Crowley’s Pyrrhic Victory
Everyone I know has been recovering from the brutal Democratic primary. After two weeks of Tony Evers and David Crowley fear-mongering and attacking Francesca Hong, he barely eked out a victory. Now he’s left trying to win in November with a very broken and divided Democratic base. The establishment saw Hong’s army of volunteers coming to prove that left populism works, and they chose to attack, rather than give us a chance. Their moves divided the electorate, jeopardized the election, and may irrevocably harm the party.
Crowley’s victory depended on his allies in the corporate press and donor class, a horde of online reactionary centrists, and regressive construction trade unions, the kind that support data centers. They ran millions of dollars of dark money attack ads, misrepresented Crowley’s record and positions, joined the howling MAGA culture warriors to punish Hong for acknowledging colonial history and native communities in a Thanksgiving tweet. All of this noise convinced naive, fearful Wisconsinites that someone who supports data centers and dropped out weeks ago because he could not galvanize statewide support is the best candidate to take on Tom Tiffany.
It has been gross. Evers and his arrogant cadre of insiders were so certain they knew better than the majority of Democrats that they went on this very public and very shameless ratfucking of a strong candidate galvanizing huge movement support. I have long hated Tony Evers, ever since he broke his promise to reduce the prison population. My hatred of him metastasized this month, as he relentlessly tore my and all of my friends’ hope to shreds. Fuck Tony Evers. His attack blitz also hurt progressive candidates down ballot, allowing corporate and ADCC-backed candidates with unpopular policy platforms to all-but sweep the Democratic primaries, jeopardizing the trifecta.
Wisconsin’s open partisan primary ballot also seems to have helped Crowley. This deserves more research and an article of its own, but at first glance it looks like thousands of Crowley’s voters were likely Republicans or conservative independents. This is not a conspiracy theory, but an observation that the campaign must contend with. I’m not arguing for closed primaries. If we’re going to do election reform there are definitely better options than a closed primary system. I just think it is important for David Crowley and the Democratic Party to recognize that they won with voters who will definitely vote for Tom Tiffany in November. I want them to recognize that David Crowley and his policies are not more popular with Democratic voters, and he is going to have a hard time in the general.
Hong’s campaign unilaterally disarmed
I am also going to be blunt about Fran for Wisconsin. First, I remain incredibly proud of Hong and her team. They did so much with very very little, and they very solidly proved that a socialist can win in a midwestern swing state. Evers had to deploy extraordinary levels of angst, betrayal, fear-mongering, dark money, and burnt bridges to stop them.
But anyone trying something this big and new is going to have missteps, blind spots, and missed opportunities. I’m not worried about those. The one criticism I do want to make publicly and clearly is that Francesca Hong was too nice.
I know Hong is a genuinely compassionate person. We also need to recognize the incredibly unfair social expectations forced on women, and particularly Asian women, around politeness, docility, and compliance. I know from being inside Hong’s volunteer network that many of us were ready to defend and celebrate her against racist and sexist attacks, but leadership actively discouraged us. Yes, reigning in vitriolic “Bernie bros” and keyboard warriors is necessary for any socialist campaign. Ad hominem attacks (even mine, even if they’re counter-attacks) can be taken out of context to make us look bad, for sure, but I think Hong and her team overcorrected.
This was not a misstep or accident, but an intentional, considered, strategic error. On election night, Hong’s campaign manager Becky Cooper spoke to the Associated Press. She said:
“I’m incredibly proud of the race we ran. Our team campaigned clean, our souls are intact and we really made meaningful change.”
This is the core problem. I did not come into electoral politics with an expectation of an intact soul. Electoral politics is a scummy den of ratfucking spin doctors. It is gross. I hate it, everyone does. If I wanted an intact soul, I would have gone to church. I came to electoral politics because I wanted to fucking win.
Hong’s campaign did not just avoid going negative, they avoided drawing contrast at all. Crowley was never held accountable to his record, his donors, his regressive sales tax or his regressive views. It’s not that Hong brought a knife to a gun fight. Her populist policy platform taps into a well of hardship and pain that the working class has endured for over a generation. The left populist base’s resentment against elites is a deep, profound, and righteous anger. With that in her arsenal, it is more like Fran Hong brought a gun to a knife fight. Then she left it holstered and let her opponents stab her.
Crowley, Brennan, Roys, and especially Tony Evers attacked. First indirectly, slipping hit pieces to the media on defunding police and her $30,000 debt. Then openly attacking her appearance with socialist podcasters. Finally, they joined far right culture war Republicans in piling on her over old “woke 1.0” tweets. Meanwhile, Hong had nothing but praise and thanks for each candidate. Even as she was being ridiculed for her Thanksgiving tweet, she ignored David Crowley’s obvious lie about his homophobic and misogynistic tweets being written by a friend who happens to be dead now.
I think primary candidates need to talk shit. I would even go so far as to say informing the electorate of your opponent’s shortcomings in an attention-getting way is a civic responsibility. People needed to know Crowley’s actual policies, donors, and impacts. Without that, he is allowed to portray himself as everything to everyone, winning the poorest and Blackest as well as the richest and whitest, wards in Milwaukee. Hong could have used the platform of her campaign to point out that, in office, he often lets down all but the rich white people.
