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Francesca Hong: “Our Movement Is Strong, and the Work Isn’t Done”

More than 300,000 Wisconsin voters backed a democratic socialist’s gubernatorial bid. That’s the measure of the strength of a new kind of politics.

Francesca Hong at a primary election night watch party at Atwood Music Hall in Madison, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, August 11, 2026.

This week, Francesca Hong won one of the highest vote totals ever recorded for a Wisconsin Democrat in a seriously contested primary for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Her tally—around 312,000 votes—was almost 90,000 votes more than Democratic Governor Tony Evers won when he was first nominated in 2018.

Evers chose not to seek reelection this year. He remained aloof from a chaotic multi-candidate campaign to replace him, before finally endorsing a last-minute bid by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who on Tuesday finished a little over 3,000 votes ahead of Hong.

Election analysis is often an exercise in managing expectations, and that it certainly the case in Wisconsin, where pre-primary polls put Hong in the lead. When she didn’t prevail, pundits and political insiders rushed to declare a definitional victory for the Democratic Party’s embattled centrist wing.

“Democrat establishment strikes back as socialist candidate downed in battleground primary,” read the Fox News headline, while CNBC announced, “Hong’s defeat in Wisconsin deals blow to rising Democratic socialists.” And, of course, The New York Times presumed that “A Stunning Loss in Wisconsin Shows the Limits of the Left.”

Seriously? A little-known legislator with a scant campaign treasury, whose candidacy was actively opposed by the sitting governor and faced a hair-on-fire national media onslaught, finished in a virtual tie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the ultimate swing state. And we’re supposed to believe that the result has defined the limits of the left?

History suggests differently.

Movements are built over time. Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive governor of Wisconsin in the early 20th century, lost repeated bids for his Republican Party’s gubernatorial nomination. He was labeled as too radical, too unprepared, and too unfit to govern. And then he won. The transformational figure in the modern Democratic Party of Wisconsin, William Proxmire, was dismissed as a gadfly. He lost bids for governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956. Then, in 1957, he won a special election for what had been Joe McCarthy’s US Senate seat and ushered in a new kind of politics in a once rigidly Republican state.

In the heat of an election season, results are measured in raw vote totals. But they should also be measured by the potential they reveal. That is what Hong did on election night. “We have built something that will change politics forever,” she told a........

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