{"id":793,"date":"2026-07-22T11:10:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T11:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=793"},"modified":"2026-07-22T11:10:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T11:10:21","slug":"a-crucial-governors-primary-just-became-democrats-biggest-debacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=793","title":{"rendered":"A crucial governor\u2019s primary just became Democrats\u2019 biggest debacle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Move over, Maine. A new Democratic primary has taken the crown as the country\u2019s most dysfunctional.<\/p>\n

Read more An HIV vaccine is within reach<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Wisconsin\u2019s gubernatorial race, a crowded field of establishment-tied Democrats has been splitting the vote for months, giving democratic socialist Francesca Hong\u2019s energetic campaign a lane to the nomination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Recently, fearing Hong would lose the general election (and spooked by a seeming Republican effort to boost her chances), some in the party tried to coalesce around one candidate to stop her: lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But that attempt disastrously backfired last week, when it turned out Rodriguez\u2019s campaign had badly mismanaged its funds. It\u2019s still not clear what happened, but the situation was so messy that she quit the race.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With Rodriguez gone, the two leading contenders appeared to be Hong and Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who was Democrats\u2019 losing nominee for a Senate race in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet, party bigwigs were unhappy with those options and coaxed a candidate who had already dropped out \u2014 Milwaukee county executive David Crowley \u2014 back into the race, even though the primary is only three weeks away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This weekend, Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley in a last-ditch attempt to stop Hong (and, apparently, Barnes) from winning the nomination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The chaos is all the more shocking, because the state party, until recently, was often cited as a national model for Democrats, with leaders and candidates successfully coordinating over multiple cycles in a long-term plan to undo years of Republican dominance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I asked Jessie Opoien, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to walk me through this dizzying sequence of events. How did the party find itself in this mess? Is Hong on a glide path to primary victory? And what awaits in the general election? Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Democrats began this race with optimism. Now, they\u2019re a lot more worried.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Back before this primary began, what was the situation of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and the political status quo in the state?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Democrats were feeling more optimistic heading into this primary. We have a lot of really, really tight races here. But if you look at the past three state Supreme Court races, you had liberal candidates just really blowing it out of the water, no matter how much Republican money came in. Democrats came out feeling pretty happy about those races.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another significant element is new legislative maps that got passed. This would be the second state election where they\u2019re running on those new maps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, for the first time in 15-ish years, Democrats are actually within striking distance of getting a majority or, at least, taking one of the chambers \u2014 or getting closer to the point where they\u2019re not completely irrelevant in the capitol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And the congressional map, which gives Republicans a 6-2 advantage, hasn\u2019t changed yet \u2014 but that\u2019s something Democrats could do if they win a trifecta?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yes, and some of the candidates running for governor have made that a priority.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How was Governor Evers viewed after his two terms?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We look at the Marquette University poll as our gold standard for approval ratings, and Evers is by far the most popular statewide politician they\u2019ve polled, pretty much in the time of their existence. He\u2019s been above 50 percent for pretty much all of his two terms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That being said, there has been a little bit of friction, especially toward the end of the legislative session. The state had this large projected budget surplus that no one could agree on what to do with it. Evers and the Republican leaders of the legislature proposed this deal that included some tax relief and some school funding \u2014 and basically got no support from Democrats in the legislature. They\u2019ve probably gotten past it, but you had people starting to become a little bit more willing to be publicly critical of him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The leading contenders to succeed Tony Evers<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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So, after Evers announces he isn\u2019t running for another term, how does the race to succeed him kick off?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Early on, I think everyone was expecting the attorney general, Josh Kaul, to get in. He would have been the clear frontrunner, and we wouldn\u2019t be in the situation we\u2019re in right now. [Kaul eventually decided not to run.]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor, was the first person to get in, but she did not come in as an automatic frontrunner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mandela Barnes took a little bit longer to get in, but he did. He\u2019s the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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David Crowley, Milwaukee county executive: I think everyone expected his campaign to take off more at the beginning than it did. Milwaukee has had some big moments while he\u2019s been in office. I think people expected him to be possibly a frontrunner early on, and that didn\u2019t necessarily materialize.