So, at time of writing, it looks as if voters don’t want to cancel Thanksgiving – on balance, at least.

Come November, however, few Democrats will be expressing gratitude for their party’s vote-tabulation systems.

Francesca Hong, it seems, will not be America’s first avowedly socialist state governor. She appears to have just lost an extremely tight primary to David Crowley, a Milwaukee County executive, in the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin.

The long-view – and already ubiquitous – reaction to this news is to mark it down as a major blow for the Democratic Socialists of America and their bid to take over the Democratic establishment. But the more immediate takeaway is two-fold: pollsters are very bad at divining Democratic primaries – and Democratic primary officials are hopeless at tallying votes.

The primary ended in farce early this morning as Milwaukee County workers reportedly had to recover five USB sticks with vote counts on them, only for those sticks to apparently be blank – or something, nobody seems entirely sure. But what is certain is that the Wisconsin polls predicting a comfortable victory for Hong were wildly wrong – and did not take into account the peculiar dynamics of the race. Crowley only became the clear moderate choice late in the process – and mainstream voters duly flocked to him over Hong, a proud DSA member with a long record of expressing barmy radical opinions. Polling companies failed to anticipate or identify those shifts. They made a similar mistake in not identifying late trends in last week’s Senate primary in Michigan, which ended up being a far narrower victory for the DSA-aligned – but not affiliated – candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

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 bi-racial son gives her a “proximity to whiteness.” She has supported the abolition of the Senate, supported public-owned grocery stores and banks, and opposed Valentine’s Day. In 2019 she tweeted the following:

No, it suggests that successful Democratic candidates are now the ones who bridge the gap between the hard and soft left of their party – as El-Sayed just about did in Michigan, and as the Ojibwe 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 – backed by Senator Bernie Sanders, the party’s elder socialist statesman.

“I’m doin a 6-course dinner inspired by menstruation alongside my friends Autumn and Kel. There will be booze too. Come hang.”

And, on CNN a few weeks ago, she declined to disavow her stated view that Thanksgiving should be annulled – insisting instead that she was a trained chef who knew all about bringing people together (to celebrate catamenia, for instance.)

In comparison to Hong, El-Sayed comes across as Obamaesque in his political professionalism. And yet she came within a whisker of being the Democratic nominee for governor in a state Donald Trump won twice. None of this means the party’s voters are returning to the establishment’s preferred path.

She won by 20 percent in a primary cycle dominated by debates about immigration enforcement. She is now the strong favorite to win against Michele Tafoya, the Republican former National Football League sideline reporter.

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Freddie Gray, The Spectator