I’ve got four kids, a minivan with 190,000 miles on it, and a group chat that has been ON FIRE this week. And let me tell you something, I did my own research on this Wisconsin governor’s race, and what I found made me want to ask to speak to every manager in the Republican Party.
Here’s what’s happening, and I’m going to lay it out plain because that’s how we do things in my house. Francesca Hong is running for governor of Wisconsin. She’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her own campaign has spent exactly zero dollars on TV ads. Zero. I spend more than that on soccer snacks in a single season.
But somebody has spent nearly a million dollars on pro-Hong TV ads. And that somebody, according to Wisconsin Politics, is a group believed to be funded by Republicans.
VOA Korea Service (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsRead that again.
Republicans are spending a million dollars to get a socialist elected. On purpose. With their eyes open.
Now here’s where it gets really cute. The Republican Governors Association has also spent $3.6 million on ads “targeting” Hong. Except those ads, conveniently, tell left-leaning Wisconsin voters that Hong opposes Trump’s immigration agenda and will “take the Dem Party back to its progressive roots.” That’s not an attack ad. That’s a recruitment poster. I’ve seen my nine-year-old try sneakier tricks to get extra iPad time.
VeeTHis (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsJeff Maurer, who writes the newsletter “I Might Be Wrong,” laid this whole thing out and he’s exactly right. Republicans know that leftist candidates are poison at the ballot box in general elections. They don’t debate it. They don’t lose sleep over it. They just spend the money. They’ve watched moderate Democrats overperform and progressive Democrats underperform, over and over and over. Justice Democrats, the far-left group, has never flipped a single congressional seat from red to blue. Never. Not once. Meanwhile, centrist candidates do it routinely.
So the Republican playbook is simple: pump up the socialist in the primary, watch her win the nomination, then crush her in November. And polls right now show Hong leading her main opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. The psyop is working.
And here’s what kills me. The DSA crowd, the folks Maurer calls the “Freaks Lobby,” looks at their track record of losing and losing and losing and says, “See? It’s a conspiracy against us!” No, honey. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s arithmetic. Voters don’t want it. You can tell because the other side is literally spending their own money to make you the nominee. When the opposing team buys your uniform, you might want to ask why.
Michael Vadon (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsI don’t trust either party as far as I can throw my husband’s riding mower. But I trust my eyes. And what I see is a bunch of consultants in suits treating Wisconsin voters like pieces on a board. They’re spending Republican money to pick the Democratic nominee so they can beat her in the fall. And Wisconsin Democrats might just let them do it.
Maurer says sometimes you have to let the child touch the hot stove. Fine. But I’d rather my kids learn from somebody else’s burn. Wisconsin, you’re about to grab the burner. The people handing you the oven mitt are the ones who lit the fire.