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Others who got in were state senator Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, the Department of Administration secretary under Evers. And Missy Hughes, a state economic development official.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And state representative Francesca Hong, who came in very much as an underdog candidate, but whose campaign blasted off and gained a lot of traction in a way that, I think, a lot of people didn\u2019t see coming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tell me what you\u2019ve seen on the ground about Francesca Hong\u2019s campaign.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She is absolutely running as a democratic socialist, but she\u2019s talking to Trump voters about affordability and being left behind. She was one of the first ones to jump on the anti-data center sentiment. \u201cJump on\u201d was probably the wrong word, because she was there before the publicity; it didn\u2019t appear to be an opportunistic move.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I started noticing back in December that something felt different with her, just in terms of the fundraising events she was doing. She did a ramen pop-up, bringing back her restaurant specialties. [Hong was a chef and co-owned a restaurant.] She did these small and intimate but unique events, like karaoke and bingo \u2014 bringing people to do fun things, things you don\u2019t necessarily see a candidate engaging in themselves<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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My anecdotal observation is: I see people that I went to high school with or that I know from my non-political life who are talking about her campaign. I just don\u2019t see that, you know, ever, anywhere else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Marquette polls came out early this year, it was really remarkable just how split the field was; the first place candidate had just 11 percent <\/strong>in one poll<\/strong>. There\u2019s been very little polling lately, but the narrative until recently was that it was shaping up to be a three-way race between Hong, Barnes, and Rodriguez, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I think it was starting to feel that way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mandela Barnes, it was harder to measure. He came in with the most name recognition, having been on the ballot as lieutenant governor and for the Senate race. More people had an opinion about him, because they at least had heard of him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With Sara Rodriguez \u2014 there wasn\u2019t a lot of public polling for us to look at. But, then, there started to be an attitude behind the scenes of: Is the frontrunner going to be a democratic socialist, and do Democrats want that? And if they don\u2019t, do they need to start organizing around one candidate?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You started to see that around Sara Rodriguez. The first candidate who dropped out, Missy Hughes, got behind her the day she dropped out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fundraising reports were due in a few weeks, and Sara Rodriguez announced she was going to put up a million-dollar ad buy. In this race, with this many candidates, no one has a lot of money, so a million dollars would have been a big deal. And she had an independent group that was putting ads up for her, too.<\/p>\n

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So, everyone was like, \u201cOh wow, the momentum\u2019s going in her direction, the money\u2019s there, she\u2019s picking up endorsements.\u201d Then, David Crowley got out, pretty much right when that ad buy was announced, and endorsed her. And then, everything started falling apart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Sara Rodriguez disaster and the David Crowley switcheroo<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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So, what happened to the Rodriguez campaign?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was pretty much all starting last week. Sara Rodriguez has got this ad buy that\u2019s supposed to be going up on TV. And we had heard some people starting to raise questions about, where is it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sunday night, about 9:30, Sara Rodriguez\u2019s campaign puts out a press release, and they say that they fired her campaign manager, because they\u2019ve discovered financial mismanagement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On Monday, she holds a press conference in her Madison office. Basically, she has no idea how much money she has, and the ad buy she thought she placed, there\u2019s no money for it. She said she didn\u2019t know if this was something done on purpose or if it was mistakes that were made.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I asked how much she thought she had on hand when they made the million dollar buy. She said $1.5 million. So, we\u2019re talking about maybe a difference of a million dollars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, it goes from \u201cthis is the candidate into the strongest position\u201d to \u201cthis candidate maybe has some money, but we don\u2019t really know how much, and also she\u2019s got these debts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She was committed to staying in [at first]. But, it sounds like, as she continued to dig into whatever the problem was. everyone around her was saying her campaign was over, and she finally decided that was the case on Friday morning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And then, we get this switcheroo.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yeah, then, my colleague, Matt Smith, reported this first, but we all started talking to Democratic sources who told us there was an effort to try and get David Crowley back in the race.