Francesca Hong led every poll. She had the energy, the buzz, the momentum, and the Democratic Party’s left-wing base firmly behind her.
And she still lost.
To a candidate who dropped out of the race in early July and said it had “become clear” that he would not be the party’s nominee. Until, of course, the exact moment the party decided he would be and brought him back in to stop the socialist takeover.
Just like the national Democratic Party denied socialist Bernie Sanders its presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020 (and then just coronated Kamala Harris in 2024 after President Biden dropped out), the state Democratic Party worked tirelessly for months to deny voters the candidate they wanted and instead foisted upon them the candidate party insiders preferred.
Just as important as who that preferred candidate was, though, was who that candidate was not. From the earliest stages of the campaign cycle, it was clear that the Democratic Party would not let a leftist–especially one with a tremendous amount of baggage–be its standard-bearer.
In late 2025, that wasn’t Francesca Hong; it was Mandela Barnes. The earliest public polling on the Democratic primary showed him with a commanding lead on the strength of name recognition alone and party leaders realized they had a major problem. Barnes was the Democrats’ anointed candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022, but after forcing all three of his primary opponents from the race while early voting was going on, Barnes bungled the general election and Senator Ron Johnson won a narrow victory on the same ballot where Governor Tony Evers won re-election relatively comfortably.
Democrats were not about to make the same mistake twice, and they took the unprecedent step of compiling an opposition research dossier on one of their own candidates. As Barnes was very publicly flirting with a run in October 202, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin hired an outside law firm to investigate longstanding rumors that Barnes had used his status within the party to strike up relationships with young women.
All of them were of age and none of them alleged any wrongdoing, but the party kept the dossier as a sort of insurance policy to stop a Barnes candidacy in its tracks the moment it became a problem. Party insiders then engaged in a public and private smear campaign against him, coordinating a New York Times hit piece against him that all but broadcast to the entire nation that he had no shot at winning the party’s nomination for governor.
Barnes jumped in anyway and while polls still showed him leading the field, he barely campaigned and continued to skate by on name recognition alone. What neither he nor the party’s leaders saw coming, though, was a challenge coming from his left.
Hong, a socialist who fully embraced every one of the movement’s most radical and least politically viable ideas, caught fire with the voter base and steadily grew her following through the savvy use of social media and a campaign focused on pushing the party farther left than it ever dared to publicly admit that it was going.
No one inside the party ever had a problem with Hong’s radicalism per se, but as she grew in popularity and solidified the left-wing base, leaders fretted over her ability to hide her insanity from voters. Pretending to be a moderate and then unleashing a radical left agenda is a time-honored tradition for Democrat candidates, and Hong seemed wholly unable to do so.
By early summer, that became a major problem.
Poll after poll showed her steadily building her lead while it became clear that the socialist brand was becoming more toxic to general election voters. A socialist sweep in New York’s Democratic primary followed the next week by a socialist unseating a 15-term Democrat congresswoman in Colorado shifted the national focus away from President Trump’s impact on Republicans’ chances in the midterms to socialism’s impact on Democrats.
This terrified the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which recognized that both socialism and Hong’s personal nuttiness would spell doom in the general election. By late June, party leaders got to work doing exactly what they did four years earlier: cajoling, bribing, or blackmailing every candidate to drop out except the one the party selected.
That was Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez. Not because she was a uniquely qualified or politically gifted candidate, but because she was the only viable option. In truth, the party didn’t particularly care for her. Governor Evers famously refused to endorse when she announced her candidacy the day after he said he wouldn’t seek a third term.
She got no major endorsements, no big donor money, and no traction in the race for a full calendar year until Democrats panicked at Hong’s rise in early July and started eliminating her competition. First, Missy Hughes dropped out of the race and endorsed Rodriguez while urging every other candidate to do the same.
Then, David Crowley did likewise, even going so far as to say he recognized that the party had rejected him and he would not be the nominee. In order to stop Hong, and with her a socialist takeover of the party, he said it was imperative that every other candidate drop out or else.
“All the candidates should be looking really hard as far as what do they want to see as an outcome,” he said. “I think it’s extremely important that all of us as candidates start to make decisions about how we win this race and making sure that we are keeping the Democratic party, keeping the people at the center of these decisions.”
The people, naturally were at the center of none of those decisions, which were being made very quickly behind closed doors. Democrats had their candidate,
Until very suddenly they didn’t.
Just days after Crowley’s endorsement, Rodriguez dropped the mother of all Sunday night news drops: Her campaign didn’t actually have the $1 million-plus in cash on hand that it had been claiming it had for months and had to fire campaign manager Kara Spencer for grossly inflating donations on campaign finance reports.
Rodriguez held a disastrous press conference the following afternoon in which she admitted that her campaign only had a little more than $200,000 in its coffers and struggled to answer basic questions about how such mismanagement (or outright criminal fraud) could have gone undetected for nearly seven months.
