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

On 8/13/2026 7:47 AM, Wilson wrote:
> 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.
> 
You are soaking in it.

If California were an independent country, its nominal GDP of roughly 
$4.3 trillion places it as the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world, 
closely trading spots with Japan and trailing only the rest of the 
United States, China, and Germany.