Francesca Hong is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin next week. If she goes on to win the general election, she’ll become the first democratic socialist governor in American history. 

But, when Bernie Sanders, the most famous democratic socialist in the country, was asked Wednesday if he’d endorse her, he said: “I don’t think so.” He said he’d met her a few years ago, and that she “seems very very nice” — but said he wasn’t familiar with her race.

Indeed, while leftists and socialists who’ve long been eager to overthrow the Democratic establishment are excited about Hong’s campaign, some are increasingly sounding a bit wary of her chances — and wondering whether she’s the best representative the movement has to offer given the electoral stakes in this swing state. 

For instance, when Hong was asked this week about an old deleted tweet in which she called to cancel Thanksgiving due to its celebration of colonialism, she didn’t exactly disavow it. Instead, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “views can evolve” while also stressing the holiday was “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

Moderate Democrats cringed, of course. But what was more notable was how many fellow leftists joined in — even to some of her biggest fans, the answer seemed like political malpractice. It also brought to the surface simmering tensions within the left over how to navigate social issues more broadly, a divide that’s becoming more relevant now that their candidates are on the cusp of wielding actual power. 

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, fresh off campaigning with Hong, posted on X: “love fran, this was an opportunity to turn this back on how thanksgiving is about to be unaffordable due to trumps wars.” (Two days later, Hong tried a do-over on the answer, claiming Thanksgiving was actually her favorite holiday.)

Another source of concern, for some, is Hong’s tendency of giving elliptical answers when asked about her old support for abolishing police and prisons — saying she won’t do it as governor, but remaining reluctant to disavow the idea as a long-term goal. 

Sanders has been a longtime critic of “defund the police” rhetoric. And in the same interview where Sanders said he likely wouldn’t endorse Hong, he said, in response to a separate question: “No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote defunding the police.”

Hong’s rhetoric is reminiscent of how many people in progressive spaces talked about culture, identity, policing, and prisons back during the “Great Awokening” era, peaking in the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But some on the left increasingly believe that those positions alienate voters — particularly the working-class voters they’re trying to mobilize. 

This new left conventional wisdom, said to be embodied in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is that socialist candidates for office should quietly downplay or even explicitly renounce those old causes — as Mamdani did for police defunding — in favor of a laser focus on issues like affordability, stopping data centers, and opposition to Israel, where public opinion is on their side. 

It’s a sort of left-wing version of “popularism” — the center-left credo that Democrats should campaign on popular ideas that poll well, and abandon unpopular progressive stances. In other words: Don’t scare the normies.

But not everyone on the left is so eager to jettison these stances for purportedly optimal campaign messaging: After all, a major organizing principle for many on the left is their willingness to stand up for what they believe in even when it isn’t popular. 

For instance, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani ally who successfully challenged a House Democratic incumbent this year, stood by her old calls to abolish policing and borders — though, unlike Hong, she’s running in extremely blue terrain. 

“Five years ago, the left was collectively making the case for abolition &/or defund, & gaining public opinion wins,” leftist podcaster Briahna Joy Gray wrote. “Today, they’re making the case for why elected progressives are justified in abandoning this agenda.”

All this is symptomatic of a deeper divide on the left, not just about today’s political strategy, but about race, class, and gender more broadly, and how 2020-era cultural issues fit into their movement today. 

Many class-focused leftists view the period they now jokingly call “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” as a cringey mistake, and seek to blame Democratic elites for it. But others on the left still think and talk about race, identity, and social justice causes just like they did in 2020 — indeed, to them, these issues might be why they joined the left in the first place.

Some on the left now want to move on from “woke 1.0”

In 2021, Chi Ossé, campaigning for New York City Council, tweeted: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

When a critic of his on X unearthed that old post earlier this year, Ossé — now a council member — gave a pithy response: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”.

The citation of “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” is a now-common shorthand among parts of the online left to describe — and distance themselves from — what they now view as the more dated or inconvenient aspects of the impassioned social justice activism they participated in during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Typically, this doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting causes like racial justice altogether. Rather, it is often intended to acknowledge that the tactics used a few years back didn’t work, and that a new approach is necessary to try and achieve those goals. (Indeed, “woke 1.0” implies that “woke 2.0” is either coming or already here.)