Running too clean a campaign against him also does a disservice to Democrats in the general election. Now we have a candidate striding into the Republican hate machine largely untested. Do you think they’re going to let Dirt McGirk go with an obvious lie? Clearly not. How is Crowley going to handle being asked again and again on primetime TV or in a journalist scrum about data centers, his record on housing, Milwaukee’s regressive taxes or crime, or why exactly, he loves “kicking it with drunk women”? We don’t know how he’ll handle any of that, because he was given a free ride during the primary.
Evers Painted Crowley into an Impossible Corner
By resurrecting David Crowley’s campaign and amplifying Republican talking points to impose it upon the Democratic Party, Tony Evers put us in an incredibly difficult position for November. Evers and Crowley are hosting unity rallies and saying they want to “earn our votes”. Impossible. David Crowley is running the same centrist strategy as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Tony Evers before him. For that strategy, Crowley needs a coalition that includes rich donors and moderate Republicans. Given his record in office, and the divisive, ruthless way he won the primary, he doesn’t have other options. He can’t make promises like Biden did in 2020. His words are not worth shit to us.
Some groups are taking Crowley at his word, and calling for a better platform. That’s admirable, but actually earning the real support of Hong’s army of volunteers (not just her voters) will require flip-flopping to earnest, repeated, strong promises on many of her policy positions. That might be cool, except those positions are incompatible with Crowley’s election strategy. If he tries to woo Hong volunteers by embracing taxes for the rich, eviction and workplace protection, ending the school voucher scam, and a moratorium on data centers, Crowley will lose his wealthy donors. If he tries to woo her supporters by standing up against the GOP hate machine on culture war issues, or y’know… showing up at all for Palestine, he will lose “moderate” Republicans and Zionist Democrats.
Threading this needle is impossible, and trying will leave Crowley with an incoherent campaign. Even where it is possible, Crowley isn’t doing it. Fran’s data center moratorium is the easiest issue to please left and right populists. It's an easy way to bite deep into Tom Tiffany’s constituency, but team Crowley is either too arrogant, clueless, or too hooked on tech money to do it. Instead, already, Crowley and his consultants are distancing themselves from Hong, and his backers have begun fear-mongering and bullying her supporters to shut up and get in line.
Nothing but a Lesser Evil
Sad thing is, they’re right. However awful David Crowley is, Tom Tiffany is a greater evil. I do not want to think of how many people will suffer and die if Tiffany wins and helps greenlight the MAGA dictatorship that Trump is so obviously working to assemble. I have made the argument to anti-electoralist organizers that we all need to vote for Hong, and the same logic applies here. Proving the poverty of centrism by withholding our votes and letting Republicans win has been strategically disastrous. Trump’s personal paramilitary force is on our streets, masked and armed to the teeth, killing people. Meanwhile, the centrists clearly haven’t learned shit from their failures.
I know my words aren’t going to work for everyone. There are many red lines preventing people from voting for Crowley regardless of what I or Fran Hong says. More importantly, votes aren’t everything. There is very little about Crowley’s campaign that will inspire Hong’s people to volunteer or donate, which is what it takes to actually win an election. His patchy decrepit astroturf ground game is going to be on its own. That’s why I’m afraid he might lose.
When our opponents give us two bad options, like enabling MAGA Republicans v volunteering and donating to a campaign that just actively undermined our will and broke our hearts (for the umpteenth time), we need to choose a third thing. We need something affirmative, something inspiring and meaningful, something like Fran Hong’s platform.
A Path Forward
On Monday January 4, 2027 the new governor and legislature will assume office. Whether that Governor is David Crowley or Tom Tiffany, they are going there with the intention to serve the rich and exploit the rest of us. What if they were met with a crowd of protesters demanding Hong’s platform? What if we outnumber the supporters at inauguration? What if we stay in for the long haul, pressuring the legislature, trifecta or not, to pass Hong’s policies? What if we name and shame, and then primary and replace, anyone who obstructs our mission?
I want to spend the time between now and January building a political machine capable of wrenching demands out of whoever takes office. Fran Hong put the platform together, and we certainly put in the work to help her enact it, but that failed. Now we have to do the work of winning it another way.
That’s what lies before us. The direction is clear, we just need to do it.
Voting is still part of that work. I know voting for the lesser evil sucks long term, but letting Tiffany win and dethroning MAGA without electoral victories has no long term. That’s a civil war, and not the cool heroic adventure kind, but a horrific bloody massacre and carbon catastrophe. If we’re lucky, an American civil war would just settle into a decades-long morass of attrition and desperate guerilla fighting. Or we could stop being so precious about our votes, elect shitty stop-gap Democrats, and actually organize for policies between elections.
A Governor Tom Tiffany would be far less likely to concede to our demands in office. That fact will earn David Crowley 20 minutes of my time casting a ballot on or before November 3. But that’s all he’ll get out of me. Autumn is the organizing season in Wisconsin. If we waste September and October trying to help a campaign that is dead-set against our interests, and maybe doomed to fail regardless, then we will start November on the back foot and fail to build something sustainable through the holidays.
Start organizing for January 4 now. Plan to take off work, talk to your friends. Reach out to activist groups. Make coalitions. Dream big and get creative. Mobilize and connect.
We’ll use this space to share what we’re doing and seeing. We can help you share your work. Email milwaukeebeagle@gmail.com if you are organizing along similar lines.
