Democrats scored a narrow, but ultimately pyrrhic, victory in Wisconsin Tuesday night, as the wacky Thanksgiving-hating and Hasan Piker-backed gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong lost the primary to a more moderate candidate. But their socialism problem is far from cured.
Just as in Michigan two weeks ago, the polls in this Democratic primary reflected about as much reality as Alice in Wonderland, as all of them had Hong with a seemingly insurmountable lead of over 15 points.
The prediction markets had Hong’s chances of winning at 96% on Tuesday morning, but something happened on the way to her coronation. Actual flesh-and-blood voters decided that socialist policies such as abolishing police and ICE aren’t really what they want.
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This column, based on reporting from the ground in the Midwest, has been warning for weeks that the polls have been absurdly favoring socialist candidates such as Adbul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary who squeaked out a 1-point win after every survey put him up double digits.
This has left Democrats with the most serious problem they have faced in a generation, because half of their voters seem to want a socialist utopia while the other half just wants a normal, everyday Democratic candidate, to the extent those still even exist.
Democratic establishment leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries keep insisting that the Democrats just have a big tent, and that this is a good thing. But what does that really mean?
If the Democrats' "big tent" includes proposals such as abolishing the Senate and Supreme Court, seizing private property and, as one of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top aides put it, "impoverishing the White middle class," then voters have a right to believe that electing Democrats might bring those things about.
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In the final 10 days of the Michigan race, Piker and the DSA were basically El-Sayed’s running mates. At first, the party thought it had found electoral gold as the fabulist polls posited a socialist supercharged blowout.
They were ready to send Piker everywhere and to plaster his face all over America.
When that lead turned out to be fool's gold, Democrats realized they had made a huge mistake, and that Piker and his lunatic ravings about Israel and murdering United States senators had done far more harm than good.
Even having realized that, however, the party is stuck with Piker and the DSA now. For weeks, Democrats have been insisting that the antisemitic Twitch streamer is a major voice for youth who must be given space and a platform, and that America is trending towards socialism.
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Well, not so fast, commies.
It is far too late for Democrats to disavow Piker now, and the odds of him shutting up and going away on his own, especially after last week’s Rolling Stone fashion shoot, are somewhere between narrow and non-existent.
Piker is to Republicans what cowbell is to Christopher Walken: They need more, the GOP has a fever and the only cure is more Hasan Piker, who seems to say things daily that make Democrats miss nutty Graham Platner.
Republicans are going to tie El-Sayed and every Democratic candidate in America to Piker and communist crazies, and where is the lie? Who in their party other than Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has said a word against them?
When you combine this with the galaxy-sized polling misses, all in favor of the left, in this cycle, who is to say that Michelle Tafoya can’t flip the Minnesota Senate seat red or that Bruce Blakeman can’t unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul in the Empire State’s governor's race?
Elections are stories, not math problems, and boy do Republicans have a good story to tell now that Democrats have embraced Piker and the radical left. If destroying the constitution and immiserating White people is inside the Democrat tent, there are a lot of ordinary, everyday American voters who will not be.
Democrats will try very hard in the coming weeks to move to the center and put all of this socialism behind them, but so long as they are tied to Piker and the communists, they will never be able to get there.