THE TIMES WON'T ABANDON ITS PREFERRED NARRATIVE ABOUT DEMOCRATS JUST BECAUSE THE FACTS CONTRADICT IT

Francesca Hong was expected to win the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin yesterday. That anticipated victory, along with last week's win by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary and other recent triumphs by left-leaning Democrats, was giving mainstream journalists a story they liked: The Democratic Party is being taken over by radicals who are very, very scary.

You'd imagine that Hong's loss to David Crowley, a moderate, would force the media to write a different story. But The New York Times simply swapped in a different Democrat for Hong and kept peddling the agreed-upon narrative:

David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive, won an upset victory for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin early Wednesday, prevailing over Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had led in opinion polls but faced questions about whether she could win the swing state in the general election....

But another Midwest progressive, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of neighboring Minnesota, won the high-profile Democratic Senate primary there....

In Wisconsin, Mr. Crowley, who had the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, scored a surprising win over Ms. Hong, a chef and state lawmaker who energized left-wing voters. But her candidacy worried moderate Democrats: Ms. Hong had come under fire for writing on social media in 2020 that Thanksgiving should be canceled, though she recently walked back the statement. She also supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increasing taxes on people who make more than $750,000 per year.

Ms. Flanagan’s nomination in Minnesota, however, was a victory for the party’s left wing heading into the midterms.

See what the Times did there? It conflated Hong's attack on Thanksgiving -- which I'm sure would have been offputting to at least some swing voters in the general election, even though it's not a real issue voters are concerned about -- with ICE abolition and taxing the rich, which are mainstream ideas.

Hong's $750,000 floor for tax increases isn't extreme -- as a Pew survey noted last year,

About six-in-ten (58%) say tax rates on household income over $400,000 should be raised, including 23% who say these tax rates should be raised a lot. Much smaller shares say taxes on higher-income households should be lowered (19%) or kept the same (21%).

As for ICE, here's a YouGov survey from March:

Support for abolishing ICE has hit a new high in this week's Economist / YouGov poll. Half (50%) of Americans now somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. Only 39% oppose abolishing the agency.

Flanagan also supports abolishing ICE -- understandably, given what ICE has done in her state. I don't think this is perceived as a radical, beyond-the-pale idea by most Minnesota voters.

Hong previously supported police abolition:

“I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” Hong said in a 2020 social media post after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A year later, while serving in the State Assembly, Hong again posted about Blake, writing: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

Flanagan never did, even when the city of Minneapolis put it to a referendum vote in 2021. (The measure failed.) And even though Flanagan is Native American, she doesn't want Thanksgiving canceled:



Swing Democrats in Wisconsin seemed to be focusing on electability: Hong has been trailing Republican Tom Tiffany in general-election polls, though not by much, while Crowley has a slight lead over Tiffany. (I should note that it's hard to take the polls seriously when they predicted a double-digit primary win for Hong.) In Minnesota, by contrast, Flanagan seems quite electable: a recent survey by her moderate opponent, Angie Craig, showed either of them winning a general-election matchup by 7.

Flanagan is both progressive and mainstream. She's the lieutenant governor. She's not like Hong (or Zohran Mamdani) -- a DSA-affiliated state legislator who entered the race with little name recognition outside her district. But you can expect the Times and the rest of the mainstream media to add her name to the list of outsiders trying to overthrow the party mainstream, simply because she ran against a Schumer- and AIPAC-backed moderate. It's too tempting a narrative to give up.