In a move that smacks of cutthroat Democratic primary politics, CNN dropped a batch of fresh opposition research on leading gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong highlighting her radical calls to abolish the police just as outside groups start spending money to boost her more moderate opponents.
CNN’s KFile reported Friday that Hong has not backed away from her extreme “defund then abolish” rhetoric, even years after the Democratic Party tried to bury the toxic slogan following electoral disasters in 2020.Hong repeatedly pushed to eliminate police departments, declaring in one X post her support for “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”
“Police exist to uphold white supremacy,” she wrote in a 2021 post. “Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”
Notably, Hong has not backed down from this radical stance at all. In a statement to CNN, she called her past comments part of a “wider conversation around police abolition” and admitted that this is still her end goal.
“While I envision a world where public safety is not synonymous with law enforcement, I recognize that this paradigm shift is a very long-term vision and my focus is building systems of care for now and for our future,” she said.
A leading candidate for governor openly calling for the abolition of law enforcement is obviously very newsworthy, but one has to question the timing of the story and the outlet that published it.
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski did not just randomly decide to go digging through Hong’s old tweets; an opposition researcher for one of her opponents obviously handed them to him.
The Democratic primary is less than three months away and Hong is the only candidate in the crowded field who has gained any real traction with voters or generated any actual enthusiasm. She has consistently led or has been near the lead in every poll conducted this year, and with nine candidates on the ballot, her loyal base could easily propel her to victory as her opponents suffer from a split vote.
She is also an unapologetic radical whose far-left policies are poison in a general election. “If elected, I will abolish your local police department” doesn’t exactly play well in rural Wisconsin (or anywhere else, for that matter). Democrats are of course cognizant of this and are desperate to avoid a repeat of the 2022 US Senate race, in which Hong’s fellow socialist Mandela Barnes lost to Sen. Ron Johnson on the same ballot in which Gov. Tony Evers won re-election relatively easily.
Democrats see Hong suffering the same fate against Republican Tom Tiffany—a folksy, down-home and, most importantly, normal guy. Even in a big year for Democrats, normal beats crazy every single time.
The problem for Democrats is that they can’t decide on which of their more normal (relatively speaking) candidates to back. CNN’s hit piece on Hong dropped the same week that two third-party groups made six-figure ad buys supporting Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and a random outlier poll from a brand-new think tank showed Barnes with a commanding lead in the primary.
These things didn’t happen in a vacuum; nothing in Democratic Party politics ever does. The knives are now out for Hong and Rodriguez, Crowley, and Barnes are each vying to be the candidate around which the party coalesces.
Don’t expect Hong to go down without a fight, though. She saw what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries and won’t tolerate the state party doing the same to her.
But will she be able to stop it? That is the question that will determine the result of this primary and, by extension, the future of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party.
