Stipulated: I’m very happy for David Crowley. He’s a great candidate I look forward to supporting today and beyond election day. If he’s half the governor he is a county commissioner, he’ll be tremendously successful.
But I remain a Hong supporter, too, and there is nothing surprising let alone “stunning” about the outcome of last night’s election, as the NY Times would like you to believe.
Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, entered Tuesday evening’s Wisconsin primary for governor as the Democratic favorite, with a lead in the polls built on months of grass-roots organizing and a left-wing message that seemed to fit the moment of establishment unease.
Favorite is doing a lot of work here as it has in nearly every story written about this race. The word implies she had a clear majority going into yesterday, but she never did. Even the Journal Sentinel called it a “shocking finish to a surreal primary.”
It reflects how newspaper editors always want to name a presumptive nominee, rather than what the electorate is feeling in their day-to-day.
If polling is to be believed, 38% of voters were undecided on July 29, two weeks before the election. The week before it was 45%. The latest Marquette poll last week showed Hong 38, undecided 34, and Barnes, who dropped out of the race, still pulling 16%. Sure Hong was polling higher than anybody else. Crowley was at 7%. But with that many undecided or committed to candidate who withdrew, about half the electorate needed to pick a candidate last night. It was always anybody’s race.
If anything last night’s outcomes show the need for ranked choice if not formal runoff elections in Wisconsin. Last night, 61% of people voted for someone other than David Crowley, yet he still “won” the election. It reminds me of elections in the late-90s and through the 2010s when the following candidates all won Gubernatorial elections with less than 50% of the vote.
- Jesse Ventura 37% (1998)
- Tim Pawlenty 44% (2002) 47% (2006)
- Mark Dayton 44% (2010)
- Jim Doyle 48% (2002)
- Tony Evers 49.5% (2018).
In each of those four elections, a decade of MN politics, the winner of the election had more people vote against them. That should not be possible in the United States in 2026. It’s impossible to know the outcomes had those elections had runoffs.
Runoffs also help avoid people casting a vote for an ineligible candidate. In Wisconsin, you’re not allowed to spoil your ballot even if your candidate dropped out. You just have to accept that your vote is meaningless.
Until we have better elections we can’t make sweeping claims about “the limits of the left” or that “the democratic socialist wave cannot reach beyond urban centers,” tempting as they are for the clicks. We particularly should avoid them when the data don’t bear them out:
- Hong lost by less than 5000 votes statewide
- 65 thousand people voted for a candidate who withdrew (Barnes + Rodriguez)
- The Times’s own data shows she out-performed Crowley in smaller cities around the state
- Crowley won in the state’s largest city and metro area: Milwaukee-Waukesha.
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