‘this Race Is Now In Chaos’: Democrats Are Panicking In Wisconsin

LAKE TOMAHAWK, Wisconsin — Sara Rodriguez had a prime opportunity this past Saturday to show voters gathered for a gubernatorial candidate forum in Wisconsin’s rural Northwoods that she was the person who could unite Democrats, thwart a democratic socialist insurgency and deliver the party unified control of state government for the first time in a generation.

Except the lieutenant governor didn’t show up. Her reserved table sat empty, save for a lone campaign sign. She blamed the last-minute cancellation on a family emergency. But a day later, Rodriguez revealed she had just fired her campaign manager for overcounting donations by hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple months.

After a weeklong scramble to unsuccessfully contain the financial and political damage she dropped out of the race on Friday, declaring in a video that her money issues were an “ongoing distraction” and that she didn’t want it to “become a cloud over an election that Democrats need to win.”

Her downfall has thrown the Democratic primary field into upheaval less than a month from Election Day. "This race is now in chaos,” said Mitchell Stough, a now-former Rodriguez campaign staffer.

Democratic socialist state Rep. Francesca Hong is surging, alarming centrist Democrats who fear her unabashed leftism may torpedo what should be a winnable race against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in a key swing state. The only other frontrunner, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, lost a 2022 Senate campaign after facing relentless attacks for past progressive positions — a fact that’s giving Democrats pause.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez less than two weeks ago, told POLITICO Friday night “I’m jumping back into this race,” expanding the already-splintered field of candidates that includes state Sen. Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, a former Cabinet secretary for Gov. Tony Evers, who are languishing in the polls while potentially playing spoiler.

The stakes are sky-high for Democrats. They haven’t held unified control of swing-state Wisconsin’s government since 2010. In a favorable national political environment, this is their best chance in many years to win in a stubbornly purple state where elections are often decided by the thinnest of margins. And Hong’s apparent momentum is alarming some Democrats who see a winnable race slipping away.

"There's a ton of policymaking power that hinges on the next election cycle in Wisconsin,” said Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election campaign in 2024. He said he worries about the possibility that Hong "gets the nomination and loses because she's too left.”

“Let's not fuck it up,” Mamo added.

As one Democratic state lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said of Hong, “It's scary to think that this is the person who is leading the primary … There's a lot of us that think if she’s the nominee, we lose that seat, even in what's supposed to be a very big Dem year. And we will lose the Assembly, too.”

Crowley has a rally scheduled for 11 a.m. central time Saturday to reenter the campaign.

“Now that the candidate that I endorsed, who always had the best pathway, is no longer there, I think it’s extremely important to answer the call,” he said. “I know what it means to step up during one of the toughest times — and some people would say all of this is a shit show — and step up during this time right now to make sure that we are building the necessary coalition.”

When asked if he was worried his reentry risked further fracturing the Democratic field and giving Hong an easier path to victory, he said “We’ve had this field already. If that was the case, I guess those conversations should have happened months ago.”

Two Democratic strategists granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations said that outgoing Gov. Tony Evers (D) may back Crowley. Crowley said he’d received calls from elected officials, business leaders and community leaders but demurred when asked specifically about Evers.

The clamoring to get Crowley back in the race when he’d shown little momentum earlier on shows how concerned some Democrats are about the contest — and that they don’t feel much better about Barnes than Hong.

But other Democrats worried that backing Crowley could backfire by stripping support from Barnes, potentially weakening his standing against Hong. Two senior Wisconsin strategists, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that elevating Crowley would be an uphill battle, and that his re-entry could further splinter the field.

"It's probably not a realistic move at this point, even with the governor's support, because of the time constraint," said one. "David was never really able to catch fire and resonate with voters."

Rodriguez’s protracted fall from grace dominated the news cycle in Wisconsin this week, leaving little oxygen for party insiders to elevate a consensus candidate in her wake. She initially tried to salvage her campaign, calling the scandal a “bump in the road,” but on Wednesday night, what’s left of her campaign team submitted a finance report showing just $35,000 in the bank as of the end of June. It is unclear how and why her campaign finance reports were so wrong; her former campaign manager, Kara Spencer, didn’t return requests for comment.

A Thursday attempt to amend the report only sowed more chaos as she briefly appeared to have more than $600,000 on-hand, before reverting back to a paltry $35,000. There was no coming back.

Stough, the Rodriguez campaign staffer, said her decision to drop out blindsided many on the campaign, saying he was “shocked and baffled” and that he had just spoken with a fellow staffer who said their "head was spinning." He said he sent Rodriguez a supportive text after she suspended the campaign and received heart reaction from the lieutenant governor in response. Rodriguez did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hong’s allies are gleeful.

“Unless the moderate and conservative Dems consolidate, this race is going to be won by Fran,” said Ryan Clancy, a democratic socialist state lawmaker who is backing Hong’s campaign. “[They] are going to try anything to make sure that she doesn't win.”

