What the h*ll just happened? It turns out that the answer was embedded in a memo that Democratic primary winner David Crowley released about a week ago and almost everyone ignored.
“Who turns out matters,” I wrote FIVE DAYS before the primary election, which Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive narrowly won. “If this Crowley memo is right, and old boomers end up overrepresented, what if David Crowley pulls this off? What if Francesca Hong’s lead is beer foam that evaporates on Election Day because polls suck at predicting turnout?”
“Here’s a point no one’s talking about,” I continued then. “It’s August. College students aren’t on campus so getting them to vote is like herding cats. And they’re Hong’s edge. The typical Democrat August primary voter is really old.”
I warned: “We’re all basing this Hong frenzy on 4 polls that are already old and include two internals and a goofy leftist site, Up North News. If this is the case and somehow Crowley pulls off a stunning upset, then those conservative influencers who urged people NOT to cross over to vote for Hong may have just cost Tiffany the election. I said MAY.”
The reason I said may because there is a pathway for Tom Tiffany to still win. It’s just that it’s a lot harder now.
In case you missed it, the Democratic establishment orchestrated a by-the-skin-of-his-teeth victory for Milwaukee County Executive David “Dirty McGirk” Crowley over socialist loony tune Francesca “Cancel Thanksgiving!” Hong. It was the closest of margins, determined (of course) by an almost 3 a.m. ballot dump in Milwaukee County.
I didn’t get to sleep until 4 a.m. because I was so caught up in the drama. I stayed up that late once for Bush v. Gore. This was also high drama. At one point, the candidates were separated by about 600 votes.
Initially, around 1 a.m., hapless Milwaukee election officials downloaded the wrong data on their flash drives (of course.) This is a pattern. Wisconsin Right Now once wrote a (true) story about a Milwaukee official briefly misplacing a flash drive with election results. The liberal media’s “misinformation reporters” at Wisconsin Watch pounced, even though the official later admitted it in a letter. The demise of biased “misinformation reporter” operations is a great media trend.
The Campaign Memo Tells the Tale
So, what happened? How did Crowley pull it off? It turns out the answers are embedded in a memo that his campaign released shortly before the Aug. 11 primary. This memo was roundly ignored, but I highlighted it at the time.
That memo was one reason why talk radio host Vicki McKenna and I repeatedly pushed conservatives without competitive GOP primaries to cross over and vote for Hong. Common sense was the other reason. Hong was obviously the weakest candidate for Tiffany to face. Hong wanted to abolish police, prisons and capitalism itself. David Crowley is no moderate – he’s a typical far-left Milwaukee Democrat who mismanaged the county – but he’s never run out of a Culvers because there were too many old white people there. At least not as far as I know.
Crowley’s memo underscored an important point. Sitting on TikTok and getting all excited about Hong’s rage-against-the-machine candidacy is one thing; who turns out to vote in a low-turnout August primary is another. Here’s why Crowley won:
1. It turns out that Democratic primary voters in a low turnout election skew extremely old. They’re basically my 73-year-old mom. It turns out that my mom (I chronicled her journey through the primary my social media pages) was the canary in the Democratic mine.
Crowley’s memo stated that Hong was winning voters under age 45 by roughly 50 points. However, it added that she was trailing Crowley with Democrats over age 65.
The memo matched the age mix to people WHO ACTUALLY VOTED in August 2022. The memo stated that, when the age differential was taken into account, the race was actually tied. It also stated that Crowley was ahead by four points when the actual makeup of 2018 Democratic primary voters was used because that primary voter base was slightly older than in 2022.
The Crowley memo also stated that voters over 65 had returned three of every five ballots in 2026. Voters under 46 had returned only 15%. The Madison market has the lowest mail return rate of Wisconsin’s major cities.
Even so, Crowley almost lost. That’s because the field was still divided: people who quit remained on the ballot; Joel Brennan and Kelda Roys were still in the race, a lot of people already voted, and Crowley left the race for a week. That almost eroded these advantages in Hong’s favor. But not quite.
Crowley’s last-minute advertising push (my mom thought he looked “strong”) and Tony Evers’ advocacy moved her into Crowley’s column at the end. Initially, she was leaning toward Mandela Barnes. She wavered slightly after the debate, when she announced that Crowley was very underwhelming and nothing like his TV ads at all.
She toyed with the idea of voting for Joel Brennan or Kelda Roys. She never considered voting for Hong. She went up to Hong at a forum and said, “What should I tell my daughter who is upset that you want to defund the police?” and Hong responded with a bunch of meaningless blather. Over time, my mom absorbed the reality that Hong would lose to Tom Tiffany.
They got her in the end. It was fascinating – and disturbing – to watch as the Democratic machine methodically funneled my former kindergarten teacher mom (and other old reasonable Democrat normies like her) to Crowley, eliminating her other choices (like Barnes), and convincing her that the weird lady who wanted to cancel Thanksgiving probably wouldn’t defeat Tiffany.
My mom was never overly excited by Crowley, but she was horrified by Hong. And I can’t talk her into choosing Tiffany instead. Trust me, I’ve tried. She told me that she “thought he could beat Hong who I felt was being given all of the media attention because Republican Super PACs were pushing for her to win. Evers’ endorsed him and good ads at the end helped.” She added that she liked what he said at a forum and a second debate she also watched.
In the end, the big ad buys for Crowley, her reliance on a narrow slate of legacy media sources, Tony Evers’ advocacy, and Hong’s nuttiness drove her (and many others) to Crowley, along with a perception that Brennan and Roys couldn’t win. In a way, the polls weren’t that wrong, even though the last Marquette poll showed Crowley 31 points behind. There were a lot of undecideds in the polls. Turns out they broke overwhelmingly for Crowley. The Crowley memo noted that broadcast TV is the top media source for voters over 65.
