when pressed on how she’d appeal to voters come November. “I’m a proud democratic socialist. I’m not advancing a brand. I’m focusing on the policies, the socialist policies that improve lives.”
But some Wisconsin Democrats, particularly those focused on down-ballot state legislative races, don’t buy that argument. Some privately fret that Hong’s candidacy, and her DSA labeling, could make flipping state legislative seats more difficult and that money from Democratic donors would dry up.
In the districts where there are “data center fights, she might turn into a folk hero, and other places, it may be more complicated,” said a third Wisconsin strategist who is not involved in the gubernatorial primary. “People are incandescent about prices, the Iran war and data centers, so the question is, is all of that enough to overcome the kinds of attack ads Tiffany will surely be running the day after the primary.”
It’s Hong’s positions on the “defund police” movement that gives those Wisconsin Democrats the most heartburn, they said. “She’s somewhat backed off of that, but the receipts are there, the tweets are there,” the first Democratic consultant said.
In 2020, Hong posted several times in support of defunding the police after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When a voter at the community garden event asked about her posts, Hong said, “We’re in a different political climate than where we were five years ago, where the fearmongering of ‘defund’ is not as much of a priority when we’re able to shift to the issues.”
Pressed on her position in the interview, Hong said her “values are established.”
“How I believe I can make sure that we have laws that reflect those values, that may evolve, but again, I think it’s more important about what I’m going to do, and I’m going to be investing in things that we know would prevent crime,” she said. “I won’t defund the police, and I cannot.”
DSA supporters, who gathered for their national meeting in Chicago over the weekend, are keeping a close eye on Wisconsin. Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, a DSA-backed candidate who won his own multicandidate congressional primary this year, said that “if Hong wins, it will affirm that the platforms of democratic socialist candidates are more broadly embraced by a diverse electorate than corporate media and institutionalists within our electoral duopoly care to admit.”
The DSA does have some political history on its side. At the Franklin Public Library event, one voter brought up Wisconsin’s legacy as the first state to elect a socialist to Congress, in 1910.
“Don’t apologize for being a democratic socialist,” the voter told Hong, rushing to shake her hand. “That’s part of Wisconsin’s tradition. Welcome.”
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