Hong, a 37-year-old democratic socialist state legislator from Madison and former ramen shop owner who has rocketed from little-known contender to the front of the Democratic primary, dismissed concerns about her electability in interviews with POLITICO earlier in the week. She pointed to the vast volunteer network, online enthusiasm and anti-establishment fervor fueling her campaign as proof of her viability, while insisting her focus on lowering prices and curbing data center development would attract voters from across the political spectrum.

“The most electable person is the one who wins the most votes,” Hong said, “and I think we’re bringing so much strength.”

Barnes has polled atop the field alongside Hong in the handful of public surveys of the campaign. On Friday, his campaign rushed to make the case that he was the only candidate left who could compete with Hong. His pollster, Bryan Stryker, declared the campaign “a two person race” on X, citing polls showing Barnes leading Tiffany in a general election matchup.

“Mandela has a path to victory with strength in the primary and general, and we risk another four years of Scott Walker style governing if Francesca wins,” Stryker wrote.

Yet Barnes has struggled to clear the field despite his high name ID, and he hasn’t received public support from his former running mate Evers. Privately, some party insiders compare his effort to his 2022 run, which came up short against GOP Sen. Ron Johnson.

“He did lose a statewide race,” said the Democratic lawmaker, “and I think that's an anchor around him.”

In a statement, Barnes campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak rejected those claims, chalking the 2022 loss up to “being outspent by tens of millions of dollars, in an incredibly difficult year for Democrats.”

Lower-polling candidates are also trying to seize on Rodriguez’s slip by asserting their viability, but their odds are slim. Brennan and Roys spent the week messaging that they were best positioned to supplant her, with each circulating a memo to supporters that laid out what they saw as their paths to victory.

“I am the candidate who, over the course of the last two decades, has demonstrated that I've got the executive experience,” Brennan told POLITICO in an interview Friday.

Roys ran for governor in 2018, finishing a distant third in the primary. She told POLITICO she’s seen a "huge influx" of support this week from activists, donors and party officials who previously supported other candidates, as well as an uptick in grassroots contributions.

But none of the candidates have a definitive financial edge to capitalize on Rodriguez’s failure. Following this week’s campaign finance reporting deadline for the first half of 2025, Hong and Roys had just over $400,000 in the bank, with Brennan and Crowley close behind at $360,000 and $315,00 respectively, and Barnes declaring just $204,000 in cash-on-hand, despite out-performing the field in total fundraising. Tiffany, who has no primary challenge, is sitting on nearly $3 million awaiting the eventual nominee.

Republicans are basking in the chaos. Tiffany has boasted about his financial position and fired shots at Hong earlier this week, while declaring on X that “socialists have set their sights on Wisconsin.”

The Republican Governor’s Association is also meddling to boost Hong’s profile with $2 million in TV ads featuring clips of her promising to “abolish ICE” and restore Wisconsin’s “progressive roots,” according to the media tracking form AdImpact.

“I don’t think [Tiffany] could have drawn it up any better to put himself in a position to be ‘common sense versus crazy,’” said Bill McCoshen, a longtime Wisconsin GOP strategist. “Tiffany's in a position to win this race, and I don't think most national pundits would have even considered that a year ago.”

Republicans are salivating over what else they can say about Hong in attack ads should she become the nominee. Hong has called for abolishing the police in past social media posts, though she has since walked back her position. She’s been criticized for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance at legislative hearings. In May, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Hong told voters her “perfect world would be a world without prisons” during a campaign event.

Freshman state Rep. Christian Phelps, a democratic socialist and Hong ally whose district includes some rural areas and parts of the western Wisconsin college town of Eau Claire, said that assuming Wisconsinites won’t accept Hong’s position is an “elitist view,” citing the state’s long history of progressive politics and farmer-labor movements.

But he admitted that nominating Hong would be a “bigger political risk” than picking a moderate — even though he thought it was a risk worth taking.

Back in Lake Tomahawk in northern Wisconsin, where Hong showed up to the candidate forum while Barnes and Rodriguez skipped, a crowd of mostly older, rural Democrats worried about how her views would play in their neck of the woods.

“In this state, she would have the hardest time winning against Tiffany,” said Sarah Kemp, 60, a resident of the nearby town of Woodruff. “This is not Colorado.”

Other Democrats argued that Tiffany’s hard-right positions would be disqualifying and give any Democrat an advantage in the current national environment. The Freedom Caucus Republican has refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and voted against certifying those results.

Pat Kreitlow, a former Democratic state senator who hosted the Northwoods forum, downplayed the doomerism, arguing that Hong was galvanizing what he calls “ones” — strong liberals — and could attract disengaged voters in a general election.

But this year, Kreitlow said, is “the year of the fours,” referencing lean-Republican voters that he thinks Democrats can peel away as Trump’s approval ratings sink and gas prices remain high.

“Some of those fours that we're talking about are going to hear the [socialist] title and not go past it into policies and the person,” Vilas County Democratic Party Chair Amy Fassler, who co-hosted the forum, chimed in. “And we need the fours.”