Tuesday’s New York Times featured “Inside the Left’s Playbook for Scoring Election Wins,” by Kellen Browning, Tim Balk, and Dan Simmons, which whitewashed the radical postures of the new crop of hard-left, socialist candidates who’ve won some Democratic Party primaries, threatening to push the party’s center of gravity further leftward.
But that didn’t concern the Times which was in the mood to celebrate “progressive” progress. This came right before Francesca Hong lost her race:
In cold Milwaukee in March, the reporters eagerly pumped anecdotal drama into the ho-hum tasks of voter registration.
In late March, several thousand angry demonstrators gathered at a park in Milwaukee for a “No Kings” protest to denounce President Trump’s administration. For the crowded field of Democrats running for governor of Wisconsin, the event was the perfect chance to engage fired-up primary voters.
Only one campaign appeared to show up in significant numbers: Francesca Hong’s.
In weather so chilly that attendees could see their own breath, a small army of volunteers wearing Hong T-shirts set up a tent and fanned out in the crowd. Clipboards in hand, they gathered support along with the lifeblood of organizing: cellphone numbers and email addresses, to be used later to recruit volunteers and turn out voters.
Ms. Hong, a democratic socialist and chef, is now the front-runner ahead of the Democratic primary on Tuesday, outlasting and outworking better-funded rivals in the party establishment, including a past lieutenant governor and the current one. Both of them exited the race in recent weeks.
“From the start, there was an ambition to the organizing,” said Harry Walton, a senior adviser to Ms. Hong’s campaign. “I put a lot of miles on my car.”
(Wouldn’t a true lefty take public transportation or at least not brag about polluting the planet with his gas-guzzler?)
Around the country this summer, underdog democratic socialists and their allies have scored a series of victories over traditional Democrats with superior messaging and organizing tactics that have terrified the party establishment, caused them to burn through gobs of cash and left them asking: How do progressives keep getting away with this? The latest example came last week in Michigan, where Representative Haley Stevens lost in a Senate primary race to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, despite her massive spending advantage.
“Progressive” is a euphemism for socialist or even communist. It's easier to tout they're "superior" when they coast through the media coverage.
The left’s recent victories make clear what has worked: face-to-face campaigning, personal testimonials from supporters and an easy-to-embrace outsider message. The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.
With this cozy, hand-in-glove coverage, one can almost feel the excitement of being involved in a socialist political campaign! There was nothing of Democratic Socialists of America spokeswoman Frances Gill spouting radical embarrassments to an L.A. television anchor. Or Wisconsin candidate Hong’s expressed hatred of holidays, most notoriously Thanksgiving (although this online-only Times piece had a reasonably complete rundown of Hong’s controversies).
They also had fun, inviting their supporters to dance parties and game nights with Dungeons and Dragons and Loteria.
Not until paragraph 32 did a brief challenge to the cheerleading appear.
Other [veteran Democratic strategists] are more alarmed, because of their belief that Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Hong’s far-left positions could cause them to lose winnable races against Republicans in battleground states.
Ooops! Hong didn't even make it to the general election. But the soul-searching section was brief; the story concluded with a quote from Beto O'Rourke. Yes, that Beto.
But the real juice this year has come from regular people, said Beto O’Rourke, a former member of the House and past candidate for Senate and governor in Texas who built a similar grass-roots ground game.
We all remember how that worked out for O’Rourke, the media’s previous Democratic hope for Texas.
