Have "wokeness" and anti-American sentiment become toxic at the ballot box? Even former champions like AOC and Bernie Sanders seem to be backing away.

Francesca Hong appeared poised to make history. Instead, the Wisconsin state representative discovered that even Democratic primary voters have limits — especially when the governorship of a crucial swing state is at stake.

Hong, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, led every major poll conducted during the closing weeks of Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. One survey placed her 22 points ahead. Another, commissioned by opponent David Crowley’s campaign less than a week before the election, showed her leading by 18.

Crowley won anyway, 39.8% to 39.4%.

The result embarrassed pollsters, who once again mistook a measurement for a prediction. But it also exposed the weakness of Hong’s coalition. Polls accurately identified her core support: Marquette University put her at 38%, and she finished with 39.4%. What they failed to detect was that undecided voters and supporters of withdrawn candidates would consolidate almost entirely behind Crowley.

That distinction is important. Hong did not lose most of her supporters. She reached her ceiling while Crowley was still assembling his coalition.

Hong had benefited from an extraordinary sequence of events. Crowley dropped out before reentering. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez withdrew after campaign-finance irregularities emerged. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes departed under the shadow of a sexual-misconduct investigation. Republicans, believing Hong would be easier to defeat, spent millions on advertisements ostensibly attacking her as “too liberal for Wisconsin.” The ads simultaneously introduced her to progressive voters.

Hong mistook favorable circumstances for an ideological mandate.

Her campaign initially emphasized affordability, free school meals, universal child care and opposition to tax incentives for data centers. These proposals gave her the aura of an economic populist fighting powerful interests. Yet once she became the presumptive nominee, attention shifted to the rest of her record.

Hong had called for defunding and eventually abolishing the police. She supported abolishing ICE and the U.S. Senate. She advocated eliminating prisons and ending Wisconsin’s school-choice program. She called Thanksgiving a “colonizer holiday” that should be canceled and lamented her own “proximity to whiteness” — an apparent reference to having a half-white son.

These were not inventions by Republican operatives. Hong had said them.

She then compounded the problem by embarking on national interviews in which she appeared unprepared to explain whether she still believed what she had once declared so emphatically. She eventually said she would not abolish the police and acknowledged that law enforcement needed resources and training. That was welcome, but it invited an obvious question: Had experience changed her judgment, or had electoral necessity changed her vocabulary?

Democrats apparently did not want to spend the autumn finding out.

Outgoing Gov. Tony Evers endorsed Crowley and campaigned with him, signaling that the experienced Milwaukee County executive was the safer choice against Republican Tom Tiffany. 

Older voters and moderates broke heavily toward Crowley. Black Democrats helped provide him with a base in Milwaukee. Hong dominated younger and very liberal voters, but enthusiasm on social media could not overcome Wisconsin Democrats’ fear of losing a winnable race.

Most revealingly, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Pocan declined to endorse Hong. Asked about the controversy surrounding her, Ocasio-Cortez conceded that “Woke One was crazy.”

That extraordinary remark suggests, at the very least, that the progressive movement recognizes its vulnerability. Voters may support reducing medical costs, improving schools and restraining corporate subsidies. That does not mean they want police abolished, prisons eliminated or national traditions treated with contempt.

The Democratic Socialists’ recurring mistake is to bundle potentially popular economic proposals with a radical cultural worldview — and then insist that voters accept the entire package.

Hong attempted to associate herself with Milwaukee’s tradition of “sewer socialism,” which emphasized honest local government, public works and competent municipal services. After voting, she summarized her politics as fixing potholes, funding schools and celebrating the community-owned Green Bay Packers.

It was a clever formulation. Sort of. 

It was also too late.

Historic sewer socialists built credibility by delivering visible public services. Hong had built a record of attacking institutions and traditions ordinary voters considered important. Promising to repair potholes cannot erase years spent demanding that police departments, prisons, immigration enforcement and even the Senate be abolished.

Socialism itself carries an even larger historical burden. Its American advocates insist that democratic socialism must be distinguished from communism. The distinction is real: Sanders and Hong seek power through elections, not revolution or one-party dictatorship. But democratic socialism still proposes transferring considerably more economic power to government, creating the same fundamental danger on a smaller scale.

The record of full-scale communism is catastrophic. The Black Book of Communism estimated approximately 100 million deaths under communist regimes — a figure scholars debate at the margins, but no serious accounting can erase the mass executions, engineered famines, prison camps and political repression. The communist governments that remain survive through coercion, isolation, poverty or strict control over information. Their citizens are rarely clamoring for fewer opportunities to leave.

Communes and other small experiments usually encounter their own problems with incentives, authority and internal conflict. Socialism repeatedly promises equality but produces administrators who decide what everyone else receives. Communism completes the process by making dissent a threat to the state.

Hong’s defeat does not prove that socialism has disappeared from American politics. On the contrary.

Nearly four in 10 Wisconsin Democratic voters supported her, and other left-wing candidates have won important primaries this year. That should concern anyone who believes the lessons of the last century remain relevant.

But Wisconsin Democrats looked over the edge and stepped back. They chose an executive with a record of governing over a socialist activist with a record of condemning. They decided that affordability could not compensate for extremism, and that opposition to Donald Trump did not require abandoning ordinary judgment.

Hong nearly won because economic frustration is real. She lost because socialism, “wokeness” and cultural hostility remain a dangerous combination outside the activist left.

The pollsters never saw that reckoning coming. Voters did.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)