Tangle - The Wisconsin gubernatorial primaries.

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

On Tuesday, August 11, Wisconsin held primary elections for the 2026 midterms, headlined by the gubernatorial race to replace outgoing Gov. Tony Evers (D). U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany won the Republican nomination with 95% of the vote, while on the Democratic side, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley narrowly defeated state Rep. Francesca Hong 39.8%–39.4%. Crowley’s victory was a significant upset, as pre-election polls showedHong with a double-digit lead. Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Under the radar” story ⁠here⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: Who do you think will win Wisconsin’s gubernatorial election? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and we're back from a week-long vacation. That means I had an opportunity to just experience what catching up on seven days of news was like in August. 2026, which means you now get to drink in what a regular week of news is like in August, 2026. Here's just a rundown of what we missed while we were out. Just to start this episode, I'm just going to do this. This is just one week of news. Let's start in the Middle East.

Iran reportedly is threatening to derail an Oman-Broker deal to reopen the Strait of Ormoos. Iran also attacked a third UAE oil tanker in the straight last week. At a rally in Long Island, President Trump declared or joked that he plans to make the Strait of Hormuz's U.S. territory and idea Iran predictably rejected. Oh, also, the Washington Post reported that Trump secretly left Air Force one in an airport catering truck to board a separate jet for his return flight from last month's NATO summit after a credible Iranian assassination threat. In domestic news, President Trump signed an executive order recommending the childhood vaccine schedule

will be shrunk from 18 diseases to 11 and called for splitting the measles, mumps, and rebella shot into three separate visits. His comments drew strong rebukes from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician. Separately, senators Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, and Ron Johnson, the Republican from Wisconsin, released text messages showing Dr. Anthony Fauci privately discussed a theoretical miscarriage risk from COVID-19 vaccines back in 2021.

sparking viral rumors that the vaccine caused an 82% miscarriage rate in the first or second trimester. Spoiler, it didn't. President Trump also expanded immigration enforcement on multiple fronts. The administration terminated temporary protected status or TPS for Myanmar and South Sudan nationals, and a federal judge in Boston lifted a stay blocking TPS termination for Somali nationals. DHS also published a notice that it was equipping ICE officers with gloves capable of delivering electric shocks to subdue subjects. Then there are the things we aren't doing,

the news that isn't breaking. The administration said it won't enforce reporting requirements under the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, the law aimed at Shell Company money laundering, while the DOJ has refused to challenge a ruling that struck down the pillar of the Prohibition-era National Firearms Act. Some other notables, Hunter Biden said that former President Joe Biden's cancer

has metastasized to his bones and other parts of his body. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy, the Democrat signed legislation removing gestational age limits on abortion, making her state the 10th state to do so. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled two to one to block most of President Trump's plan construction at the White House ballroom, finding that the project lacked necessary congressional authorization. Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges tied to the 2024 killing of Brian Thompson, and a crypto company, partly owned by the Trump family, got preliminary approval for a banking charter from the Office of Comptroller of Currency. That all happened since our last regular newsletter, which is why a lot of political journalists quit from burnout, and that's why we just took our annual summer recess. Oh, and today, we are going deep on the results of last Tuesday's primaries in Wisconsin, the big.

biggest election to happen while we were on summer recess. It's going to be a great show. Here's John Wall to get us started. Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We've got a lot to cover today, so we're going to jump right into it with today's quick hits. First up, Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, visited the USS Abraham

Lincoln amid concerns about service members' living conditions and mental health. The approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines on the ship have been deployed in the Middle East for over 260 days. Number two, President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to reduce the U.S. military's joint exercises with South Korea, noting his very good relationship with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and calling the exercises totally inappropriate and hostile. Number three, at least seven people have been killed in severe storms and flooding throughout Indiana over the weekend. Number four, a gunman wounded five people in a shooting at Virginia State University, a suspect identified as a 19th.

year old man was found hiding on campus and arrested. And number five, a federal judge ruled that planned border wall construction in Arizona can proceed despite objections from the Thana-Othon nation, which argued that the wall would trespass on tribal lands. Overnight in Wisconsin, an upset for the Democratic Party's progressive wave and a surprise victory for the party establishment. Democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly defeated by the establishment-backed David Crowley. Crowley posting overnight, Wisconsin, let's get to work.

