Fox News dug up a tweet where Francesca Hong wrote, “I want this country to stop being an abundance of suffering but a wealth of opportunity.” They presented this as a scandal. Read it again. That is not a gaffe. That is a diagnosis.
Hong, a 37-year-old single mother who worked as a dishwasher and a line cook before she became the first Asian American woman elected to the Wisconsin state Assembly, is running for governor. She is a democratic socialist. She is one of four members of a socialist caucus revived in the Wisconsin legislature after nearly 90 years of dormancy. And the entire machinery of both parties is mobilizing to make sure she does not win.
The Republican Governors Association has dropped $2.2 million on ads calling her “too liberal.” Trump-backed Rep. Tom Tiffany, one of the most conservative members of the House, posted “common sense or crazy” alongside screenshots of Hong’s posts. Some Republicans are openly trying to boost her in the primary, betting she will be easier to beat in November. They want to choose their opponent. That tells you everything about who actually threatens them.
Lightburst (BY-SA) via wikimediaBut the hand-wringing from Hong’s own side is worse. Neera Tanden, architect of the think-tank wing of the party, warned that Wisconsin’s governor will oversee the 2028 elections, so Democrats must pick someone “viable.” Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez launched a $1 million ad campaign featuring herself in nursing scrubs. Gov. Tony Evers endorsed David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, who had dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez, then reentered the race days later. This is not strategy. This is a circular firing squad with catering.
Here is what nobody in the electability chorus can explain: a March Marquette Law School poll showed Hong with a slight lead over the entire field. Bernie Sanders won all but one county in Wisconsin in 2016. Milwaukee elected the first socialist congressman in American history in 1910 and sent two more socialist mayors to City Hall before 1960. The soil is not alien to this movement. It is native to it.
And what does Hong actually want? A $20 minimum wage. Free health care and child care funded by taxing the wealthy and creating a state-owned bank. A moratorium on data center construction. She leads with “Packers, potholes, and public schools.” She has not backed away from her calls to defund and abolish police, though she acknowledges a governor cannot do that unilaterally. Her spokesperson framed police and prison abolition as “an aspirational goal, akin to eradicating disease or eliminating poverty.” That framing is correct. The question is whether we accept mass incarceration as permanent or whether we build something else.
US Department of Labor (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThe Fox News hit piece catalogued her posts with the breathless urgency of someone discovering that a working-class woman of color has opinions about colonialism. She tweeted “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621.” She wrote about having an anxiety attack at a Culver’s surrounded by white people who assumed she did not speak English. She said “Police exist to uphold White supremacy” after seven bullets were fired into Jacob Blake’s back in Kenosha. None of this is inflammatory. It is a person telling the truth about what she has seen and survived.
Democratic socialists have won primaries in New York, Washington, and Denver this cycle. Zohran Mamdani endorsed congressional candidates who swept. The movement is building. Wisconsin is not Manhattan, as pollster Charles Franklin noted. It is also not the place where the establishment gets to decide what working people are allowed to want.
Hong would be the first woman and the first person of color to serve as Wisconsin’s governor. She has lived the policies she fights for. The question is not whether she is too far left. The question is whether the people who have spent decades managing decline will get out of the way.
Organize. Phone bank. Show up on Aug. 11. The abundance of suffering is a policy choice. So is the alternative.