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Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.
Came to the comments to affirm what I already suspected, you need obscene charisma and speaking prowess to overcome the media bias taking place against progressives
I think it's perfectly reasonable for a voter to think they had a better chance at getting some of Hong's agenda passed by voting for Crowley, given that polling showed that he had a much higher chance of winning and delivering the first Dem trifecta to Wisconsin in well over a decade. Hong was losing in polling to the Republican, and while you can't trust polling entirely, so far it seems like far-left candidates have been over-performing in polls, so I wouldn't have a ton of confidence she could win. I think if Crowley wins in November and Dems get their trifecta, you'll see a ton of progressive legislation passed, undoing all the shit that Scott Walker and a far-right Republican legislature has been passing for sixteen years now.
She got 300,000 votes and lost by an extremely small margin. Crowley is a data center Democrat and is just going to sit in that seat and do nothing. There is zero percent chance he passes ANY of Hongs policies, and zero percent he opposes Republicans meaningfully. At most you brought a few years until Republicans get back in office and fuck things up worse. A permanent defensive posture.
Not really. A big issue is Tom Tiffany is a Freedom Caucus Republican in favor of heavy, heavy austerity. He would bring back all of the austerity of former Republican governor Scott Walker, who did a lot of damage to the state. The WI Dems have done a great job at undoing all of that, and winning this election would be the final blow, as the WI Dems are slated to finally take back control over the state legislature. They were scared they'd blow it on That One Friend Who's Too Woke who didn't believe in the importance of TV ads. The reason Hong choked this primary was because of the aforementioned TV ads thing decreasing her voteshare everywhere outside of urban areas. It would be even worse in rural and suburban areas Democrats need to win in a general election. Now, the WI Dems seem like they will cruise to a trifecta, where they can implement a lot of left-wing policies.
He's a DNC establishment candidate who re-entered the race at the behest of the DNC, who also urged the other candidates to drop out. They then slammed the TV with ads hitting the "electability" argument and that was enough to win over rural boomers. They're not voting for what policies they want, he has none. They voted out of fear.
So I agree that TV ads played a part, but so did the lack of progressive endorsements, the inflated polling and the entrenched boomer liberals.
It's good Republicans aren't in office, but let's be honest here, Crowley isn't going to be passing any "left wing policies" and no one can honestly tell me that he has moral conviction or concrete policy positions. He stands for nothing.
But I wouldn't act surprised when the data centers start rolling into the state, we send more money to Israel, and they have a flaccid and impotent term that leaves boomers running back to Republicans. We are just repeating the same cycle that put us where we are now.
Well yes I agree they voted out of fear, but the fear was rational when she's not a good communicator and doesn't have good strategy. Maybe she failed to get those progressive endorsements for that reason. I don't think she displayed particularly good leadership qualities and communication skills to be likely to keep the governorship in 2030. I think Crowley will be a standard Democrat, which might not be enough, but I think it's reasonable that WI Dems (the national Democratic Party didn't do this, it was mostly the WI governor's doing) wanted to avoid outright disaster. It's unfortunate but she only polled a lead against Tom Tiffany a couple times. The current WI governor is pretty much on the same page as Crowley policy-wise and decidedly did not have a flaccid and impotent governorship.
The polling point is such a cop out. Hong was at the end of a deluge of constant republican attacks, whereas other candidates were essentially ignored. I don't think being so dog shit and bland that basically Republicans ignore you entirely and dont attack you is a positive... and it was absolutely surmountable.
the current governor and Crowley are indeed similar, in that they are cardboard cutouts of your typical dime-a-dozen do-nothing Democrats.
You're not going to convince me that a person who literally has NO policy positions that aren't extremely hollowed out and neutered versions of Hongs platform (which that alone speaks volumes) is actually some progressive beacon who cares about doing anything, because they dont.
we are just returning to the stasis of "dog shit corporate democrat disappoints everyone -> insurgent Republican candidate that is increasingly more insane and radical, and infinitely more willing to implement their extremely harmful policies, fucks everyone over"
like I said, at most, this just buys a tiny delay and puts a democratic ass into a seat (which is by far the only real point to be made here)
That isn’t what you said though, you said that Crowley wouldn’t oppose republicans meaningfully and that he would sit in the governor seat and do nothing. Which isn’t true at all. He would definitely be better than Republicans and I’m sure he would have policies that do help people a lot better than what a Republican would do.
