Wow. Just wow. What a crazy and chaotic ending to the Democratic primary race for Governor. No one could have predicted that a candidate who dropped out of the primary on July 8th because he said some really offensive stuff on twitter and horribly mismanaged Milwaukee County government, that he would be resurrected by Governor Evers, brought back to life, and actually win. Just insane.
We believe in miracles, we just didn’t believe this miracle was possible. That will teach us to never lose faith again in the Democrat voter’s zealous obsession with one and only one thing – power. Dem voters will literally vote for a senile, career politician
After a roller coaster, whiplash-inducing ending to Wisconsin’s strangest statewide race, here are The Heartland Post’s preliminary winners and losers of the 2026 Primary Campaign.
Winners
Tony Evers
Strange as it may sound, last night’s biggest winner was not Crowley but Governor Tony Evers and his Chief-of-Staff Maggie Gau. Insiders were already putting Evers out to pasture, thinking his hold over the Party and his successful voting coalition had not only waned but all but crumbled. Evers didn’t endorse his first Lieutenant Governor in a critical race to continue his legacy and Democrats’ grip on power. Evers didn’t even endorse his second Lieutenant Governor. He didn’t really seem to care about the race.
Then, all of sudden, after Hong’s disastrous appearance on Fox News and CNN, Evers comes racing off the pickleball court and decides he needs to put his thumb on the scale for Crowley. Even after he made the decision to interfere, Evers was on a trade mission to Africa, which everyone thought would significantly minimize the impact of his endorsement.
No matter, Evers just had to appear at a few campaign events down the stretch, say the quiet part out loud that Hong was out of touch with Wisconsin and couldn’t win in November, and viola, the nominee is David Crowley. What??!! Gau must have had polling or a gut feeling at the end that with all the undecided voters still out there, there was a path for Crowley to win with Evers’ help. No one else thought it was possible, but Gau did. Bravo to her and Evers makes it clear to everyone that he is still in charge of the Democrat Party. Wow.
David Crowley
Brought back to life at the last minute, Crowley narrowly wins a primary contest that he actually dropped out of just days before. When he dropped out, many thought his political career was essentially over. A bruising primary from a DSA candidate was surely in his future when he ran for reelection as County Executive in 2028 but now, he is the Democrat candidate for Governor. Even if you set out to write the craziest and most outlandish script to the Dem primary, you would not have predicted this. Sure, the party base is split and many of his voters are hopping-mad, but he is the nominee.
If someone had told you, if Maggie Gau had told you back in June or July that David Crowley is going to be the nominee, she would have been laughed out of the room and committed for observation. Though Crowley had very little to do with it, Crowley is one of the biggest winners of the primary race.
Northside and Outer Ring of Milwaukee County Voters
Congresswoman Gwen Moore tipped us off to this last night when she announced that 10,000 of the votes that needed to be recounted in Milwaukee County had been cast in the last several days of the primary, after Crowley had leapt back in and Evers endorsed. Her implication was that these were largely Crowley votes and that Crowley was going to end up winning. We need to do some more digging here to confirm, but it sure seems like these longstanding Democrat voters decided that Hong could not win down the stretch and they provided the winning margin for the biggest upset in Wisconsin political history.
Tom Tiffany
No primary to speak of and all of the attention in the race, really the nation, directed at the Democrats and the toxic ending to a chaotic primary race. Tiffany has used this time to just quietly go about his business of methodically building a statewide campaign apparatus and his warchest. While Hong was sticking her foot repeatedly in her mouth and Evers was stabbing Hong in the back, Tiffany has assembled perhaps the state’s largest and most effective grassroots operation ever. Good news for him because with the easy-target Hong out of the race, Team Tiffany is going to need a first rate and concerted effort from today to Election Day to win.
Losers
Francesca Hong
No way around it, Hong was firmly in the driver’s seat all along in the primary and she ended up crashing in spectacular fashion. Crowley’s own polling just days out from the vote showed him down 20 points! Think about that for a second, 20 points with time running out. Looking back, Hong was not ready for prime time and the scrutiny that comes with being out front. Hong was good at giving pre-canned, memorized platitudes that the young socialists in her party craved and accepted as the gospel truth, but it turns out that the world is a bigger, more complex place than the communist utopia that she has meticulously built in her head.
She could have easily said that her hate-filled tweets were something she said in a fit of anger and, just as she has taught her son, she realizes now that speaking when you are full of rage was a poor decision and something that she is working on as a mother, a person and a policy maker.
But, she didn’t do any of that. Instead, she did these interviews as if what she said was mainstream and normal, with an almost condescending look on her face, like how idiotic are you to dare question my prophecy! And don’t get us started on the child-like whisper down the stretch. Voters don’t want someone who sounds like a cartoon character as their nominee. Successful candidates in either party need to be able to read a room and adapt his/her messaging on the fly, borrowing one of her favorite expressions, to meet the voters where they are in that moment. Hong failed spectacularly at this basic and critical campaign characteristic and, because of that absolute failure, she is the biggest loser of the primary.
Hong’s Staff and Close Advisors
To put Hong on Fox and CNN after her hatred towards Thanksgiving was burning like wildfire across the nation was just plain stupid and reckless. Then, after giving everyone unfettered access to their candidate and having it explode in their faces, the handlers decide at the end to prevent certain outlets, local outlets, from interviewing her. As conservatives, we feel good that Hong’s useful idiots will still be a large part of the Dem Party and the socialist movement for the foreseeable future.
The Socialist Movement
They supposedly had momentum following Mandami’s win in New York City but as they attempt to take root outside of an urban center in the rest of the country, the Socialists are finding the political sledding tough and arduous. The polling showed their candidate was way out front in Michigan but when the actual votes were cast and counted, he barely squeaked by in the primary. Their belief that their radical views were beloved by all Democrats went up in smoke in an instant.
And things got even worse here in Wisconsin for the movement this week. Their supposedly articulate and serious candidate Hong was universally criticized and belittled for voicing what they all believe – that the United States is a fundamentally racist country and that all of the things that make our country great, Thanksgiving is the one Hong brought to everyone’s attention, are actually evil and need to be forever discarded from our lives.
The Socialist Movement believes that our treasured and collective traditions need to be thrown out and replaced with their narrow-world view of less individual freedom, more power for an authoritarian and omnipotent government that controls every aspect of our lives. Problem is, it turns out, not everyone, not even their fellow liberals, agrees with their irrational hatred of our country and everything that went in to building our great nation. Hong had a prime opportunity to convince Wisconsinites, and the nation, that the socialist doctrine was relatable to the common man, to the non-coastal elites of the Midwest, but Hong and the entire Socialist movement failed miserably to meet the moment.
Election Administration in Milwaukee
This is starting to feel like a pattern. Once again the City of Milwaukee did not report its absentee votes in a timely manner and once again a bizarre feat of incompetence, something got royally screwed up that delayed reporting even further.
“Human error” caused audit data and not actual vote totals to be downloaded on five of the nine data sticks used to transport the city’s votes from Central Count to the Milwaukee County Courthouse. There is nothing to indicate that any votes were compromised, but whether it is forgetting a USB drive containing the votes in 2020, a Milwaukee Election Commission deputy director convicted of voter fraud in 2022, incorrect ballots mailed out and tabulator machines not properly locked in 2024, there is also nothing about the way Milwaukee runs elections that should inspire any confidence.
