Will Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed Get Elected?

Washington's plan to block them

El-Sayed and Hong

As we move closer to the midterm elections, two candidates stand out for their independence from the institutional Democratic Party.

The first is straight-talking chef Francesca Hong, whom I’ve interviewed and is the clear frontrunner to be governor of my home state of Wisconsin. The second is doctor Abdul El-Sayed, who enters Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan with a double-digit lead in polls.

Yet the Democratic Party and the mainstream media are not accepting the clear will of voters. Instead, they’re busy manufacturing the sense that if the two candidates are nominated, losses in the general election would be inevitable because they are too “extreme” for ordinary voters.

The evidence for this is largely just vibes. In fact, a leaked memo shows Hong is privately seen by Republicans as the most formidable candidate, as I’ll detail in a moment. But first, take a look at the orgy of fear-mongering by the Party about these candidates.

“The Dem race for governor in WI feels like a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist in his 2008 campaign.

Democratic Party elder James Carville went further, declaring “the two-party system is just under tremendous stress” due to the rise of figures like left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, whom Hong has campaigned with. (When asked if she’d condemn Piker, Hong’s characteristically blunt response was simply “No,” as shown in the video below.)

Party leaders have thumbed the scales in both primary races — Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers in his state, Chuck Schumer in Michigan — each backing the party establishment favorite. The Democratic establishment keeps advancing candidates who aren’t gaining any traction; but instead of asking why they are so out of touch with what the people want, they are resorting to tearing down the popular choices. The Party doesn’t like anyone who it hasn’t anointed and who hasn’t risen through its ranks.

The Democratic Party sits at its lowest level of popularity in at least 30 years. It has been fighting the people’s choices since Zohran Mamdani emerged as mayoral frontrunner in New York last year. When he beat the Party’s candidate last year, the smug reaction from election knowers was that his victory was only possible in a deep blue state like New York.

Turns out that was bullshit. Neither Michigan nor Wisconsin is New York. Nor are they lefty outliers. Trump carried both in 2024!

Now the Party hacks and their elite media buddies are trying to put the fear of god in voters that if they choose the candidate most of them want, it is playing into the hands of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and so on. Though disguised as a warning, it is actually a threat.

It bears mentioning that this is not the view of congressman Tom Tiffany, the Republican who will actually have to run against Hong.

“We Need To Take Francesca Hong Seriously,” reads the subject line of a memo prepared for U.S. Tiffany’s gubernatorial campaign by Republican consultants. Leaked and reported on by Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the April memo correctly anticipated Hong’s dominance in the primary. It also described her as “uniquely dangerous in the general election” and that “general election strengths are formidable.”

Per the memo, as reported by Opoien:

• Hong’s “combination of grassroots momentum, unapologetically progressive ideology, and a platform centered on high turnout makes her uniquely dangerous in the general election.”

• Hong’s platform is “broadly popular and difficult to counter.”

• Her agenda “is built around kitchen-table issues that poll strongly with independents, working families, and even some rural voters.”

• “more moderate and establishment Democratic alternatives would likely produce lower base motivation and depressed turnout.”

Now compare that with the doomsaying national media coverage. It’s almost surreal how different it is.

The “electability” argument is always a claim about what your neighbors will tolerate, made by someone who has never met them, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. As a campaign staffer once told me, the horse race’s main function is propaganda to induce voters to feel like voting a certain way is prudent or responsible.

This is all about telling people who they can or cannot vote for. Sometimes it’s barely even concealed. Third Way, the centrist think tank, said in a strategy memo this year that Democrats “cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district.”

It’s the very definition of mainstream that is at stake here.

If there’s one thing that ties together Mamdani, Hong and El-Sayed, it is that they have distinct personalities and they talk without the prevarications and doublespeak of what we’ve come to know as “moderates.” Things like democratic socialism are, in my view, a small element of their popularity. That they are willing to directly buck the establishment is their appeal. And when they talk about affordability, it comes from experience and living among normal people rather than the lanyard class that dominates Washington.

As the Republican consultant memo about Hong warns, her “working-class biography and populist economics [could] blunt ‘radical socialist’ framing.”

I have no idea what will happen in the election. Neither does anyone else. But I do know what’s happening in America. People are tired of the establishment, tired of the blow-dried, overproduced version of everything that seeks to manage rather than move.

“I think they’re underestimating voters,” Hong said back in May of the commentariat and their negative predictions. “That has always been a problem for the Democratic Party — that we are not listening to how they are feeling.”

She seems to hear it loud and clear.

— Edited by William M. Arkin