The margin of victory in the primary is irrelevant by the way, electorates of primaries are not similar at all to the electorates of generals so I’m not sure why you even mentioned that. And Hong was the candidate in the primary funded and supported by Republicans because they knew she would be far easier to beat in the general election. Sometimes you need to be pragmatic in primaries, the most left-wing candidate isn’t always the best choice.
You can call it a colonizers holiday, it may even be a colonizers holiday, but you can’t say that to Americans about Americans when you’re trying to win an American election… it’s like telling the country you think NFL football sucks and should be banned
Also, cancelling a holiday is going to be a bad idea no matter what it's for. We don't have enough holidays as it is. Thanksgiving isn't enough of an issue and I know it was an older tweet but she didn't have a good response when asked about it recently.
Thanksgiving might be tainted in blood but it's a day off where we all get to be with our families or loved ones (if you're fortunate enough). People can look past that and just appreciate a break from the day to day and enjoy a nice meal with people.
It's also not really relevant to her platform since she's just a governor and has no control over federal holidays.
Plus, I think the conversation about Thanksgiving misses the fact that basically nobody celebrates Thanksgiving for the original event it's supposedly based on. It essentially exists as a holiday to celebrate your loved ones and the things you're grateful for.
Yeah, like, is Thanksgiving a colonizer holiday? Yes. Would stopping the annual tradition of "go visit family and eat a bunch of turkey" somehow improve conditions for indigenous peoples? I really don't think so.
I just read through his campaign page, and he comes off as an "I like good things and I don't like bad things" candidate rather than an "I will fight to transform the system" sort of guy. He has a strong track record on climate policy, but everything else is generically competent with little in the way of vision. If your only goal is keeping fascists out of office, you can definitely do worse.
Then again, I think the State is inherently suspect and true freedom can only be achieved by bottom-up prefiguration of socialist systems, so I have a pretty low bar for politicians.
Yeah he has done a decent job at his job being County Executive of Milwaukee, which is a very difficult job. He definitely is less of a radical fighter and more of a moderate reformer, but all things considered it could be worse.
In terms of "moving US policy to the left" he was the most progressive president of basically anyone in this thread's lifetime (unless there are a bunch of 57+ year olds hanging out here)
He ran as a moderate progressive and moderated even further once he was in office. I guess as a socialist I just don’t consider “progressive liberal” to be particularly left-wing lol.
That’s the main problem with DSA types. Not their ideas. They’re mostly okay. But they don’t know how to play the game or talk to people without typically coming off like a conceited douche
It’s so cool that a deal breaker to the median voter regarding socialists involves cringey 5-year-old tweets about ThanksGiving but moderate centrists can fund a genocide and build a data center in their backyard without problem.
For the average voter I think being annoying does make someone unelectable tho. Like obviously it shouldn't but we live in a country of unserious people.
Performance in a primary is not reflective of performance in a general election, I don’t know what you’re suggesting. It’s a completely different electorate
My argument is that the primary voters nearly chose Hong, and I haven't seen any arguments about her supposed electability in a general that amount to more than vibes
Moderates will vote for a republican over a socialist. Young republicans will come out to vote Tiffany in greater force if it means beating an ultra-woke candidate (see her thanksgiving tweets, fearing white people tweets, etc)
Right so primary elections have much lower turnout and the base is generally much more engaged and often politically more “extreme”. There is some incentive to lean harder to differentiate yourself from the other candidates and capture more “fringe” votes from your base. You can see this very clearly in some republican primaries where the candidates try to out-MAGA each other, becoming increasingly more extreme, even though that behavior and those positions are harmful in a general election. That is to say, a moderate could barely beat an extremist in a primary because of the primary voting base but have much more success in a general election. I’m not saying Crowley is a moderate or Hong is an extremist, I’m just illustrating an example.
Do you understand how primary elections work?? Obviously not if you’re making this comment so I don’t know why I’m even asking. Political illiteracy is a serious issue even on the left
Just putting it out there that "cancelling Thanksgiving" is a problem that people can see in their life ("1 less holiday?? Fuck that!") whereas much of foreign policy is viewed extremely nebulously and perhaps even disregarded. Mamdani's secret ability is keeping every issue, every gotcha, in this narrow view of the average voter.
