Let me tell you something. I’ve been around long enough to know when somebody’s selling me something, and Francesca Hong is selling something alright.
She’s a 37-year-old state representative from Madison who still picks up bartending shifts, and she wants you to think that makes her one of us. She told Newsweek that behind the bar is where she hears “the version of the economy that does not show up on cable news.” Well, honey, I hear that version every time I swipe my card at Pick ‘n Save and wince. You don’t need a tap handle to know groceries cost too much. You need a plan that doesn’t involve handing the government another credit card.
Hong is leading every public poll in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor. She entered the race last September as a nobody from the state Assembly’s Socialist Caucus, and now here she is, two days from the primary, the frontrunner. Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor, dropped out on July 30 after admitting she was probably going to be the nominee. Just like that. The party cleared the deck for a socialist, and nobody in the back rooms batted an eye.
Her platform? Free childcare. Fully funded public schools. Higher taxes on the “ultrawealthy” and corporations. A moratorium on new data centers. She calls it “permanent affordability,” a phrase she borrowed from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who became mayor of New York City in 2025. So the playbook that worked in Brooklyn is supposed to work in Green Bay. I have questions for the manager about that.
Who pays for free childcare? I’ll give you one guess. You do. I do. Every family that’s already stretching a paycheck to cover swim lessons and school supplies gets to chip in so the government can run a program that’ll cost ten times what they promised and serve half the kids they claimed. “Higher taxes on the ultrawealthy” is the line they always use, and somehow my property taxes go up anyway. Funny how that works.
She also proposed a public bank for Wisconsin, modeled on the Bank of North Dakota. The government running a bank. What could possibly go wrong there? I’ve seen what the DMV looks like at 4:45 on a Friday. You want those people handling your mortgage?
Edmond Dantès / PexelsThen there’s the immigration piece. Hong said flat out, “I do not plan on cooperating and working with ICE.” She framed it as protecting Wisconsinites. I’m a Wisconsinite. I’d like to be protected from people who break the law to get here, not from the agency trying to enforce it. But what do I know? I’m just a mom with four kids who’d like the border to mean something.
And here’s the one that really got the group chat going. Hong posted on X that Thanksgiving is a “colonizer holiday” and suggested canceling it. Thanksgiving. The one day a year where everybody stops fighting, eats too much, and counts their blessings. She wanted to cancel it. Then she walked it back and said it’s actually her favorite holiday. Which is it, Francesca? Because I’ve got a teenager who changes her mind less than that.
She’s organized 300-plus events and driven nearly 50,000 miles across the state. That’s impressive, genuinely. But miles don’t equal votes, and a socialist agenda doesn’t magically become mainstream just because you drove to every county fair in a Honda.
Wisconsin voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Hong says the state that voted for Trump 21 months ago isn’t the same state she’s running in now. She might be right. But I don’t think it changed in the direction she thinks it did.
She told Newsweek she remains “cautiously and sometimes nauseously optimistic.” Nauseous is exactly how I feel about the whole thing.