Francesca Hong’s defeat won’t stop the De mocratic Socialists

‘I’m doin a 6-course dinner inspired by menstruation alongside my 
friends Autumn and Kel. There will be booze too. Come hang.’


So, at time of writing, it looks as if voters don’t want to cancel 
Thanksgiving – on balance, at least. Come November, however, few 
Democrats will be expressing gratitude for their party’s vote-tabulation 
systems.

Francesca Hong, it seems, will not be America’s first avowedly socialist 
state governor. She appears to have just lost an extremely tight primary 
to David Crowley, a Milwaukee County executive, in the gubernatorial 
primary in Wisconsin.

The long-view – and already ubiquitous – reaction to this news is to 
mark it down as a major blow for the Democratic Socialists of America 
and their bid to take over the Democratic establishment. But the more 
immediate takeaway is two-fold: pollsters are very bad at divining 
Democratic primaries – and Democratic primary officials are hopeless at 
tallying votes.

The primary ended in farce early this morning as Milwaukee County 
workers reportedly had to recover five USB sticks with vote counts on 
them, only for those sticks to apparently be blank – or something, 
nobody seems entirely sure. But what is certain is that the Wisconsin 
polls predicting a comfortable victory for Hong were wildly wrong – and 
did not take into account the peculiar dynamics of the race. Crowley 
only became the clear moderate choice late in the process – and 
mainstream voters duly flocked to him over Hong, a proud DSA member with 
a long record of expressing barmy radical opinions. Polling companies 
failed to anticipate or identify those shifts. They made a similar 
mistake in not identifying late trends in last week’s Senate primary in 
Michigan, which ended up being a far narrower victory for the 
DSA-aligned – but not affiliated – candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

But the real story should not be how Hong lost. It should be how on 
earth she came so close to being the Democratic choice for Wisconsin in 
a very high turnout primary in such an important swing state. Like many 
DSA members, Hong has said she wants to abolish the police because law 
enforcement agencies ‘uphold white supremacy.’ She’s also expressed 
discomfort at the fact her bi-racial son gives her a ‘proximity to 
whiteness.’ She has supported the abolition of the Senate, supported 
public-owned grocery stores and banks, and opposed Valentine’s Day. In 
2019, she tweeted the following:

‘I’m doin a 6-course dinner inspired by menstruation alongside my 
friends Autumn and Kel. There will be booze too. Come hang.’

And, on CNN a few weeks ago, she declined to disavow her stated view 
that Thanksgiving should be annulled – insisting instead that she was a 
trained chef who knew all about bringing people together (to celebrate 
catamenia, for instance.)

In comparison to Hong, El-Sayed comes across as Obamaesque in his 
political professionalism. And yet she came within a whisker of being 
the Democratic nominee for governor in a state Donald Trump won twice. 
None of this means the party’s voters are returning to the 
establishment’s preferred path. No, it suggests that successful 
Democratic candidates are now the ones who bridge the gap between the 
hard and soft left of their party – as El-Sayed just about did in 
Michigan, and as the Ojibwe Native American activist Peggy Flanagan did 
in her Minnesota senate primary last night. Flanagan is not a DSA 
member, but she was the progressive choice – backed by Senator Bernie 
Sanders, the party’s elder socialist statesman. She won by 20 per cent 
in a primary cycle dominated by debates about immigration enforcement. 
She is now the strong favourite to win against Michele Tafoya, the 
Republican former National Football League sideline reporter.

Just a couple of years ago, Republican strategists would have found it 
easy to cast Flanagan as a far-left lunatic. Their problem in 2026 is 
that, compared to Hong and the popular DSA fringe, she seems to many to 
be the reassuringly sensible 
choice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​


Freddy Gray