And the state party chair calling for Democrats to come together, writing tonight Wisconsinites made their choice, and tomorrow Democrats will unite around David Crowley. On Tuesday, August 11th, Wisconsin held primary elections for the 2026 midterms, headlined by the gubernatorial race to replace outgoing Governor Tony Evers. U.S. Representative Tom Tiffany won the Republican nomination with 95% of the vote. While on the Democratic side, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley narrowly defeated State Representative Francesca Hong 39.8% to 39.4%.

Crowley's victory was a significant upset, as pre-election polls showed Hong with a double-digit lead. Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, worked as a chef and community organizer before entering politics. Her campaign highlighted health care reform and increased funding for public schools. Crowley is a longtime Democratic organizer in the state, who positioned himself as a moderate, with housing affordability and public safety as key issues. Hong's past social media posts became a source of controversy in the primary's final weeks, including a 2020 post in which she said Thanksgiving should be canceled because it celebrates colonialism. She later walked back the comments and distanced herself from some elements of the national

DSA platform, such as abolishing police and prisons, saying her focus was on delivering for people the policies that improved the material conditions of their lives. Crowley suspended his campaign in July, but re-entered the race later that month with Governor Ever's endorsement after Lieutenant Governor Sarah Rodriguez, whom Crowley had supported, dropped out amid a campaign finance scandal. Prominent Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opted not to endorse Hong after backing other progressive Democratic candidates, such as Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed in Michigan.

Republican groups also boosted Hong in the primary, ostensibly to produce a more favorable matchup in the general election. Since winning the primary, Crowley has focused his campaign on Representative Tiffany's voting record and support of President Donald Trump, noting his votes against certifying the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Tiffany, meanwhile, has equated Crowley's and Hong's platforms, saying there's not a dime's worth of difference between all the Democratic candidates. Data centers have also emerged as a key issue in the race, with both candidates calling for

limitations on new construction, though not an outright moratorium which Hong had supported. Today, we'll share views on the results from the right, left, and Wisconsin writers, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, first up, let's start with what the right is saying. Many on the right say the DSA is still building power despite Hong's loss. Others argue Hong's candidacy was more hype than substance. In The Spectator, Freddie Gray wrote, Francesca Hong's defeat won't stop the DSA. The long view, an already ubiquitous reaction to Hong's loss, is to market

down as a major blow against the Democratic Socialists of America and their bid to take over the Democratic establishment, Gray said. But the real story should not be how Hong lost. It should be how on earth she came so close to being the Democratic choice for Wisconsin in a very high turnout primary in such an important swing state. Like many DSA members, Hong has said she wants to abolish the police because law enforcement agencies uphold white supremacy. She's also expressed discomfort at the fact her biracial son gives her a proximity to whiteness. This result suggests that successful Democratic candidates are now the ones who bridge the gap between the hard and soft left of their party,

as Abdul al-Said just about did in Michigan, and as the Ojibway Native American activist Peggy Flanagan did in her Minnesota Senate primary last night. Flanagan is not a DSA member, but she was the progressive choice, Gray wrote. Just a couple of years ago, Republican strategists would have found it easy to cast Flanagan as a far-left lunatic.

Their problem in 2026 is that, compared to Hong and the popular DSA fringe, she seems to many to be the reassuringly sensible choice. In the Wall Street Journal, Jack Butler suggested left-wing candidates are hype masters. The polling and exciting vibes behind the campaigns of Abdul Al-Sayed for Senate in Michigan and Francesca Hong for governor in Wisconsin gave wildly misleading pictures of the actual races, Butler said. Neither result was expected. Mr. Al-Sahed led by 10.2 points in the real clear. politics polling average before his one-point victory. He was already talking about reshaping the party in his image by purging people like Pennsylvania Senator John Federman. No recent poll in the RCP average had mishong winning by less than 10 points. DSA-type candidates have mastered

the art of hype. It can cow moderate rivals and establishment forces into submission even when it's overblown. Yet the combination of circumstances that stopped her from within the Democratic coalition may be rare, Butler wrote. Those pushing our politics left were, have a confidence out of whack with their viability. But if history is any indication, without serious resistance, they'll keep trying to fake it till they make it. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying.