Among those who use the term, there isn’t a consensus about what’s an outdated relic worth abandoning, and what’s a worthy cause worth preserving. However, there’s probably the most consensus that the sweeping, totalizing identity-related rhetoric and assertions that were common at the time haven’t aged well. Not only did they repel winnable voters, but they fueled constant arguments inside progressive organizations, to the point that some activists likened the discord to undercover federal plots to disrupt left-wing groups in the 1960s. 

Take it from Chevalier. The victorious congressional primary challenger has stood by her old tweets about police and borders being fundamentally wrong. But when the New York Editorial Board asked her about “woke 1,” she said it was “indeed crazy” — because there was too much “divisive rhetoric” that hurt the left’s effort to build solidarity.

“At the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision,” Chevalier said. “And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke. That actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements.”

To others, the true core of “woke 1.0” is unpopular, fringe-sounding cultural causes — like, say, calling Thanksgiving problematic. In response to the Thanksgiving clip, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted: “Hong has a lot of strengths but this woke 1 stuff is a major weakness.”

“Socialists must practice effective communication,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, wrote. “Reply to a Thanksgiving question: The only thing threatening to cancel Thanksgiving is the rising cost of groceries.”

The deeper disagreement inside the left on economics and identity issues

Underneath some leftists’ attempt to turn the page from “woke 1.0,” there’s a deeper and more longstanding divide on the left between those who want to prioritize economic issues — and those who care deeply about identity-related causes too.

To broadly generalize, we can think of the left as having three main strains, focused on economic justice (class politics), social justice (causes related to identity and culture), and foreign policy (war, empire, and — especially nowadays — Israel). But not everyone prioritizes them in the same way, or joined the movement because of the same issue.

Amid the rise of social media-powered identity related activism, some on the economics-focused left have expressed concern that progressives’ language, approach, and tactics were hampering what should be the left’s top priority: mobilizing the working class. The Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, for instance, has criticized “left identitarians” as “fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics.”

Some on the class-focused left go further, characterizing “wokeness” as essentially an op by their political enemies. 

According to this potted history, it was Hillary Clinton who first opened the Pandora’s box of weaponized identity politics, and she did this to defeat a Bernie Sanders campaign that was overwhelmingly focused on economic justice. Clinton characterized Sanders as insufficiently attentive to gender and racial issues, famously questioning whether breaking up the big banks would solve racism and sexism. His record of more moderate positions on hot-button issues like guns and immigration, which had helped maintain support with culturally conservative independents back in Vermont, also came under attack. 

But by 2018, the rising left — embodied by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all first elected that year — had fulsomely embraced identity-related causes alongside economic ones, believing them to be compatible and interconnected.

All this built up to the 2020 racial reckoning, in which the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin spurred massive nationwide protests and impassioned demands from the left for societal change. And some activists insisted this change had to include not just defunding but outright abolishing the police.

Yet the racial reckoning ended in disappointment, an “anti-woke” backlash soon followed, and rising crime seemed to discredit the idea of doing away with police. And though the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still calls for taking “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system,” there’s an increasingly open debate on the left about whether it should.

“The idea that police/prison abolitionism flow from ‘core socialist principles’ is pretty odd,” Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, posted recently.

“We need to create a permission structure on the left that allows socialists to have normal socialist beliefs about police & prisons (fairer, fewer, and more humane) instead of “abolish” which is flatly anarchist, and incompatible with any form of state socialism,” the socialist Cassie Pritchard wrote.

Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, fired back: “In what fantasy land are police not the natural enemies of workers and their movements? There is no ‘reforming away’ that core truth.”

How these tensions play out in Francesca Hong’s campaign

With Hong holding a large lead in recent polls, some Democrats — fearing what lies ahead for her in the general election — have essentially been trying to coach her into giving what they view as better answers on these “woke 1.0” questions.

When Jon Favreau interviewed Hong on Pod Save America this week, he asked about her old tweets — saying he was only focusing on this because Republicans would be sure to spend millions attacking her, and “I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

Asked about how her views on policing have evolved, Hong said: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.”

Favreau then asked if she still believed police exist to uphold white supremacy (as she tweeted in 2021), and Hong said, “No.”