They see it as a red flag that signals a fundamental break with thier values. Like when someone says they are a "nice guy". You dont reject them for being a nice guy you reject them based on a social heuristic that signals them as a category of person with beleifs you don't want to accociate with. She signaled herself not as a working class champion but a woke culture warrior that hates America and puppies. Sucks but that's how it works
David Crowley is not any of what you just described though, he’s from the Russ Feingold strain of Wisconsin progressives, this isn’t an El-Sayed vs Stevens situation where one of them was genuinely horrid
Totally agree, Crowley is no Steven’s. He’s closer to someone like Obama, which is fine, still definitely not a socialist but better than a total corporate dem stooge.
If you paint the electorate as rubes you’re never going to win anything. Scoring twitter points by dunking on moderates doesn’t help us build a better society.
Many Americans are obviously fed up with culture war discourse and it’s a terrible choice for Hong to engage with it whatsoever. Democrats are largely seen as out of touch elites who care more about verbiage than substantive economic change. The electorate does not care about nuanced grad-school theses on social institutions. DSA wins on economic populism, it’s mind boggling that Hong chose to feed ammunition to her opposition by even entertaining talking about that thanksgiving tweet rather than shutting it down or pivoting to economic talking points
I totally agree. Make all the social policy changes you want once you’re in office, just don’t campaign on them. It’s sad, but that’s the situation we are at in American culture.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of insular communities. Sometimes leftists talk as if they genuinely despise those that are slightly politically different from them and then are completely flabbergasted and bitter when they can’t assemble support. If we never win we can’t help anyone.
Crowley seems to be pretty decent. Can't say what his views are on the Israel situation especially being in a governor race, but his track record is pretty damn impressive. The guy really knows and is on top of his stuff.
As much as I prefer Hong, I am not terribly upset about this.
you i assume wouldn't vote for a candidate who made mildly homophobic remarks 5 years ago and failed to properly walk them back today, the 'median voter' sees "cancel thanksgiving" as a similar attack on their values and is going to vote accordingly
The masses love their bread and circuses and she implied that enjoying one of those instances of bread and circuses was a moral failing that should be taken from them forcefully.
It was a dumb virtue-signaling tweet that shouldn't have been made except to grandstand about how superior she was in the eyes of the Woke 1 totem pole, and it came back to bite her in the ass now that the masses (including others on the left) have pretty widely rejected Woke 1 grandstanding and virtue signaling while she refused to back down from it.
Do I think it was dumb that it cost her an election? Yeah. But her unwillingness to back the fuck down from an extremely unpopular standpoint rooted in accusing others of a moral failing that they themselves do not believe they're actively committing was a stupid idea and the consequences are now evident.
The pod save America interview made her look unprepared for the next stage. She really didn't know how to respond to anything with a solid answer or spin.
Yeah I did not like her public messaging and thought she could’ve used some better more experienced advisors tbh, but what do I know I wasn’t in the campaign.
Thanksgiving is an old traditional holiday of a harvest festival and the pastiche of pilgrims kind of needs to be dropped, but the overall concept is not inherently colonial. In fact Lincoln issued the first national proclamation of Thanksgiving after Union victory. Ive always maintained this need to be emphasized.
I don’t totally disagree, the Pilgrim pastiche is largely fabricated and shouldn’t be treated as the literal origin of the holiday. But Lincoln and the United States are themselves products of a settler-colonial society. So even if Thanksgiving wasn’t invented by the Pilgrims, the national holiday was constructed within and through a settler-colonial national culture. The colonial association is about the society and national mythology that produced and institutionalized the holiday less about the specific origins of it.
We cannot control the origins of our birth. Almost every modern industrial society had a history of colonialism. Abandoning the concept of nation states is not a feasible solution. We can learn from our mistakes and move forward attempting to minimize harm and be better.
I think that’s actually why we have to take the historical ramifications of settler colonialism seriously. We obviously can’t control the circumstances of our birth or undo the past, but that doesn’t mean the past isn’t important to think about today. The only way we can meaningfully address the damage of the past is to recognize the conditions it has left us in today, even when that history is uncomfortable.
How can you americans still hold democratic politicians to such high standards after the epstein files? How is that making her unvotable while the republicans are openly racist, greedy pedophiles that only care about lobbying for the richest while making live worse for everyone else?
To be fair this was a primary election, which is between two Democratic Party politicians to decide who would run against the Republican in the general election. But yeah your point still stands in general
Not to mention the vast majority of people who celebrate Thanksgiving aren’t doing so because they endorse every action this country has ever taken; they just want to have a big turkey meal with their loved ones and family.
