Hong Lost Wisconsin. Medicare for All Didn't.

The policies Francesca Hong ran on didn’t lose Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday — Hong did. Voters didn’t reject Medicare for All, or subsidized child care, or taxing the wealthy, or canceling student debt, or a pause on new data-center construction. They rejected a Democratic-Socialists-of-America badge on a first-time statewide candidate who had handed Republicans a year’s worth of attack ads and walked back a “cancel Thanksgiving” tweet two weeks before the election. One prominent reading of the result is that progressive economic populism has run out of road in the Midwest. That’s the wrong diagnosis, and the wrong road.

Let me be plain about what conceding looks like in this corner, because I’m not in the business of pretending Hong won. Crowley won. MSI had been tracking the campaign’s polling position and the public skepticism from her own party about her electability — the reasons Hong was unable to overcome the inside-the-party doubts going into Tuesday. Tony Evers, two-term governor, is viewed favorably by about nine in ten Wisconsin Democrats, and his last-week endorsement of David Crowley is credited with flipping a race polls had given Hong by double digits. Hong’s social-media history was a problem. Calling Thanksgiving a “colonizer holiday” is exactly the sentence that gets clipped to two words and put on a Republican mailer; she knows it, her campaign knows it, and that clip is going to land. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who endorsed progressives in Michigan on the same night, declined to endorse her. Anne Steele, the Madison voter quoted in MSI’s coverage of Tuesday’s results, backed Crowley because “he has the best chance of winning.” That’s a coherent and serious reason, and I’m not going to mock a voter for thinking about November.

Now watch the trick. A candidate-specific electability result gets recast as a verdict on the policies themselves — Medicare for All, child care, taxing the wealthy, debt cancellation, the data-center pause. The real cause (a candidate voters didn’t trust to win) gets dressed up as a different cause (the agenda is too radical), and the conclusion slides from “Hong lost” to “limits of the far-left.” That’s the usual catechism. Crowley and Hong didn’t disagree on much — Tiffany’s campaign has already noted there “aren’t many policy differences” between them. The Midwestern voter is being asked to interpret Tuesday as a referendum on Medicare for All when the candidate who won supports Medicare for All.

Follow the cost. The Midwestern voter isn’t rejecting what Hong ran on. She has Medicare, and she’s been paying into Social Security since she was sixteen, and many seniors in Crowley-aligned districts ration blood-pressure pills because Part D wasn’t designed to be affordable. Many mothers in Crowley country have child-care bills that eat a paycheck — the arithmetical result of trying to keep a workforce decently paid while keeping the cost cheap. Nothing about Tuesday changes those facts. Crowley’s policy is closer to Hong’s than the column will admit.

Here’s what the polling on the policies themselves shows. Universal healthcare — the principle, not any specific bill — polls at majority or plurality support in most years, swinging with how the question is framed. Subsidized child care polls at majority support when described as making it affordable for working families. Taxing the wealthy polls at majority support when the proposed rate is named honestly. KFF polling has consistently found that majorities of Americans, including in the Midwest, think their health care costs are too high and want expanded public coverage in some form. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit, by the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, cut child poverty by roughly 46 percent in a single year — the steepest single-year drop on record — and child poverty shot back up when the credit expired in January 2022. That’s not a fringe position. That’s the most efficient anti-poverty intervention this country has tried in decades, and the people who liked it are not concentrated in Manhattan. That doesn’t sound like a limit. That sounds like a constituency.

Why the gap between what voters want and what the column says they want? Seventy years of work by people who’d prefer you not notice that distinction. “Socialism” is the word the Cold War froze and the right has kept frozen ever since — so frozen that Medicare, which every other rich country has, gets called socialism when an American politician proposes it; Social Security, the most popular government program in the country, gets called socialism when an American politician defends it. Wisconsin voters didn’t decide Tuesday that subsidized child care was a step too far. They decided that putting a “Democratic Socialist” badge on a first-time statewide candidate was. Those are two different decisions, and treating them as one is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The thing to notice — and this is the part that should make anyone on the right uncomfortable — is that the country already does this. Medicare is single-payer, and it’s the most popular federal program since highway funding. Social Security is universal social insurance, and the candidate campaigning on “we’ll protect yours” wins landslides. The rural electric cooperatives the New Deal built — member-owned, not-for-profit utilities — still serve 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the country’s landmass, per the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The “socialism” debate is, in some important sense, a debate about whether to extend working things to more people — or, in the column’s telling, whether the voters who use these programs secretly despise them.

If you want a receipt for what voters actually think of the policies, you don’t have to leave the upper Midwest. Wisconsin expanded Medicaid under Evers — BadgerCare now covers roughly a million Wisconsinites, and it’s politically untouchable. Minnesota passed paid family leave and a child tax credit in 2023, both signed by a Democratic governor, both popular. Michigan expanded Medicaid under Whitmer and is now sitting on a budget surplus. The pattern in all three states is the same: when the policy is popular enough and the candidate is plausible enough, Democratic primary voters deliver. The college counties show the progressive pull — Flanagan led Craig by more than 30 points in Minnesota’s college towns, El-Sayed led Stevens by 22 in Michigan’s. The bottleneck is non-college-educated white voters who don’t trust that a candidate with the label can win in November. They’re not wrong about November. They are wrong about which lever to pull.

There’s a limit in the Midwest, and it’s real. It’s not the limit the column is selling. It’s the limit on what working families can absorb before the arithmetic stops penciling out: the deductible that doubles between January and December, the child-care bill that eats a paycheck, the wage that hasn’t moved since 2019 while the cost of staying alive has moved around it. Hong’s candidacy misread the room on candidate-style, but the room’s problem — care that’s structurally underfunded, wages that are structurally flat, a bill that arrives in November for surgery in March — is exactly what she was trying to talk about, and it isn’t going anywhere just because she is.

So here’s the build. The agenda doesn’t need the word “socialist.” It never did. Hong’s actual platform — Medicare for All, child care, taxing the rich, debt relief, the data-center pause — can be packaged as “what every other rich country already does” or “what working families in Wisconsin have been asking for.” That packaging wins. Minnesota proved it in 2023. The 2021 Child Tax Credit, briefly, proved it. The Nordic social democrats who built the most admired welfare states on Earth chose the ballot over the Bolsheviks a hundred years ago and won.

The working alternative is right there, and it’s not new. North Dakota has run a profitable state-owned bank since 1919 — nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. Alaska mails every eligible resident a check out of the state’s oil fund every year, in a redder state than Wisconsin. Denmark makes it easy to fire a worker and spends about 2 percent of GDP on active labor market policy, per the OECD, making sure the fired worker doesn’t end up on the street — a piece of Danish policy that has no American analogue on any ballot. The pieces exist. The hard part isn’t the policy — it’s that the institutions you need to put most of them in place took a century to build in places that decided to build them. Policy is the tip; institutions are the iceberg. And the easier part of all this is still talking about it: “Midwestern voters don’t want this” sells better in certain editorials than “Midwestern voters already have most of this and want the rest of it too.” The first is a story. The second is a Tuesday.