But when Favreau asked specifically why she changed her mind on that, her answer was difficult to parse.

“When you talk to people who are most justice-impacted — a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities — justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people’s lives,” she said.

Then, when asked how her long-term vision of a world without prisons would work, Hong said: “What I know is attainable and the policies that actually meet the urgency of the moment and understanding the realities of it, means that we have to ensure that we’re funding our local governments, that we’re bringing justice to victims.”

She added, more succinctly: “What may have been aspirational is not primary.”

Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — albeit by a significantly smaller margin than preelection polling suggested. He’s beaten back $30 million in AIPAC spending and endorsements from top Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens. Now he’s moving on to face the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a contest crucial to determining Senate control.

So the next question is: Can El-Sayed beat a Republican?

That will be a cinch, some in his camp claim. “For progressives, getting out of the primary is a far more difficult battle than winning in the general,” left-wing streamer Hasan Piker told CNN last week.

But the reality is that we’ve had very few true tests of how candidates associated with the left flank of the party — and specifically with the Bernie Sanders-backed revolt against the establishment — would fare in competitive swing-state general elections. 

Which means that this would be one of the first such tests, and that its outcome will have enormous stakes for the party’s future.

El-Sayed’s views on Israel and his prospective history-making turn as the first-ever Muslim senator have gotten much coverage. But El-Sayed is also a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Sanders faction, having been closely aligned with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since his first political campaign in 2018. Both have campaigned for him this cycle.

If El-Sayed defeats Rogers convincingly (he’s personally predicting a 7-point victory as his baseline), he’ll become a megastar and even possibly a presidential contender. He’ll arguably be the first to prove that the Sanders formula — attacking billionaires, corporate influence, and the party establishment, while backing sweeping social welfare spending like Medicare-for-all — can win over voters who once backed President Donald Trump.

“If Abdul El-Sayed beats Stevens I actually think he’s very likely to be the next president,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, posted on X last month. “If he wins the general, it’s over for centrist Dems.”

Conversely, if El-Sayed — who has trailed Rogers in recent polls — loses, skeptics may conclude that the left can’t appeal to the country’s true swing voters, and that nominating a leftist for president in 2028, or in downballot races, is too big of a risk. 

The core disagreement: Will the left’s approach succeed in the general election?

Over the past decade, it has become an article of faith across much of the left that their particular populist approach to economics and foreign policy would be potent in a general election.

They argue that typical Democrats have a more compromised platform and timid style, lacking the populist fire that can win over disaffected Americans. “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016, the saying goes, by using his outsider credibility and ambitious plans to appeal to the working-class voters and independents that went for Trump. Kamala Harris’s defeat, amid intense criticism on the left over her and Joe Biden’s support for Israel, further bolstered their sense that the party establishment just can’t get it done. 

Now, left factionalists are pointing to their several high-profile primary victories this year and arguing that energy and enthusiasm are on their side — and would translate to the general election too.

Many mainstream Democrats see this as naive. They believe that while talk of “socialism” and other far-left positions might work fine in deep blue cities and districts, it could well prove toxic in swing states that have voted for Trump. While public opinion on certain issues has moved in the left’s direction, especially Israel, candidates could have a tougher time on issues like crime, where El-Sayed has offered nuanced explanations of his “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020.

“Winning a Democratic primary means close to nothing when it comes to the general election, because these are functionally different voter pools,” Lakshya Jain of the center-left publication The Argument recently wrote.

Some analysts pointed to the primary results as a potential harbinger of general election struggles, with El-Sayed performing poorly against Stevens in the kinds of rural areas that have swung toward Republicans in the Trump era.

Are there past examples of Bernie-aligned candidates making it to tough general elections?

But even though the “Bernie vs. the establishment” battle has been raging on and off for the past decade, there have been very few clean tests about how Bernie-backed candidates would do in swing states.

Sanders never won the presidential nomination, and candidates aligned with him have generally preferred to run in strongly Democratic areas where, if they win the primary, the general election is a fait accompli. The now-expanding “squad” of left-wing House members that began with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley all fit this model.

There have, however, been a few past examples where Sanders-aligned candidates have made it to the general election in tough territory.

