What Can We Learn from the Campaign?
By Sophie Scholl
This article was originally published by the team at “Nothing to Lose News”, who were actively campaigning for Hong during the election. It is being republished here through the ISP now, and we hope it will help stimulate an international discussion on how Marxists should approach campaigns like Hong’s.
Despite the serious limitations of Hong’s campaign, we strongly feel that we made the right choice by engaging with this campaign in a positive and friendly manner. While campaigning for Hong we met other volunteers and were able to engage in discussions about what the campaign would need to do in order to succeed. While the end result of this was not the transformation of the campaign into a genuine socialist juggernaut the end result has been that, coming out of the campaign, we and other Marxist activists across the state of Wisconsin who agreed on our general approach have been able to work together and help each other in the aftermath of the campaign’s conclusion. This small group of socialists has since been able to work together to plan a statewide action conference where we hope to be able to bring together volunteers from the Hong campaign who don’t want to support the rotten corporate Democrat Hong has since endorsed, and who want to continue the fight in the streets, our classrooms, and our workplaces for the demands that inspired us while also working to refine and improve them. An initial planning meeting already took place for this conference and drew in a wide array of activists, including people who are not currently with any organization, and is providing the framework that we hope will allow us to stay connected and continue the fight long term. From this standpoint, the experiences of this campaign provide an important reference point for how Marxists should engage with left electoral campaigns that have built a mass or semi-mass base of support around working class demands.
Edits have been made to this article to make it shorter, and more relevant to an international audience. If you want to read the original, click here.
In the early hours of the morning on August 12th, DSA-backed progressive and self-described democratic socialist Francesca Hong conceded the Wisconsin Democratic Party Gubernatorial Primary to the establishment favorite and hand-picked successor of Governor Tony Evers, David Crowley. When “Nothing to Lose News” last covered the race roughly 2 weeks before the election, Hong was being reported as having been up in the polls by around 20 percentage points. The election left many wondering just how the campaign could have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The truth is that, before the election, Crowley did appear like a long shot, and rightly so. His campaign was uninspiring and he essentially ran on being a centrist who wouldn’t offend Republican voters. In fact, his campaign was so lackluster that at one point Crowley actually dropped out of the race to endorse another candidate, only to reenter the race after the candidate he had endorsed then dropped out herself due to a campaign finance scandal. But in the end, Crowley’s donations from big business figures and corporate PACs were able to narrowly beat Hong’s grassroots network of volunteers, which was largely built and maintained by DSA (the Democratic Socialists of America). This is a disappointing result, but the fact is that, in American politics, elections are often sold to the highest bidder as a matter of course. The wildcard is having an inspiring, demands-focused campaign that can bring out an army of volunteers to campaign for you, which most candidates are simply incapable of because the truth is they won’t fight for their working class constituents, and they certainly don’t want to be on the hook for promises they never had any intention of keeping once they’re in office.
In this article, we won’t be able to examine the final weeks of the campaign chronologically – instead we are going to draw out the major factors that contributed to the results of the election. We hope this article will generate friendly and honest discussion and debate among supporters of Hong who are disappointed by these results, and looking for answers as to what went wrong and how we can avoid it next time. Our team feels that, especially as people who not only campaigned for Hong but who also encouraged other people to do so, we have a responsibility to now give an honest account of what went wrong, not for the purpose of finger-pointing but to make it possible to draw out the lessons from this campaign’s defeat.
Soft Pedaling Good Demands, and Cozying up to Wisconsin’s Millionaires
Francesca Hong ran on exciting working class demands that, if delivered, would have transformed life for working people in Wisconsin: taxing the rich to fund free universal childcare and reviving our public school system, expanding Medicaid and BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s public healthcare option) and bringing down healthcare costs through a public option for health insurance, kicking ICE out of Wisconsin, and a moratorium on data center construction.
She also talked about “putting a stake in Act 10,” [Act 10 is a piece of anti-union legislation that makes rises past inflation and all strikes illegal for public sector workers and forces public sector unions to recertify every single year] which would have given the public sector labor movement room to breathe again. She also talked about constitutionally enshrining abortion access and fighting for expanded access to gender affirming care.
