Francesca Hong is a legend
She may have come up just short, but every last statewide campaign going forward is going to be learning something from the wildcard who out-hustled the field.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer.
This column is one part of Dan Shafer’s deep-dive mega-breakdown of the election results from Wisconsin’s Aug. 11 partisan primary. Read the full column with all 12 takeaways here.
Each of these 12 takeaways are available as a standalone free version. Find each of those here.
She may have come up short, but I just absolutely loved Francesca Hong’s campaign. It tapped into so much of what politics needs right now. She was authentic and earnest, focused on building community — in “churches and dive bars and bike races and dance parties and in their homes.” She was unafraid to do things differently. She was, and is, for something.
She listened to the voters, adopting the position on data centers that helped propel her campaign. She activated thousands of volunteers, going everywhere and making the “meeting people where they are” rhetoric into a true reality instead of a tired cliché. She put policy first. She was not insulting toward her competitors; she did not make this a me-against-the-establishment battle. As I’ve said throughout, this campaign is truly distinct.
She ran as an unapologetic democratic socialist in a purple state and received more than 311,000 votes. She received about 86,000 more votes in her bid for governor than Tony Evers received when he won in 2018. She carried counties in critical swing regions, like the Fox Valley and western Wisconsin. She built a movement — a real movement.
Her campaign stumbled toward the end1, but she should be proud of what she built and how strongly it resonated across Wisconsin. Sometimes the best campaigns are the ones that come up just short but point the way forward. Every future statewide candidate in Wisconsin will learn something from the wildcard who out-hustled the field.
She came within 3,500 votes of doing something no one thought possible. Francesca Hong is a legend — and she will survive.
Dan Shafer is an independent journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He worked with Civic Media from 2024 to 2026. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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