Daily Kos84%
Can a socialist win this swing state? 8%
By Andrew Mangan58%
7/24/2026, 11:01:00 PM
Keywords: 2026, Davidcrowley, Francescahong, Governor, Mandelabarnes, Midterms, Primary, Wisconsin, Elections
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Optimism Bias, and Loss Aversion, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 9.2% saturation with 110 hits. Analysis detected 1,249 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,196 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 23.9% and a BS Rank of 8% (20,329 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.90% of the article peer group.
If a flood of new polling bears out, Democrats in swingy Wisconsin will likely nominate a democratic socialist for governor, raising the volume on a tense debate over the electoral appeal of political moderation.
Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old single mother and state assembly member endorsed by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, leads in all four public polls of the race released in the past week.
What’s notable is not just that she leads, it’s by how much.
Three of the four polls show her with a double-digit advantage over former Lt.
Gov.
Mandela Barnes, her nearest rival ahead of the Aug. 11 primary.
A Barnes campaign poll finds Hong leading him by 13 points, and a poll from the campaign of David Crowley, who is also running, shows Hong leading Barnes by 20 points.
Two other surveys, from Wedgewood Polls and Marquette University Law School, find her with 8- and 11-point leads over Barnes, respectively.
Yes, Hong’s two best polls come from her opponents’ campaigns.
This week’s polls also show her support growing since early July, when a Wedgewood survey for the Isthmus Political Report found her leading by just 2 points.
Across all public polls fielded in July, she leads Barnes by an average of 11 points, though an average of 26% of the electorate remains undecided.
And it makes a lot of sense why one-quarter of Wisconsin Democrats don’t know whom they’ll vote for.
The race has been pretty chaotic, with multiple candidates dropping out and one (so far) subsequently restarting his campaign.
Crowley, the executive of Milwaukee County, dropped out on July 8.
Then on July 17, Lt.
Gov.
Sara Rodriguez suspended her campaign after a scandal over the apparent inflation of her fundraising figures.
But that led Crowley, who had endorsed Rodriguez, to reenter the race the next day, only 10 days after he’d dropped out.
Notably, on reentry, he picked up the endorsement of Tony Evers, the state’s popular governor who declined to seek a third term.
However, throughout this recent upheaval, Hong and Barnes have remained the front-runners.
Both are progressives, though only Hong refers to herself as a democratic socialist.
If Barnes’ name rings a bell for you, it may be due to his 2022 Senate bid.
That year, he came 1 percentage point from toppling Republican Sen.
Ron Johnson.
That’s the second-closest Senate margin in Wisconsin since it became a state, in a year when no Democratic Senate candidate beat an incumbent Republican.
Hong’s lead over Barnes and the sitting lieutenant governor is indeed impressive.
She began her bid as a long shot, reminiscent of another now-elected democratic socialist, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The big-ticket items on Hong’s agenda—universal childcare and paid leave, expanding Medicaid, and “fully funding public schools”—are bound to be broadly popular in Wisconsin since most are popular nationally.
At the same time, Barnes names many of those same issues in his platform.
Other than the “democratic socialist” label, what divides them are two issues that also divide America's left-wing.
In 2024, Hong helped lead a movement to protest then-President Joe Biden’s support for Israel amid its brutal war on Gaza, by urging Democrats to vote against Biden in the primary.
Meanwhile, Barnes ran a get-out-the-vote program supporting Biden’s bid.
“You can vote for somebody, and still, if you want to protest … go for it,” he told Politico at the time.
“It is a very real likelihood that your grievances will be shut down with force if Donald Trump is a president again.”
The other issue is law enforcement.
Barnes is calling to “fully fund” the police, while Hong has called for abolishing them.
Unlike much of her broader platform, police abolition is a profoundly unpopular idea.
Nationally, only 27% of Democrats support it, per a Gallup poll taken in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of police reforms following George Floyd’s murder.
Support for police abolition plummets to just 15% among all Americans, revealing how much Hong’s position could jeopardize her with a general electorate in November.
Or perhaps not.
There is considerable debate over how much ideological moderation matters when it comes to winning an election.
Some political scientists argue that moderation is not a trump card.
For instance, data journalist G.
Elliott Morris says the effect of “strategic moderation” was negligible in 2024, increasing a Democrat’s chance of winning “by just 10%.”
“This is not to say that moderation doesn't matter, but lots of other factors matter more,” Morris added.
“I don’t think moderation is worthless, I just think it’s overrated.”
Meanwhile, other data journalists and political scientists heartily disagree.
Regarding Morris’ findings, elections analyst Nate Silver writes that a candidate seeing their chance of winning increase by 10% is “huge … especially if multiplied across dozens of races.”
He points out that Morris’ underlying findings suggest moderation amounts to “about as much as the assassination attempt against Trump or Biden’s disastrous debate moved the polls”—so, a lot in the grand scheme of things.
(Full disclosure: I know Morris and have worked with Silver.)
If you know your Wisconsin history, it may not be a surprise that the debate is playing out there.
Though it may now be a purple state, it once was pretty red—in the socialist sense.
In 1910, the Badger State sent the first socialist to Congress, an Austrian immigrant by the name of Victor Berger.
He and other Wisconsin leftists pioneered the so-called “Sewer Socialism” movement—a once-derisive nickname they reclaimed—that sought to enact the socialist ideals through reforms rather than revolution.
For a time after World War I, the Republican Party’s main opposition in Wisconsin wasn’t the Democratic Party, which was temporarily in shambles.
It was the Wisconsin Socialist Party, according to a study by historian Joshua Kluever.
Between 1919 and 1931, the state legislature passed 295 bills authored by socialists.
Those bills included reforms to the criminal justice system, protections for workers, and funding for public hospitals.
That history is about a hundred years in the rearview, so it won’t play much of a role, if any, in this year’s governor’s race.
But clearly, Hong’s campaign is tapping into a lefty, anti-establishment wave, at least among Democrats.
General election polls show Hong in a dead heat with the expected Republican nominee, Tom Tiffany, a U.S. representative affiliated with the far-right Freedom Caucus.
In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, she runs even with Tiffany, at 44% support apiece among likely voters, according to Marquette's poll.
However, Barnes leads Tiffany by 5 points.
If Hong scores the Democratic nomination and wins the general election, then democratic socialists would have a major example of the popularity of their platform (which would be a boon to a certain potential presidential candidate in 2028).
But if Hong wins the nomination and loses in November, then democratic socialists would face possibly the highest-profile failure for their burgeoning movement—one that moderates would trot out forever as an example of how socialist politics can’t win outside of a city.
There is high risk, high reward, and a high price for failure.
Wisconsin’s August primary may help decide the fate of a movement.
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