Democrats Have No Process for Choosing Energy Over Electability

Francesca Hong raised more than fifty thousand dollars in under an hour on Hasan Piker's Twitch stream, campaigning for governor of Wisconsin from a folding chair, in the style she describes as meeting voters "where they weren't expecting to meet a gubernatorial candidate": bike rides, dive bars, a livestream audience that skews younger and angrier than the electorate she'd need in November. On August 11, David Crowley beat her in the Democratic primary anyway, four days after Governor Tony Evers endorsed him and three days after Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez dropped out over a campaign finance mess. The Wisconsin establishment got what it wanted. It just had to burn its own bench to get it.

The case for what Hong represents deserves to be stated in full, because it is not a fringe theory. It is the working thesis of a movement that has just had its best primary season in a decade. The Democratic Socialists of America gained more than 7,500 members nationally after its June sweep in New York. Melat Kiros knocked off a 29-year incumbent in Colorado. Chris Rabb won an open seat in Pennsylvania. DSA is on pace to seat at least eight aligned members of Congress, on top of mayorships in New York, Washington, and Seattle. Milwaukee's own DSA co-chair, Autumn Pickett, draws the comparison explicitly: this is the Tea Party wave, run in reverse, without the billionaire donors, a decade-long project to move a party's center of gravity by winning primaries the leadership didn't want fought. That project doesn't need every candidate to win a general election. It needs the argument to keep winning inside the party until the party stops treating it as an argument and starts treating it as the mainstream.

Here is the trouble with resting the case there: a party's center of gravity is not an abstraction. It has to be carried by an actual candidate, in an actual state, against an actual opponent, and Wisconsin is not Manhattan. Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School Poll put the point bluntly — a DSA win in Manhattan tells you nothing about Manhattan, Kansas. Trump carried Wisconsin twice. The seat Hong was chasing sits in a state where Democrats need a governor, an Assembly majority, a Senate majority, and a state Supreme Court seat all at once to build a trifecta they haven't held since 2010. That is a coalition-arithmetic problem, not an enthusiasm problem, and it is why a Republican Governors Association PAC spent $2.2 million calling Hong "too liberal" in the final weeks of the primary — not to stop her, but to make sure enough Democratic primary voters knew her name to nominate her. Republicans wanted the base energized. They wanted it energized toward the candidate they thought they could beat in a walk.

That is the tell worth putting on the books: the opposing party's money was betting on the socialist, not against her. Democrats caught the signal in time in Wisconsin. Evers moved, Crowley relaunched a campaign he'd suspended days earlier, and the party coalesced around the candidate it judged could hold Trump-district voters against Tom Tiffany, the most conservative member of the state's congressional delegation. It worked, in the narrow sense that Crowley is the nominee. It worked at the cost of a governor publicly overruling his own party's primary process, a lieutenant governor's campaign ending in scandal rather than a concession speech, and a state party spending its final pre-primary week fighting itself instead of Tiffany.

Put a price on that.

Montana shows the alternative ending. Alani Bankhead has refused to step aside despite pressure from a Democratic establishment that wants a cleaner lane against an incumbent GOP seat it believes is winnable, and there is no Evers-shaped intervention forthcoming to clear the field the way Wisconsin's was cleared. One battleground state managed to consolidate at the buzzer. Another has not, and there is no evidence anyone with the authority to force the question intends to try. This is not a story about socialism succeeding in one place and failing in another. It is a story about a party that no longer has a mechanism — a convention, a real endorsement process, anything with binding force — for adjudicating between grassroots energy and general-election survival before the fight goes public and the other party starts funding it.

Republicans lived this exact failure in 2010, when Tea Party primary voters in Delaware and Nevada chose Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle over candidates who would almost certainly have won two Senate seats the GOP then lost. The movement reshaped the party's arguments for a decade. It also handed Harry Reid a sixth term. Both things were true, and no one in the party ever had to answer for having built no process that could tell the difference in advance.

Wisconsin found a way to answer that question this year, barely, at real cost. Montana hasn't answered it yet. The Democratic Party is not being undone by democratic socialism, and it should stop pretending the diagnosis is that simple; Hong lost fair, on the merits, in a primary Crowley entered twice. What the party still lacks is any process for deciding, before Republican PACs decide it for them, which fights are worth having in August and which ones it can't afford to lose in November.