2. Democrats certainly moved millions into targeted direct mail and advertising designed to reach, and turn out, exactly those sorts of older Democratic normies who reliably vote. Turns out, they don’t want capitalism abolished, and they don’t even know who Hasan Piker is. Someone warned me of that, saying: “Are you a Democratic primary voter normally?” I said, “No.” They said, “Then you’re not seeing it. But it’s happening.”
Crowley’s memo noted that Hong has no broadcast, cable or radio buys in any market whereas Crowley had a $2.3 million ad buy (Hong was boosted by Republican ad buys trying to help her get over, but my mom told me she figured that out and it made her more determined to vote for Crowley.)
3. Hong’s voting base – younger voters, especially college kids – aren’t on campus yet, so they are harder to organize.
I warned about this on primary morn, when I wrote that there was still a path for Crowley because organizing college students in the summer is like “herding cats.” Some of them aren’t even in the state. If college was in session yet, Hong would have won. Consider my daughter. She wouldn’t have voted for Hong anyway, but she was navigating between Cincinnati (where she goes to college), home (Waukesha County), and DC.
4. Hong’s comms team and Hong herself made a colossal error by putting her on national TV, especially Fox News but also CNN, where she was peppered with questions about cancelling Thanksgiving and abolishing police. She’s not a force of personality like Mamdani or Trump, and she couldn’t handle it. This convinced moderate Democrats like my mom that Hong would lose to Tiffany.
They should have kept her in bubble wrap for two weeks. Three pictures may have flipped this race: The photo (and video) of Hong with a megaphone agitating against the police after a Madison shooting; Hong standing gleefully next to Hasan Piker and Ilhan Omar at a rally; and the photo of Chardonnay liberals being hectored by BLM at a wine concert on Capital Square. Throw in the bad network performances, and Democrat normies got the message. Hong would have been a disaster for them.
5. Unlike the methodical and incredibly disciplined Democratic collective, Republicans and conservatives are notoriously feudal and individualistic. They don’t take direction. So, while talk show host Vicki McKenna and I repeatedly urged people to cross over and vote for Hong if they did not have a competitive primary (along with a couple Twitter influencers), major conservative figures (like former Gov. Scott Walker) bizarrely told them not to.
This never made sense to me. Why not deliver Tom Tiffany his weakest opponent? I don’t blame Tiffany for this; as the candidate he had to say that when asked the question. But the rest of them…?
As David Crowley said recently, he’s not very different from Hong on policies; he just doesn’t want to abolish core American institutions. I think top conservatives believed the polls and didn’t think the crossover vote was needed. They were wrong.
6. In addition, as state Rep. Jim Piwowarczyk (R-Hubertus) noted, conservatives spent two weeks beating up Hong, convincing enough Democrats that she was too big of a risk. Tiffany even used his bully pulpit to do so, over and over again. Even if everyone had shut up, though, national social media influencers with massive followings were mining her Twitter account to engagement farm off the craziest posts.
So, it wasn’t going to hold anyway. But Piwowarczyk has a point. After the Marquette poll showed Crowley 31 points behind, everyone locked and loaded as if Hong were already the nominee. That wasn’t wise.
7. Tony Evers engaged too late, so he only squeaked Crowley over by a few thousand votes (yikes), but it’s the victory that matters, not the margin. Evers cut through the crap when he warned moderate Democrats like my mom that Hong “probably” wouldn’t defeat Tiffany. His plainspoken warning broke through. Democratic voters trust Evers.
8. The Democrats nefariously used a racial trope to force Mandela Barnes out of the race. Hong would have won with Barnes still in it. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did its part here, publishing the most nefarious and unfair story in state political history: informing voters that Barnes had consensual s*x once at a convention. With an adult. While a bachelor. Ridiculously unfair, a total double standard applied to no one else, and a racial trope besides.
Can Tom Tiffany defeat David Crowley?
Yes. Tiffany has a path. It’s not that I think Tiffany can’t beat Crowley; it’s that I know it will be harder than Hong.
If the Democrats had orchestrated this plot to get, say, Joel Brennan over, it would have probably been game over, not because Tiffany is not a good candidate (he’s great on policy, folksy), but because it’s a bad cycle and independents have Trump fatigue. Now the race will again revolve around DJT, not DSA.
Instead, Democrats chose Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive who is so underwhelming that he was hovering around 3% before he quit the primary. He has a lot of baggage. He mismanaged Milwaukee County. And he’s not vetted. To Democrats, I would say: Buyer beware.
The transit system is a mess, the jail (which his budget funds) is a mess, he needed a state bailout because his budget was a mess, he jacked up sales taxes, his administration uses a racial equity formula to determine park maintenance, and the county almost went bankrupt.
Milwaukee County is also a mess with the most concentrated violent crime and poverty in the state, despite (or really because of) generations of weak Democratic leadership. Milwaukee Democrats have failed black kids, in particular. The reading disparities are an outrage.
Furthermore, folks up north aren’t fond of Milwaukee candidates. I interviewed one such voter this summer, in Ladysmith, and he said he’d never vote for a candidate from Milwaukee because he perceives it as a poorly run city with lots of crime and other problems. It wasn’t a race thing. He said he was an Obama voter who later flipped to Trump. It was a Milwaukee thing.
Crowley is all in on DEI. He is adamantly for boys in girls’ sports. He doesn’t want violent criminal illegals detained in the jail. He’s not a moderate. He just sort of looked that way standing next to Hong. He seemed more reasonable than Hong. But who isn’t, save for Mao Zedong.
Whether that’s enough to get Tiffany over in a bad cycle for Republicans is anyone’s guess. There is a wildcard: How many of Hong’s voters will take their anger out on the establishment and simply stay home? Time will tell.
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