Nick Garcia
Francesca Hong gives a speech at her watch party at Atwood Music Hall.
Madison-area Rep. Francesca Hong spoke hours after polls closed Tuesday, thanking supporters at her watch party while not conceding her race.
At 11:20 p.m., with the Democratic primary race for governor still too close to call, Francesca Hong, dressed in a bright blue blazer, took the stage of the Atwood Music Hall. She told the crowd that her campaign had rejected “fear and division” and that they were “growing a community through a campaign.”
“We have built something that will change politics forever,” she added. “What we have done will be remembered. I don’t even know how the final results will end. But what I do know is that we are ready to keep fighting, and I feel confident. More importantly, I am so deeply, deeply grateful.”
Halfway through her speech, one volunteer in the crowd turned to another and whispered, “Is this a concession speech?”
It wasn’t. About 90% of the votes were in and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley held a slim lead over Hong at the time. But no one had called the race for either candidate.
It had been touch-and-go for hours, with Crowley and Hong taking turns at the top. Several times Hong would match Crowley’s lead within a tenth of a percent. When that happened, cheers from the crowd would nearly drown out the pop music blaring overhead.
The energetic music often seemed in sync with the state of the results. By hour one, it was “Staying Alive.” As midnight approached, Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” blared, Crowley, at the time, appeared to be pulling away with a slim lead.
Hong wrapped up her speech with a promise of unity: “In 11 weeks, no matter who’s on this ballot y’all, we are going to win for one another.”
Shortly thereafter the crowd started streaming out of the hall. Event staff confirmed that the event needed to wrap up by midnight.
It was an unresolved ending to a chaotic primary season — where Crowley dropped out of the race for 10 days in July, only to re-enter the race after receiving Gov. Tony Evers’ endorsement. Crowley’s surge Tuesday night was not necessarily expected; Hong led the pack in all five Marquette Law School polls since last October. As Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, wrote in a recent Substack, there was “one stable point in the campaign: Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist.” Her margin, he added, “increased in early July, and again in late July.”
In the latest poll, released July 29, Hong led with 38% support. But 34% of voters said they were still undecided, just two to three weeks ahead of the primary.
The poll also found that both the term democratic socialist and the group, Democratic Socialists of America, were popular only among a quarter (25%) of registered voters: 43% found the DSA unfavorable, 55% found the label “democratic socialist” unfavorable.
While democratic socialists have seen more electoral success recently the novelty of a democratic socialist running in Wisconsin still made national headlines. Hong made the cover of Time magazine and was featured — numerous times — in the New York Times. Hong also received support from fellow democratic socialists, including Kat Abughazaleh — a 27-year old candidate who in March lost a primary challenge to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss in a bid for Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, and has grown an online following.
Abughazaleh, at Hong’s watch party on Tuesday, said she and dozens more volunteers from Illinois affiliated with her nonprofit KAPOW have made the trek up to Wisconsin, knocking on roughly 7,000 doors for Hong. They had also volunteered in recent weeks for Abdul El-Sayed, who last week won the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan.
Halfway through the night, attendee Ankita Bharadwaj said she wasn’t feeling good about the vote count at the moment. But, after taking another sip of wine and glancing around the room, she had a change of mind: “I am very, very fucking proud of what Hong’s accomplished in a swing state like Wisconsin.”
