Re: Francesca Hong’s defeat won’t stop the Democratic Socialists

On 8/12/26 8:35 AM, Julian wrote:
> ‘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

asian foids smh

-- 
hi, i'm nick!
let's end war 🙃