The left is mixed, with some saying Hong's campaign was still a win for the progressive movement. Others say Hong was a poor candidate who would have set Democrats back. In the nation, John Nichols called Hong's campaign a measure of the strength of a new kind of politics. election analysis is often an exercise in managing expectations, and that is certainly the case in Wisconsin, where pre-primary polls put Hong in the lead. When she didn't prevail, pundits and political insiders rushed to declare a definitional victory for the Democratic Party's embattled centrist wing,

Nichols said. Seriously? A little-known legislator with a scant campaign treasury, whose candidacy was actively opposed by the sitting governor and faced a hair-on-fire national media onslaught, finished in a virtual tie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the ultimate swing state, and we're supposed to believe that the result has defined the limits of the left? In the heat of an election season, results are measured in raw vote totals, but they should also be measured by the potential they reveal. That is what Hong did on election night, Nichols wrote. With an outsider campaign that defied expectations in conventional wisdom,

she came within a whisker of winning one of the highest profile contest of a volatile election year. and despite a frenzied final debate about her electability, public polls and internal Democratic surveys suggested that she could be a viable contender in November against the extremely right-wing Republican nominee Tom Tiffany. In Salon, Jason Kyle Howard argued, Hong's loss in Wisconsin is a win for progressives. What the race revealed were the weaknesses and limitations

of an ineffective candidate who would have almost certainly flamed out in the general election. Democrats across the political spectrum and especially progressives should all be, breathing a sigh of relief at her defeat, Howard said. At nearly every turn, Hong allowed herself to be defined as a well-intentioned candidate with some wacky views. Abolished the Senate, anyone? As a provocateur who, to quote, one Wisconsin voter, was sort of inviting some controversies, as being in the words of the Wisconsin Election Commission's Democratic chair willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks.

A more adept progressive, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Dr. Abdul Al-Sayyad, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, would have easily batted away the questions, Howard wrote. For the left to succeed, Ocasio-Cortez knows they must move beyond functioning as schools. Dowreness rarely plays well in politics, and it's a particularly unbecoming quality in progressives, who can sometimes come off as humorless. Most electable progressives are instead happy warriors, a quality Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdami have in spades. All right, that is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to to what Wisconsin writers are saying.

Some Wisconsin writers believe the result underscores the state's independent spirit. Others say the focus should be on Tiffany's extremism, not Hong's. In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, James N. Fitzhenry wrote, Wisconsin election results stunned as humans wreck the machines. Polsters botched the Wisconsin race, just like had happened in Michigan a week before. This time, however, the progressive socialist candidate, Francesca Hong, lost, and Crawley, the establishment Democrat, won an improbable victory after every single poll had him losing by double digits, Fitzhenry said.

Prediction is power, the high-tech hucksters on Calci and Polymarket would have you believe. When their power to predict is tested, they invariably lash or crash out. Algorithms and AI seem sure that they have mastered quantifying and ultimately controlling human nature. Sometimes humans have to wreck the machines, which they did on August 11th. I was ecstatic the polls were wrong, not so much for who won or lost, but for what it told us about Wisconsin. most of the critique of today's politics is that people are easily classified into vicious tribes or voter blocks

who are trapped in their own information bubbles. In this view, people are not capable of independent thought or doing something gasp, crazy, like taking their time to decide or changing their mind, Fitz Henry wrote. But most seem to have missed in the Wisconsin Democratic primary that undecided was in the lead for most of the campaign. The Capitol Times editorial board said,

The extremist in this race is Tom Tiffany. Tuesday's primary election saw the nomination of the most extreme candidate ever to be submitted to the voters of Wisconsin by a major political party at the board route. Yet with a campaign funded by out-of-state billionaires, Tom Tiffany has prevailed in a primary, and his cynical Republican allies now seek to confuse general election voters with messaging that seeks to suggest a moderation that simply does not exist. Make no mistake, there is nothing moderate, nothing mainstream, and nothing acceptable about career politician Tom Tiffany. The Republican nominee for governor's outlandish record is practically and ideologically extreme. He is running to serve the most anti-democratic president in American history, Donald Trump. Tiffany actively supported Trump's drive to overturn results in Wisconsin and nationally. This despite the fact that Tiffany enjoyed his own re-election win, in the very election he now contest, the board said.