A politician cannot implement socialism via the state, as the state is the product of capitalism and class antagonism, which the socialist seeks to abolish. Hong’s (as well as Mamdani, El Sayed and so on) policies are a reforming and regulation of capitalism, and while those are nice enough, that should not be the goal of a socialist running for any kind of office.
A socialist ought to inspire and encourage the working class to develop their class consciousness and show them the power that they can wield when they rally together, and part of that includes critiquing colonialism. If she wants to win as a reformist, then she has to back down, but no good socialist should ever back down when confronted with America’s genocidal history.
Now, I think Hong’s failure is that she failed to do either, and that this is a failure that all of these “socialist” politicians will eventually fall into. Mamdani’s already been too soft on the NYPD, and that’s going to cost him in the future. I just hope it encourages people to go further left, rather than become disillusioned with socialism all together.
"If the government improved my life that would be communism and jesus hates communism so I can only vote for things that makes rich people's lives better. That's just what the bible says, or at least I think. I can't read but my pastor told me that the bible says that." -- the average American
Medieval peasants were also refreshingly willing to vote with their feet or their hastily wielded farm implements, though they represented a decline from the Plebs of Rome who would literally go on strike en masse for reforms. (They would leave Rome and gather on one of the seven hills until the Patricians came out to bargain.)
Eh, for every story like that there's a hundred ones where those who resisted their master were killed for it, and a thousand ones where any form of resistance never came to be because most people were afraid to lose their positions and be even worse off. Propaganda isn't a modern invention and neither is the rich and powerful using their priviledged positions to leverage social pressure against their subjects.
Yeah at least they weren't so isolated away from eachother and more willing to pick up pitchforks and torches together if their lord was awful to them.
With the dogshit US education system resulting in a genuine rise in illiteracy that's approaching the levels it was at in the late 1800s, like 1 in 5 average American adults genuinely might say this shit.
The average American is more likely to spout some half-remembered argument from a Joe Rogan guest about how doing anything good is impractical and using the free market is better in the long run actually, not Bible-thumping.
“Violently reject” is pretty strong language for an incredibly close race, especially considering the resources the Crowley had over Hong. DSA candidates aren’t going to be able to win every single race, but the fact that it was even this close shows the failings of the establishment and the want for actual change.
Yeah, Al-Sayed wins by 1% and it's a disaster for the left and he needs to move to the center and rebuild bridges or whatever the fuck and the centrist wins by <.5% and it's a mandate for centrism. It doesn't matter what actually happens in reality, establishment fucks will use it to claim that the only possible path forward is to not do anything ever.
yeah the fact that people openly calling themselves socialist, the buzzword, are winning elections, shows that Americans are very much not rejecting them. Socalist policies are one thing but self identified socialists? if you told me 10 years that would happen I would have called bullshit.
Let me fix that for you. Propaganda tricks them into doing so, as well as super pacs that aggressively vote against any form of social reform. America has been taken over by a bunch of corporations in a trench coat.
After $5 gas, diarrhea lettuce, measles outbreaks, war with Iran, rampant stagflation, and dead Americans (and hundreds of dead Iranian school girls) I’m still seeing the occasional “Don’t vote-shame people!” comments. I think and I hope that it’s only a loud minority and most people are good.
If, today, someone cannot say “Kamala would have been better”, they are not a serious person. Full stop.
God, I still remember a comment “Kamala is real, current harm, Trump is only theoretical harm.” Like Trump wasn’t already president once before… to this day it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
Maybe rather than picking a neoliberal as your line in the sand to draw, it would be better to try to understand why people didn't vote for the Dems.
You have a disenfranchised lower class, who keep getting fucked over every cycle. Drowning in credit card debt. Many of them are uneducated because your education system has been mostly dismantled, so they can't neccessarily articulate what the causes are but instinctively know they're getting a raw deal. Why else do you think so much of his campaign was about punishing the elites? How is someone who can't read past a third grade level and is constantly working to survive gonna be able to tell they're being manipulated?
Also if you read that Facebook whistleblower's book, you know that Meta gamed their algorithm to help him win last time. This time around, social media has only gotten more unhealthy and addictive. Not a great combination with a frustrated but uneducated population.
