In her bid to be the next governor of Wisconsin, Francesca Hong likes to invoke the state’s progressive heritage. When journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she expects purple Wisconsin — known for its “razor thin margins” and “moderate swing voters” — to swing from Donald Trump in 2024 to a proud Democratic Socialist in 2026, she responded with a review of the Badger State’s left-wing traditions.
“This is the state,” replied the Assembly member from Madison,
where progressivism was born and nurtured, where kindergarten was formed. This is where ‘sewer socialism’ in Milwaukee came from. This is where Social Security and unemployment insurance was born. … Our socialist progressive roots run deep and the people all across our state are ready to dig up those roots and build something new and better.
This unapologetic and historically minded vision has energized the state’s Democratic base and lifted Hong’s long-shot gubernatorial campaign into the clear front-runner in the Democratic primaries scheduled for Aug. 11. Last week’s final poll from Marquette University, considered the local gold standard, found the progressive leading the pack by more than 20 points.
But while thrilling progressives and democratic socialists in Wisconsin, her surge has sparked deep anxiety among more centrist Democratic leaders who are issuing familiar warnings about her electability and pointing to the latest Marquette survey for the general showing, which show Hong three points behind (among registered voters) and tied (among likely voters) in a matchup with the likely Republican nominee, MAGA-aligned Rep. Tom Tiffany. “She’s too left,” Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist told Politico. “There’s a ton of policymaking power that hinges on the next election cycle in Wisconsin. … Let’s not fuck it up.”
Observers note that Hong has never run in a competitive race against a Republican, and comes from one of the state’s most progressive Assembly districts, in the center of Madison. She won her seat with 88% of the vote against a Republican in 2020.
“Her district, depending on how you measure it, is the first- or second-most Democratic 1% of the state,” John D. Johnson, a research fellow and pollster at the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center, told me. “It is hard to think of a part of Wisconsin that’s more dissimilar from the rest of Wisconsin.”
Her surge has sparked deep anxiety among more centrist Democratic leaders.
But Hong’s supporters reject concerns that she is too left-wing to win. In the same survey that found Hong virtually tied with Tiffany among likely voters, about 7 in 10 of her primary supporters said that winning in November is “extremely important.” This is slightly higher than other Democratic candidates, indicating that her supporters see her as the more electable candidate. “Hong’s campaign and her supporters believe that they would actually be strong in a general election,” says Johnson. “They believe she can turn out people who wouldn’t vote otherwise, and that the policies she supports as a democratic socialist are more popular than the traditional narrative might have.”
Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizens Action of Wisconsin, a statewide organization with ties to the labor movement, agrees with this alternative theory of Hong’s electability. In particular, he emphasized the grassroots energy behind the campaign as reason to be bullish, with base turnout being more critical than appealing to a dwindling number of swing voters. “What really happens [today] is you have two equally capable blue and red bases, and it comes down to which one can be the most excited and turn out the most.”
Kraig has seen the grassroots energy firsthand: Citizens Action endorsed Hong last month after its members pressured the board relentlessly to do so. “For us to get to a Francesca endorsement was hard,” he told me, noting that two of the other Democratic candidates — state Sen. Kelda Roys and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (who dropped out last week) — were both former board members at the organization. The board ultimately chose to endorse Hong because her campaign had the energy of “our leading members that are doing the work on our healthcare and our climate energy justice campaigns.”
This is the grassroots enthusiasm, Kraig argues, that Democrats should be working to foster and harness in the general election.
Voter turnout will also be critical for the state’s legislative contests, where Democrats have their best chance in over a decade to win majorities and a possible trifecta.
Since 2011, Wisconsin Republicans have controlled both chambers of the state Legislature in large part because of an egregious gerrymander. But, after the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Republican-drawn maps in 2023, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed new maps into law that made legislative races competitive for the first time in nearly 15 years. In 2024, a year that largely favored Republicans across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 10 seats in the Assembly and four seats in the Senate, narrowing both GOP majorities.
Those results have set up a major opportunity for Democrats. According to Johnson’s most recent forecast , Democrats are favored to pick up a majority in the state Senate, where they simply have to win seven seats that he classifies as “safe” or “lean-Democrat.” The state Assembly, which has 99 seats, is closer and will likely come down to a few must-win races currently rated as toss-ups. While the national climate favors Democrats, there is no guarantee they will retake one chamber, let alone both. As Johnson notes, a trifecta for either party is “realistically in play.”
These tight margins have deepened the jitters among moderate Democrats who worry that putting an unapologetic leftist at the top of the ballot could derail their efforts to win back the Legislature. Progressives, once again, dispute this conventional framing and insist that a populist firebrand like Hong would bring disillusioned and younger voters to the polls and thus boost candidates down the ballot.
A trifecta for either party is “realistically in play.”
State Rep. Ryan Clancy, one of four Democratic Socialist lawmakers in the Assembly and a close ally of Hong, expressed strong confidence that Democrats will pick up a trifecta this fall, especially if his colleague is leading the ticket. “I knock on enough doors, and understand how underrepresented younger, enthusiastic voters are in polling, to know that whichever Democratic candidate wins the primary will be Wisconsin’s next governor by at least five points, though my assessment is that Hong wins it by more.”