Two days after that, her campaign filed another finance report showing that it only had $35,000 in cash on hand. Hours later, an amended filing showed that no, she actually had $640,000 but then a second amendment sheepishly admitted that no, the initial $35,000 figure was correct.
This was such an embarrassment that Rodriguez dropped out the next day.
The Democratic Party had to scramble to replace her. This utter ineptitude played right into the socialists’ hands as it demonstrated that the so-called “corporate dems” were thoroughly unable to win elections and Hong looked even stronger by comparison.
It was at this point that the fix was truly in and became impossible to ignore. Rather than coalesce around one of the other candidates who were still in the race–Barnes, Joel Brennan, or Kelda Roys–the Democratic Party bribed Crowley to get back in the race with the promise of an Evers endorsement, tons of labor union money, and the united support of the entire party apparatus.
He was back in the next day. With the Evers endorsement. With tons of labor union money. And with the united support of a party that had rejected him since the moment he first entered the primary. Now, though, he was the best possible candidate Democrats could run! He was the only one with executive experience, the only one with a chance of defeating Tom Tiffany.
But there was still the problem of Mandela Barnes. He refused to step aside for Crowley, so Democrats deployed their secret weapon: the dossier they had compiled when he first entered the race. They held it until the exact moment they needed to destroy his political career and handed it to a friendly reporter in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Molly Beck.
Barnes was sufficiently frightened about what the dossier might contain and dropped out of the race that morning, but in a final middle finger to him from a party and media machine that seems to genuinely despise him, Beck published the story anyway.
Roys and Brennan were still in the race, but the Democratic Party had what it wanted. Every serious challenger to Crowley and Hong were out and he at least had a slim chance of beating her.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, Crowley and the Democrats were gifted with Hong’s truly baffling decision to give a pair of disastrous interviews with FOX News and CNN to explain her past positions on everything from defunding the police to abolishing Thanksgiving.
Her inability to effectively lie about those positions and whether she still supports them–not the positions themselves (since most Democrats largely agree with them)–revealed Hong to be an unhinged buffoon who was making Wisconsin’s Democratic Party a national laughingstock.
Evers spent the week leading the equally buffoonish but decidedly not unhinged Crowley around to every public appearance he made, and answered with a blunt “Probably not” when asked whether Hong could defeat Tiffany in November.
Still, Democrat voters turned out in droves for Hong, and not just in the socialist hotbeds of Madison and Milwaukee. Across the state, Democrats turned out for her in big numbers. Fortunately for the party, however, the fix worked and Crowley kept pace with her throughout Election Night until the entire race came down to the final absentee votes in (where else?) the City of Milwaukee.
In typical City of Milwaukee fashion, however, those votes would not be reported until every other county in the state had fully reported their totals. First Milwaukee’s numbers would be delayed until 10:30 pm. Then 11:00. Then they absolutely, positively would be reported by 11:30.
Only when it came time to finally enter the votes, City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County election officials announced that due to “human error,” vote totals were not downloaded on five of the nine memory sticks that contained the 28,000 or so absentee votes the city had yet to report. Somehow, an election worker had downloaded the vote audit and not the actual vote total onto those memory sticks.
While the entire country watched the hastily-called press conference at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, those 28,000 votes were still sitting back at Central Count with only a small number of election workers there to keep an eye on them.
Rather amazingly, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore gave a speech at Crowley’s victory party indicating that approximately 10,000 of those 28,000 votes had “come in within the last couple of days” and would likely catapult Crowley to victory.
They did. When Milwaukee’s absentee votes were finally reported after 1:00 am Wednesday morning, it was obvious that Hong had no path to victory and she conceded the race at about 3:00.
To be clear, there is no evidence that those votes were altered or tampered with in any way, but the long delay–which just happened to end after reporting issues in Fond du Lac and Green Counties were cleared up and those totals went in–will do nothing to assuage socialist suspicions that the nomination was stolen from them.
Milwaukee has a long history of late-night vote dumps and mysterious delays in reporting votes until every other county is finished reporting, and Republicans have long suspected (but have never been able to definitively prove) malfeasance.
The reality in this election is that it wasn’t rigged on election night; it was rigged for nearly a full year before any votes were ever cast. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin used blackmail, bribery, and every other trick it could muster to ensure that Barnes and Hong never had a chance at winning the party’s nomination.
Their plan worked, but hardly flawlessly. Crowley is the nominee, sure, but the party’s fix was obvious to everyone paying attention–including the socialists, who were denied their biggest electoral prize yet by the Corporate Dems they despise.
Are they going to take that lying down? Are they going to roll over and abandon their principles to line up behind Crowley his capitalist backers–especially after Hong was so obviously conspired against? They may, and they may present a united front to win a general election, but in the long term, this is yet more reason for the socialist movement to continue to work against the Democratic Party and ultimately take it over.
That way, at least, they will be the ones rigging primaries for a change.