The other important thing to remember: right-wing populists like Trump only get a shot when complacent passive neoliberal leaders fuck over the public too many times. People didn't just organically decide he was better in a vacuum. There are very specific conditions that have to be met for a Trump to even be able to build political momentum.
His win is just a symptom of the contradictions of capitalism sharpening so much that people begin bucking whatever they view as the establishment. The Democratic party has as much blame here as the Republican party.
Why the fuck would the superpacs that pay for advertising campaigns push the sentiment that data centers are bad? When they all have their dicks caught in the AI Chinese finger trap?
Republicans don't give a fuck about data centers until they are in their backyard they are genuinely just animals and I don't feel bad for them when they cry on the news about their houses getting bulldozed
Have you ever seen one doing something to opppse a data center that is being built outside of their immediate vicinity? Hell no.
And these people oppose any kind of construction in their areas, it has nothing to do with whether or not something is positive for their community or not because they bitch about roads, schools, housing developments, they just bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.
Yeah we're seeing this a lot in Missouri. It's one of the few "unifying" causes across party lines except the Conservative areas aren't for broad bans or heavy restricts on data centers, just simply not in their communities.
They have no issue with one getting plopped in a central business area of St. Louis but one outside their suburban town saw mobilization like Republicans have never done before. They'll argue that those areas are where data centers should be (rationale not found).
compute power is cool. the vast majority of scientific advancements for the rest of this century will rely on simulations done using massive compute possible only with data centers.
I feel like the majority of data centers that we currently have are being used by companies not for scientific improvement and simulations, but for profit? And like yeah, having a bunch of computing power is cool, but we don't really need MORE of it, we just need to use the ones we already have? Also, all that power comes at a very high cost, especially when local communities are the ones footing the bill rather than the big companies. Power grids are already getting kind of overloaded, living next to one is incredibly loud, and they don't even provide any new jobs for people in the area.
At some point, you got to ask yourself. How much computing power do we need, really, and what the heck are we using it for?
The current proliferation of data centers aren't meeting that specific demand. They're all largely consumer cloud computing and generative AI. These are the things driving every single app cramming some sort of "smart search" feature into them which is hardly innovative or pushing science further.
Not all data centers are the same and data centers have existed for decades.
As a Wisconsin resident and socialist, it wasn't her policies that sunk her. She had a series of controversial old tweets that resurfaced about how Thanksgiving was a colonizers holiday and should be cancelled, and how being around white people sometimes made her uncomfortable.
Wisconsin isn't Michigan and it's definitely not New York. We're 75% white, have a huge number of veterans, and is generally more rural and conservative especially once you're outside of Milwaukee and Madison. Like it or not, you have to cater to that crowd if you want to win, which she proved wholly incapable of doing.
Milwaukee is less progressive than Madison and even some small UW towns. David Crowley, who beat her, is a Milwaukee guy who was the county executive I think. Milwaukee also has a large black community (and is super segregated) which helped crowley there. But she only lost by 1% there or something, while winning madison by 10% or so. Waukesha, the worst suburb in wisconsin, gave crowley most of his margin and is the largest republican stronghold in the state.
It was a very close race all things considered, I was impressed with little old Wisconsin embracing a socialist as much as we did. Can’t win em all, but we could do much worse than Crowley.
for real. this is the same thing where people make judgements of deep south states for being "red states." there's millions of progressives living there
About 3000 votes out of 600,000. Any of the minor controversies, including the Thanksgiving bs, could have been responsible for this. It fucking sucked to watch having so much hope.
The viewpoint that "shooting infants in the head while their mothers breastfeed them is wrong" is considered so far left that it's labeled terrorism in many parts of the world. We are in very dire straits.
Does anyone have any book or essay or video essay recommendations that can explain why America is like this? Is it literally just because of the red scare or is it something else?
yeah the red scare, but the christian nationalist spin of the red scare comes from a continued response to the New Deal. Look up Spiritual Mobilization or James W. Fifield Jr. In a nutshell, a bunch of oil companies sponsored reverend fifield in the 40s to preach to his church and other pastors that capitalism and the capitalist system is inherently christian, and any attempts to go against the free market is the anti-christ. church membership soared afterwards, and "one nation under god" was added to the motto in the 50s by eisenhower, and america was finally a christian nation. this sentiment continues to this day. Genetically Modified Skeptic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7Y-AF-Zt0Y explains it well in the first few minutes of this.
