Move over, Maine. A new Democratic primary has taken the crown as the country’s most dysfunctional.

In Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, a crowded field of establishment-tied Democrats has been splitting the vote for months, giving democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s energetic campaign a lane to the nomination.

Recently, fearing Hong would lose the general election (and spooked by a seeming Republican effort to boost her chances), some in the party tried to coalesce around one candidate to stop her: lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez. 

But that attempt disastrously backfired last week, when it turned out Rodriguez’s campaign had badly mismanaged its funds. It’s still not clear what happened, but the situation was so messy that she quit the race.

With Rodriguez gone, the two leading contenders appeared to be Hong and Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who was Democrats’ losing nominee for a Senate race in 2022. 

Yet, party bigwigs were unhappy with those options and coaxed a candidate who had already dropped out — Milwaukee county executive David Crowley — back into the race, even though the primary is only three weeks away. 

This weekend, Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley in a last-ditch attempt to stop Hong (and, apparently, Barnes) from winning the nomination. 

The chaos is all the more shocking, because the state party, until recently, was often cited as a national model for Democrats, with leaders and candidates successfully coordinating over multiple cycles in a long-term plan to undo years of Republican dominance. 

I asked Jessie Opoien, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to walk me through this dizzying sequence of events. How did the party find itself in this mess? Is Hong on a glide path to primary victory? And what awaits in the general election? Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

Democrats began this race with optimism. Now, they’re a lot more worried.

Back before this primary began, what was the situation of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and the political status quo in the state?

Democrats were feeling more optimistic heading into this primary. We have a lot of really, really tight races here. But if you look at the past three state Supreme Court races, you had liberal candidates just really blowing it out of the water, no matter how much Republican money came in. Democrats came out feeling pretty happy about those races. 

Another significant element is new legislative maps that got passed. This would be the second state election where they’re running on those new maps. 

So, for the first time in 15-ish years, Democrats are actually within striking distance of getting a majority or, at least, taking one of the chambers — or getting closer to the point where they’re not completely irrelevant in the capitol.

And the congressional map, which gives Republicans a 6-2 advantage, hasn’t changed yet — but that’s something Democrats could do if they win a trifecta?

Yes, and some of the candidates running for governor have made that a priority.

How was Governor Evers viewed after his two terms?

We look at the Marquette University poll as our gold standard for approval ratings, and Evers is by far the most popular statewide politician they’ve polled, pretty much in the time of their existence. He’s been above 50 percent for pretty much all of his two terms.

That being said, there has been a little bit of friction, especially toward the end of the legislative session. The state had this large projected budget surplus that no one could agree on what to do with it. Evers and the Republican leaders of the legislature proposed this deal that included some tax relief and some school funding — and basically got no support from Democrats in the legislature. They’ve probably gotten past it, but you had people starting to become a little bit more willing to be publicly critical of him. 

The leading contenders to succeed Tony Evers

So, after Evers announces he isn’t running for another term, how does the race to succeed him kick off?

Early on, I think everyone was expecting the attorney general, Josh Kaul, to get in. He would have been the clear frontrunner, and we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in right now. [Kaul eventually decided not to run.]

Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor, was the first person to get in, but she did not come in as an automatic frontrunner. 

Mandela Barnes took a little bit longer to get in, but he did. He’s the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson in 2022.

David Crowley, Milwaukee county executive: I think everyone expected his campaign to take off more at the beginning than it did. Milwaukee has had some big moments while he’s been in office. I think people expected him to be possibly a frontrunner early on, and that didn’t necessarily materialize. 

Others who got in were state senator Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, the Department of Administration secretary under Evers. And Missy Hughes, a state economic development official.

And state representative Francesca Hong, who came in very much as an underdog candidate, but whose campaign blasted off and gained a lot of traction in a way that, I think, a lot of people didn’t see coming.

Tell me what you’ve seen on the ground about Francesca Hong’s campaign.

She is absolutely running as a democratic socialist, but she’s talking to Trump voters about affordability and being left behind. She was one of the first ones to jump on the anti-data center sentiment. “Jump on” was probably the wrong word, because she was there before the publicity; it didn’t appear to be an opportunistic move.

