Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong speaks to supporters during an election-night party on Tuesday, August 11, 2026, in Madison, Wisconsin. Recent polling had Hong with a substantial lead over her nearest Democratic rival David Crowley, but returns have shown a tight race throughout the evening with the two candidates trading slight leads. (2026 Getty Images) Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google On the rainy morning of primary day in Madison, a volunteer for Francesca Hong’s gubernatorial campaign told her that what they were doing together was about so much more than Wisconsin.
“I think we’re going to make history, I really do!” he exclaimed.
As the legendary Lee Corso might put it: not so fast, my friend.
Despite the furor over her history as a police, prison and Thanksgiving abolitionist, Governor Tony Evers’ prodigious efforts to boost her opponent and the Sanders-Cortez axis’ abandonment of her, Hong had appeared to be on a glide path to the Democratic nomination.
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong speaks to supporters during an election-night party on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, in Madison, Wisconsin. Getty Images Every single recent survey of the race had suggested that she would win — and win handily — on Tuesday.
In the final days of her campaign, Hong herself appeared assured of her own inevitability.
She barely bothered to distinguish herself from her opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and couldn’t contain a smirk as she fantasized about welcoming Evers to her team in short order.
In a particularly disturbing, hubristic middle finger to the press, her staff even turned journalists from both The Post and Fox News away at the door of her election night watch party.
Would a Hong administration have also arbitrarily denied adversarial media access to her?
I guess we’ll never know; she was so drunk on the idea of wielding power that she forgot to earn it.
Despite having suspended his campaign for a week-and-change just last month and being written off by the national press, Crowley shocked the world on Tuesday, dealing a painful blow to both Hong and the movement from which she hails.
Socialists with radical, holiday-hating politics have hit pay dirt in deep blue New York City.
One even prevailed in next-door Michigan last week.
But as it turns out, those victories also depended on the quality of the winning candidates.
Her self-sabotaging past rhetoric aside, she was utterly bereft of star power.
A gregarious campaigner with a friendly smile; she didn’t let a single canvasser she met hit the road without a hug, thank you and selfie.
But she lacked the dynamism of Ocasio-Cortez, the conviction of Sanders and the easy, polished charisma of Zohran Mamdani.
Her stump speeches weren’t stirring, her energy wasn’t infectious and her occasional curses — an apparent substitute for the vigor she lacked — landed flat.
“Let’s f—ing go,” she told her admirer in Madison on Tuesday.
Francesca Hong chats with a supporter in Madison on Tuesday morning. Hong spoke in the manner you might expect a robot playing a therapist might, weaving platitudes and non-sequiturs together in whispers that some airheaded recent grad told her exuded thoughtfulness but actually betrayed her as a hollow space cadet.
Her supporters reliably conveyed both some limited amount of affection for the candidate personally and unbridled enthusiasm for her agenda.
They were enamored by her never-before-conceived “idea of taxing the rich,” and continued commitment to putting ICE on ice.
They viewed her heavy-handed demand for a data center moratorium as an imperative (one supporter from Sheboygan fretted that they would otherwise be used by immortality-hungry billionaires to “upload their brains to a computer.”)
And her promise of delivering what she called “permanent affordability” landed well after a half-decade of runaway inflation.
Her problem, though, was that her campaign spoke all of the quiet parts about her worldview out loud.
Hong scored points with progressives over her vacuous hostility to law enforcement.
But she had already demonstrated what that looked like in practice by voting against legislation targeting sexual predators in the state assembly.
Moreover, the iconoclasm and rage central to her political identity were reminders of the 2020 riots that wrought untold death and destruction across the country, and particularly in minority-majority communities.
Her events were littered with (mostly white) volunteers wearing T-shirts opposing school voucher programs.
But black families from Milwaukee were none-too-pleased that Hong was coming for their children’s education while crowing about equity.
And while she professed to be laser-focused on the ongoing affordability crisis, those voters without medium-term memory loss might have recalled that it was profligate government spending of the kind she was championing that had spawned it.
In the end, working-class voters grounded in reality rather than post-modern theory turned out in droves to save the Democrats’ flighty, overeducated class from themselves.
Because while Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani have proven adept makeup artists, they’ve still been applying lipstick to a pig that Hong lacked the talent to disguise.
