Move over, Maine. A new Democratic primary has taken the crown as the country’s most dysfunctional.
In Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, a crowded field of establishment-tied Democrats has been splitting the vote for months, giving democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s energetic campaign a lane to the nomination.
Recently, fearing Hong would lose the general election (and spooked by a seeming Republican effort to boost her chances), some in the party tried to coalesce around one candidate to stop her: lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez.
But that attempt disastrously backfired last week, when it turned out Rodriguez’s campaign had badly mismanaged its funds. It’s still not clear what happened, but the situation was so messy that she quit the race.
With Rodriguez gone, the two leading contenders appeared to be Hong and Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who was Democrats’ losing nominee for a Senate race in 2022.
Yet, party bigwigs were unhappy with those options and coaxed a candidate who had already dropped out — Milwaukee county executive David Crowley — back into the race, even though the primary is only three weeks away.
This weekend, Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley in a last-ditch attempt to stop Hong (and, apparently, Barnes) from winning the nomination.
The chaos is all the more shocking, because the state party, until recently, was often cited as a national model for Democrats, with leaders and candidates successfully coordinating over multiple cycles in a long-term plan to undo years of Republican dominance.
I asked Jessie Opoien, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to walk me through this dizzying sequence of events. How did the party find itself in this mess? Is Hong on a glide path to primary victory? And what awaits in the general election? Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.
Democrats began this race with optimism. Now, they’re a lot more worried.
Back before this primary began, what was the situation of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and the political status quo in the state?
Democrats were feeling more optimistic heading into this primary. We have a lot of really, really tight races here. But if you look at the past three state Supreme Court races, you had liberal candidates just really blowing it out of the water, no matter how much Republican money came in. Democrats came out feeling pretty happy about those races.
Another significant element is new legislative maps that got passed. This would be the second state election where they’re running on those new maps.
So, for the first time in 15-ish years, Democrats are actually within striking distance of getting a majority or, at least, taking one of the chambers — or getting closer to the point where they’re not completely irrelevant in the capitol.
And the congressional map, which gives Republicans a 6-2 advantage, hasn’t changed yet — but that’s something Democrats could do if they win a trifecta?
Yes, and some of the candidates running for governor have made that a priority.
How was Governor Evers viewed after his two terms?
We look at the Marquette University poll as our gold standard for approval ratings, and Evers is by far the most popular statewide politician they’ve polled, pretty much in the time of their existence. He’s been above 50 percent for pretty much all of his two terms.
That being said, there has been a little bit of friction, especially toward the end of the legislative session. The state had this large projected budget surplus that no one could agree on what to do with it. Evers and the Republican leaders of the legislature proposed this deal that included some tax relief and some school funding — and basically got no support from Democrats in the legislature. They’ve probably gotten past it, but you had people starting to become a little bit more willing to be publicly critical of him.
The leading contenders to succeed Tony Evers
So, after Evers announces he isn’t running for another term, how does the race to succeed him kick off?
Early on, I think everyone was expecting the attorney general, Josh Kaul, to get in. He would have been the clear frontrunner, and we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in right now. [Kaul eventually decided not to run.]
Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor, was the first person to get in, but she did not come in as an automatic frontrunner.
Mandela Barnes took a little bit longer to get in, but he did. He’s the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson in 2022.
David Crowley, Milwaukee county executive: I think everyone expected his campaign to take off more at the beginning than it did. Milwaukee has had some big moments while he’s been in office. I think people expected him to be possibly a frontrunner early on, and that didn’t necessarily materialize.
Others who got in were state senator Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, the Department of Administration secretary under Evers. And Missy Hughes, a state economic development official.
And state representative Francesca Hong, who came in very much as an underdog candidate, but whose campaign blasted off and gained a lot of traction in a way that, I think, a lot of people didn’t see coming.
Tell me what you’ve seen on the ground about Francesca Hong’s campaign.
She is absolutely running as a democratic socialist, but she’s talking to Trump voters about affordability and being left behind. She was one of the first ones to jump on the anti-data center sentiment. “Jump on” was probably the wrong word, because she was there before the publicity; it didn’t appear to be an opportunistic move.
I started noticing back in December that something felt different with her, just in terms of the fundraising events she was doing. She did a ramen pop-up, bringing back her restaurant specialties. [Hong was a chef and co-owned a restaurant.] She did these small and intimate but unique events, like karaoke and bingo — bringing people to do fun things, things you don’t necessarily see a candidate engaging in themselves
My anecdotal observation is: I see people that I went to high school with or that I know from my non-political life who are talking about her campaign. I just don’t see that, you know, ever, anywhere else.
When the Marquette polls came out early this year, it was really remarkable just how split the field was; the first place candidate had just 11 percent in one poll. There’s been very little polling lately, but the narrative until recently was that it was shaping up to be a three-way race between Hong, Barnes, and Rodriguez, right?
I think it was starting to feel that way.
Mandela Barnes, it was harder to measure. He came in with the most name recognition, having been on the ballot as lieutenant governor and for the Senate race. More people had an opinion about him, because they at least had heard of him.
With Sara Rodriguez — there wasn’t a lot of public polling for us to look at. But, then, there started to be an attitude behind the scenes of: Is the frontrunner going to be a democratic socialist, and do Democrats want that? And if they don’t, do they need to start organizing around one candidate?
You started to see that around Sara Rodriguez. The first candidate who dropped out, Missy Hughes, got behind her the day she dropped out.
Fundraising reports were due in a few weeks, and Sara Rodriguez announced she was going to put up a million-dollar ad buy. In this race, with this many candidates, no one has a lot of money, so a million dollars would have been a big deal. And she had an independent group that was putting ads up for her, too.
