Primary Colors

**Marianna Sotomayor** (0:00)
When I was talking to Democratic strategists a week ago, they were like, whoa, money clearly doesn't matter, and paid advertising anymore. And now you fast forward to today, and everyone was saying, wait, last-minute spending on TV can make a huge difference.

**Peter Hamby** (0:20)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Thursday, August 13th. Today, I'm joined by Marianna Sotomayor to sort through the wreckage of Francesca Hong's gubernatorial bid in Wisconsin, which collapsed in the final weeks thanks to a variety of basic campaign mistakes and a Democratic establishment that came in late to stop the DSA candidate before she put the state in jeopardy in the general election. Marianna also explains the importance of two other Democratic primaries this week, a Senate race in Minnesota and a House primary in Connecticut, and what those contests reveal about angry Democratic voters this cycle. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
Happy Thursday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, Marianna Sotomayor, to break down some fascinating Democratic primary results this week. We've had some time to marinate on the results. Obviously, the Wisconsin governor's race, the Democratic primary there went totally sideways for the Democratic socialist, Francesca Hong. She lost by only a few thousand votes. The race was called on Wednesday morning, but we also had a Senate primary in Minnesota. We had a very interesting House primary in Connecticut and Marianna, the national press, the Twitter crowd, everyone wants to break down these races. Every single one, it seems like, from Colorado to New York into the frame of left versus establishment, or moderate versus DSA.
Every one of these things is complicated. There's different candidates, there's different candidate skills, there's different states. So I think these three are a great example of, yes, you can look at some left versus center framing, but they all had something different to offer. Am I right about that?

**Marianna Sotomayor** (2:30)
Yeah, you definitely are. And you let me know how you want to break it down. We can take it race by race, state by state. But you're totally right that yes, we've been talking about the moderate versus progressives. How is that going to affect the Democratic Party for like the last 10 years? And we have seen not only is every state different, it's also different depending on whether you're ready for governor versus the House seat versus the state level. And also every election year is different.

**Peter Hamby** (3:00)
Yeah, totally. I mean, look, I think the frame that works the best that we've seen so far is just the people who win primaries are sometimes younger, but it's more anti-establishment in the sense that people want candidate Democratic primary voters, want candidates who seem like they are not of Washington and that they are willing to fight for change, whatever that means. The Democratic primary for governor in Colorado a month ago was a great example of that. Michael Bennett, well-liked senator from Colorado, decided to run for governor.
He got smoked in that primary by Phil Weiser, who's no one's idea of a DSA person. He was the attorney general of the state and pretty normie Democrat, but he was seen as the outsider. He was different than the Chuck Schumer swamp, and that's why he won. Let's start. We might as well start with Wisconsin. What's the headline story of the week? The winner of that primary, David Crowley, Milwaukee County executive, came from poverty on Milwaukee's north side, black guy.
Very interesting story. Had the late backing of Governor Tony Evers, who had stayed out of the gubernatorial primary because here, yes, you can call him the establishment, but Crowley is a new fresh face at least. But they were spooked by the idea of surging Francesca Hong, coming out of nowhere a few months ago and just dominating the race with a lot of DSA support. She had a lot of white people with septum piercings backing her in Madison and Milwaukee. Let's talk about the polling error. I think that's very interesting here because she was up by double digits. This is coming off the polling error in Michigan, obviously, where Abdul El-Sayed was up by 18 points and only one by a single point, I believe. In Wisconsin, she was up by 20 points over Crowley, and Crowley had dropped out of the race, he came back in, was left for dead. But I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. One, Francesca Hong didn't really put any money on television. She didn't attack her opponents, she was high on her own supply and thought she was going to win. Whereas Crowley and Evers and National Democrats came in late with millions of dollars on television and a real contrast message about electability. Francesca Hong, who once posted that she wants to cancel Thanksgiving, that she complained about her proximity to whiteness, even though she's married to a white guy, that spooked a lot of Democrats who thought she couldn't win in November against Tom Tiffany, who we should say is a big MAGA guy, an election denier in Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election. And so the electability message ended up really working, and it reminded me of when we were out on the campaign trail in 2020, when in Iowa, the New York Times dropped a poll showing Elizabeth Warren losing a general election to Donald Trump. And Elizabeth Warren was peaking at the time and she fell off. And so I think in a state like Wisconsin, which is a very political state, a lot of engaged voters, the last two weeks of bad news and noise around Francesca Hong really swung those late deciders in her direction.