This is an opinion form the Center.
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
Establishment Democrats, in Wisconsin and everywhere else, may appreciate Winston Churchill’s quote even more after dodging a potentially deadly political bullet in Wisconsin last week. By the time centrist Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley squeaked into the general election with an excruciating advantage of less than half of one percentage point over DSA insurgent Francesco Hong, state and national politics had been upended yet again as the progressive freight train that had dominated the Democratic Party for the last year had been at least temporarily slowed.
But the slim defeat of the Sanders/AOC/Mamdani wing of the party that Crowley achieved certainly does not represent a broader repudiation of the Democrats’ leftward trajectory. Since last year’s campaign for New York City mayor, DSA candidates and other ultra-progressives have won a string of primaries in deep-blue districts across the country. Abdul El-Sayed’s similarly narrow triumph in the Michigan Senate primary a week earlier may have indicated a strengthening—or at least a broadening—of the movement into a contested battleground state and encouraged an increasingly frenzied speculative surge about whether Ocasio-Cortez or another like-minded candidate could be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028.
Just over one month before the election, Crowley was one of several traditional candidates all fighting for position in one lane of the primary campaign while Hong had consolidated liberal voters behind her. And then…
On July 8, mired in low single digits in most polls, Crowley withdrew from the race and endorsed Lt. Governor Sara Rodriguez. Less than one week later, Rodriguez’ campaign was rocked by a campaign finance scandal that left her with virtually no money to fund her candidacy. She then suspended her campaign.
The following morning, ten days after his original exit, Crowley re-entered the primary and was endorsed by popular outgoing governor Tony Evers, who then traveled the state with Crowley almost non-stop until the election.
A few days later, less than three weeks before the vote, a fatal police shooting took place in Madison, which Hong denounced as an “execution” and “state-sanctioned violence.” After a public furor, Hong was forced to backtrack and say that as governor she would not judge such incidents prior to an official investigation.
The following week, the second-place candidate in the race, former Lieutenant Governor and 2022 Democratic Senate nominee Mandela Barnes, ended his candidacy amid allegations of sexual misconduct. If you’re keeping score, that means that three of the four leading candidates for governor withdrew from the race in 22 days (and one re-entered). There is no precedent for this type of electoral anarchy in modern American politics.
Less than 24 hours after Barnes pulled out, Breitbart News reported that Hong had posted in 2020 that Thanksgiving was a “celebration of colonialism” and should be cancelled. Hong’s media tour was designed to quell the uproar but had the opposite effect, guaranteeing that her antagonistic feelings about a revered national holiday would dominate the last days before the primary.
With the aid of a governor with 85% approval among state Democrats, Crowley consolidated the support of the two withdrawn candidates and attracted the backing of almost all the sizable number of undecided voters at the same time the frontrunner was facing a series of unflattering and debilitating controversies. After all that, the mainstream candidate won the primary by four tenths of a percentage point.
Was the victory exhilarating for the Democratic establishment? Perhaps, but only compared to the alternative. This game of political bumper cars should also be a warning, which smart centrist Democrats will heed.
Want to talk about this topic more? Read more of Dan’s writing at www.danschnurpolitics.com.
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