Francesca Hong led the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary by 31 points in the late July Marquette poll. State Navigate's survey had her up by 30. Their own stress test — the worst-case scenario model — predicted a 17-point Hong victory at minimum.
She lost by 0.4 percent.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the establishment-backed candidate endorsed by outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, finished with 39.8% to Hong's 39.4% in Tuesday night's primary. That alone would be a significant polling miss. But the real story started when the vote counting hit a snag that should sound familiar to anyone who's paid attention to Milwaukee on election night.
Five of the nine USB drives carrying absentee ballot data from Milwaukee arrived at the counting center without any election results on them. Milwaukee Election Commission executive director Paulina Gutierrez confirmed that officials had downloaded the "audit log" from the tabulators instead of the actual vote tallies — on five of nine machines. They had to send people back to the operations center to redownload the correct files.
The five bad downloads affected the electronic reporting of roughly 15,000 of the approximately 27,268 absentee ballots returned by Milwaukee voters. More than half the absentee data, in other words, showed up blank because someone "clicked the wrong button."
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, wasn't buying the explanation. He wrote on X that "the democrat establishment stole the election from Hong." NBC analyst Steve Kornacki was reportedly left speechless on air as the results defied every available data point.
Now, there's no public evidence that ballots were manufactured, altered, or added to the count during the delay. Gutierrez said the redownload took between 3 and 10 minutes per tabulator. The official explanation is human error, five times over, on the same night, in the same city, affecting the same race.
Some background on the candidate who lost. Hong, a 37-year-old state representative from Madison and card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America, had previously called for defunding and abolishing police, canceling Thanksgiving to "stop celebrating colonialism," and eliminating the U.S. Senate. She walked all of it back during the gubernatorial campaign, insisting she had "evolved" and "learned." She told voters, "I'm not defunding the police, not abolishing police. I am serious about public safety."
Hong was backed by Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ro Khanna of California. Bernie Sanders, notably, declined to endorse her, saying he wasn't sufficiently familiar with her campaign. Even the socialist grandpa kept his distance.
Crowley, meanwhile, had his own baggage — years-old social media posts with inflammatory comments about women, race, and derogatory LGBTQ references. Evers endorsed him anyway and called him "the future of our Party." Republican super PACs had spent nearly $3 million boosting Hong during the primary, calculating that a DSA-endorsed socialist would be the weakest possible opponent for their nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, a House Freedom Caucus member backed by President Trump.
Left-wing critics might point out that Van Orden's "stolen election" language is irresponsible without hard evidence of tampering. Which is a fascinating standard to suddenly adopt, given that questioning election procedures was treated as a constitutional right for four solid years when Democrats were the ones asking questions. The objection isn't to scrutiny — it's to who's doing the scrutinizing.
The deeper problem isn't whether someone literally stuffed a ballot box in Milwaukee. It's that a 30-point polling lead evaporated on the same night that more than half of a major city's absentee USB drives showed up with the wrong data. Those two facts exist in the same timeline, in the same state that has been ground zero for election-night chaos since 2020. Tiffany, the Republican nominee, framed the general election stakes plainly: Wisconsin would be "the firewall" and "the place that stops socialism."
The socialist didn't even make it past her own party's primary. Whether she was stopped by the voters, the establishment, or five mysteriously blank USB drives depends on how much faith you have left in Milwaukee's election infrastructure.
