by liberal japonicus
I guess the big news is from the Michiganders and Abdul El-Sayed. I like Jamelle Bouie’s encapsulation of this, which is Vote Blue No Matter Who. If anyone has a more granular view of the race, please drop it in the thread and feel free to write about anything else.
Hong’s Thanksgiving post was a garden variety Twitter hot-take. It’s not like she ever did anything to try to actualize that bit of snark.
This is part of the cultural divide that is currently dividing the Dems. The older voters really seem bothered by social media tone, where the people who grew up online see it for what it is and let it go.
By the same token, the careful and conciliatory tone of the older Democrats comes across to younger voters as a complete lack of fight, and the awkwardness of the oldsters’ online presence lands on the bad side of cringe for them – ‘out of touch,’ rather than ‘adorkable.’
Neither side should take it seriously. There’s too much real stuff that needs their attention more.
Well, she damn near won the nomination. But as to whether she could win the actual election, it looks like plenty of voters thought that statewide there wouldn’t be enough “people who grew up online” to carry her through. That kind of calculation, fortunately or unfortunately, is necessary in electoral politics, where you have to appeal to different groups of voters.
Judgement is not the same thing as cowardice. AOC appears to be successfully threading that needle at the moment,
And FWIW it seems there are likely to be serious compensations:
https://newrepublic.com/article/214244/wisconsin-governor-election-democrats-maga-weapon
I don’t see anything of substance in that TNR article. It’s all just Dem strategists trying to hype up their team on the coming politicsball season, and what the offense will look like with Crowley as quarterback.
There’s no reason why a Hong election would have to focus on the youth vote, nor one why Crowley’s strategy would not want to reach out to younger voters and aim for broader appeal.
Our political media is noisy and shallow.
What they really need is some union organizers who know how to put together a solidarity campaign.
For anyone interested in more, this from today’s NYT covers some of the same stuff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/us/elections/david-crowley-wisconsin-governors-primary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.41A.5Twm.h9Je8k22l2NO&smid=url-share
Also, I saw this on hilzoy’s feed and found it interesting. I didn’t know who Brian Beutler was, and had never heard the expression Woke One, but it seems to cover some of the things we have been talking about:
https://www.offmessage.net/p/woke-one-aoc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-bernie-sanders-mitt-romney-donald-trump-immigration-abolish-ice-defund-the-police-george-floyd-covid-19
And that’s enough from me tonight. Honestly, once you go down the rabbit hole of something interesting….
Not sure if Woke One is a thing (if it were like an operating system, she would have said Woke 1.0, so I’m not sure what she means with Woke One), but I think Jamelle Bouie does a good job of dismantling it here
https://youtu.be/46tpqFxfomI?si=JIEklhGKSaVP7o-B
lj, did you read the Brian Beutler piece? I liked the Jamelle Bouie clip, although in his eagerness to dismantle the bogeyman David Brooks I think he seriously loses sight of the fact that it is perfectly possible to dislike and condemn woke “rightthink” (not just find it tiresome) while simultaneously thinking that the MAGA lawlessness, violence, authoritarianism and racism are infinitely worse and more dangerous, and springing from (understatement!) much less benevolent impulses.
Which is why, since so many people seem to be vulnerable to MAGA-type messaging, it is necessary for liberal and lefty politicians, who want to eliminate the conditions which made MAGA possible, not to give idiotic hostages to fortune which make their ascent to power so much less likely or even possible. Hong seems OK to me, but I’m guessing it’s partly this political immaturity that may explain why AOC, Warren and Sanders did not endorse her.
Alternative understanding of the Hong/AOC thing… as AOC says, she’s focused on national politics. Looks like all of her endorsements are either for NY races she’s connected to, or for US Congressional races. She has not ever endorsed a candidate in a governors race that was out of state.
The pundits are a gossipy bunch.
Did a bit of digging into the WI polling before the Democratic Governor’s primary. I find it odd that so many stories are being written about “what went wrong with the polling?” and “how did Hong lose?.” In July, Hong was at 26%. Crowley was out of the race in July and not in the polls. Rodriguez was polling at 11% and had not yet dropped out. Mandela Barnes was at 15%. 45% of those polled were undecided.
What happened? Most of Rodriguez’s and 11% of Barnes’s supporters shifted elsewhere, and the undecideds decided. Hong picked up 13% and Crowley, riding Evers’ endorsement, picked up just under 4000 more of the remaining voters.
Where is the mystery in this?
I did read the Beutler and I was a bit confused by it. As I noted (and you did as well), I had never heard ‘Woke One’ and it seems like Beutler was taking a single phrase and making it to be a movement. I don’t have problems condemning problematic instances on the left, but I don’t think it is true or useful to raise those instances up as a movement. Taking on Brooks is like shooting fish in a barrel, but give that he devotes a paragraph to a totally imaginary situation that he claims is what is happening, Bouie’s take is enlightening.
I thought I read about polling showing Hong in very low 40s. The result easily fits in the margin of error. But pundits were looking at the margin over second place, before the consolidation behind Crowley happened.
I hadn’t heard or seen Woke One until here, but Woke 1.0 has been tossed about quite a bit lately.
Woke-Wan Kenobi, SJJ (social justice Jedi)
Is “Woke 1.0” the new “Web 3.0”?
“it seems like Beutler was taking a single phrase and making it to be a movement.”
That is my take as well. Plus, coining or promoting simplistic neologisms like “Woke One” can get you promoted to pundit of the month if they catch on.
The term “woke” comes out of American black culture, and began as a word meaning an awareness of ingrained systematic disparity in how black people are seen and treated. Its use has expanded to the point where it means whatever the person saying it wants it to mean, whether positive or negative.
The things Beutler calls out were, as he notes, responses to specific social problems. Real problems, not just the figments of bougle lefty social justice warriors doing their performative thing.
Calling something “woke” has become a way of dismissing any attempt to address those real problems.
As far as the Crowley / Hong thing, Crowley won by a little less than 4K votes out of 300K+ total. Polls aside, what strikes me is how close the margin was in a race between the “centrist” with strong party backing and the “hard left” candidate with a record of extreme and polarizing public statements.
There’s also the money disparity to consider with how close the campaigns ended up:
https://www.wpr.org/news/crowley-outraises-hong-july-2026-democratic-primary-governor
Crowley raised double what Hong did. Hong spent nothing on TV buys. Hong’s donors were almost all small donors and in-state money.
Hong’s face was on TV more than Crowley’s, though, because the Tiffany campaign ran a ton of anti-Hong ads hoping to boost her profile over the other candidates in the Democratic primary because they thought she would be easier to smear, and would have fewer available funds for the general.
All things that I am sure are keeping the Democratic strategists up at night. The DSA candidates are doing an awful lot with less money and almost no infrastructure.
I seem to remember that back in the Web 1.0 days people used to give out “Karnak Awards” to posters/commenters whose posts were mostly based upon assumptions and mind reading in ways that were unfair to the subject. I feel like those may need to come back, given how much the clickthrough economy incentivizes this sort of framing.
Not sure, though, that the implicit reference to Johnny Carson would come through for the post-Carson web generations. Probably needs a different name for the future.