By Christian Schneider
Thursday, August 13, 2026
The day before Tuesday’s stunning Democratic
gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers traveled the state to stump for his preferred candidate,
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. It was unusual that a sitting
governor got involved in a partisan primary for his successor, but in this
case, the circumstances of Evers’s involvement are almost too incredible to
believe.
Effectively, Evers, a relatively moderate Democrat, stood
up to the socialist wave overcoming his party, and he did so armed with only a
soup ladle. Francesca Hong, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of
America and a backbencher in the state legislature, had shot to the front of
the gubernatorial field, imperiling the Democrats’ chances of winning against
Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November. Every legitimate poll had
Hong walking away with the race, leading by double digits, and in some cases
doubling the vote of her next-closest competitor.
Republicans clearly wanted Hong to be the Democrats’
candidate. Past tweets of hers expressed crackpot theories, including the idea
that Thanksgiving and virtually every other holiday should be canceled, that
police and prisons should be abolished, and that being in a place with too many
white people made her uncomfortable. Hong actually believed all the lunacy that
your uncle on Facebook is trying to convince you Democrats believe.
“She’s not ready for prime time,” Crowley said of Hong.
“And the fact that she’s been asked very simple questions and the way that
she’s responding to those questions makes the news even more should cause all
of us to pause.”
Nonetheless, Hong was coasting on a socialist momentum
within the Democratic Party that had birthed U.S. Senate candidates including
Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And in the past few
weeks, Hong’s nomination seemed inevitable.
It was, until Evers stepped in and reversed the race in a
way that may never have been seen in modern politics. In order to stop Hong and
face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Crowley, who had
dropped out of the race weeks before, to reenter the contest and become the
“establishment” candidate. And for weeks, it looked as if the effort was going
to fall short, given Hong’s huge polling lead. And yet, on Election Day, it
appears that Democrats all over the state decided to side with Evers in
preventing Wisconsin from becoming a national laughingstock.
Democrats suddenly snapping out of an ideological
delusion in favor of electability isn’t entirely unprecedented. In 2019, after
Bernie Sanders was barreling toward the presidential nomination, lesser
candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar quickly dropped out of the
race and threw their support behind the establishment candidate, Joe Biden, who
went on to defeat incumbent President Donald Trump.
But Evers’s last-minute switcheroo was even bolder, as he
exhumed the dead corpse of a previous candidate in order to topple the
socialist front-runner. He didn’t need candidates dropping out to coalesce
establishment voters; he actually added more candidates to the race to
do so. And in the span of about a week, he apparently turned an entire state
against an extreme candidate. (And it wasn’t just the state — national figures
including Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren all declined
to endorse Hong, treating her as if she were a Steve Bannon underwear
calendar.)
Evers’s emergency machinations should go down as one of
the bravest political coups in American history, in one of the most chaotic
elections the nation has seen. In the words of Saturday Night Live’s
Stefon, this race had everything, from sex scandals to candidates tanking their
campaigns with fiscal mismanagement. And it was all capped by a candidate
dropping out of the race, then jumping back in and winning the nomination just
weeks later.
Evers is darn near the last governor you’d expect to
strike so swiftly and decisively. He plays the part of soft-spoken, aw-shucks
Midwestern governor to perfection (even though he is occasionally prone to public profanity).
And yet, while Republicans may be angry that the
Democrats have a more viable candidate to run against Tom Tiffany, there is
something admirable in anyone who stands up to the creeping influence of
socialism and expanded government control of our lives. Republicans rooting for
Hong were playing a dangerous game — while Tiffany was polling ahead of Hong,
we have now seen just how wrong polls can be. Hong could have beaten Tiffany;
then the state’s residents would have been stuck with a lunatic as their governor.
At least now Badger State residents can know that their next governor will be a
sane person.
And for that, whether on the left or right, they should
thank Tony Evers for throwing himself on the socialist grenade.
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