The scare story is doing the work the policy isn’t. Wisconsin families are asking who keeps the rural hospital open, who makes the childcare bill survivable, who fixes the property tax their grandparents didn’t have — and Scott Walker’s answer in a Fox News column titled “Democratic Socialists are coming for my state. This is how we beat them” is that the urgent problem is Francesca Hong’s video cheering the Knicks, and the solution is a Republican congressman named Tom Tiffany. After three terms as governor, that is what he has to offer a state with one of the worst cost-of-living crunches in the Midwest.
Walker’s strongest claim is factually correct. Donald Trump carried Wisconsin twice in three cycles. Ron Johnson won the Senate twice. The state is the closest in the country, and Hong holds positions — on policing, on youth gender care, on the size of the welfare state — that sit well outside the median Wisconsin voter’s comfort zone. Tom Tiffany has a clearer path through his primary than Hong does through hers. None of that is fake. The voters will decide.
The piece still runs the checklist. A Democratic Socialist who wants to abolish prisons and law enforcement, legalize sex work, perform gender surgeries on children, raise taxes into the stratosphere. The point of the inventory is not to convince you Hong wants any of it — it’s to convince you the Republican alternative is the only adult in the room. You are not meant to ask what “ending the 400-year property tax increase” actually does, or what “greater transparency in healthcare” changes about a real deductible, or why a decade of GOP legislative dominance and Walker-era control of the governorship didn’t fix any of the things now driving Democratic primary voters to the left in the first place.
The writer would rather you not ask what any of this has to do with the property tax bill, the hospital down the road, the childcare spot that costs more than the mortgage, the technical-college tuition that doubled, the utility rate hike that just landed in the mailbox. Walker served three terms as governor. Tiffany has held his House seat for years. They had the governorship, the legislature, the state Supreme Court, the whole apparatus. They cut taxes. They cut regulations. They let the university system be defunded. They let the rural hospitals consolidate into regional systems that then got bought by the kind of outfits that load them with debt and sell the building out from under them. And the result is a state where Democratic Socialists are competitive in Democratic primaries for the first time in living memory. You don’t have to like Hong’s platform to notice that the conditions that made her possible are not her fault.
Here is the second thing the column is hiding, and it is mechanical, not ideological. The “Democratic Socialists are coming for my state” panic rests on a turnout differential the writer never names. The spring primary electorate and the November general electorate are not the same group of people. The casual, working-against-the-radical Democrat who shows up in November stays home in April. If only the five most hardcore activists turn out on a Tuesday night to vote on the block-party budget, you might conclude the whole neighborhood wants to plant a community forest and ban cars. The Tuesday-night meeting is not the neighborhood. The spring primary is not the state. Walker is reading the Tuesday-night crowd and screaming the town has been captured, and the trick works because the trick has worked in every low-turnout primary since primaries were invented.
Hong deserves one honest line, because the discipline requires it. “Abolish the police” is not a serious platform plank. Neither is a tax plan that promises the universe without arithmetic. If the Democratic Socialists want to win Wisconsin they will have to do what every serious left-of-center project in modern history has had to do: show the mechanism. A co-op. A public option. A community land trust. A negotiated price for childcare. They have the rhetorical ammunition. The institutional ammunition is harder, and they have not, yet, built it.
Walker’s piece is not a serious argument against Hong’s platform. It is the catechism of the comfortable — pointing at the loudest person across the aisle so you never have to defend your own record. The reader is supposed to feel the warmth of a “common sense” candidate and not notice that no mechanism has been named, no cost calculated, no institution proposed. The Tiffany “plan” is a bumper sticker applied to a state budget. “Freeze college tuition” means nothing when the technical colleges have already been defunded into a corner. “Greater transparency in healthcare” is the emptiest phrase in American politics. The piece is a campaign ad dressed as a civics lesson, and the civics lesson is that you should be afraid.
The path to winning Wisconsin, on either side, is not a socialist bogeyman. It is the boring one. Universal childcare co-located with public schools, paid for out of general revenue. A public-option hospital system that rural co-op hospitals can contract into the way rural electric co-ops contract into the grid. A state bank that lends to small employers at cost, the way North Dakota’s has done since 1919. Sectoral wage floors for care workers, the way the Danes set them. Property-tax relief aimed at the family paying the bill, not at the buyer who’ll just capitalize the cut into the next sale price. None of that is radical. All of it is plumbing. Every piece of it has been built, somewhere, by serious people, in the last hundred years.
Anyway. Wisconsin is a real state with real families and real institutions quietly being dismantled, and the people who dismantled them want you scared of the woman with the Knicks video so you don’t notice. The scare story will still be there tomorrow. The hospital might not be.