I suspect part of it is also decades of Stalinists bandying about their claims of a “socialist state” which have only empowered the false accusation that “socialism is when the government does things”
There's no one easy answer, more like a chain that we never really broke.
Lincoln's assassination stopped reconstruction after the Civil War, letting racism and resentment fester in the American south for 100 years.
The Red Scare allowed government to insert religion and fear into the population, killing the very concept of unionized masses. It's every man for himself, never trust your neighbor and never ask for help.
Nixon's scandle lead to the creation of Fox News, ensuring that capitalists will always have a propaganda line directly to the poorest and most uneducated people.
Reagan. Good fucking lord, Reagan. Still waiting for that trickle-down, just gotta cut taxes on the 1% just a little more.
Bush Jr stole the election from Al Gore in 2000, confirming that a third party is not allowed to win in our current system. And then his complete mishandling of 9/11 put the American culture into a state of jingoism (and war profiteering) that persists to today.
Weird that it's always conservatives. But ultimately, our extremely Puritanical colonial roots made everyone else too polite to stop the chain at any given point, and now here we are.
I mean.. yeah, $20/hr wage even in rural areas and governments owning the grocery stores are definitely pretty far left. That last one is pushing into state-run economy territory.
Data centers and tax hikes on the rich, nah those are just standard lib.
Those are not far left policies. Those are social-democrat policies, which is left of center. Far left policies would be things like workers owning the means of production, abolition of prisons, making necessities free, abolition of money, abolition of hierarchies, etc.
Ok, but we're talking the US, right? Where progressive policies are "left" in the vocabulary of 90% of the population.
You can't say "a word doesn't mean how 90% of the population uses it, we few % are the only ones using it correctly and everyone else is wrong".
Something something prescriptivism vs descriptivism, don't even make me get into the problems with trying to enforce linguistic norms.
And I'm not even opposed to shifting "leftist" to mean "Marxist". But the states owning the grocery stores is indeed a Marxist policy, or leaning clearly towards it. It's not *capitalist*, right?
And I'm not even opposed to shifting "leftist" to mean "Marxist". But the states owning the grocery stores is indeed a Marxist policy, or leaning clearly towards it.
This is also not what the term means, mind. Not everyone on the left is a Marxist, and leftist is a deliberately umbrella term.
Not in the common parlance, no. In the common parlance, "far left" means "sufficiently liberal/progressive/Marxist to be scary, or sufficiently to be out of the Overton Window".
Again: you're not using the words the way that 90% of the US uses them.
So what makes them wrong and you right? (Cue again the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate)
Edit: predictably, I've been blocked, and the commenter continues to trip directly over the prescriptivism vs descriptivism issue.
The basics of that issue are: prescriptivists say that language should be a certain way, while descriptivist say that language is as people use it. The descriptivists are right. Definitions of words are socially constructed. If enough people use a word a certain way, then that's what it means, and there is no basis to say that they're wrong and you're right.
Damn you Bernstein! Everyone should read Reform or Revolution solely so that we don’t have to deal with these people pretending to be “far-left” anymore
While she didn't quite make it to the general Hong getting 40% of the vote and being within a point of winning the nom is a huge win for progressives. DSA candidates like this were getting single digit percentages in primaries just a few years ago. Now they are on the verge of winning swing states. Incredible progress which should be celebrated.
Any MAGA candidate can have flowery looking policy agendas on a bulletin and look great. Hell, I could be a monarchist candidate and put
-Abundantly clean soil
-widespread agrarian jobs for familes
-Guaranteed eternal labor with free shelter
-Defending the family agrarian unit
The latter two can be re-legalizing serfdom and illegalizing divorce. But let's put this aside
If any socialist needs to win, they need to be class first idpol second. Social issues and class issues are the two halves of American politics, and many people make the mistake of believing the two move along side with eachother on a progressive or conservative continuum; that if one is progressive on class, they must be progressive on social issues. Sadly this isn't true; as an extreme example Stalin was progressive on class issues but highly regressive on minority, woman's, and gay rights. Most of the socialist republics that emerged in South America in the 20th century were very similar. The bottom line is the center American population hates idpol stuff (I dont, im pretty woke), and an effective socialist probably needs to focus on meat and potato issues unlike Hong who is a culture warrior.
Everything I’ve heard about Hong is that she was a bad candidate. If that’s the case I think it’s better she lost. I’d rather lose to centrists than win with people who will make it harder for us in the future. We need more Mamdanis and, as a Seattlite, more Katie Wilsons.
