In the early morning hours of August 12, after Milwaukee County’s final absentee votes were reported, all mainstream news outlets made the same call: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidate Francesca Hong had lost the 2026 Wisconsin Democratic Party gubernatorial primary to corporate candidate David Crowley by little more than 3,000 votes. 

Her razor-thin loss has been celebrated by many political commentators as a significant defeat for the insurgent progressive wave within the Democratic Party this year, whose notable primary victories include self-described socialists in New York City and Colorado, as well as progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Such claims can erase neither the deep political crisis of the Democratic Party establishment whose do-nothing approach has lost the confidence of countless workers, nor the strong appeal of progressive politics demonstrated by Fran’s mere 0.5% margin of loss.

Her campaign’s 7,000+ active volunteers and 300,000+ voters are now faced with the question of how to continue the fight for the progressive politics that brought them to the campaign in the first place, and what to do in the general election. Fran’s call is for her supporters to get behind Crowley in the fight for what she refers to as a “trifecta” in the state: Democratic Party control in the state assembly, senate, and governor’s office. Already, the Crowley campaign has called for a “Unity Brunch,” with Fran and other Democratic Party figures joining for a rally to unite behind the machine that spent over $7,200,000 to continue the sad, centrist legacy of Governor Tony Evers.

It is a serious mistake for Fran to direct the anti-corporate momentum she helped build into the same Democratic Party establishment that opposed her. While some of her base may feel compelled to support Crowley to defeat the right, or even hope that Crowley can be pushed to the left to unify the vote, this is nothing more than a dead end for her progressive policies that corporate Democrats will refuse to accept. This movement must organize itself beyond the limitations Fran is imposing on it and give no support to Crowley’s bid for governor.

An Upset By The Establishment

Francesca Hong’s campaign was propelled into the lead with a popular progressive platform—including a one-year data center moratorium, fully-funded public schools, and taxing the rich—that attracted working-class people looking for an alternative to the corporate Democratic Party politics of Governor Tony Evers. Coming on the heels of victories for left Democrats in New York, Colorado, and elsewhere, the Democratic Party establishment was correctly worried that their business-as-usual approach would not appeal in comparison. Polls showed Fran surging ahead of a pool of candidates since late 2025, and the victory of Abdul El-Sayed just one week before the Wisconsin primary rang massive alarm bells.  

The establishment got its act together late in the race, closing ranks around current Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Even though he had already dropped out of the race on July 8 after seeing no path to victory, he was asked to step back in as the establishment’s pick when current Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez dropped out unexpectedly due to financial mismanagement. But disinterest in the Democratic Party establishment was so massive and excitement around progressive politics was so high that Crowley was still polling far short of Fran’s massive lead.

Lacking any solution to the problems Fran’s campaign sought to address, Crowley and the establishment ignored issues affecting working people in Wisconsin, focusing their attacks instead on redbaiting her, dredging up controversial left-wing views, and concluding that she was too far left to defeat a Republican. Massive fundraising from wealthy donors helped Crowley’s campaign far outraise and outspend Fran, pushing ads with narratives around electability and “common sense” politics. For a party machine more interested in protecting AI data center profits than representing working people, they had to pull out all the stops to beat Fran’s campaign.

Fran’s campaign didn’t see anywhere near the same level of support from national progressive forces, with Bernie Sanders declining to endorse and others like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez openly speaking out against Fran’s past statements on defunding and abolishing the police. It is an indictment of these leaders that they would sit out this election during a historic year of progressive victories, especially when Sanders endorsed corporate politicians like Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin. While endorsements would not have corrected shortcomings of Fran’s campaign, they likely could have pushed the vote in her favor. Trapped inside the corporate Democratic Party, Bernie and AOC are stuck playing party politics. 

The capitalist press is ecstatic about this outcome, pointing to Crowley’s miniscule victory as evidence of the “limits of the left.” Others, including left publication Jacobin, blame the loss partially on Hong’s failure to disavow her past “woke” positions forcefully enough. Neither of these analyses are correct. This loss represents the lengths that the Democratic Party must go to, the number of corporate donations they have to sell out Wisconsinites for, and the apolitical attacks they have to levy against insurgent progressive campaigns to have any hope of winning. And it is certainly wrong to turn away from social and working-class movements, as Jacobin is effectively arguing for—in fact, what was needed was to go further than simple calls for defunding the police and to deepen her campaign’s connections to working-class movements for complete community worker control over the police linked to a broader economic program. Appealing to electability with moderate voters as AOC appears to be doing ahead of a 2028 presidential run is a dead-end strategy right from the Democratic Party’s playbook.

Socialist Politics Must Be Based On Mass Movements

Socialist Alternative helped canvass for Francesca Hong, but we also openly raised important weaknesses of the campaign, namely limitations in her platform and most importantly, her approach that was isolated from, rather than based on movements of working people. Her stance on healthcare (an enhanced public option instead of Medicare For All) would still leave millions in Wisconsin without access to the healthcare they need and deserve. Her plans around ending Act 10 were disconnected from the labor movement, which must play a key role in this fight, and were generally indistinguishable from those of other Democratic candidates. 