One is Andrew Gillum, whose 2018 bid for governor of Florida was backed by Sanders and other progressive groups, including billionaire Tom Steyer’s network. He won the nomination over establishment favorite Gwen Graham — but then went on to lose the general election to Ron DeSantis by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point, ushering in what became the era of Deep Red Florida.

In nominating Gillum, did the left blow a winnable race amid a national Democratic wave? Maybe — but one counterargument is that longtime Sen. Bill Nelson, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat, lost his seat by a similarly tight margin in that same election. Florida may have just been trending redder generally. Gillum’s post-election personal struggles also color views of his candidacy today.

That same cycle, in Nebraska, Kara Eastman upset the establishment favorite to win the nomination for a swing House district. (Sanders hadn’t endorsed her in the primary, but she ran on a platform of Medicare-for-all and free college.) She lost in 2018 — and again in 2020, even though Joe Biden won her district — and has been viewed inside the party as a cautionary tale about blowing a winnable race ever since.

The outcome was happier for Keith Ellison, a close Sanders ally who won his race to be Minnesota’s attorney general in 2018. Yet his margin of victory — about 4 percentage points — wasn’t particularly impressive in a lean blue state in a strongly Democratic year when Tim Walz won the governor’s race by 11. Later, when Ellison ran for reelection in 2022, he eked out a win by less than 1 point while Walz won by 8.

John Fetterman was generally understood to be a “Bernie faction” candidate when he ran for an open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022. (Sanders stayed neutral in the primary that year, but had backed Fetterman’s earlier lieutenant governor campaign and championed him in the general election.) But he wasn’t exactly running on a bold left platform — he backed off his past Medicare-for-all support and was pro-fracking.

Fetterman ended up winning by 5 points even though it was a favorable cycle for Republicans — but simultaneously, the more centrist Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race by 15. However, Shapiro’s opponent was believed to be weaker and more extreme, and the stroke Fetterman suffered that year complicates efforts to read too much into his performance. 

Separate from his electoral performance, Fetterman’s association with the Sanders left ended years ago as his politics moved to the right; lately, there has been talk he might switch parties. This has also fueled arguments from moderates that populist outsider candidates are less reliable than more conventional ones even if they do manage to win.

El-Sayed is running on a bold left platform in a true swing state

Taking this grab bag of outcomes together, one can see why mainstream Democrats might be skeptical that the left has the secret sauce to win swing voters. But each race has had its own unique circumstances and complications.

Furthermore, in this cycle, the electorate could be in a different place — more disenchanted by the establishment and more willing to take a chance on further-left candidates.

Graham Platner was set to be the great hope for the Sanders faction until his Senate campaign was derailed by scandal and he was replaced on the ballot by Troy Jackson — another Sanders-aligned candidate, albeit one with his own long history in state politics. But though Jackson is facing a formidable Republican incumbent, Maine is a blue state that hasn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.

Michigan is tougher turf, having voted for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. The conventional wisdom for how a Democrat can win a race there is to run a cautious campaign, being careful not to alienate potentially winnable Republican and independent voters. A good example is Gary Peters, the departing two-term senator El-Sayed is running to replace, who’s a traditional pro-union Democrat known for keeping a low profile in general.

El-Sayed is not doing that. He supports Medicare-for-all, a billionaire wealth tax, abolishing ICE, and a full arms embargo on Israel. While El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, he’s very closely tied to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — the trio held hands and raised their arms together at a recent rally, in an image Michigan voters may well see in GOP-funded attack ads. 

And back in 2020, El-Sayed expressed sympathy with activists calling to “defund the police” and said most major cities spend far too much on police departments, though he’s tried to downplay those views this cycle.

“I’m worried that he’s more passionate about attacking other Dems than Republicans and may not be ready for what’s coming,” Adam Jentleson, president of the center-left Searchlight Institute, posted on X recently.

Now that he’s won the primary, El-Sayed will get the chance to try and show he’s ready — and to test whether his bold left platform will be his greatest asset, or a millstone.

One of the most powerful forces in American politics is about to face a major test of its influence — and it may well come up short.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has for decades spent heavily to ensure that US policy remains strongly supportive of the Israeli government. The group has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and elections to stock Congress with allies and keep them supportive of Israel’s policy priorities once they’re there. It also tries to defeat elected officials and candidates who, in its view, are too supportive of the Palestinian cause or too critical of Israel’s Gaza war.