The governor who has elected this year will serve when the 28 presidential election takes place. Wisconsin cannot afford to have a governor who would actually actually be. seek to overturn the results of that election or any other election. Our democracy is too precious to be sacrificed to the service of Tom Tiffany's political extremism. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for with the left and the right and some writers from Wisconsin are saying, which brings us to my take. Nearly all the commentary I've found about this race revolves around Francesca Hahn.

Almost unanimously, conservatives celebrated her loss while decrying how, close she came to becoming the nominee. Virtually all writers on the right referenced her off-putting comments about hating Thanksgiving and having proximity to whiteness through her biracial son. To be fair to Hong, it was a ham-fisted attempt to discuss the difficulty she has identifying as a racial minority, but it was also a bizarre, distanced, and politically extreme way to talk about her own child. On the left, meanwhile, the commentary was essentially split.

pragmatists, moderates, and establishment Democrats celebrated her loss because they believe it will help their odds in November. It will, while idealist, progressives, and democratic socialists were disappointed in the loss, but resolute that their movement remains ascendant. These various perspectives just added to the existing commentary on the DSA and progressive left that have been piling up for months. And very little of it struck me as in any way additive. I was, however, captivated by three things. The polls, the actual Democratic primary winner and his Republican counterpart. First, the polls were very bad.

Again, we barely discussed this point when we covered Abdul Al-Said's victory in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, but he had a double-digit lead in almost every one of the final polls only to win by a single percentage point. Hong, too, was crushing Crowley in the final days of the campaign.

In late July, Marquette University, a leading pollster and also a Wisconsin institution, had her leading Crowley by 31 points. State Navigate had her up by 22 points. The Crowley campaign's own poll had hung ahead by 19 points. Just six weeks ago, Crowley was so far behind the two frontrunners in the polls that he suspended his campaign. Candidates have dropped out of races then come back before, but I don't know of a single example of it ending in victory, particularly in a race of this. significance. How could this happen? And how could the polls be so wrong that Crowley, whom the pollsters had all but left for dead, ended up winning? For one, polling a race with this much turbulence is difficult. For another, the number of undecided voters created more uncertainty than

polls top lines led on. This from the New York Times, quote, in a survey taken by Marquette Law School just after Mr. Crowley re-entered the race in mid-July, 38% of respondents said they favored Ms. Hong. Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor, was in second place at 16%, and Mr. Crowley had just 7% of the vote. But almost as large as Ms. Hong's vote share was the percentage of undecided survey respondents, 34%. Most surveys estimated she would win about 40% of the vote. She ended up winning 39%. What changed was Mr. Crowley's support. In a ballot-counting marathon that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he over-performing. the Marquette polls estimate by more than 30 points.

So the polls actually estimated Hong's vote share remarkably well, but they had a hard time pegging Crowley's eventual support. Is this polling problem an issue in the Midwest, in swing states, across the country? Is it a polling problem at all, or is it simply a problem with how we report on and write about the polls? In 2024, we interviewed pollsters about what they got right and wrong, and one takeaway I had was that polls are good at predicting how. how people would vote, but not very good at predicting who will vote. It seems we still aren't adept at weighing our election predictions for who will actually turn up and cast a ballot. At the same time,

Hong's weaknesses were there all along. The polls showed us that the percentage of undecided voters was about equal to the percentage of Hong supporters, yet all the media coverage and election analysts focused on Hong's support dwarfing crallies, not how many potential Crowley voters were showing up in the polls. For the last 10 years, the inability of polls to capture the electorate accurately or for us to interpret accurate polls with the correct context has given the news media a lot of problems. I've also been fascinated by the blanket declarations that Crowley is a moderate. We've talked a lot about how Trump has moved the Overton window on what constitutes a scandal or how our president should behave. Now candidates like Hong are moving the Overton window on what constitutes left or progressive. As many conservative writers have noted, Crowley supports raising the state's minimum wage to $20 by 2030, wants to enshrine the right to abortion in Wisconsin's constitution, and has expressed opposition to local law enforcement cooperating with ICE.