These policies inspired an impressive and important wave of volunteers to hit the pavement and canvas for Hong, along with an army of phonebankers to turn out volunteers and get out the vote.
I myself got calls 5 or 6 times a week, for over a month straight asking me to volunteer, whether or not I was already signed up for a door knocking shift within the next few days! This kind of impressive, no-stone unturned ground game was only possible because of DSA chapters all over Wisconsin, which lended their considerable network of activists to not only bear a great deal of the organizing effort, but also to turn out new volunteers.
However, even in terms of the campaign’s ground game, the impressive effort needed to be even bigger, and the truth is that it could have grown much bigger and faster – that was definitely on the table, if a different political approach had been taken by the campaign leaders. Hong’s campaign needed to absolutely hammer away on the demands she was running on – it would have been the only way to turn out volunteers on the scale required.
The Campaign’s 7,000 volunteers knocked over 135,000 doors over the course of the campaign – this is impressive, and it took a large amount of effort from many hardworking activists, but when you break down the math, some conclusions become obvious. For example, Wisconsin’s population is only a bit lower than the population of New York City. In NYC, Zohran Mamdani’s army of 104,000 campaign volunteers knocked over 3.1 million doors. Adjusted for population differences, to achieve equivalent results in Wisconsin, Hong’s campaign would have needed to have over 72,000 volunteers knock on over 2.1 MILLION doors, both of which were well over 10 times what the campaign achieved. In order to make this possible, Hong would have needed to inspire a much bigger base of volunteers.
Now it’s true that Wisconsin is not New York City – NYC is a deep blue stronghold and Wisconsin is a swing state, but there’s no reason to believe that that alone would cause a gap in the upper threshold of number of possible volunteers on such a large scale – there are not ten times the people that want healthcare and wage raises in NYC that there are in Wisconsin! Even if there had been a significant difference – half as many volunteers per capita, or a third or a fourth as many, or even one fifth as many, you could make the argument that Wisconsin and NYC are just apples and oranges, but this difference, amounting to an order of magnitude on a per capita basis, is too big to be explained away without assigning at least part of the responsibility to the campaign’s overall strategy.
The best way to bring out volunteers on this scale would have been for Hong to relentlessly hit her core demands at every opportunity – this was one of the strongest parts of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. This is what inspired the huge wave of volunteers who campaigned for him, and that eventually went on to swell the ranks of a newly-revived DSA. Every speech, every public appearance, every interview, and every social media post should have relentlessly emphasized the demands she was running on and how they would improve the lives of Wisconsinites.
Instead, Hong and her campaign strategists did the exact opposite and consistently downplayed the demands she was running on. For example, in her speeches at campaign events, she talked about a $20 an hour minimum wage [current minimum wage in Wisconsin is $7.25 an hour] and kicking ICE out of Wisconsin, but the campaign mailers that we were given to pass out while doorknocking only said she’s fighting to “raise the minimum wage” with no specific amount listed. Furthermore, the mailers didn’t even mention ICE in any way, even on the spanish language materials designed for use in predominantly hispanic neighborhoods.
We need to be honest and say that, at a moment when Trump’s thugs are arresting 2,000 people a day for deportation, this was a criminally negligent move by the campaign leaders deciding strategy.
The campaign also made a strategic and political mistake by putting too little effort into reaching anyone who wasn’t already a likely Democratic voter. While this is certainly the conventional wisdom of corporate candidates, a populist candidate running on strong working class demands can do something these milquetoast moderates never can: reach right wing voters and yank them to the left with demands that will completely change their lives.
When Mamdani ran in NYC he managed to do this – almost 1 in 10 of Mamdani’s supporters had also previously voted for Trump, but supported the self described democratic socialist because they could tell he meant business when he talked about affordability and the cost of living.
It’s worth remembering that the right wing uses these talking points too, but they do it cynically while lying through their teeth. A genuine left wing candidate can hit these same class-based demands much harder, and then actually deliver on them when they get into office.