Next week’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan is AIPAC’s biggest-ever investment in a single election: The group has spent more than $30 million to defeat staunch Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed and to try to ensure Rep. Haley Stevens wins the Democratic nomination instead.

In the past, AIPAC has very often gotten its way. But this time may be different. El-Sayed has been explicitly running against AIPAC, arguing that the group’s heavy investment in the race discredits his opponent — and trying to capitalize on the Democratic base’s sharp turn against Israel due to the devastation of the Gaza war. And if polling is any indication, it seems to be working. Several recent surveys show El-Sayed with a double-digit lead. 

If he wins, it would arguably be AIPAC’s worst-ever defeat. It could also mean we’re in a new chapter of politics, where the group’s heavy spending is less and less effective — and even potentially toxic to voters in the Democratic base.

What has changed, and how could these changes reshape politics? 

To understand the influence of AIPAC — what it’s like to go up against the group, and also how its power may be ebbing — we spoke to a Michigan politician who ended up on their bad side, crossing the group on the Israel issue and then losing his seat. (In fact, he lost it to the very candidate AIPAC is boosting in next week’s Senate contest: Haley Stevens.)

Andy Levin was a two-term congressional incumbent and scion of a Michigan Jewish political dynasty — he succeeded his father, Sander Levin, who had served in the House for decades. Andy’s uncle, Carl Levin, had served in the Senate for decades as well; both held high-profile committee chairships.

But once in Congress, Andy Levin staked out positions on Israel that spurred furious pushback from AIPAC. A former president of the group declared he was “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship.”

And when, after redistricting, he and his colleague Rep. Stevens ended up running against each other in the same primary, AIPAC spent more than $4 million to boost her chances, successfully knocking Levin out of Congress.

Levin is an enthusiastic supporter of El-Sayed, and was in the car on his way to canvas for him when we spoke Thursday. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, follows.

How Rep. Andy Levin ran afoul of AIPAC

Tell me about your history and how you’ve thought about the Israeli-Palestinian issue over the years.

I guess the thing to understand is, I’m Jewish, right? You know what a mezuzah is? I had mezuzot on all my doors in Congress. I was the president of my synagogue until I won my primary, and then I felt I had to resign and turn that over. 

I am a long, long, longtime human rights activist. My human rights grounding comes from my values as a Jew. Everyone’s created the image of God, you know, and all this. “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Not a lot of words are repeated twice in the Torah.

So I was active on Tibetan human rights and Haitian human rights. I was in China during the Tiananmen massacre. I interviewed the Dalai Lama. In 1990, as a graduate student, I went to Israel and Palestine. We traveled all over Israel, and we could go in Gaza, there was no Hamas yet. We met the political leaders there and talked to everybody in the West Bank.

And I came home, and I wrote an article in the Detroit Jewish News that said, “Oh my God, 23 years of occupation, this is enough. It’s totally toxic. It’s bad for our soul as the Jewish people, and there’s no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without fully realizing the political and human rights of the Palestinians.” 

My positions never really changed. But after a quarter century of Bibi [Netanyahu] being the Israeli government — he’s always been against the two-state solution, no question, but he pussyfooted around; he played a lot of games about it. But his government’s gotten more and more right-wing. And in this century, no president of either party has done anything significant to force the Israelis and the Palestinians into each other’s arms, or just to, like, really negotiate.

So you get elected to Congress in 2018. How did you earn the enmity of AIPAC?

I get to Congress. I get on the Foreign Affairs Committee. And the Gaza war before this one happens [in 2021]. It was like a pimple compared to this, but it was terrible. 

In the House, there were eight more senior Democrats who worked on Israel and Palestine together. I was, like, the kid; they let me tag along. We were all J Street-aligned [J Street is a more progressive Israel advocacy group]. 

There were these meetings, and everyone was like, we have to do reconstruction of Gaza, we have to do aid. And I’m like, okay, I’m for all that. But this is just an endless cycle of violence. I want to focus on ending the cycle of violence and actually achieving peace. 

