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

On 8/13/2026 6:51 AM, Creon wrote:
> At Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:35:17 +0100, Julian <[email protected]>
> 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
> 
> "Oh Lord, here they come again ... RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"
> 
> Seriously though:  since the U.S. of A. doesn't have proportional
> representation, a few DSA types in office won't ruin anything, and
> might achieve a kind of balance to the rightward march of the Overton
> window in USA politics.

You're probably right, a few absolutely unhinged people running things 
won't make much difference.

Just like allowing a few people to sleep on the street doesn't.

And making shoplifting under $995 doesn't.

And allowing drug addicts to shoot up publicly doesn't.

And taxing the wealth people hold in investments won't.

Mao famously waged a war on the sparrows in China's farmland because he 
thought they were eating the grain, leading to a widespread infestation 
of pests that those sparrows had also eaten. Which destroyed so much of 
the food that it made the widespread famine even worse.

Small things.

> 
> And...have you compared the size of the California economy to that
> of (say) Japan, or (say) the UK?
> 

The golden goose will never die.