Sewer Socialism, but Worse

National Review Online

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

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.

 

And so Wisconsin finds itself seriously considering a journalism dropout and failed restaurateur in Francesca Hong. Elected to the state assembly in 2020, Hong has never needed to be, or shown an interest in being, anything other than the stereotype of a Madison progressive. Whether the subject is Israel, defunding the police, or killing off school choice, she has gleefully taken the leftmost position and spends time with the likes of Hasan Piker. A card-carrying member of the DSA, Hong is the latest of the Platner/Mamdani school to take a crack at winning a Democratic primary in the cause of socialism.

 

The national and state GOP would prefer that Hong get the nod to run against Republican Tom Tiffany, currently a congressman for a safe-red Wisconsin district, because Hong appears the most beatable in a general election and because of the opposition fundraising she’ll provoke. Tiffany has the advantage of an unopposed primary run, and ads of him hanging out with dairy cows, quilting with his mom, and raising an old-fashioned are straight out of the playbook that worked for the likes of Tammy Baldwin, Bryan Steil, and Evers. Compare the optics of aw-shucks spots with the anti-Hong ads blanketing the state and the cringe-inducing clips showing Hong’s relative inexperience with hostile press. Look at her laundry list of growth-and-culture-crushing policies: doubling the corporate tax rate while instituting an estate tax in a state with twice the average of large, family-owned businesses, public banking, and state-run farms, to start. Milwaukee, one of the two blue strongholds, is a city of African-American and Jewish voters who prize the school-choice options and must look askance at the DSA’s calls for returning their kids to failed public schools and the group’s antisemitism. Then, there are her past remarks about defunding the police. Given all of that, one can see why the GOP won’t mind if Hong is the Dems’ contender.

 

But what if she wins a general election? As local reporters have noted, Hong seems to have found a bipartisan lane with her AI moratorium push. Blue and red enclaves along the shores of Lake Michigan have been some of the first in the nation to loudly denounce what they perceive as AI data centers’ 19th-century-style industrialization of what was farmland the year before and the threat to the freshwater of the Great Lakes. Moreover, state-level Republicans, other than Ron Johnson, have yet to prove that they can win statewide races in this decade.

 

If this race bounces the wrong way, the Wisconsin public is going to get a return of sewer socialism — good and hard.