Amid all the talk of “electability,” a Midwestern state’s radical history points to what’s possible.
Democratic socialism is having a moment in 2026. In congressional and big-city mayoral primaries across the country, candidates who support economic and social democracy are winning Democratic nominations—defeating incumbent members of the US House of Representatives, coming out on top in open-seat contests for mayoralties, and generally prevailing with a frequency that has corporate Democrats running scared.
So, of course, defenders of the status quo politics that voters are so aggressively rejecting have turned to the oldest of all arguments: the claim that while socialists—along with progressive populists who are open to a bolder politics—may be appealing to a small segment of the public, they aren’t “electable” outside of, say, New York City. And, well, Denver, and Washington, and Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and Tempe, Arizona, and the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, and all the other places where they have won during the current primary season.
Since candidates supported by the Democratic Socialists of America movement swept New York congressional and legislative primaries last week—and especially since 29-year-old socialist Melat Kiros beat a 15-term House incumbent in a Colorado primary on Tuesday—pundits have been trying to put a lid on the insurgency. Which brings us to Wisconsin, where a robust campaign for governor by DSA-backed Wisconsin State Representative Francesca Hong is gaining national attention.
Hong has been leading in several polls for Wisconsin’s August 11 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Cue the establishment warnings that she couldn’t possibly win a general election in this swingiest of swing states.
Even as she rouses crowds with a declaration that “possibility is bound only by our ambition,” political insiders keep dismissing Hong’s bid as an unlikely fit for Wisconsin.
On CNN, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel—a historically Wall Street–friendly Democrat who fancies himself a presidential contender in 2028—recently ran through a list of swing states that included Wisconsin and declared, “They’re not electing socialists.” On a WTMJ talk radio show in Milwaukee, commentators echoed the sentiment. “If the primary were held today, Hong would win, and that is a problem for the Democrats,” announced one of the talkers, while another declared, “There’s not been a single statewide race in America where a democratic socialist has won anything yet.”
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Really? Let’s press pause and review the record.
The nation’s most prominent democratic socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, has won a dozen statewide general election contests (for the US House and the US Senate) in Vermont—most recently two years ago, when he carried 63 percent of the vote and swept urban and rural regions of the Green Mountain State. (It’s worth noting that he’s done that in a state that for almost a decade has also elected a Republican governor.) And Sanders won 32 statewide contests across his two presidential campaigns (23 primaries and caucuses in 2016, and nine more in 2020).
One of the statewide primaries that Sanders won in 2016 was in Wisconsin—and it wasn’t even close. The democratic socialist senator secured almost 57 percent of the statewide vote and carried 71 of 72 counties. Some of his strongest showings were in the largely rural counties of northwest and southwest Wisconsin.
Of course, the defenders of status quo politics will claim that Democratic primaries don’t count and that we should only concern ourselves with general elections.
Fair enough. So let’s consider some more Wisconsin electoral data.
A little more than a century ago, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette mounted one of the most robust left-wing presidential bids in American history. Though he had always identified as a progressive Republican, La Follette was endorsed in his 1924 presidential bid by the Socialist Party (which at the time held the mayoralty of Milwaukee and maintained the second-largest caucus in the Wisconsin legislature) and strongly supported by former Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs.
La Follette had a long history of working closely with the Wisconsin Socialists, who in the first decades of the 20th century elected a member of Congress, state legislators, mayors, city councils, school boards, city attorneys, and even a sheriff. That earned him condemnation from his rivals—and much of the national media—for aligning with “radicals.” Yet he carried Wisconsin with ease in the 1924 general election, winning the vast majority of the state’s counties. Nationwide, La Follette won almost 17 percent of the vote and beat the Democrats into third place in 11 Midwestern and Western states. In a number of states, his name and that of his League for Progressive Political Action running-mate, Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, appeared on the Socialist Party ballot line.
La Follette’s agenda contained numerous initiatives associated with the socialists of his time, just as President Franklin Roosevelt’s did when he won reelection two decades later as the advocate for an “Economic Bill of Rights” that said all Americans were entitled to jobs, housing, healthcare, and education.
In 1924, La Follette proposed to “use the power of the Federal Government to crush private monopoly” in the business sector, and promised to fight for “public ownership of railroads” and “strict public control and permanent conservation of all the nation’s resources, including coal, iron and other ores, oil and timber lands, in the interest of the people.”
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La Follette’s platform also called for the “curtailment of the eight hundred million dollars now annually expended for the army and navy in preparation for future wars” and “the recovery of the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Treasury through fraudulent war contracts and the corrupt leasing of the public resources.” La Follette and his supporters also chose to “denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interests of financial imperialists, oil monopolists and international bankers.”
This was the message that ran up a huge victory margin in Wisconsin a century ago. History may not repeat itself, but they say that it sometimes rhymes. Wisconsin’s 2026 gubernatorial race is still very much in flux. But the state’s adventurous electoral record reminds us that Wisconsin often breaks the predictable patterns of American politics. This is a place that has sent both red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy and Bill of Rights champion Senator Russ Feingold to the US Senate; that elected Earth Day cofounding environmental advocate Gaylord Nelson to both the governorship and the US Senate, along with Koch brothers–aligned fossil fuel industry stooge Governor Scott Walker; and that is currently represented by Trump-apologist Senator Ron Johnson and progressive human rights defender Senator Tammy Baldwin. Wisconsin is a maverick state that is quite capable of upending status quo thinking about what is possible in our politics.
Hong knows this. “Wisconsin is the state where environmentalism was born, where progressivism was born, where the Wisconsin Idea was born,” she told a cheering crowd at the state Democratic convention in June. “This is the state of [pioneering African American statewide elected official] Vel Philips and Gaylord Nelson, ‘Fighting Bob’ La Follette—people before us who imagined a better world and fought like hell to realize it. These folks were called unreasonable, impractical and unelectable, and told their ideas should be tempered by convenience. Yet today they’re considered visionaries—because possibility is bound only by our ambition. We must ask ourselves whether conviction is once again strong enough to meet the demands of dangerous and desperate times.”
Even as she addressed one of the signature issues of her campaign—a call for a moratorium on the construction of large-scale AI data centers—Wisconsinites with an ear for such things might have been excused for noting echoes of La Follette’s economic populism when Hong declared, “I will not meekly accept the sellout of Wisconsin to millionaires, billionaires and Big Tech.”
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