There is every reason to be skeptical of the Daily Wire’s bombshell report alleging that Wisconsin gubernatorial nominee David Crowley quit the race and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez shortly before the Democratic primary in exchange for a promise of $250,000 in campaign cash for a future run and a job for his wife.
Extraordinary claims such as this require extraordinary evidence, and the Daily Wire’s report doesn’t really have it. The reporter is simply taking the word of a single anonymous source—a “longtime Democrat operative” who provided “corroborating materials” that were not published or even quoted from in the Daily Wire’s story.
That simply would not pass many publications’ editorial or legal vetting (including the Heartland Post’s).
Still, Crowley, Rodriguez, and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin must definitively answer these allegations because, frankly, it has already been well established that Democrats extorted Mandela Barnes to get him out of the race and Crowley’s own running mate, Sarah Godlewski, rather obviously cut a deal to drop out of the 2022 Senate primary.
Given that sordid and very, very recent past, Democrats clearly would be willing to seed a future Crowley run with the relatively low sum of $250,000 and give his wife a job with the Rodriguez campaign (and then, had she won, the Rodriguez administration).
Ericka Crowley’s current job at Community Advocates is already under intense scrutiny after it was revealed that she was first hired when her husband was elected Milwaukee County Executive and then received a big promotion to director of the agency’s Rental Housing Resource Center shortly after her husband steered tens of millions of dollars in federal rental assistance grants to Community Advocates.
Neither the Crowley campaign nor Community Advocates will say how big of a raise Ericka Crowley received as part of her promotion. Moreover, she had been working at Community Advocates for nearly a year, and Milwaukee County had already distributed millions to it before David Crowley ever disclosed the conflict of interest.
Given that, it does not seem at all far-fetched that a high-paying position for Ericka Crowley would be part of a deal to get her husband out of the governor’s race.
And it’s not like the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has never given sweetheart deals to their candidates in exchange for dropping out. In fact, Crowley’s own running mate, Lieutenant Governor candidate Sarah Godlewski, took the most obvious one in state political history.
In 2022, she was serving as State Treasurer but opted not to run for re-election and instead ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Ron Johnson. The Democratic Party, however, wanted then-Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes to be its candidate and wanted to clear the field for him ahead of the August primary.
Just two weeks before the August 9 election (while both mail-in and in-person early voting were going on), they did. Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson dropped out of the race and endorsed Barnes on July 25. Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry did likewise on July 27. And Godlewski followed suit on July 29.
Barnes ended up losing the general election that November, but Democrat Gov. Tony Evers won re-election and so did longtime Secretary of State Doug LaFollette. Godlewski was left without an elected position (Republican John Leiber won the election for State Treasurer), but not for long.
A little more than two months after La Follette was sworn in, he abruptly retired—effective immediately—on March 17, 2023. In the same press release announcing that retirement, Gov. Evers appointed Godlewski to fill the remainder of La Follette’s term. Evers undoubtedly wanted as few people to know about this move as possible: Not only was March 17 a Friday, but it was also St. Patrick’s Day.
The “Friday News Dump” is well known in journalistic circles. Politicians will always release information they don’t want to circulate widely on a Friday afternoon so that it is forgotten over the ensuing weekend. A St. Patrick’s Day Friday News Dump is therefore something that Evers and Godlewski REALLY didn’t want the public to know about.
Godlewski, though, wasn’t content to simply have a thoroughly powerless position like Secretary of State; she wanted to position herself for another run for Senate in 2028. To do so, she would need a much more visible job.
On August 20, 2025, she announced a run for lieutenant governor. But then something strange happened: No other Democrats jumped in the race. Not one. The Democrat field for governor swelled to eleven candidates, but Godlewski ran unopposed. Even as it became clear early in the cycle that lower-tier gubernatorial candidates like would be much better served dropping out and running for lieutenant governor, not a single one did.
It was patently obvious that Godlewski was promised the lieutenant governor nomination as part of the deal she struck for dropping out of the 2022 Senate race. Bribery, therefore, is not exactly unheard of in Wisconsin Democratic primaries.
And neither is extortion.
Because Barnes lost what state and national Democrats considered a very winnable race against Johnson (especially on the same ballot that Evers won re-election by three points), nearly all his institutional Democrat support evaporated. Still, he made plans to run for governor in 2026 and told everyone who would listen that he was going to announce in either October or November 2025.
Shortly before he did, though, Democrat insiders started leaking to the New York Times that he should not get in because he would neither have the field cleared for him again nor have much party backing at all.
Barnes was not dissuaded and announced a run anyway. Behind the scenes, Democrats took the unprecedented step of compiling a dossier on him focused on his supposedly lurid sexual history.
No one outside of a handful of party insiders knew this dossier existed, as they held it until the moment that they needed Barnes to drop out of the race. By late July, that moment arrived. Socialist Francesca Hong was running away with the primary and Democrats knew that she stood no chance in a general election against Republican Tom Tiffany. They needed to again force every other candidate out of the race.
Lo and behold, they all started dropping out. First, it was Missy Hughes on June 22. Then David Crowley on July 8. Both endorsed Sara Rodriguez, whom the party had picked to be the candidate to consolidate the anti-Hong vote.
It was a disastrous choice. Just days later, Rodriguez’s campaign imploded in spectacular fashion amid a finance scandal in which it was revealed that Rodriguez had only a tiny fraction of the money her campaign had been claiming for months that it had raised. She dropped out on July 17.
The very next day, rather than turn to Barnes—the lone remaining candidate with any real backing or chance of beating Tiffany—the party got Crowley to jump back in the race. With Barnes still in, though, the anti-Hong vote would be split and she would win with a consolidated socialist base.
On July 30—just 12 days before the primary election and while in-person early voting was taking place—Barnes shockingly dropped out. A few hours later, it was clear why: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a portion of the dossier alleging that Barnes used his clout within the party to strike up sexual relationships with younger women.
Nothing that was alleged was illegal or even overly indecent. All of Barnes’ relationships were consensual and none were with underaged girls or married women. If that was all that was in the dossier, why drop out over it? The implication seemed to be that if Barnes didn’t drop out, other, far more salacious and reputation-destroying information would be leaked.
On August 11, with Crowley essentially running one-on-one against Hong, he pulled off a narrow upset and joined Godlewski on the party’s gubernatorial ticket. And all it took to get them there was a little bribery and extortion!
With all of this as a backdrop, is it really that much of a stretch to believe that when the party was desperate to get Rodriguez in a one-on-one matchup against Hong that it would promise Crowley a future shot at statewide office and $250,000 to help him launch that campaign? Is it really so hard to believe that it would promise a job to Crowley’s wife, who has already been the beneficiary of a questionable hiring and promotion?
The Daily Wire should immediately release the corroborating evidence it claims backing its party insider’s account of this alleged deal and, given the pattern into which it fits, Crowley, Rodriguez, the Democratic Party, and everyone else potentially involved in it must immediately answer questions about it.
Wisconsin deserves to know the truth.