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because there was a question of, when Crowley dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez, was he brought in under false pretenses? I think he would not have gotten out, obviously, if he had a clearer picture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, that transitioned to: He\u2019s only been out for a few days; he could get back in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And the key element that made this more of a story than just him getting back in was now having the governor\u2019s endorsement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Had Evers endorsed Rodriguez before that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No, he had not endorsed anyone. He had said throughout the race he wasn\u2019t planning on getting involved, but that he might at some point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, can David Crowley, a candidate who was apparently polling nowhere, who actually quit the race \u2014 can he come back into contention with just three weeks left?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s a really good question. They\u2019ve got to get on the air. They\u2019ve got to get the money. If Evers would like to transfer over the hundreds of thousands to a million dollars he\u2019s got in his campaign account, that would be a big help to David Crowley, or if unions who were backing Sara Rodriguez or hadn\u2019t made an endorsement yet decided to get behind him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But he was polling below 5 percent. So, I don\u2019t know. I just keep reminding myself, I guess, that all of this is occurring within the bubble of people who are actively paying attention to it right now. While the primary seems like it\u2019s tomorrow, it is three weeks away, and there are many people who have not been paying attention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why not Mandela Barnes?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Now, here\u2019s the big question I\u2019ve been confused by.<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If the establishment is so worried about Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, winning the nomination and losing the general, wouldn\u2019t the thing to do be to coalesce around Mandela Barnes, who seems to be the other leading contender?<\/strong> Barnes had run before and lost, but it was in a tough cycle, in 2022, and it wasn\u2019t by that much.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, there\u2019s what seems to me like a cockamamie scheme to get a candidate who had already quit the race to come back in weeks before election day. And that will make it a three-way race, which many people think will make it easier for Hong to win, with a plurality of the vote. So, what\u2019s going on here?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You know, I don\u2019t know if anyone has figured out the answer to that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Before Mandela Barnes even got in the race, there were a not insignificant number of Democrats who were urging him not to. It\u2019s a question, I guess, of whether you think he got really close to beating Ron Johnson and just got out-campaigned, or if you think he came really close on something that he should have been able to pull off. He had money left over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He got attacked in 2022 for <\/strong>some positions on policing<\/strong> that he had. So, is the main concern that he, like Hong, is too far left to win? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I think it probably does have a lot to do with the policing stuff. If a Democrat is willing to say that they\u2019re concerned about the electability issue, they usually point pretty quickly to the police rhetoric.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mandela distanced himself from that more in \u201922, and he\u2019s definitely distancing himself from it now, in a way that we haven\u2019t seen from Francesca Hong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, just the fact that there\u2019s a photo of him holding a t-shirt that says \u201cabolish ICE.\u201d These things exist, and they made for good campaign ad fodder in \u201922.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The other thing I\u2019ve heard, that it is hard to assess the veracity of, is that he just hasn\u2019t been performing as well in internal polls [of the general election] as people had hoped he would.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the Dem sources I spoke with on Friday who was pushing Crowley to get back said, \u201cThis was Mandela Barnes\u2019s race to lose, and he\u2019s been losing it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tom Tiffany and the general election<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Tell me about the general election and the presumptive GOP nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany. What kind of Republican is he, and how formidable an opponent is he likely to be?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Congress, he tends to rank as one of the more conservative Republicans \u2014 certainly within Wisconsin\u2019s delegation. There was trepidation early on from Republicans, as he was getting ready to get into the race, I think, specifically about his positions on abortion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, he didn\u2019t have to deal with a primary, because he got the Trump endorsement and that got his opponents out of the way pretty quickly. So, he\u2019s had a few months to just run some biographical ads that make him look like a folksy guy from Northern Wisconsin. They\u2019re good ads, they\u2019re him and his family, him and a dairy barn. He\u2019s talking about things like data centers and home affordability.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wisconsin is an archetypal swing state. It voted for Trump two out of three times. What\u2019s the current partisan mood there? Does a blue wave look plausible? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you look at polls, Trump\u2019s popularity here is not good. Tariffs continue to be a question here, especially for farmers. I think last time we saw a poll, inflation, jobs, health insurance, education, those were the top concerns. The national economy, I imagine, will bear some weight here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, I expect it to be a close election. Democrats have been very optimistic because of the national environment, but realistically, Wisconsin is a lot closer than that. We elect Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin, we elect Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We\u2019re not predictable.<\/p>\n

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