Even at the Gubernatorial primary debate, only weeks before the election, Hong soft-peddled her demands and seemed to focus on avoiding giving her opponents any radical-sounding quotes they could use against her. When Hong was asked point blank if big companies would leave the state of Wisconsin because of her policies, she pivoted to how her policies would improve the lives of Wisconsin’s millionaires too. This answer is ridiculous and uninspiring to say the least.
A better answer would have been that this empty threat from Wisconsin’s wealthy elites is no different than a boss claiming they will have to shut down a facility if the workers there unionize – experience has shown time and time again that these claims are very rarely followed through with. Wealthy families have as much tying them to their homes and communities as the rest of us, and they rarely flee just because a left wing candidate is elected. However, it’s not just about one answer to one question – the truth is that, at every step of the campaign, Hong and her staffers spent more time trying not to make waves with conservative Democrats rather than excite and activate the much larger pool of uninspired and disenfranchised non voters who would be energized and pulled into activity by working class demands that would transform their lives. This mistake cost Hong not only votes, but volunteers, both of which she badly needed more of in the final estimation.
A Refusal to Draw Honest Distinctions Between Primary Competitors
Another major error that the Hong Campaign made in the service of pleasing both the Democratic Party establishment and centrist Democratic voters was a total refusal to expose, or even discuss, the very real political differences between Hong and the other candidates running in the primary. During the campaign, staffers were often heard telling people never to say anything negative about the other candidates running in the primary, even if we encountered someone who was planning to vote for one of these candidates. We were told to try to convince them by talking about the demands Hong was running on which, again, were downplayed at every point by the campaign, including in the official literature we were given to hand out. We were told this was done out of party unity, and not wanting to harm any of the other candidates in the race, which sounds very noble until you remember that these politicians have made their careers selling out the working people who elected them and refusing to fight for their interests.
Hong was running against Democratic Party candidates who said they would welcome data centers with open arms, promised they would never defund the police and did not support abolishing ICE, and a plethora of other scandalous betrayals of working people. She, her campaign, and the people campaigning for her actually had a responsibility to bring these divisions over vital political issues and demands to light and expose them to the general public, to make it clear that the issues people were voting on were not just simple matters that boiled down to electability, but were questions that, if the party establishment got to answer for them, would make their lives and the lives of their neighbors and loved ones immeasurably worse in the years to come. Hong had a responsibility to call a spade a spade and explain that, when Crowley said he would fund public schools, we all have no reason to believe he is telling the truth because his mentor Evers made the same promises and was shown over 8 years to be a liar. These are not small questions, and it is not as simple as not offending anyone or being polite – if someone was going to steal from your friend, you wouldn’t stay silent to avoid rocking the boat, and if someone was going to sick armed thugs on your neighbor, you wouldn’t want to stay silent out of politeness to the guy who called in the armed kidnappers!
We want to be clear here: party unity is not bad in theory, and when the working class is waging a struggle for its interests, unity is essential. But the reality is that, for both the billionaires and those of us struggling to get by, class unity is fundamental and always comes before anything else. The Democratic Party establishment, which is fully in the pocket of big business, knows this fundamental truth like the back of their hands – they knew it when they sabotaged Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, twice, they know it when they send the national guard or police in to disperse protests against war, racism, and genocide, and they know it when they consistently refuse to deliver on the overwhelmingly popular demands working people have, like raising the minimum wage, passing medicare for all, or making the rich pay their fair share in taxes.
The ruling class and their political servants know what side they are on, and they do not compromise for party unity. The working class and our leaders shouldn’t either! Until working people have a party of our own, a party which takes no corporate cash, runs candidates who arise out of our movements and are fully responsible to them, and which is democratically run by local branches where dues paying members vote and make binding policy decisions, we can’t truly talk about party unity.
The hard truth is the Democratic Party is divided, and it always will be while working people still show up to vote for it: there’s the people who make up the bulk of their voter base and who campaign for them, and then there’s the people on the other side of the class line who run the party and make its policy decisions. That divide is fundamental, and there can be no meaningful talk of unity or party loyalty across it because it is the line that divides the exploited from the exploiters.