I started noticing back in December that something felt different with her, just in terms of the fundraising events she was doing. She did a ramen pop-up, bringing back her restaurant specialties. [Hong was a chef and co-owned a restaurant.] She did these small and intimate but unique events, like karaoke and bingo — bringing people to do fun things, things you don’t necessarily see a candidate engaging in themselves

My anecdotal observation is: I see people that I went to high school with or that I know from my non-political life who are talking about her campaign. I just don’t see that, you know, ever, anywhere else.

When the Marquette polls came out early this year, it was really remarkable just how split the field was; the first place candidate had just 11 percent in one poll. There’s been very little polling lately, but the narrative until recently was that it was shaping up to be a three-way race between Hong, Barnes, and Rodriguez, right?

I think it was starting to feel that way.  

Mandela Barnes, it was harder to measure. He came in with the most name recognition, having been on the ballot as lieutenant governor and for the Senate race. More people had an opinion about him, because they at least had heard of him.

With Sara Rodriguez — there wasn’t a lot of public polling for us to look at. But, then, there started to be an attitude behind the scenes of: Is the frontrunner going to be a democratic socialist, and do Democrats want that? And if they don’t, do they need to start organizing around one candidate?

You started to see that around Sara Rodriguez. The first candidate who dropped out, Missy Hughes, got behind her the day she dropped out. 

Fundraising reports were due in a few weeks, and Sara Rodriguez announced she was going to put up a million-dollar ad buy. In this race, with this many candidates, no one has a lot of money, so a million dollars would have been a big deal. And she had an independent group that was putting ads up for her, too. 

So, everyone was like, “Oh wow, the momentum’s going in her direction, the money’s there, she’s picking up endorsements.” Then, David Crowley got out, pretty much right when that ad buy was announced, and endorsed her. And then, everything started falling apart. 

The Sara Rodriguez disaster and the David Crowley switcheroo

So, what happened to the Rodriguez campaign?

This was pretty much all starting last week. Sara Rodriguez has got this ad buy that’s supposed to be going up on TV. And we had heard some people starting to raise questions about, where is it?

Sunday night, about 9:30, Sara Rodriguez’s campaign puts out a press release, and they say that they fired her campaign manager, because they’ve discovered financial mismanagement. 

On Monday, she holds a press conference in her Madison office. Basically, she has no idea how much money she has, and the ad buy she thought she placed, there’s no money for it. She said she didn’t know if this was something done on purpose or if it was mistakes that were made. 

I asked how much she thought she had on hand when they made the million dollar buy. She said $1.5 million. So, we’re talking about maybe a difference of a million dollars.

So, it goes from “this is the candidate into the strongest position” to “this candidate maybe has some money, but we don’t really know how much, and also she’s got these debts.”

She was committed to staying in [at first]. But, it sounds like, as she continued to dig into whatever the problem was. everyone around her was saying her campaign was over, and she finally decided that was the case on Friday morning.

And then, we get this switcheroo.

Yeah, then, my colleague, Matt Smith, reported this first, but we all started talking to Democratic sources who told us there was an effort to try and get David Crowley back in the race. 

Because there was a question of, when Crowley dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez, was he brought in under false pretenses? I think he would not have gotten out, obviously, if he had a clearer picture.

So, that transitioned to: He’s only been out for a few days; he could get back in. 

And the key element that made this more of a story than just him getting back in was now having the governor’s endorsement. 

Had Evers endorsed Rodriguez before that?

No, he had not endorsed anyone. He had said throughout the race he wasn’t planning on getting involved, but that he might at some point.

So, can David Crowley, a candidate who was apparently polling nowhere, who actually quit the race — can he come back into contention with just three weeks left?

That’s a really good question. They’ve got to get on the air. They’ve got to get the money. If Evers would like to transfer over the hundreds of thousands to a million dollars he’s got in his campaign account, that would be a big help to David Crowley, or if unions who were backing Sara Rodriguez or hadn’t made an endorsement yet decided to get behind him. 

But he was polling below 5 percent. So, I don’t know. I just keep reminding myself, I guess, that all of this is occurring within the bubble of people who are actively paying attention to it right now. While the primary seems like it’s tomorrow, it is three weeks away, and there are many people who have not been paying attention. 

