Editors at National Review Online ponder Wisconsin’s troubling political shift.
Wisconsin Democrats appear prepared to try to resurrect what was once known as sewer socialism in the state, although now in a less practical and more radical form.
Marquette’s latest polling for the state’s gubernatorial race, published on July 29, has Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong at 38 percent, 22 points in front of second-place Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson and just dropped out. Wisconsin’s Democratic leadership prefers the third-place David Crowley (7 percent), the current Milwaukee County executive. Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley after his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, also withdrew from the race because of gross financial mismanagement. The single primary debate saw Hong go unchallenged while Barnes and Crowley did yeoman’s work convincing viewers that neither of them is up to the job.
Those who haven’t spent much time drinking Leinenkugel’s on Lake Winnebago may not know that Wisconsin has experienced an extraordinary bout of Democratic political success since Evers defeated Scott Walker’s attempt for a third term. Since that day in 2018, every executive position has gone to Democrats. The state supreme court majority has flipped from a 5–2 conservative majority to a liberal one by the same margin. The Republican legislature, the last bulwark against progressive excess, has shrunk from a near supermajority to a biennially endangered majority.
But now Democrats are about to undertake a massive act of ideological hubris. The party must reckon with the fact that Evers was elected not because of his unique skills but because Wisconsin wanted a boring schoolteacher two years into the first Trump administration, and the left was happy enough with the deal because Evers functioned as a sock puppet for left-wing activism. No one, though, told Evers this. So one can imagine his and the Dem establishment’s shock as they’re realizing that Evers’s endorsement is worth less than an Ostmark.