A Refusal to Continue the Fight If She Lost
Even at this point, so late in the game, there would have been another way forward. Like Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, there were those of us in the Hong campaign who thought that this outcome was a distinct and terrifying possibility, and were trying to prepare for it. At public forums run by the campaign, Hong was asked at various points what would happen if she lost the primary, and whether or not she would boldly continue the fight for her demands by running an insurgent campaign as an independent. Unfortunately, Hong was completely hostile to this idea and brushed it off each time, treating the idea of her losing the primary like a laughable thought experiment. According to a firsthand account volunteers passed on to Nothing to Lose News, at a campaign event in central Wisconsin Hong was asked point blank if she would continue the fight if she lost the primary. According to volunteers who were there that day, Hong responded by saying: “I don’t plan on losing.”
Let’s be clear: Francesca Hong does not have a crystal ball the rest of us don’t know about. Any serious working class candidate should always have a plan for how to continue the fight if they lose, and Hong, as she said in response when asked, has absolutely none.
While Wisconsin has sore loser laws that prevent her from continuing the fight as an independent, she could have pivoted toward building a grassroots movement to demand the policies in her campaign – utilizing on the ground organizing to both put pressure on corporate candidates like Crowley as well as build for future campaigns. Instead, Hong is now going on a “unity tour” with the Crowley campaign, trying to turn her supporters towards voting blue, no matter who. This is happening at the same time as Crowley is giving no indication of absorbing any part of her platform, and while sitting Governor Tony Evers is actually publicly advising Crowley to reject adopting any of the demands Hong ran on or making any concessions to her supporters, essentially saying that Hong’s supporters and former volunteers need to get in line.
For an example of the direction Hong could have taken her campaign after this narrow defeat: she could have launched a new organization that would continue the fight for the core demands of her campaign through November and beyond, and worked to build local chapters of that organization everywhere the campaign had volunteers.
An organization like this wouldn’t need to be totally separate from DSA; on the contrary they could actually work together hand-in-glove. Even if she didn’t want to launch a completely separate organization from DSA, she could have worked with DSA chapters all across the state to hold public meetings that functioned as a speaking-tour, and worked to not only mobilize current DSA members to them but also to bring out as many of her non-DSA supporters as possible. She could have gone from being just another candidate that DSA members campaigned for in Wisconsin to using her authority and notoriety to sponsor new campaigns.
The most important of these would likely be a renewed effort to link up with immigrants rights organizations and force ICE out of Wisconsin and to link up with local labor unions and their members to build an actual movement against Act 10 instead of just talking about it in stump speeches.
Once again, these priorities wouldn’t have had to work against each other: if rank and file union members were brought out to consistent public meetings and protests against Act 10, you could also funnel many of those people into the anti-ICE movement, which would give it a massive boost not just in terms of increased size but also in terms of having powerful unions behind it. Most importantly, absolutely all of this could have been done without endorsing Crowley, and Hong’s political reasons for making that endorsement are the same reasons she is not throwing herself into full-tilt statewide organizing to continue the fight. Both a refusal to endorse Crowley and this kind of serious, multifaceted, and all-out approach to movement-building are totally foreign to the Democratic Party establishment that Hong has been treating with kid-gloves the entire campaign, and has partnered with after her loss.
It is this same Democratic Party establishment that, through its repeated betrayals, broken promises, and refusal to fight for working people, has ended up as the far right’s most important unwitting allies – in effect, the disgusting politics of the Clinton’s, Obama, Pelosi, and Biden have provided the far-right with better conditions to recruit than they could have prayed for, and the Democratic Party establishment even holds down and restrains the far-left, hampering any attempt to fight back.
