Francesca Hong’s Loss Is Both a Blessing and a Curse for Progressives

But shifting to the Midwest introduced two other elements to these contests: more conservative electorates and electability considerations. While I don’t have data to prove this, I would ***ume that the average Democrat in Michigan or Wisconsin is less progressive than in the New York districts where DSA-backed candidates won. And in the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries, prominent figures in those states, most notably governors Gretchen Whitmer and Tony Evers, emphatically endorsed Hong and El-Sayed’s opponents, arguing that they were more likely to win the general election. Democratic voters are likely to be particularly receptive to these arguments in Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which are must-win presidential states and flipped from Donald Trump to Joe Biden back to Trump over the last decade.

Hong’s defeat was almost a mirror image of El-Sayed’s victory a week earlier. Pre-primary polls, as with El-Sayed, suggested Hong had a comfortable double-digit lead. But instead, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Hong ended up effectively tied, as Representative Haley Stevens and El-Sayed were last week. (El-Sayed won by about 1 percent; Crowley by even less.) Like El-Sayed, Hong won in areas near the state’s colleges but trailed her more centrist opponent in small counties and the state’s heavily Black urban county (Wayne County in Michigan, Milwaukee County in Wisconsin). While it’s too early to have such full ***ysis of the results in Wisconsin, I ***ume that Hong, like El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and other progressives, defeated her more centrist opponent among younger and college-educated voters but trailed with African Americans, non-college voters, and those over age 50.

We don’t know if the polls were wrong, Crowley gained ground, or Hong lost it in the final days of the campaign. But two factors probably shaped the stunning outcome a lot: Evers’s rejection of Hong and strong backing of Crowley; and Hong’s own comments reinforcing doubts about her, most notably when she at first refused to fully backtrack from her 2020 tweet calling for ending the celebration of Thanksgiving. It was notable that prominent progressives such as Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders, who had campaigned aggressively for El-Sayed, refused to endorse Hong in the final days of the campaign. I suspect they, like center-left Democrats, were skeptical she could win the general election and didn’t want her defeat to tar the broader progressive movement.