Debunking Media Spin on Crowley's Victory
In the wake of Francesca Hong’s loss to David Crowley in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, the mainstream media inside and outside of Wisconsin have weighed in with their interpretations of the results. While some of these articles are better than others, there are three takes being circulated that need to be corrected.
The first of these is the idea that Tony Evers is a popular governor. This one isn’t completely wrong, but it’s only a partial answer that’s missing a key part of the picture. While Evers’s job approval ratings for the past year were slightly more positive than negative, according to the Marquette Law School polls, it was not by a huge amount. From April 2025 to July 2026, his approval rating fluctuated between 47% and 51%, while his disapproval rating ranged from 44% to 47%. That’s an average approval rating of 49% and an average disapproval rating of 45.5%, for an average of 3.5% above water.
A more revealing polling result is that, while the July 2025 Marquette poll reported that 83% of Democrats supported Evers running again, one year later 39% voted for Hong, who represents the antithesis of Evers’s approach to governing. This divergence indicates the ambivalence of the Democratic electorate, which is torn between the safety of the familiar, fear of the unknown and “radical,” and hope for a more equitable, affordable society.
Even more important is the weakness among Evers’s core base hiding under his moderately positive approval numbers. This weakness was tellingly exposed in a July 2025 open letter signed by a who’s who list of liberal advocacy groups and politicians. Titled “Demand Wisconsin Democrats Meet the Moment in 2026,” the letter begins by describing the dire state of politics and the economy on the national level. It then states that “we stand on the precipice of being able to win a trifecta in Wisconsin in 2026 and to change course in a way that can tangibly improve the lives of working people and serve as a social democratic model for the rest of the nation. For that reason, it has never been more important that Democratic candidates–especially our candidate for Governor–in 2026 share the following commitments with us.”
The letter then goes on to list a series of progressive demands, including universal child care, housing reform, reducing the state’s prison population, expanding BadgerCare, and a $20 minimum wage–all of which became key planks of Hong’s platform. Perhaps most important of all was the first demand, which was “to fight, with every ounce of their political capital, for a fully funded public education system at every level, including a dramatic infusion of per pupil aid and 90% reimbursement for special education.” This demand refers to the woeful state of Wisconsin’s public education funding, which has been in crisis since at least 2020 due to severely inadequate funding from the state. Voucher schools get reimbursed for 90% of their special education costs, while public schools will only be getting 35%. This shortfall has rightly infuriated education advocates across the state.
The letter was signed by thirty-two elected officials, including eight current and former school board officers, as well as representatives of AFT-Wisconsin, Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, Citizen Action of Wisconsin, and the teachers’ unions of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay. This group makes up much of the institutional base of the Democratic Party, who were exasperated with Evers’s failure to apply any sort of pressure on the issues that they cared most about. While it’s true that the legislature was in the hands of the Republicans, time and time again, Evers gave in politically to the Republicans without putting up any kind of fight whatsoever, in situations where he could quite likely have secured more favorable deals. We saw this with redistricting, the sales tax increase in the 2024 shared revenue bill, and, most consequentially of all, reimbursement for special education expenses.
It’s beginning to dawn on Democrats across the country that their voters want politicians who are going to fight for their (supposed) values, not gesture weakly in their direction before utterly collapsing. Evers could be the poster child for the latter. When the open letter came out on July 23, it was clear that this was how the Democrats’ core sources of institutional support saw Evers. Evers announced his retirement the next day.
David Crowley won the primary as Evers’s anointed successory (after the previous frontrunners vying for that spot, Sarah Rodriguez and Mandela Barnes, dropped out). Crowley has a reputation among Milwaukee progressives for doing as little as possible as County Executive, putting him firmly in the Evers tradition. Crowley managed to eke out a win against Hong, with some help from Evers and some very deep pockets. But the coalition that expressed its displeasure with Evers hasn’t gone away, and if Crowley turns out to be Evers 2.0, he’s probably going to find out sooner rather than later that that just won’t hold water anymore.
The second mistaken idea is that the polls showing Hong ahead were wrong. A Marquette poll on July 29 showed Hong leading with 39%. She ended up getting 39.4%. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has pointed out that this is pretty dang accurate. What the polls didn’t show was how a fractionally larger group of voters would solidify behind Crowley. The same poll showed that 34% of primary voters were still undecided. After Barnes dropped out, Evers swung his support hard to Crowley, and his attacks on Hong did much to consolidate support behind Crowley. The reason the polls didn’t show this is because it hadn’t happened yet. Evers’s barrage of criticism, and the heavy ad spending for Crowley, kicked in in the final stretch of the campaign. The earlier polls weren’t wrong. They were in fact astonishingly accurate; they just couldn’t predict the future. The national media has frequently missed this point because they have been looking at Hong’s lead in the polls rather than at her eventual vote count
The third mistaken idea is that Hong’s loss shows the limitations of socialism’s appeal in the Midwest, or swing states, or both. This one is really the most absurd. Hong lost by a fraction of a percent, so clearly this was a race that could have gone the other way if things had played out slightly differently. A number of articles have pointed out that this primary was unusually topsy-turvy, but what they have been less liable to recognize is that this benefited her opponents as well as herself. Rodriguez and Barnes dropping out helped consolidate the establishment behind Crowley, while Roys staying in split the progressive vote. Between Hong and Roys, progressives got nearly half the vote total in the primary, so while Hong did not triumph in this race, it’s clearly well within the realm of possibility for a socialist to win a state-wide race in a purple, Midwestern state.
Prior to the primary, the state already had a caucus of four socialists in the Assembly—Hong herself, Ryan Clancy, Darrin Madison, Jr., and Christian Phelps—and several other self-proclaimed socialists in elected office in Milwaukee. As Milwaukee socialists well know, Milwaukee had a long tradition of electing socialists in the first half of the twentieth century. This tradition has been revived in the past six years and currently shows no signs of abating.
