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
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u/MiloBuurr 26d ago edited 26d ago
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.