Why not Mandela Barnes?

Now, here’s the big question I’ve been confused by.

If the establishment is so worried about Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, winning the nomination and losing the general, wouldn’t the thing to do be to coalesce around Mandela Barnes, who seems to be the other leading contender? Barnes had run before and lost, but it was in a tough cycle, in 2022, and it wasn’t by that much.

Instead, there’s what seems to me like a cockamamie scheme to get a candidate who had already quit the race to come back in weeks before election day. And that will make it a three-way race, which many people think will make it easier for Hong to win, with a plurality of the vote. So, what’s going on here?

You know, I don’t know if anyone has figured out the answer to that. 

Before Mandela Barnes even got in the race, there were a not insignificant number of Democrats who were urging him not to. It’s a question, I guess, of whether you think he got really close to beating Ron Johnson and just got out-campaigned, or if you think he came really close on something that he should have been able to pull off. He had money left over.

He got attacked in 2022 for some positions on policing that he had. So, is the main concern that he, like Hong, is too far left to win? 

I think it probably does have a lot to do with the policing stuff. If a Democrat is willing to say that they’re concerned about the electability issue, they usually point pretty quickly to the police rhetoric. 

Mandela distanced himself from that more in ’22, and he’s definitely distancing himself from it now, in a way that we haven’t seen from Francesca Hong.

But, just the fact that there’s a photo of him holding a t-shirt that says “abolish ICE.” These things exist, and they made for good campaign ad fodder in ’22. 

The other thing I’ve heard, that it is hard to assess the veracity of, is that he just hasn’t been performing as well in internal polls [of the general election] as people had hoped he would.

One of the Dem sources I spoke with on Friday who was pushing Crowley to get back said, “This was Mandela Barnes’s race to lose, and he’s been losing it.”

Tom Tiffany and the general election

Tell me about the general election and the presumptive GOP nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany. What kind of Republican is he, and how formidable an opponent is he likely to be?

In Congress, he tends to rank as one of the more conservative Republicans — certainly within Wisconsin’s delegation. There was trepidation early on from Republicans, as he was getting ready to get into the race, I think, specifically about his positions on abortion. 

But, he didn’t have to deal with a primary, because he got the Trump endorsement and that got his opponents out of the way pretty quickly. So, he’s had a few months to just run some biographical ads that make him look like a folksy guy from Northern Wisconsin. They’re good ads, they’re him and his family, him and a dairy barn. He’s talking about things like data centers and home affordability. 

Wisconsin is an archetypal swing state. It voted for Trump two out of three times. What’s the current partisan mood there? Does a blue wave look plausible? 

If you look at polls, Trump’s popularity here is not good. Tariffs continue to be a question here, especially for farmers. I think last time we saw a poll, inflation, jobs, health insurance, education, those were the top concerns. The national economy, I imagine, will bear some weight here.

But, I expect it to be a close election. Democrats have been very optimistic because of the national environment, but realistically, Wisconsin is a lot closer than that. We elect Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin, we elect Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We’re not predictable.

A decade’s worth of grudges and feuds between the Democratic establishment and the insurgent left is coming to a head in one election this year: Michigan’s Senate primary.

The contest between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed has somehow unearthed every fault line that’s divided the two factions over the years — from gender and racial politics, to Israel and Gaza, to questions of electability and fair play, to money in politics, and much more.

On one side there’s Stevens, a four-term House member who is the preferred candidate of the Democratic establishment — and of AIPAC, which has spent nearly $30 million to support her campaign. 

On the other is El-Sayed, a former public health official who’s been backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their network of supporters and fans. 

But the race has quickly gone beyond just them and become about something bigger — the national struggle for influence in the Democratic Party. 

“This is the quintessential contest between the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the economically populist wing,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the left group Our Revolution.

In contrast, Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left group Third Way, argued that nominating El-Sayed — a “super extreme candidate who will alienate lots of voters in the middle” — is a dangerous risk.

In this one race, the Democratic factions are relitigating the 2016 presidential primary, the 2020 presidential primary, and several major controversies of the past few years, all at once. And whoever wins will have to find a way to somehow unite the party and win a competitive general election against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers. 