Hong’s supporters, and especially the volunteers who did the most to fight for her candidacy, need to make an important decision this fall: is their loyalty to the Democratic Party, the establishment of which has helped crush left wing movements for decades, helped eagerly inflict pain and suffering on working people abroad through its imperialist military, and served Obama loyally as he deported more people than any president in U.S. history up to the present day? Or is their loyalty to the working class demands Hong ran on, which inspired us all and, if we had been able to win them, would have transformed all our lives? If the loyalty is to those demands, then we have no business supporting either Crowley or Tiffany this November, because neither will deliver on any of them. To anyone who claims their loyalty is to the party itself, with all its failings and evils, and that they’ll vote blue no matter who: this is the exact same mindset as Trump’s diehard MAGA base that is refusing to abandon him even as he abandons every campaign promise he made, from affordable cost of living to “no new wars.” If our loyalty is to the demands we need and still believe in, we must break with the Democratic Party now and work to launch a new party of the working class. If our loyalty is to the rotten, long-since-sold-out Democratic Party, then we have to admit that we are not so different from the diehard Republicans who are also constantly sold out by their elected officials, and who support them anyways. As for Nothing to Lose News, we stand firmly on the side of political independence – our loyalty is to the demands, not the party, and we will work to continue the fight through November and beyond.
No Democratic Structures or Real Room for Discussion Among Volunteers
The sad truth is, none of these mistakes, which were a direct result of the politics of the individuals running the campaign, including Hong, were impossible to correct, if the campaign had been willing to allow democratic debate and discussion among the volunteers who turned out to fight.
There were no public meetings for campaign volunteers where issues of policy, strategy, and tactics could be questioned and discussed, and there were certainly no structures available for the people campaigning for Hong to discuss and take binding votes on what the campaign should or shouldn’t do to address the obstacles it faced. While this is of course the norm for campaigns in capitalist parties where the decisions come from the tops and the volunteers carry them out, it goes against the real traditions of democratic socialism, which Hong and her campaign claimed to represent. True Democratic Socialism stands above all for working class democracy, collective decision making, and holding leaders accountable when needed. In the future, activists campaigning for progressives running within the Democratic Party will need to actively fight for the creation of these democratic structures, going around the official campaign staffers if needed. They will also need to maintain them after the election as a way of furthering the movement to fight for the demands our candidates ran on.
Which Way Forward for the Left?
Any defeat, especially in an important election campaign, is never easy to stomach. It’s easy to feel frustrated and demoralized in the aftermath of Hong’s loss to Crowley, especially when the corporate media is screaming to high-hell that this means socialism is dead. The truth is left-wing movements have survived much worse setbacks than this, as disappointing and frustrating as these results are. The critical question for us all is what lessons we take away from this campaign, and what we do going forward.
For all its shortcomings, which we have not been shy about both during and after the race, Hong’s campaign inspired thousands of people to come together and fight for a set of demands that inspired us and would have made the lives of working people across Wisconsin better. That has real value, especially when you consider how many of the volunteers that joined this campaign were first time activists. This campaign and the demands it was built on were, and still are, worth fighting for. As Nothing to Lose News said on our weekly news podcast, the reality is that that fight was always going to need to eventually either break out of the containment of the Democratic Party and continue the fight in a new political form, or be strangled by the Democratic Party establishment. We should be totally crystal clear: Crowley and Evers are coming as friends, promising to work to defeat the right wing, but the whole purpose of Crowley’s campaign from the beginning was to prevent left wing progressives from getting a candidate through the primary and into the election. There is a significant chance Crowley will lose this election thanks to his milquetoast moderate politics, which inspire no one. Crowley, Evers, and the whole Democratic Party establishment know this, and they’re unconcerned with it because the main threat that they see right now is an insurgent left wing populist movement that is rearing its head and threatening to break out of their control.
We will either have to continue the fight and work to launch a new party of the working class that can fight for the demands we all need, or watch the party establishment strangle this movement in its crib.
At this point, it will be very difficult to continue the fight for the demands we fought for, and it’s necessary to be honest about that. Unfortunately, it’s the price of losing the primary to a big business candidate. For left wing activists and organizers who recognize that supporting Crowley is betraying ourselves and our community by supporting a politician who will not fight for us, we have to say that, at this point, for us the election is more or less over. One of these two rotten corporate candidates will get in, and while they won’t be identical in how they govern, their similarities unfortunately outweigh their differences. At this point the best thing we can do is start planning for the future, because there will be new elections and new struggles in the streets and our workplaces, and we need to be prepared for them.
