Francesca Hong Is Almost Certain to Win Tonight — and That’s Great News for Republicans

Greetings and welcome to this 101st performance of the Carnival of Fools! The dark Democratic Socialist storm clouds have once again gathered on the horizon of the Great Lakes on this momentous Tuesday, with their thunderheads now moving past Michigan to float ominously toward the fair fields of America’s Dairyland. The rains, they are a-comin’.

Yes, the Wisconsin primary is upon us! (There is also a fiercely contested Minnesota Democratic Senate primary tonight between Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and Representative Angie Craig, but I ceased thinking of Minnesota as a proper state long ago.) Can anything stop Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong from seizing the governor’s nomination and potentially fumbling the race away to Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November? I haven’t met a single Wisconsin operative or commentator who thinks so.

And that includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did the “Sunday show” rounds this weekend (on ABC’s This Week). While she was careful to stipulate that she “[hadn’t] endorsed in that race,” she treated Hong’s nomination as a fait accompli and was already making her excuses: “My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate . . . she’s moved away from it . . . ‘Woke 1’ was crazy!”

That indeed it was. Wonder if “Woke 2” will be any more sane? My colleague Charlie Cooke has further thoughts about AOC’s glib, giggly dodge, so I’ll defer to his supernova of contempt. Instead, let’s actually grant Sandy her flippant point for a moment and catch up on how Francesca Hong — set to win over a disastrously fractured field tonight — is herself doing six years after Woke 1.

Francesca Hong, Still Crazy After All These Years

How to summarize the Wisconsin Democratic (and Democratic Socialist) gubernatorial front-runner, for those unfamiliar with her candidacy? Maybe like this: Hong is a 37-year-old Madisonian born and raised, which means that she speaks English only as a second language — her native tongue is “Insane Progressive.”

And it is a strange and difficult language for normal people (including most Wisconsinites) to grasp, one only distantly related to ours. (I would know — I lived in the heart of Madison myself for a few years, off State Street right near the capitol. Since this was the era of Scott Walker’s union-busting Act 10, that meant it felt a bit like living in Beirut during the year 1982.)

Hong herself is a UW-Madison dropout who worked her way up from dishwasher to executive chef at a bistro east of the capitol, then started a ramen place with her then-husband. (Both establishments are now shuttered.) In 2020, while still working as a restauranteur, Hong ran for the open 76th state assembly district, which covers Madison’s downtown (the “isthmus,” where both the capitol and the University of Wisconsin are located) and the east side of the city. And tellingly, she ran as a Democratic Socialist; she joined the party-within-a-party during the campaign.

Most of the time, a 31-year-old college dropout running on an explicit program of police abolition — Hong: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option” — would cut no mustard in the state of Wisconsin, not even in Madison. But Hong was lucky enough to split the vote seven ways among her opponents and thus managed to win a spot in the legislature with an anemic 28 percent of the vote, supplied to her mostly by the DSA. (She has run unopposed since then.)

And since then? Boy, has she ever been on a tear! Let’s start with the greatest hits, some of which you may already know: Soon-to-be statewide candidate Hong now says she only used to want to abolish the Senate, empty the jails, and abolish the police — you know, back when she was one of 99 assemblymen — but she’s all better now. (She still wants to expand the U.S. Supreme Court, though why that’s relevant to the job she’s seeking as governor is beyond me.)

Some things she just can’t quite let go of, however. In late 2020, after formally joining the DSA and winning her race, Hong tweeted:  “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.” (The “x” in “folx” is apparently for LGBT inclusion.)

For those worried that our political divisions have become unbridgeable in a polarized age, rest assured: This remains a universally unpopular position to take as a statewide candidate in Wisconsin. But given the chance to walk it back just last week, on national television, by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, Hong couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

I’m a chef, and one of the first meals I made, uh, that was um, for the community, uh, when I was 16, was a Thanksgiving meal. You know, I always think, my hospitality background in owning a restaurant for seven, eight years, that bringing folx around the table, uh, to share conversation and build community is always a good thing. But Thanksgiving is also a time that’s very painful for many people in our communities. And so, I think there I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve. And the position that I’m running for right now, and my background as a chef, will actually help me become a better governor that’s able to bring more people to the table.

I printed out that entire answer for two reasons: (1) So you could marvel at one of the most politically inept responses of 2026, an inconceivably cack-handed fumble of an easy question; (2) to emphasize that Francesca Hong has never had to engage in serious electoral politics. (The cherry on this sundae of retail incompetence: After her universally-panned response, Hong went to Politico to give a cleanup interview where she claimed: “My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving . . . yup. I don’t want to cancel it, I actually love it.”)

