Pro-Palestinian progressive poised to win Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor

WISCONSIN, United States (JTA) — One week after notching a significant primary victory in a Midwestern swing state, pro-Palestinian progressives were looking to repeat their success in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor was set to end Tuesday with state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, polling comfortably in the lead. Despite the best efforts of the state’s Democratic establishment and the concerns of Wisconsin Jewish groups, Hong appears well positioned to win the primary — leaving many in the state concerned about her electability in the general election.

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Hong’s record on Israel and antisemitism was of concern to Wisconsin Jews, as well as Democratic figureheads more broadly. She had appeared on livestream fundraisers with Hasan Piker, the left-wing strident Israel critic who had also rallied with Hong, as well as twice with Michael Beyer, a.k.a. “Mike from PA,” who has called Jewish identity “a constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.”

On one of her appearances with Beyer, Hong urged constituents to fundraise for people on the “front lines in Gaza.”

A poll of likely voters one week before the race, conducted by nonpartisan outlet State Navigate, showed Hong with a commanding lead. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they favored Hong, twice the total who backed Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the next-closest candidate. Only 17% of the same voter sample said they identified as democratic socialists, possibly indicating that Hong — whose platform had emphasized working families, healthcare and data centers — had found wider appeal beyond her movement.

The party’s left flank was buoyed by Abdul El-Sayed’s victory last week in the US Senate primary in Michigan, and hoped that a repeat success was possible in a neighboring Great Lakes state with a similarly purple voting bloc. But El-Sayed performed far short of the comfortable victory many polling outlets had predicted, squeaking a winning margin of just under 1%.

That may not be the case this time. Polling from Marquette Law School, considered the gold standard in the state, had also consistently shown Hong with a wide lead. Despite entering the race with little name recognition, Hong had benefited from both a national progressive populist push and a crowded, musical-chairs Democratic field that burst with seven candidates at its peak.

The race had whittled down to four candidates, with Crowley having re-entered the field after previously suspending his campaign. The flip came after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the preferred candidate of Crowley and many other institutionalist Democrats, dropped out of the race following an accounting scandal. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the party’s 2022 US Senate nominee and a once-promising figure in the state, also dropped out after failing to gain traction.

During her campaign, Hong apologized for having called the police on a vandalized Israeli flag in her district in December 2023, which at the time she had called “highly antisemitic” and urged to be investigated as a hate crime.

She explained why she now regrets making the call. Hong recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “The image was cropped and incomplete to misrepresent anti-Zionism as antisemitism – a distinction I take seriously.”

Hong’s impact on Israel policy as governor of Wisconsin would be limited. But she had called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “genocidal” and pushed the state to overturn a ban on government contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. She had also criticized Wisconsin’s current moderate Democratic governor for backing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s controversial definition of antisemitism.

Hong’s general-election success may hinge on the broader electorate’s views of the Democratic Socialists of America.

This week a co-chair of the DSA drew further concern from Jewish Democrats after appearing in a viral interview on The New Yorker’s podcast. Megan Romer called the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel “largely inevitable” and said she “probably would have” joined a pro-Palestinian rally in New York the day after the attacks if she’d been able to attend.

Prior to Oct. 7, Hong’s state house campaigns had expressed some positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish causes. In January 2023, her campaign sold a Hebrew-language shirt, with proceeds going to Jewish Social Services of Madison.

“Team Hong has upped our commitment to uplifting multiculturalism,” Hong’s campaign wrote on Twitter at the time. She included praise of the symbolic significance of the number 18 in Hebrew and of the Hebrew phrase “L’chaim.”

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