The ideal next step would be, at a minimum, for volunteers from the Hong campaign who agree on the principle of continuing to fight for these demands long term to come together and begin having regular meetings where we all can discuss the way forward.
It will be a difficult path, but the truth is elections are not the only way to create change, and for socialists they’re not even the most favorable ground to wage a fight on. In the period before the next elections, we can organize and work to advance fightbacks wherever they crop up, and ideally draw other serious fighters close to us in that time, and lay the basis of beginning to work together long-term. During this period, one of the most important things we would need to do is firmly root ourselves in movements against war and imperialism, all forms of oppression, and the struggle against capitalist exploitation. If we were able to do this, we would have the ability to eventually identify co-thinkers and natural leaders that arise within these movements, serious fighters that are looking for a way forward and who want to work together with others like them. Through democratic debate and discussion we could eventually come to an agreed upon understanding of where we can do the most good at any given moment, and how we can gain real ground in the fight. Eventually, it would be necessary to take part in an election again – when there are grassroots movements around genuinely progressive candidates running on working class demands, we would of course help, like supporters of Nothing to Lose News did with Hong. However, the way we could make the biggest contribution to advancing the struggle for working class politics in the electoral field would be to eventually run candidates that naturally arise out of movements as real leaders as independents without use of the Democratic Party’s money, structures, or ballot line.
This has been done before to great success, most notably by Socialist Alternative when they ran Kshama Sawant for the Seattle City Council in 2013 and won, ushering in an era of movement victories that are still in place today.
If we were able to build a movement like this, and if it could advance by proving that things like political independence from the billionaire class, genuine mass movement democracy where leaders are held accountable through elections and recalls, and demands that fight for the whole working class without leaving anyone behind, are winning strategies, it could inspire other activists to take up the mantle and bring the fight to their local areas. If this happened, we could work on building a united movement through the formation of a nationally organized party that could challenge both of the do-nothing corporate parties that currently hold sway over American politics, and run against both of them to fight for a truly different society.
This itself, as Herculean as it sounds, would only be the start. For example, this new party would need to consistently root itself in every movement against exploitation and oppression, and clearly reject corporate cash while holding its electeds accountable, including by mandating that they only accept the average wage of the working people they represent and not enrich themselves through public office. It would also be especially important for it to forge unbreakable bonds with the organized labor movement, supporting, encouraging, and working to advance every organizing drive, every struggle and strike, and every progressive reform movement. It would need to firmly oppose U.S. imperialism and take a stand against war, recognizing that the main enemy for our movement is our own capitalist class, but also not providing cover for foreign exploiters or falling into what some activists call “campism.” It would also need to build strong bonds with other activists internationally who are fighting for the same ideas. Most of all, our movement would need to be clear that, while we fight for every reform we can win today, the ultimate goal of our party would need to be advancing the struggle for socialist revolution and the remaking of society along the lines of genuine workers democracy and a publicly owned, democratically planned economy. It would not be enough to win seats in Congress or even the White House – we would need to help stoke the fires of movements against exploitation and oppression, helping advance them and when necessary point the way forward and lead towards the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system itself and fight to take the banks and the biggest 100 companies into democratically run public ownership, as a start.
This may seem like a far-off goal, but revolutions often break out suddenly, and when they do so without a real mass party capable of leading the way forward towards overthrowing the capitalist system, the results are often catastrophic. But worse even than a fightback that fails is failing to ever fight back, giving in to hopelessness or accepting our lot in life as the oppressed and exploited.
Activists and organizers on the socialist left today have a responsibility to grapple with these important questions and to fight through these difficult times and find the way forward. It is this search and this fight that Nothing to Lose News is dedicated to – it is this publication’s reason for being. If these ideas make sense to you, and you want to talk to us about how we can work towards taking the first steps down this road, reach out and let us know. We are happy to talk to anyone, from any organization or background, who is genuinely interested in advancing the fight for a socialist future.
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