On his campaign website, he calls for a true public health care option and to guarantee every family with a child under five a subsidized child care slot through a publicly funded network of existing providers. On the campaign trail, he's spoken a lot about experiencing evictions as a child and called for providing free legal fees to people facing eviction proceedings. Crowley has pretty pragmatic language to his governing approach with a lot of abundance left talking points, and I think his policy positions often take on fresh, interesting angles. He's certainly gotten my attention. But calling someone with this platform a moderate was unimaginable even eight years ago.

Which leads me, lastly, to Crowley's opponent in the General election. With so much focus on Hong, her far-left views and her old social media post, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin has gotten vanishing little attention. Representative Tom Tiffany won with 95% of the vote, which kill at any suspense, but he could reasonably be declared just as radical as Hong, as the Capital Times editorial board argued under what Wisconsin writers are saying. Tiffany has been rated the most conservative of all six Republican House members from Wisconsin by the American Conservative Union. Most notably, he is a 2020 election denier, not just a skeptic or someone trying to mince his words to appease President Trump, but a person who believes Joe Biden stole the election.

He tried to overturn President Biden's win in 2020 by signing onto a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the results, and he also voted in Congress to reject the results from Pennsylvania after the January 6 riots. Tiffany is still fighting the 2020 results, having just announced his support for an FBI investigation, into Wisconsin's results this May, and repeatedly saying he would have overturned Wisconsin's results if given the opportunity. Are those views less radical than abolishing ICE or hating Thanksgiving? Reasonable people could disagree about that, but it's inexcusable that Tiffany's current positions didn't get similar levels of attention as Hong's past comments. Where Hong calls for taxing the rich, Tiffany promises to freeze all property taxes. And while Hong's past social media Post became a source of controversy, Tiffany quietly deleted pages from his website that outlined

his extreme positions on abortion, gun rights, immigration, and crime just days before his September 2025 announcement that he was running for governor. It's not a big mystery why. In 2022, Tiffany endorsed the federal bill that would have banned abortion after six weeks, with an exception for saving the life of the mother, but no exception for rape or incest, a position that would be very unpopular in a state like Wisconsin. Tiffany's opposition to universal background checks and red flag laws would similarly have some trouble getting traction among Wisconsin voters who overwhelmingly support both measures. How will all this play out in November? With Hong out of the race, I expect the press to zero in on Tiffany's past radical positions. Indeed, Crowley is already giving them a road map,

emphasizing Tiffany's MAGA extremism in an effort to pull Wisconsin's Democratic coalitions together. It's too early to know if he'll succeed, but he'll certainly benefit from the moderate versus far-right framing. All right, that is it for my take. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the podcast, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under-the-radar story for today, folks. On Thursday, Flux Safety, which manufactures cameras that police departments use to capture vehicle data,

announced new restrictions on how its products can be used. The changes include reducing the default amount of time the company retains data from one month to one week and implementing a program that locks out law enforcement officers who perform abnormal searches on their databases. The move comes amid growing objections about the technology among Americans and civil liberty groups, which have raised privacy concerns and highlighted instances of police officers using the cameras to stalk people. The company said the changes are intended to address those concerns, but the American Civil Liberties unions Chad Marlowe said that the continued. use of the cameras undermines the privacy and chills the behavior of everyone in America. NBC News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. For Kylie Corbett, an addiction treatment center helped break a cycle of unhealthy drug use.

But when her 30 days at the facility ended, she struggled to maintain sobriety. She tried attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but wasn't able to connect at the talk-based sessions. Then she discovered the Phoenix, a free gym that is part of a growing model of addiction recovery that emphasizes shared activities like fitness, music, and meditation. Through the Phoenix, Corbett started rock climbing and eventually got into CrossFit. In July, she reached two years sober and now spends time volunteering at the gym. We're not sitting there talking about addiction all day, Corbett said. We're talking about getting healthy and getting better.

The New York Times has this story, and you can check it out with a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if we'd like to support our work, please head over to reetangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow.

For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kovac and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com.