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

The map of Wisconsin confirms that assessment. Hong’s support was not narrowly defined, nor regionally constricted. She won 20 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, carrying wide swaths of northwest and western Wisconsin, as well as much of the industrial Fox Valley. She won Green Bay and surrounding Brown County, as well as Democratic strongholds such as Eau Claire and La Crosse. She carried Menominee County, the home of the state’s Menominee Indian Reservation. Her highest percentage of the vote came not from liberal Madison’s Dane County but from Ashland County on the far shores of Lake Superior. She even came within 2,400 votes of winning Crowley’s Milwaukee County.

While much of the national coverage of the Wisconsin campaign had focused on Hong’s democratic socialism and her old tweets about Thanksgiving and the best place to sample cheese curds, the secret to her statewide viability was not a novel new approach developed by strategists in New York or Washington.

Rather, Hong practiced an old-school version of Wisconsin Democratic politics—recognizing the importance of building a coalition rooted in the progressive heartlands of Madison, the diverse precincts of Milwaukee, and the rural regions that Democrats have so frequently neglected. In building that coalition, Hong did something that is so rare in politics that it confused many of the national reporters who began following her as her campaign as it surged in the polls: She engaged in real conversations with Wisconsinites, joking with them, showing off her Milwaukee Bucks tattoo, and paying close attention when they talked about things like their concerns about AI data centers.

Long before most Democrats nationally took an interest in the issue, Hong called for a moratorium on construction of major data centers. But she did not stop there. She recognized that the widespread opposition to data centers is just one expression of a deeper anxiety over the threat that artificial intelligence poses to jobs, privacy and the frameworks of our lives. So—in addition to plans to tax the rich and fully fund public education, break up agribusiness monopolies, establish public banking, and strengthen unions—she proposed a detailed agenda that promised “no tax breaks or state funding for AI layoffs” and said that, when it came to AI regulation, “Wisconsin will step in to protect workers if the federal government won’t.”

Hong’s determination to build a campaign based on her interactions with voters—as opposed to demands from campaign donors and talking points from out-of-state consultants—set her apart. And it built a loyalty that saw her through the turbulent close of a campaign in which candidates with more money and name recognition stumbled and, in many cases, dropped out. Even amid claims that Hong could not beat a Republican “culture wars” crusade that would attack her as a holiday-hating Marxist, hundreds of thousands of Democratic primary voters stuck with the 37-year-old progressive, who proudly identified herself as “a mom, service worker, chef, and community organizer”

Just as Hong stuck with them. While most of the media’s attention to the last days of the campaign focused on some ill-advised appearances on national cable shows—where the commentariat could talk about nothing but old tweets on police funding and Thanksgiving—the candidate spent most of her time on the road, traveling along blue highways and county roads from Viroqua (population 4,504) to Siren (population 1,554) and to historic manufacturing centers such as Kenosha, and, of course, to Green Bay. She frequently mentioned the latter city in response to questions about her supposedly “radical” ideology: “When people ask about my style of progressive politics, I always start with the three Ps: fixing potholes, fully funding our public schools, and our community-owned Green Bay Packers.”

“At some stops,” Hong noted, “we’ve even had to change venues because so many people [were] showing up.” They wanted pictures with the former chef and restaurant owner from Madison whom so many national commentators portrayed as “too radical” or “too woke” to connect with voters in a swing state such as Wisconsin. In fact, Francesca Hong connected with more than 300,000 of them, as she laid the foundations for a movement that is far from finished.