These weaknesses were not unique to Francesca Hong, but are inherent to any progressive candidate who ties themselves to the capitalist Democratic Party. A real struggle for any bold reform from Fran’s policy pages would require direct conflict with the two-party system. To win such a conflict requires politically independent organization rooted in mass struggle on the streets and in the workplace rather than Fran’s intended strategy of working with the Democratic Party establishment, which can only lead to endless compromises on working-class interests.

Socialist Alternative has experience with this independent, working-class approach to campaigning and electoral office. Over a decade ago, we ran our then-member Kshama Sawant as an independent and revolutionary socialist for Seattle City Council, and we won four elections. But this was never about just getting the right person elected, or getting a seat at the table: we used this office to force concessions from the ruling class by leveraging the power of the united working class. We based our council office work in movements—from the struggle of workers to win the first-in-the-nation $15 minimum wage to the George Floyd uprising, where we helped build the movement around clear demands like defunding the police by 50% and a massive tax on Amazon to help fund affordable housing in Black communities (which we won). All the while, we held the office accountable to working people by only taking the average wage of a worker in the district.

Wisconsin is no stranger to mass movements. From historic civil rights struggles, to the occupation of the State Capitol against Scott Walker’s anti-worker Act 10, to the George Floyd uprising in 2020, Wisconsinites have proven time and again that we will stand up against attacks on the working class. What we have not had is an independent political representative who would use their elected position to amplify and build these movements into the sort of struggle that can confront the capitalist interests head on, with strategies like we employed in Seattle to win real gains. For many, Fran’s campaign seemed like it could do just that, but it was here that her campaign fell short after the police execution of Corey Ruiz on July 22, 2026.

Fran should have leveraged her sizable volunteer base and called on Madison DSA to support the movement and fight for clear, bold demands. Instead, she all but endorsed Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s efforts to clear the occupied intersection and open the road back up for business. While Fran’s statements on social media called for “deeper work of strengthening independent police oversight, investing in housing and homelessness services, and changing the systems that allow injustice to persist,” she did not propose how this should be done. Effectively, her calls were to take power out of the hands of the Madison community and entrust it to the system under which this and other racist murders have occurred. An unabashed, militant approach to fighting systemic racism could have both built genuine credibility for Fran’s campaign, especially among Black working-class people, and also amplified the movement.

Madison Socialist Alternative instead called for an escalation of the encampment into a one day city-wide shutdown, organized through mass action conferences with unions, community organizations, and socialist and left political groups. While Fran was correct in saying that the encampment needed to move beyond the limits of the intersection, it needed to be done in a way that escalated the movement rather than demobilizing it.

What Way Forward For The Movement?

Already there have been calls at rallies and across social media platforms for “Democratic unity.” Fran’s call for her voters to fall in line with the Crowley campaign is an abandonment of the work done up to this point. This is a slap in the face to her supporters, many of whom felt energized and hopeful for someone openly confronting the failures of the Democratic Party establishment.

Socialist Alternative calls for no support and no vote for the Crowley campaign in the November election. It’s possible Crowley will use some progressive rhetoric to win over Fran’s supporters, but we should soberly recognize that this would be discarded at earliest convenience. If the campaigning efforts for Fran are to mean anything, we must move beyond Fran’s concession with an approach that will be most effective at fighting for the demands of her campaign: that means building a politically independent working-class movement on the foundation her campaign created. We must sharpen the program to include a fight for Medicare for All, to expand beyond just a one-year moratorium on AI data center development and instead fight for new union jobs developing sustainable energy infrastructure, and to boldly break from the failed strategy of reforming the Democratic Party.

Building a movement independent from the capitalist parties that care more about their donors than they do our livelihoods is the most effective fightback against Trump’s reactionary regime. By failing to meet the needs of working people, the corporate Democratic Party has paved the way for Trump. Central Wisconsin Socialist Alternative is calling a meeting with the Central Wisconsin DSA on August 19 in Stevens Point, WI., the heart of a region that organized and voted most strongly for Francesca Hong. We will be presenting demands that strengthen some of the best points that drew people to Fran in the first place and escalate the struggle to bring in broader layers of the working class. 

Socialist Alternative calls for:

1. No AI data centers in Wisconsin. We need a total ban on hyperscale data center construction. The working class must organize to fight for a massive green union jobs program to build sustainable energy infrastructure and affordable housing. 
2. Tax the rich and slash police budgets to fund affordable housing, social services, and Medicare for All.
3. Democratic community control of police across the state! Elected bodies of working people, especially from overly policed areas, should have authority over hiring, firing, disciplinary action, and allocating the budget.  
4. Organized labor needs to lead the charge to end Act 10. The Democrats and the courts won’t do it—it will only be overturned by organized pressure of the working class from below. 
5. Fight back against state repression and escalate the struggles against the Trump regime’s attacks on the working class. 
6. International solidarity with the working class across borders, and zero support for all imperialist war.
7. We need a new party! No support for the Democratic Party—we need to break from them entirely in order to build a real fightback against war, the cost of living crisis, and all oppression.