Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is facing David Crowley, not Francesca Hong, in November. But we know what he planned to attack her with, because the 349-page dossier has now been given to Puck and is no longer confidential. Everyone expected Hong to win handily. She lost by 3,211 votes, or 0.4 percent. It was a slim margin for Crowley, but a setback for the far left’s ongoing campaign to take over the Democrat Party. The Midwest seems to be forming a rampart against left-wing lunacy. Voters here will tolerate progressivism, but socialism might be a bridge too far. We shall see — these people will never go away.
Most of it isn’t new, which is part of the problem: GOP carpet bombed Hong to death, which seems to have worked, though it might have cost us an easy win. Hong should never have been overlooked, but no doubt her penchant for social justice jargon and overall bizarre statements took a toll, so I stand corrected on that. When people like Graham Platner slip through, though, the crazy-talk attacks aren’t the insurance policy they once were. We know Hong wanted to abolish ICE, but we didn’t know she called them fascists and terrorists, which would’ve made swing voters vomit (via Puck):
Much of the research file is devoted to Hong’s repeated use of social justice language that became chic among the left in the Trump era. At times it reads like woke Mad Libs. Some of the hits: In 2020, she wrote that neighborhood gentrification is “violence” against Black people. In 2021, she sponsored a resolution calling systemic racism “a public health crisis” and demanding the state legislature create “an equity-oriented country and society.” For years, Hong’s bio on X described her location as “occupied Ho-Chunk Land” rather than her home in Madison.
[…]
On immigration, Hong has loudly called for ICE to be abolished, which is not a secret. But the book includes references to calling ICE agents “terrorists” and “fascists”—terms that repel swing voters, according to plenty of Democratic polls in recent years. In 2021, Hong appeared at a Madison rally and said that all immigrants should be citizens.
[…]
The oppo book also features 10 full pages of Hong staking out far-left positions on trans rights and gender issues. In 2021, she supported a taxpayer-funded task force to study “the societal barriers to equality” for intersex and “gender nonconforming individuals.” In 2022, Hong referred to pregnant women as “pregnant people.” In 2023, she voted against a bill banning gender reassignment surgery for minors. That same year, she supported a local resolution that would make Dane County a legal sanctuary for trans and nonbinary Wisconsinites. She also opposed legislation requiring that public school sports teams be designated for males or females—or co-ed.
Most of these comments are probably to be expected from a D.S.A. state legislator from Madison, one of the most progressive towns in the country and sometimes called the Berkeley of the Midwest. But running for governor in one of the closest battlegrounds in the country? That’s a far different political proposition. As the book demonstrates, Republicans were set to clobber her with a voluminous archive of outside-the-mainstream commentary, hoping that her crunchy crusader brand would repel swing voters more than Trump’s ugly approval rating.
If she couldn’t do damage control about her hatred for Thanksgiving, imagine what could’ve happened here if she were the nominee. But that’s hypothetical. She might have hired new political guns, changed her tone and messaging, and retooled. Who knows?
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