On gender and racial politics, we’re doing 2016 again

When Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination, her supporters frequently implied he had blind spots related to gender and race. They argued, for instance, that certain criticisms of Clinton (and remarks by Sanders) were sexist, and that Sanders’s poor performance with Black voters demonstrated the limits of his appeal. 

The discourse also sometimes focused on so-called “Bernie Bros” — online Sanders supporters who, critics argued, directed toxic abuse and vitriol toward people not in his camp. Sanders’s backers argued that the accusations of sexism were themselves a dishonest and inaccurate smear to distract from Clinton’s own shortcomings. 

All of this is happening again now in Michigan.

On gender, a comment from El-Sayed a few weeks back — he said Stevens was unable to “string together two coherent sentences” — was criticized by the Stevens camp as sexist. 

Then, last week, a video of an enthusiastic speech by Stevens on the campaign trail went viral as online El-Sayed supporters mocked her diction and delivery, viewing her way of speaking as self-evidently ridiculous. 

Seeking to tamp down this behavior, El-Sayed posted Friday that the way “people online” were making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies” was “unkind and unhelpful.” He also told Vox’s America, Actually podcast that the accusations of him being disrespectful to women have gotten back to his daughter, and been hurtful.

Meanwhile, on race, a poll last week shows Black Democrats splitting 67 percent for Stevens, and 21 percent for El-Sayed. Days later, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC endorsed Stevens. Just like Clinton in 2016, Stevens is hoping support among Black voters who are longtime stalwarts of the Democratic base will be enough to carry her to victory. And just like Sanders in 2016 and 2020, El-Sayed is facing questions about whether the party’s left vanguard can expand its support beyond white, college-educated voters. 

“The progressive brand really, really underperforms with Black voters all around the country,” said Adrian Hemond of the Democratic advocacy firm Grassroots Midwest. “I think it’s worth Democrats, media, and people in the nonprofit blob asking themselves why that is.”

The establishment vs. insurgent tension, and the Obama of it all

In both of Sanders’s presidential runs, his team griped about the behavior of the Democratic establishment, arguing that they weren’t truly playing fair. For instance, they pointed to how the DNC initially scheduled very few debates for the 2016 presidential contenders, arguing the supposedly neutral committee was in fact trying to help the frontrunner, Clinton, by limiting attention on her opponents.

To Sanders’s supporters, the bitterest pill was the perceived late intervention of former President Barack Obama into the 2020 campaign just as Sanders appeared well-positioned to win the nomination. (Days before the crucial Super Tuesday primaries, two other candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Obama was publicly neutral, but privately called Biden and Buttigieg during this key period, raising speculation about his role.)

In Michigan, again, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is officially neutral, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has long been understood to favor Stevens, and reportedly has privately asked donors to back her.

Obama, too, has become a flashpoint. An AIPAC-linked group has spent millions on an ad showing Obama praising Stevens — even though he has not endorsed her in this race. The praise is from comments Obama made during Stevens’s first House campaign, in 2018. (Stevens had worked on his presidential task force to rescue the auto industry during the Great Recession.)

El-Sayed’s supporters have argued that this is an attempt to mislead Michigan voters into thinking Stevens has Obama’s backing. “It is disgusting that AIPAC — which spent tens of millions attacking Obama — is now spending like crazy to lie and suggest he endorsed Haley Stevens,” Ben Rhodes, a former Obama White House official who supports El-Sayed, posted on X.

Others suspect that Obama does in fact tacitly support Stevens, and that’s why he’s letting the ad stand without clarifying things. (El-Sayed thought Obama was too “centrist” and “middle of the road,” he told Vox in 2017.) And yet again, people are fighting over 2016: Some Stevens supporters point out that Sanders used footage of Obama praising him in a 2020 primary ad despite the senator’s own criticism of the former president. 

Israel/Gaza, AIPAC, antisemitism, money in politics, Hasan Piker, etc…

Of course, the issue that has come up repeatedly in tense Democratic primaries this cycle — Israel — is present in this race in a major way. 

