In the history of rough days in Wisconsin politics, David Crowley had one of the roughest.
His debate performance was such a disaster that he couldn’t even bring himself to face the media in the spin room afterwards, the biggest newspaper in the state highlighted his desperate flip-flop on one of the biggest issues in the state, and numbers from the first day of in-person early voting revealed that his strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison made up a smaller percentage of the statewide vote than they did in 2022.
Wednesday started off with this blaring headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Obviously, the notoriously left-wing paper ran that story as a favor to Crowley (allowing him to abandon a position that was clearly costing him), but it revealed that his campaign sees that the data center issue is badly hurting him.
Candidates just don’t flip-flop this publicly less than two weeks before Election Day unless their position on an issue is deeply damaging. Crowley’s support for data centers has been.
Tom Tiffany hammered him on it the second the general election began, labeling him “Data Center David” in ads that have run almost nonstop since August. Crowley’s support for tax incentives for data center construction killed him with liberal Democrats–in part leading to him getting so little traction that he infamously dropped out just days before the primary–and Tiffany used it so effectively against him that general election voters now see Crowley as being firmly on the wrong side of what has become an 80-20 issue in Wisconsin.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, after weeks of mail-in voting badly lagging returns from both the 2022 gubernatorial and 2024 presidential election, figures from the first day of in-person early voting revealed that Crowley’s strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison actually delivered a LOWER percentage of the overall vote than they did in the 2022 early voting period.
To be sure, those numbers might improve. Crowley’s day, however, did not. His debate performance can be charitably described as a trainwreck. He appeared nervous, stumbled over his words repeatedly, and so steadfastly refused to answer basic questions about his policies that even the moderators seemed exasperated.
The debate was such a disaster for Crowley that he didn’t appear in the spin room afterwards for a press gaggle. This is almost unheard of in politics: Candidates ALWAYS talk to reporters after debates. It’s their chance to clarify answers given during the debate, clean up any perceived mistakes, and just generally make the case that they won. There’s a reason it is called the “spin room,” after all.
Crowley passed on that; or, rather, his campaign realized that he would be pressed on all of the specifics he did not provide during the debate and would create even more of a mess…even in front of a friendly Wisconsin press corps.
Days just don’t get much worse than Wednesday was for Crowley. Thursday is, of course a new one, but given how poorly Crowley has run his campaign thus far there is no guarantee that it will go much better.