So I wrote the Two-State Solution Act. And, dude, it was quite a milquetoast piece of legislation, if I may say so. It was not adequate in any way. But the preamble said, “whereas” — you know, all the “whereas”-es [rhetorical throat-clearing at the beginning of legislation], which aren’t an effective part of it — it said, whereas Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under international law and United Nations resolutions, these are occupied territory.

The Democratic Majority for Israel pollster, Mark Mellman, attacked me, saying, Andy Levin says we shouldn’t be able to pray on the Western Wall. Because of that preamble, which said East Jerusalem was occupied territory arguably — it’s ridiculous.

But with the Two-State Solution Act — this is the stranglehold that AIPAC had. Some people are sort of more intellectually serious in Congress, and some are less. Some are more like, they study things themselves, but some are more staff-driven.

Some of the more serious people came up to me and said they read the Two-State Solution Act, and they said really nice things about it. And then they said, “But of course I can’t co-sponsor it, you understand.” One colleague came and co-sponsored, but because AIPAC said “dude, no,” he withdrew.

How Levin lost to Haley Stevens — who was aided by AIPAC’s spending — in 2022

So then, in the 2022 cycle, there was redistricting, and you and your colleague Haley Stevens ended up running in the same district, and that’s when AIPAC tries to defeat you.

After the Census, Michigan went from 14 to 13 seats. Haley and I were mushed in together now. You could have argued that either of us should’ve run in the new, current, 10th district. Haley lived in the 10th district; she was more moderate, and that’s a more Republican or mixed district. I never represented any of that.

My case was, I lived in the center of the new 11th district; I still live there. My kids are the fifth generation of my family to live in the new 11th district. The whole Jewish community is almost all in the new 11th district, overwhelmingly.

But the former national president of AIPAC wrote this fundraising appeal for Haley and said, Andy Levin is the most corrosive member of Congress for the US-Israel relationship. 

So the level of threat they saw in me — if you get a Rashida [Tlaib] or even if you get an Abdul [El-Sayed], they’ll fight against them. But I’m the Jewish guy, right? I’m the son of Sander Levin, the nephew of Carl Levin.

They were these two Jewish kids from Detroit, grandsons of immigrants, who rose to be, at the same time, the chair of the [House] Ways and Means Committee — my dad — and the chair of the [Senate] Armed Services Committee. So this is super threatening to AIPAC, right? So they targeted me.

So I got trounced by Haley. And I wondered afterward; I told Celinda [pollster Celinda Lake], I should have run in the new 10th district because this intramural fight was so horrible, so unpleasant. She said, I admit it would’ve been better — but I don’t admit you would’ve won in the 10th. Because AIPAC would have backed [Republican nominee] John James, and they would have spent any amount of money to beat you.

Why the politics of Israel changed — and why he thinks Abdul El-Sayed has a better shot at winning, including in the fall

You lost your race, but it certainly seems like, four years on, your views are winning inside the Democratic Party. The party base increasingly seems to be siding with you and against AIPAC now. Take me through what changed since then. 

Horrifying things caused the change. Genocide caused the change. Seventy thousand-plus Palestinians killed in Gaza caused the change. Most houses of worship, university buildings, hospitals, residential buildings being destroyed, and the US either providing the weapons for or even paying for a lot of this. 

These huge bombs, which US military leadership said, we don’t use those in populated areas — we’re providing them to Israel, and not only was Israel using them like on apartment blocks, they were using them on places they told people to flee. Any parent seeing all these maimed and killed children — and, what’s happening on the West Bank is horrifying, right? That’s part of it.

But the other part is, it gets mixed in with the larger, horrifying phenomenon of dark money, and corporate money, and special interest money in our politics. 

I mean, the idea that AIPAC is using mostly dollars from Republican centimillionaires and billionaires to be the biggest spender in Democratic primaries — that’s so gross, and it’s a huge problem for the Democratic Party and also for our democracy. 

Most people don’t vote on Israel and Palestine at all; they vote on their pocketbook, on their kids, on their neighborhood, on inflation, on jobs. We’re at a really huge gathering crisis about income and wealth inequality in America.

