Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online analyzes recent developments in a significant Wisconsin election.
The land of squeaky cheese curds, Spotted Cows, and curiously overconfident bears has suddenly become a vast inland sea of hazards for the Democrats, as they struggle to row their ship away from being completely capsized by the Charybdis known as the Democratic Socialists of America in their August 11 primary.
For those who just entered this story in medias res: The DSA is a splinter faction of the left — they explicitly refuse the label of “party” because their stated ambition is to conquer the Democratic Party as a mass-movement electoral vehicle itself, not merely compete with it — and their explicitly communist adherents have been staking out victories in Democratic primaries across the land in blue seats and safe states this primary season.
And now they have come for the Wisconsin governor’s race. Incumbent Democrat Tony Evers is retiring, and the race to succeed him has devolved into a desperate bid by the Democratic establishment to fend off the DSA. The bloody scrum was originally a four-person fandango among Dems, with three “establishment” figures — current Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — playing bumper cars against one another while Madison-area state representative Francesca Hong ran in the outside lane, as a member of the DSA. Crowley dropped out in early July to endorse Rodriguez, acknowledging he had no viable path to the nomination.
But Hong continues to lead in the primary, all while sporting the trendiest DSA positions. As a Madisonian she voices them loudly: She is running on a platform of providing free universal childcare, abolishing ICE, installing a data-center moratorium, and “taxing the rich.” She doesn’t like Israel, she doesn’t like guns, and she is a self-described “sewer socialist.” In other words, she has all the “youth energy” in this race and then some — but Wisconsin doesn’t vote for kids. Thus, the Democrats are sweating through their undershirts in fear that she will seize the nomination and then tank what otherwise would be an easily winnable general election in November.