So, everyone was like, “Oh wow, the momentum’s going in her direction, the money’s there, she’s picking up endorsements.” Then, David Crowley got out, pretty much right when that ad buy was announced, and endorsed her. And then, everything started falling apart.
The Sara Rodriguez disaster and the David Crowley switcheroo
So, what happened to the Rodriguez campaign?
This was pretty much all starting last week. Sara Rodriguez has got this ad buy that’s supposed to be going up on TV. And we had heard some people starting to raise questions about, where is it?
Sunday night, about 9:30, Sara Rodriguez’s campaign puts out a press release, and they say that they fired her campaign manager, because they’ve discovered financial mismanagement.
On Monday, she holds a press conference in her Madison office. Basically, she has no idea how much money she has, and the ad buy she thought she placed, there’s no money for it. She said she didn’t know if this was something done on purpose or if it was mistakes that were made.
I asked how much she thought she had on hand when they made the million dollar buy. She said $1.5 million. So, we’re talking about maybe a difference of a million dollars.
So, it goes from “this is the candidate into the strongest position” to “this candidate maybe has some money, but we don’t really know how much, and also she’s got these debts.”
She was committed to staying in [at first]. But, it sounds like, as she continued to dig into whatever the problem was. everyone around her was saying her campaign was over, and she finally decided that was the case on Friday morning.
And then, we get this switcheroo.
Yeah, then, my colleague, Matt Smith, reported this first, but we all started talking to Democratic sources who told us there was an effort to try and get David Crowley back in the race.
Because there was a question of, when Crowley dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez, was he brought in under false pretenses? I think he would not have gotten out, obviously, if he had a clearer picture.
So, that transitioned to: He’s only been out for a few days; he could get back in.
And the key element that made this more of a story than just him getting back in was now having the governor’s endorsement.
Had Evers endorsed Rodriguez before that?
No, he had not endorsed anyone. He had said throughout the race he wasn’t planning on getting involved, but that he might at some point.
So, can David Crowley, a candidate who was apparently polling nowhere, who actually quit the race — can he come back into contention with just three weeks left?
That’s a really good question. They’ve got to get on the air. They’ve got to get the money. If Evers would like to transfer over the hundreds of thousands to a million dollars he’s got in his campaign account, that would be a big help to David Crowley, or if unions who were backing Sara Rodriguez or hadn’t made an endorsement yet decided to get behind him.
But he was polling below 5 percent. So, I don’t know. I just keep reminding myself, I guess, that all of this is occurring within the bubble of people who are actively paying attention to it right now. While the primary seems like it’s tomorrow, it is three weeks away, and there are many people who have not been paying attention.
Now, here’s the big question I’ve been confused by.:
If the establishment is so worried about Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, winning the nomination and losing the general, wouldn’t the thing to do be to coalesce around Mandela Barnes, who seems to be the other leading contender? Barnes had run before and lost, but it was in a tough cycle, in 2022, and it wasn’t by that much.
Instead, there’s what seems to me like a cockamamie scheme to get a candidate who had already quit the race to come back in weeks before election day. And that will make it a three-way race, which many people think will make it easier for Hong to win, with a plurality of the vote. So, what’s going on here?
You know, I don’t know if anyone has figured out the answer to that.
Before Mandela Barnes even got in the race, there were a not insignificant number of Democrats who were urging him not to. It’s a question, I guess, of whether you think he got really close to beating Ron Johnson and just got out-campaigned, or if you think he came really close on something that he should have been able to pull off. He had money left over.
He got attacked in 2022 for some positions on policing that he had. So, is the main concern that he, like Hong, is too far left to win?
I think it probably does have a lot to do with the policing stuff. If a Democrat is willing to say that they’re concerned about the electability issue, they usually point pretty quickly to the police rhetoric.
Mandela distanced himself from that more in ’22, and he’s definitely distancing himself from it now, in a way that we haven’t seen from Francesca Hong.
But, just the fact that there’s a photo of him holding a t-shirt that says “abolish ICE.” These things exist, and they made for good campaign ad fodder in ’22.
The other thing I’ve heard, that it is hard to assess the veracity of, is that he just hasn’t been performing as well in internal polls [of the general election] as people had hoped he would.
One of the Dem sources I spoke with on Friday who was pushing Crowley to get back said, “This was Mandela Barnes’s race to lose, and he’s been losing it.”
Tom Tiffany and the general election
Tell me about the general election and the presumptive GOP nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany. What kind of Republican is he, and how formidable an opponent is he likely to be?
In Congress, he tends to rank as one of the more conservative Republicans — certainly within Wisconsin’s delegation. There was trepidation early on from Republicans, as he was getting ready to get into the race, I think, specifically about his positions on abortion.
But, he didn’t have to deal with a primary, because he got the Trump endorsement and that got his opponents out of the way pretty quickly. So, he’s had a few months to just run some biographical ads that make him look like a folksy guy from Northern Wisconsin. They’re good ads, they’re him and his family, him and a dairy barn. He’s talking about things like data centers and home affordability.
Wisconsin is an archetypal swing state. It voted for Trump two out of three times. What’s the current partisan mood there? Does a blue wave look plausible?
If you look at polls, Trump’s popularity here is not good. Tariffs continue to be a question here, especially for farmers. I think last time we saw a poll, inflation, jobs, health insurance, education, those were the top concerns. The national economy, I imagine, will bear some weight here.
But, I expect it to be a close election. Democrats have been very optimistic because of the national environment, but realistically, Wisconsin is a lot closer than that. We elect Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin, we elect Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We’re not predictable.