As I watch Hong’s attempts to answer the most obvious, easily anticipated sorts of questions, I have never seen a clearer example of a politician so deeply cocooned within the radical chic of Madison progressivism that they have lost any ability to appeal to the mainstream, as if a vestigial limb had simply dropped away from lack of use. Hong hasn’t even bothered to develop the survival instincts and sane political reflexes necessary to win statewide. She is instead pure progressive id. Which is why every Republican is quietly rooting for her to win the nomination.

“Driving home after work on E. Wash[ington] post-Toby Keith concert has been one of the most terrifying moments of my life,” said Hong in 2019 — an attitude certain to endear her to the country music-loving residents of, say, Eau Claire or Appleton. Elsewhere, Hong writes about how seeing “too many old white people” at the notorious den of race hatred known as Culver’s had her “on the verge of an anxiety attack.” In 2021, Hong went on a podcast to lament the “proximity to whiteness” of her own son, who is half-white. (Imagine the difficult family conversation when that kid finds out someday.)

Now, in case you’re reading this piece from South Florida or San Francisco, let me explain something to you about Wisconsin’s voter demographics: As Brandon Finnegan of the Decision Desk HQ once put it, Wisconsin is “mayonnaise-on-Wonder-Bread” white — 85 percent white, and 78 percent if you subtract Hispanics. These are not — or even mostly — Madison progressives. They’re working-class Democrats from places like Wausau and La Crosse. (And in Milwaukee, they’re also black — another demographic notably unenthusiastic about Hong.) Hong is such a poor fit for the cultural and political requirements of a statewide campaign in Wisconsin that she might as well be running on a platform of “temperance veganism.”

So how in the heck can all of this be happening? I already explained the basic malfunction in the Democratic primary last week: An overcrowded field has resulted in a rake-stepping slop show where none of the establishment candidates ever succeeded in getting out of each other’s way, even when they knew they had to. Governor Tony Evers is out there campaigning for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the lone remaining serious non-Hong candidate in the race, but all four names are on the ballot — and ballots went out in late June.

There is also the delicate matter of — ahem — “ratf***ing.” It’s one of the more regrettably vulgar terms in our modern political parlance, but alas also one of the most well-known: the tradition whereby one party seeks to interfere in the primary of the opponent. Remember “Operation Chaos?” Remember Claire McCaskill running millions of dollars in ads to boost Todd Akin in the 2012 Missouri GOP primary, knowing he was the most defeatable candidate in the general election? Such shenanigans are the very warp and woof of campaign strategy as it’s fought down in the trenches, and have been for decades.

It should thus surprise nobody that Republican-affiliated PACs have lined up to run television ads boosting Hong in the primary. The Republican Governors Association alone has spent over $3.5 million denouncing Hong as “too liberal” and “dangerously liberal” in the Milwaukee and Madison television markets. (Nudge nudge, Democratic voters!) Another $1 million has been spent by Middle Class Priorities PAC in mailers and TV ads. Meanwhile, Hong has raised only $1.1 million in the race herself — she is not a fundraising juggernaut, for obvious reasons — and all of her paid media exposure is coming from her enemies.

Are they miscalculating in their overconfidence? I suppose anything is possible in a political environment likely to be as terrible for the GOP as this November’s. (This, in fact, is why I remain pessimistic about the Senate race in Michigan.) But governor’s races are different. Candidate quality acutely matters when voters are selecting the person who will run their state for the next four years. And Republicans are dying to run against her in the fall, turning a foregone defeat into an easily achievable win.

Chuck Grassley Loses a Close Companion

Sad news from the world of notable deaths: Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley — who is nominally 92 years old, but perhaps secretly immortal — had to bid farewell over the weekend to his beloved companion of 34 years, Beth. As the New York Times points out in its tasteful obituary, Beth was more than just a mere friend or companion to Senator Grassley; she was a uniquely hard worker and faithful domestic servant as well: a Hoover “Concept Two” vacuum cleaner ca. 1977 that already had served his mother-in-law for 15 years. Grassley himself gave the eulogy on Twitter on Saturday, in his own recognizable métier: “GOOD BYE BETH . U hv been a real workhorse. Ur namesake is still a hard worker. I will miss u.”

Who among us failed to shed a tiny, manly, tear? I’m a softie, and I still remember all the noble service my own vacuum did for me during my college and law school days. So I was moved by the senator’s loss . . . that is, until I found out how quickly Grassley decided to accept another love: “The American ppl are so caring. I hv offer of a used Hoover fr a good Iowan in Sioux City. IT WONT SURPRISE ANYBODY BUT I ACCEPTED. BETH IS BACK BUT NEWER MODEL.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cynical about how quickly Grassley has traded up from Beth to “Beth II.” But in my day we used to require a decent interval of mourning before seeking such close companionship again. I suppose I’m too old-fashioned; I just wasn’t made for these times.

Until next week.