So we need three things, really, in candidates this year: authenticity, boldness about policy proposals, and truth-telling. I think this year, people are so fed up with politics as usual. And can you imagine? Honestly, can you imagine Abdul could win when they’re spending $80 million to beat him?

Why do you think he’s able to pull that off — if he is? The election isn’t over, of course, but it’s on Tuesday, and the latest polling has shown him with a double-digit lead. 

Sometimes the amount of money, it does become a little bit of a story in itself. Of the money being spent on Haley Stevens’s behalf, what percentage is going to be money she raised outside of AIPAC, and what percent is going to be dark money of one kind or another? 

But one of my biggest things about this election is this notion about how to win in November, which drives me out of my mind. The idea is, the liberals are gonna vote for the Democrat. The MAGA people are going to vote for the Republicans. Therefore, it’s all about the independents. It’s all about the people in the middle. Therefore, we must run to the mushy middle to win. 

It’s a static idea of the electorate, right? They call Michigan a swing state. What is a swing? The whole beauty of the swing — when you’re a kid, you go so high, you go all the way to the back, and you feel like you’re weightless for a second, and you go all the way to the front. That’s swinging. 

That’s what Michigan does. [In presidential primaries], this state voted to nominate George Wallace in 1972. We voted to nominate Jesse Jackson in 1988. And Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Abdul can attract voters across the political spectrum who hate the system. He’s so different than Trump, but they look at him and are like, well, nobody’s going to fuck with him. I don’t think he’s going to kowtow to anybody or just do what anybody says. I think he’s gonna do his own thing, and it will be entertaining to watch this. 

I think that actually Abdul can expand the electorate, and he’s the better candidate. We must win this seat in November. Abdul’s the better choice.

It’s been quite a year for the Democratic Socialists of America.

They got one of their own, Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York City. They’ve taken down congressional incumbents in New York and Colorado. Their membership has soared to 120,000 dues-paying members, the group said.

But with success has come more media interest — and scrutiny.

National coverage has focused on controversial elements in the DSA’s platform, which calls for, among other things, defunding the Pentagon, taking steps toward abolishing the “carceral forces of the capitalist state,” making Jerusalem the capital of a free Palestine, and making the president of the United States chosen by Congress rather than elected. 

Internal controversies and splits within the group — such as debates over whether, and when, it should endorse a 2028 presidential candidate (such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) — have also risen to national attention. Some in the movement have also argued that candidates embracing ideas like prison abolition could limit their political upside. 

As the midterm elections near, Republicans are eager to link Democrats to the DSA as part of a broader messaging strategy. President Donald Trump derided the group as communists — a term many in DSA would reject, but that some happily embrace as a self-descriptor.

So what is the DSA all about, anyway? And what do they really want?

To answer those questions, I spoke to Peter Sterne, an editor at City & State New York who has covered the ins and outs of DSA closely in such articles as “DSA for Dummies,” “Understanding DSA’s structure,” and “Get to know DSA’s internal caucuses.” 

Sterne knows the group’s inner workings well, in part, because he was a dues-paying member himself. He joined DSA in 2017 but quit it in 2023 after taking his current role covering New York politics, viewing his membership as a conflict of interest. But, he told me, he has many sources inside the group that still keep him in the loop.

Our interview, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

Why socialists aren’t just progressive Democrats

What are the core principles of DSA? What really unites the group and its members — and sets them apart from just progressive Democrats?

I would say that everyone who is in DSA identifies as a socialist, and many of them would also identify as Marxist. So they are very critical of capitalism and a society and economy that is built on capital accumulation. 

DSA members go farther than progressives like Senator [Elizabeth] Warren in that they are not just looking to rectify the excesses of capital, or create a nicer capitalism, or a mixed economy where you still have capitalism along with a generous social welfare state.

I think that, within DSA, people are critical of capitalism itself and believe in moving toward a society in which workers have more control over their workplaces and society. In terms of what that actually looks like in the short term, there are lots of different ideas. 

Now, certainly in terms of what democratic socialist candidates are running on, it is very similar to what non-socialist progressives are running on. It is largely an expansion of the social welfare state. 

But I do think there is an important philosophical difference. The Warrenites and progressive capitalists believe in the necessity of a free market economy. Whereas socialists — even if they don’t necessarily want to abolish it overnight — don’t believe that private ownership of corporations, private ownership of utilities is necessary. And that makes them much more willing to push for policies that others would see as being beyond the pale. 

