Today is Election Day in Minnesota and my home state of Wisconsin. I wrote yesterday about the omnishambles in the Democratic primary here. And if you have the intestinal fortitude (which you will need) to read more you can scroll down.
But this morning I wanted to highlight today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast with Peter Wehner — a contributor to the NYT and The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. We venture into the dark recesses of Donald Trump’s mind to discover what Trump fears most: The man who compares himself to Caesar. Napoleon, and Alexander the Great is now worrying that he’ll be remembered as a Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter.
We also discuss Wehner’s most recent piece in The Atlantic: “Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci” (GIFT LINK):
So what explains the rage directed at one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation? Some of it is the result of an era in which a major political party—in this case, the Republican Party—has become deranged and captive to conspiratorial thinking. It draws energy from the dark passions. Many people within the party, especially within its leadership and the right-wing ecosystem, delight in destroying institutions and individuals. Fauci has a target on his back because during the pandemic, he refused to live in the Twilight Zone. He called out those who did. And for MAGA world, that is unforgivable.
Some highlights of my conversation with Peter Wehner
What Trump fears….
The senators who caved to Trump are weak people.
A Trump “extinction burst?
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A Big Day for MAGA?
A text message I receive from a Wisconsin elected official last night:
“Can you believe how badly they messed this up? With a real shot at a total sweep too. The implosion is crazy.”
I answered: “The insanity. It burns.”
As Rachel Bade wrote yesterday:
With ABDUL EL-SAYED now Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee and extreme leftist FRANCESCA HONG widely expected to win tonight’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, Republicans finally have what they’ve been chasing all cycle: The perfect ploy to turn the midterms from a referendum on DONALD TRUMP into a choice about which party is more extreme.
FFS.
And, no, I take no pleasure in writing this. At all. But, as I wrote yesterday, “I’ve been watching Wisconsin politics for (checks notes) more than 50 years, and I think I can safely say that the nomination of Francesca Hong tomorrow would be the worst act of self-sabotage by either party in memory.”
I just finished an interview with a reporter from NOTUS, in which I shared a rather dark prediction. In a normal election, I told her, there would be no way that the Republican candidate, Tom Tiffany, could shake off the stink of Trumpism.
A MAGA toady and election denier, Tiffany would face massive headwinds in a purple state like Wisconsin. Democrats here have been racking up an impressive string of victories; their voters were far more enthusiastic and engaged; and Republicans have been shedding support among moderate and independent voters.
Given Trump’s cratering poll numbers, it was not unreasonable to think the Democrats could not only win the governorship, but control of both houses of the legislature, as well as picking up a key swing congressional seat.
A Hong victory puts all of that in doubt.
And even leftwing Democrats seem to be (belatedly) recognizing that.
Not only has Hong taken a series of toxic positions (defunding police, a world without prisons, getting rid of Thanksgiving)1, it has become increasingly obvious that she’s simply not a very good candidate. She lacks the political skills and charisma of a Mamdani or an El Sayed, and she is unlikely to have the resources to change the trajectory of the race. (She is spending $0 on television advertising and is unlikely to even come close to the GOP’s avalanche of campaign cash.)
One tell: Neither Bernie Sanders nor AOC has endorsed Hong. Via Politico’s Playbook:
Two people close to [Sanders] told POLITICO’s Meredith Lee Hill, Samuel Benson and Tyler Katzenberger that Hong “is less vetted and not as sharp on some of her messaging than other candidates — presenting more of a risk for Sanders, who has already been burned by endorsing Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race.”…
Some progressives privately fear that while Hong stands a good chance of winning, she may not be the movement’s best messenger heading into the general election as progressives look for sustainability through the midterms and beyond.
Bhaskar Sunkara, former DSA vice chair and 2020 Sanders surrogate, told Playbook he worries “how well she’ll do with working-class people, particularly those in rural and semi-rural areas.”
“There is much more fear than there is anywhere else that this was the wrong thing to try right now,” a Democratic operative working on progressive campaigns told Playbook.
The harsher general election scrutiny will amplify that apprehension. Hong’s campaign has been dogged over the past week by a string of interviews in which she awkwardly tried to navigate past comments ranging from abolishing prisons to ending Thanksgiving — with less than convincing results.
“She just doesn’t have the Zohran [Mamdani] ability to sort of laugh it off or pitch it effectively,” the Democratic operative added.
**
Today’s NYT asks: “Are Democrats nervous?” Well, no sh*t.
Some certainly are. Wisconsin is a battleground state where moderate Democrats tend to succeed, and some of them believe Hong is simply too far left to appeal to voters in the middle.
“This is not the year to test a democratic socialist,” Joe Wineke, a former chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told my colleague Kellen Browning this summer. “This isn’t New York.”
**
What went wrong, except for everything? The primary campaign was a clusterfuq wrapped in a FUBAR, and Hong’s rivals basically refused to lay a glove on her lest they antagonize the aroused left-wing of their party. Via NBC: “As Francesca Hong surged, Democratic rivals held their fire.”
In the final stretch of Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor, Francesca Hong has confronted growing criticism from members of her party that she is too far to the left to win a general election in a swing state.
But very few of those attacks have come directly from her Democratic opponents — one possible reason she has managed to build a double-digit lead in the polls.
At the end of last week, an outside group backing Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — who has emerged as Hong’s main rival — launched a TV ad saying that “Francesca Hong’s record is a distraction we can’t afford.”
It marks the first broadcast ad from a Democratic-aligned group attacking Hong all primary season, AdImpact data shows.
**
Here’s the best election preview, from my fellow cheesehead Jmes Wigderson:
In 2018, the last time there was a multicandidate Democratic primary in the race for governor, 538,857 ballots were cast. It’s likely the number this year will be higher. The higher the turnout, the better it is for Hong since a good chunk of her polling advantage comes from young voters.
Approximately 40% of the Democratic primary vote will come from two counties, Dane and Milwaukee. The next nearest county in terms of impact is likely to be Waukesha County, and even then we’re looking at 5-6% of the vote.
According to Joe Handrick, widely respected for his analysis of election numbers, Dane County cast more votes than Milwaukee County in the primary elections in 2022 and 2024.
We should probably expect that trend to continue in 2026, giving Hong another advantage over Crowley. How much of Hong’s vote, however, that will be taken by Barnes and Roys, compared to how much of Crowley’s vote that already went to Barnes in the African American community in Milwaukee, is unknown.
But don’t sleep on the late-breaking votes from Crowley’s hometown.
Because Milwaukee County cannot count absentee ballots before Tuesday, over 70,000 ballots will have to be counted at Milwaukee County’s central processing site after the polls are closed. Once again, we might not know the winner of the election on Tuesday until well after midnight because the Republican members of the state senate refused to take up a bill that would have allowed Milwaukee to process absentee votes one day early.
Tuesday dogs
Auggie and Eli. On watch.
And it’s not just Thanksgiving. Hong dislikes a whole bunch of popular holidays because she’s not weird and extreme at all.
Via the NYT:
Some of Ms. Hong’s most attention-grabbing social media posts have focused on holidays that are cherished by many Americans — and her own distaste for them.“I do not enjoy fireworks,” she wrote several days before the Fourth of July in 2019. Halloween, she said in 2025, is “not my thing.” Thanksgiving is a “colonizer holiday” that people should not gather to honor, she posted in 2020. Valentine’s Day, she wrote in 2022, brings out “the worst of humanity” on a day “capitalism tells you how to show love.”
