The word is doing all the losing in Wisconsin, while the platform sits there waiting to be argued. Francesca Hong, the 37-year-old Madison chef, former restaurant owner, and first Asian American elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly, is the front-runner in most polls in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, running as a self-described democratic socialist on universal childcare, fully funded public schools, and a one-year pause on datacenter construction. Yet the coverage keeps asking whether the label can win a state Donald Trump carried twice. Scott Bauer’s dispatch for the Associated Press leads with the noun and buries the platform. That is exactly backwards.
Do not put a scare in the eye of a party that has earned one. “Socialism” has ended more Midwestern candidacies than most rival candidates ever managed. Democrats who watched the label land are not fools to flinch. They are right that the other side will call Hong a socialist. They are right that the attack will be loud, expensive, and constant. They may be right that in the WOW counties and the Fox Valley, the word could mobilize opposition turnout rather than merely lose an argument.
That is a real political problem. It is also the point where the argument comes unstuck.
The party has decided that the answer to a mobilization problem is pre-emptive surrender. It is afraid of the label before voters have been asked about the thing attached to it. Nobody is making the case that universal childcare is bad policy. Nobody is arguing that fully funded public schools are bad policy. The idea is not on trial. The word is. And the people whose job is supposed to be winning are reciting it for the other side.
So let us talk about the thing.
Universal childcare is not a slogan. It is the answer to an arithmetic problem. American childcare is a market engineered to fail. You can make it cheap for parents, decent for workers, or profitable for owners. Pick two. The math does not close for all three.
Quality care requires enough skilled adults, paid enough to stay. Parents cannot pay the full cost. Owners cannot produce reliable care at a high margin without cutting wages, raising tuition, or both. Every other rich country figured this out decades ago and subsidized the difference. We act surprised every month when families cannot afford care and providers cannot retain staff, as though the arithmetic might have changed since the last time we checked.
It has not.
In Sweden, my cousins treat childcare the way Americans treat the interstate: boring, useful, and theirs. They ask whether the hours work. They do not ask whether daycare is “electable.” When the owner will not pay a decent wage and the parent cannot pay the tuition, the difference is paid by the worker and the family. That is not a socialist conspiracy. It is a spreadsheet that stopped adding up.
Wisconsin already runs the supposedly frightening category. Public schools. The library system. The public university. Nobody panicked at those institutions because nobody had first wrapped them in a red scare and sent them onto television.
Hong’s proposal for fully funded public schools is similarly ordinary in substance and treated as radical in framing. Wisconsin’s school-funding design ties district spending to local property taxes. Rich districts spend more. Poor districts spend less. That is a policy choice, not the weather, and other coverage of this race has already examined it. Changing it is a legislative act. Calling it socialism is easier than explaining who chose the current arrangement and who benefits from it.
The word is also being used to hide an American receipt. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit showed up as a monthly check. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty fell 46 percent in a single year, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent. The expansion lifted roughly 2.1 million children out of poverty, and 2.9 million children were lifted out when the broader effects are counted. Then the policy lapsed, and child poverty shot back up.
Turn it on, poverty falls. Turn it off, poverty returns.
That is not a Scandinavian fairy tale. That is the Census Bureau. Yes, the Child Tax Credit was a federal cash transfer layered onto pandemic-era fiscal expansion. Universal childcare is a harder, permanent state program that requires ongoing revenue. Good. That is not an objection. It is the point. Even the easier version — the one that simply cut a check — was abandoned when the politics turned sour. The machinery gets harder when the service is permanent. The arithmetic does not get less true.
The datacenter moratorium is the piece the coverage should find most interesting. It is the piece least interested in finding the coverage.
Datacenters consume enormous amounts of power and water. They receive tax breaks. They create a few hundred jobs, mostly in construction and light operations, while the demand for power and water continues after the ribbon-cutting and the campaign photographs. The jobs are real. They are also largely temporary. The draw on the grid, the water table, and the community is not.
A one-year pause while Wisconsin figures out what it is getting is not radical governance. It is the minimum due diligence a town should demand before somebody builds a power plant in its backyard and calls it innovation. The datacenter may bring investment. It may also externalize costs onto the grid, the water supply, and everyone who has to pay for the infrastructure after the investors leave.
The jobs are real. The bill is real too.
In a sane coverage environment, that would be the local story: who pays, who gets the tax break, how much water is committed, how much power is reserved, and what the community receives in return. Instead, the datacenter question becomes a footnote to “socialist.” The label does the work. The policy escapes inspection.
Here is the asymmetry. Hong’s Republican opponent in November, Tom Tiffany, voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election — an effort to throw out votes his own constituents had cast in a free election. That act of democratic subversion is mentioned once, late, as a parenthetical. Hong’s proposal that a child’s daycare not consume a whole paycheck receives the emergency treatment.
Sit with that.
One candidate is treated as a routine general-election challenger. A 37-year-old chef proposing childcare, better-funded schools, and a pause to examine datacenter costs is treated as the emergency. The coverage has made a priority call. The priority is the noun, not the governance.
The establishment has another Democrat available: Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who re-entered the race with the governor’s endorsement. The closing-week coverage presents the familiar electability question. Can Hong win Wisconsin? Can a democratic socialist win a state Trump carried twice?
I am told this kind of candidate cannot win a swing state. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why a Wisconsin parent paying the national average of $14,000 a year for infant care would object to a plan that every other rich country runs. Do it without “American exceptionalism,” since the exceptional part, in this case, is the price tag. Then tell me the obstacle is the label rather than the arithmetic.
Hong is also about the age at which the establishment likes to explain, very patiently, why the thing she has watched work elsewhere cannot possibly work here. Keep doing that. The condescension is doing more for the other side than any attack ad.
The answer is not to win the argument over the word “socialism.” That argument is unwinnable and not worth winning. The answer is to talk about the thing and let the word get lost in the dust. We already do this; we just will not say the word.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Wisconsin gets to make one: whether childcare is a family’s private emergency or shared infrastructure; whether school funding follows property wealth or follows children; whether datacenters receive public subsidies before the public knows the bill.
Tuesday’s primary will tell us whether Hong wins. If she does, November will bring nine months of “Can a democratic socialist win Wisconsin?” coverage. That will be a contest over a word.
Meanwhile, the platform will sit there: the childcare plan, the school-funding fix, the datacenter pause. Unexamined, because the word was easier to print than the policy was to argue with.
The question was never whether the thing is electable. The question is who is willing to say its real name out loud.