Kraig wasn’t quite as confident, telling me that the new maps are “fairer” than the previous ones but still favor Republicans slightly, meaning that it needs to be a “very good year” for Democrats to win a trifecta. But where progressives like Kraig and Clancy agree is that Hong would give the party its best shot at winning both chambers: “Unless another candidate can show the same capacity to excite the base that Francesca Hong does,” said Kraig, “she is the best candidate to win a trifecta if you look at the evidence that we have on the table right now.”
Regardless of which Democrat ultimately wins the party’s nomination, no one doubts the importance of the top candidate. As in other states, ticket splitting in Wisconsin has declined in recent decades, noted Johnson, and Democratic candidates for THE state Legislature have consistently run slightly behind the Democrat at the top of the ballot.
“The conventional view would be that these local Democrats would really be helped across the finish line by a standard bearer for their party who is winning by three or four points instead of one,” he said.
The strongest argument for Hong’s electability ultimately rests on the broad popularity of her positions on the issues dominating public attention. As in the rest of the country, material concerns have emerged as the primary focus for a majority of Wisconsin voters. More than 4 in 10 registered voters in Marquette’s latest survey cite “inflation and the cost of living” as their top issue, while another third point to related concerns like jobs, housing affordability, healthcare and property taxes.
As they have across the country, data centers have emerged as a crucial issue. Companies like Microsoft, Meta and Oracle are pouring billions into building massive facilities across the state . Since Marquette began tracking sentiment on artificial sentiment last year, public opinion has turned decisively against the construction of new data centers. “It’s remarkable how nonpartisan that issue is,” said Johnson, whose polling shows growing opposition among Republicans as well as Democrats, with 76% of registered voters now saying the “costs of data centers outweigh the benefits.”
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong talks during a primary debate in Milwaukee on July 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Hong has emerged as the candidate most associated with the data‑center issue amid rising public opposition. As of this writing, she is the only contender advocating a moratorium on new data center construction until a regulatory framework and local oversight are established, marking her as the race’s most prominent opponent of the industry. She has also decried the $2 billion in tax breaks that companies were granted in 2023 by the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Fusing affordability and environmental concerns with deepening suspicion of big tech companies and a deferential political establishment, Hong summed up why the issue has resonated with the broader electorate in a post last month. “The fight against AI data centers has become one of the defining issues of this race because it gets to the heart of what people are feeling everywhere,” she said. “Big corporations get the tax breaks, the land, the water, and the power while working people are told to settle for less.” (Hong’s strong position on the issue seems to be earning her at least some support from Trump voters.)
Hong’s biggest vulnerability may lie in some of the controversial positions she championed earlier in her political career. In 2020, for example, she supported “abolishing the police,” a position that she has since backed away from . Less controversially, she has advocated for the abolition of the U.S. Senate .
While the candidate has not backed away from the democratic socialist label, she has downplayed its importance. “People care about ideas, solutions and shared values” over labels, she wrote last month. “Wisconsinites are ready for politics rooted in honesty, care and working-class power.”
Given her strength in the polls, Republicans have already begun to paint her as a far-left radical who hates America, conjuring up the spirit of Wisconsinite Joseph McCarthy 70 years after his disgrace. With President Donald Trump’s approval rating scraping historic lows in Wisconsin and nationally , Republican leaders nationwide are attempting to summon a new Red Scare to jolt their base. But so far, the spell doesn’t seem to be taking . This may reflect the fact that today’s political climate resembles the Gilded Age that produced the Progressive movement far more than it does the early Cold War that produced McCarthy, with rising costs, corporate power and widening inequality driving public debate.
“Wisconsinites are ready for politics rooted in honesty, care and working-class power.”
For their part, democratic socialists appear less concerned about Republican red-baiting than about Democrats failing to meet the current moment. The “worst outcome” for Democrats, said Rep. Clancy — the first socialist elected to public office in Milwaukee since 1956 — is that we achieve the trifecta but “fail to deliver, and lose control of the state for another 16 years.”
“To really succeed,” he added, “we need bold legislation and bold leaders to ensure that we deliver what Wisconsin deserves. We have both of those in Rep. Francesca Hong, and in the leftist candidates down ballot who she will work with to pass transformative legislation.”
A century ago, as Hong notes at campaign events, Wisconsin was the beating heart of American progressivism. It pioneered workers’ compensation and minimum wage, and instituted the first state income tax. Forged through an unusual yet fruitful alliance between progressive Republicans and socialists in the state Legislature, these reforms cemented the Midwestern state’s reputation as the Progressive Era’s foremost “laboratory of democracy.”
It is also true that, within a couple of decades of its progressive apex, the state would produce one of the country’s most notorious reactionary populists, Joe McCarthy. Despite its reputation for moderate swing voters, Wisconsin has often lurched between progressive and right-wing populism. As Johnson told me, “It’s a purple state but it’s not at all a moderate state.”
While electing the nation’s first socialist governor would be a fitting historical turn for the state that launched the Progressive Era and gave America its “sewer socialists,” electing a far‑right MAGA candidate wouldn’t be too out of character, either. Which way it breaks may come down to the party’s willingness to embrace the energy that the Hong campaign has so effectively harnessed in the primary.
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Will a Democratic Socialist Be the Next Governor of Wisconsin?
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