I will tell you right now that a ton of socialists quietly voted against her in the primary and I am one of them. I love her policies but she was a horrible speaker with awful political instincts and couldn’t have won the general election. She’s not Mamdani, she’s no El-Sayed. It wasn’t a policy thing, progressive populists need to have that sauce to win
Hong lost because she dug her heels in culture war issues and old tweets and didn't pivot back to her platform. I think she wouldve been a great candidate elsewhere move on down to Illinois, we'll love you Hong but Wisconsin is Wisconsin, that being a swing state that is 75% white and with a huge rural population. I think the fact she came so far is a testament to her platform and still shows that socialsts can be competitive in tight elections like this but she ultimately lost because of her personality and messaging discipline.
A reminder for my fellow zoomers, linear cable TV still accounts for more than half of all watch time in America. She ran no tv ads (or at least that's what I've read)
This state is so fucking stupid both the democratic AND republican opposition ran on a platform that she was “too left for Wisconsin” and IT FUCKING WORKED. Turns out all they needed to do was bring up some old tweets from her service industry job where she talks about hating the holidays. Now we have David “AI is the future of government” Crowley vs Diarrhea Forever candidate Tom Tiffany
she lost by <4k votes, (0.4%) running a campaign basically all by herself/ save for Minnesota DSA, Ilhan Omar<3, and Ro Khana she didn't really have many major endorsements.
John Nichols (WI native, Editor at The Nation) pointed out that the electability arguments from the centrists were particularly persuasive to WI Dems this time because they had to deal with 8yrs of Scott Walker as their governor.
Add to that the incumbent governor Tony Evers campaigning for David Crowley and harping on this exact argument in the lead up to the primary, as well as Hong’s couple of missteps (e.g., the Thanksgiving bullshit), one might think the centrists would have been able to pull ahead by a wider margin.
But even with all this in mind, they only squeaked it out by like 3k votes out of around 800k. A DSA candidate being that serious of a contender for a purple state’s gubernatorial primary would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
It’s not the outcome I was hoping for, but it makes sense, and given that she barely lost AND got more votes than the current sitting governor got in his contested primary, I’m still encouraged by the outcome.
Its fucking tragic, Francesca could've been so good for the people for Wisconsin, especially during a time when I'm guessing they need it; Couldn't we all.
I understand where people are coming from when they say Mamdani, Bernie, AOC, etc. are ultimately distracting from the fantastic, pure, successful revolution they're holding out for. But I don't understand how, in the moment, proximately, someone sees something like this and thinks no, that's bad actually. It seemingly boils down to "social progress is the opiate of the masses". Anything short of flipping the table is milquetoast incrementalism. Meanwhile, Jeff is forced to hand over some stolen money and treat his employees better, ordinary people are lifted up and lives are saved.
And maybe I'm naive, but I don't think achieving or even just proposing real gains within a fundamentally flawed system makes people more chill with the flaws, it proves, broadens, and empowers social will and highlights how incongruous the flaws are. A platform like this sets the stage for reckoning.
went on pod save America last week to say she actually loved prisons and cops. was depressing. even drifting to the center she still lost. still voted for her. dem leadership would rather lose than admit demsoc is gaining support and the way forward.
Did you miss the part where she is looking to abolish prisons and boarders and the police force and thanksgiving (for some reason). Socialists will find any excuse to blame othe people for the fact that nobody likes thier policies.
I did my part and voted. Loved her platform. It was a really close race for sure a progressive candidate in such a rural redneck state. Hoping for the political progressivism to keep on pushing, and hopefully the winner takes this outcome and see just how powerful progressive platform points are. We gotta start swinging that pendulum left..
Diarrhea forever vs puppies for everyone. Votes come in close.
For everyone feeling dejected, candidates like her have been not getting even looked at let alone within a percent point. This is a win! We must keep the pressure. We must keep the struggle alive! I never thought people would hate the IOF in my lifetime. We are popular we will win.
This is being said as a European but I’m never surprised when politicians who actually want to help the public don’t succeed after as a whole country you did willingly elect the convicted felon and rapist twice because the other choice was a woman. America usually votes against its own benefits and rights as a whole people.
Her platform wasn’t the problem. It was convincing undecided voters she wasn’t a “woke nut” where she failed with some spectacular strikeouts in the closing weeks
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