Many on the left argue that the war in Gaza contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat by disillusioning some of her potential supporters and dissuading them from turning out. The evidence that this phenomenon occurred in significant numbers due to Gaza specifically is thin. But it arguably may have been a factor in Michigan, where 2 percent of the population is Muslim and Trump worked hard to court disaffected voters with vague promises to end the war.

Here, Stevens is an unapologetically pro-Israel candidate who wants to continue US military aid to the country and does not believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. (She said during a Hanukkah event once that “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”) El-Sayed, in contrast, has been sharply critical of Israel throughout this race.

The center-left group Third Way has spent months attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, arguing that comments of Piker’s — that “America deserved 9/11,” and that a certain sect of Israeli Orthodox Jews was “inbred” — are un-American and antisemitic. (Piker has said he calls lots of different groups he dislikes inbred.)

Meanwhile, Stevens has been the beneficiary of that nearly $30 million in AIPAC-linked spending — a topic she generally tries to avoid discussing. The ads in question don’t talk about Israel at all and instead praise Stevens on other issues. “It is just a clear indication of where the base of the party is right now that AIPAC has to continually do this spending through their allied outside groups,” Dani Negrete of Indivisible, a progressive group backing El-Sayed, told me.

Electability and the question of: who can’t win?

After a decade of factional squabbling, the left and the mainstream factions have each honed their talking points for why, when a Democrat loses the general election, it’s the other faction’s fault.

To the establishment, left candidates are risky bets: They’ve taken positions that may alienate swing voters and are less dependable than candidates with longer electoral pedigrees. 

In endorsing Stevens this month, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) warned they needed someone who was “fully vetted.” El-Sayed’s supporters viewed these and other remarks from Stevens supporters as baselessly linking their candidate to Graham Platner, who dropped out of his race in Maine over sexual assault allegations that he denies. However, unlike Platner, who was plucked from obscurity, El-Sayed has been a political figure for nearly a decade and faced significant media scrutiny already. 

Another version of the critique is more about whether El-Sayed’s policy positions — for instance, his past support for defunding the police, and his backing of Medicare-for-all — are too far left for this swing state in the general election.

Meanwhile, the left’s argument for why establishment candidates flop is that they fail to excite the base and stimulate turnout. Therefore, they claim, El-Sayed is the safer choice.

Lately, this argument has focused on Israel and Gaza. Left commentators argue that the Biden administration’s support of Israel and failure to stop what they call a genocide in Gaza was a major — perhaps the major — reason Harris lost in 2024, because part of the Democratic base was disillusioned and didn’t turn out. So, some on the left have suggested, if Stevens is the nominee, Democrats are risking the seat by disillusioning the same voters.

The mirror of this argument, from the establishment, blames the left for causing this disillusionment. By criticizing rival Democrats in harsh terms and casting them as pawns of special interests, they prime their voters to sit out the general election after their own candidates fail to win the nomination. “Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” famed Democratic consultant James Carville said last week, arguing this was because Sanders convinced his own supporters the Democratic Party was corrupt. 

This fight has played out in miniature in Michigan. Stevens has accused El-Sayed of undermining Democrats in 2024 by backing the “Uncommitted” movement, which sought to protest Biden’s Israel policy in the primaries. El-Sayed, conscious of this criticism, has gone out of his way to emphasize his early support for Harris in 2024, in contrast to others who sat out the race. But he’s also warned that the wrong Senate candidate could recreate the conditions that led to her loss.  

Last week, a post from one El-Sayed supporter that he would not vote for Stevens in the general election went viral. “The Democratic Party needs to be anti-AIPAC, not pro-AIPAC, and it only happens if candidates like Haley Stevens don’t win in general elections,” Adeeb Hafeez posted on X.

The next day — after critics argued this could lead to an even bigger conservative Supreme Court majority — Hafeez walked it back a bit. He posted that he “may hold my nose and end up voting for” Stevens after all in the general if she advances — but that he’d “be very uncomfortable in doing so.”

The exchange underscored the challenge for Democrats in coming together after the primary. No matter who wins, they’ll carry the scars of not only this race, but election after election pitting left-wing candidates against moderates, each of which have left behind bruised feelings and mutual suspicion.