The DSA’s ideological spectrum — from Bernie Sanders fans to full Communists

So then, walk me through some of the main things people within DSA disagree over — whether tactically or philosophically.

DSA identifies as a multi-tendency organization. In other words, it is a big tent of the left. 

So you have some people who are basically where Bernie is, in terms of identifying as democratic socialists — wanting to kind of bring back an FDR-style expansion of the social safety net but not necessarily wanting to go that much further. 

And then, on the other side, you would have people who identify as Communists and as Marxist-Leninists or Maoists who believe that, ultimately, the solution is a kind of Communist revolution — that, eventually, the workers are going to rise up and institute a new form of the state and society. 

They see their role as helping to radicalize the workers and prepare for that revolutionary moment, more so than trying to get elected and pass policies that will eventually move you into more of a social-welfare-type state.

So that’s the central tension. You have, on the one hand, people who would consider themselves socialists and often Marxists but believe in a democratic road to socialism, and those who identify as more revolutionary socialists, following the model of Lenin or Mao, who believe that it is impossible to reform the system.

How does that tension play out in debates inside DSA about electoral strategy?

There’s a lot of debate over red lines for elected officials and whether DSA elected officials should work within the Democratic Party or not. 

DSA generally does not just endorse people who are running for office in the way that a lot of organizations do. They believe in strategically choosing specific races to get involved in — and ideally having their own members, people who have been involved in the organization and are accountable to the organization and loyal to DSA running as candidates. 

DSA’s official strategy is that, for now, they will run candidates on the Democratic Party line. But they want to build up the infrastructure to be their own party in everything but name. So DSA wants to have its own donor networks, its own data on who is voting, its own electoral strategy — as opposed to relying on the Democratic Party for any of that.

Ideally, then, you can imagine DSA breaking from the Democratic Party. That would be the “dirty break” strategy, as opposed to the “clean break” strategy, which is, “we just stop running anyone as a Democrat right now.” The clean break strategy has been largely discredited within DSA, and they’re largely focused on the dirty break.

But as DSA wins more power running as Democrats, it becomes harder for people to imagine them ever breaking with the party. So people say they’re now doing a “dirty stay” strategy, where they’re just going to try and do realignment, which means basically taking over the Democratic Party.

The internal DSA tensions around electoral pragmatism 

There’s been some attention around how the national DSA leadership and the New York City DSA — which is seemingly the most successful of the DSA chapters around the country — have different views on these electoral strategy questions. Can you break that down?

NYC’s DSA’s political leadership is dominated by two caucuses in particular: Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork. Both of those are sometimes described as being on the “DSA right” —  although, they do not like that term. 

They would say that they are focused on “mass politics,” on trying to bring in the largest number of people into DSA, on trying to get DSA members elected into positions of power who can then support legislation that will materially improve the lives of the working class, can win people over to socialism and bring in more members, and build a large influential powerful socialist organization. That is essentially the Zohran theory.

Most of the people in DSA who were involved in the Mamdani campaign, and a number of them who are now involved in NYC government — such as the head of the Office of Mass Engagement, or the head of the mayor’s office to protect tenants — those are DSA members, and specifically, they are members of the Socialist Majority Caucus. SMC and Groundwork are very focused on that kind of electoral approach and, generally, are more pragmatic. They are very averse to disciplining electeds or trying to force electeds to publicly defend positions that are politically unpopular — like, say, police abolition.

Their counterparts would be the “DSA left.” Within New York City, the main left caucus is Emerge. You also have Marxist Unity Group, Red Star, and Springs of Revolution, which is primarily an anti-Zionist faction. They have less influence within New York City overall. But they have more influence within DSA nationally. A lot of chapters outside of New York City and California are more ideologically focused — and less focused on just having the most electoral success running as Democrats. 

Recently, there’s been some discussion about the national DSA platform. Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin and is a democratic socialist, distanced herself from the platform this week. How should we understand the tensions around this question about appealing to voters versus being ideologically pure?

Generally speaking, I’d say most people in DSA agree on the overall ideology. The issue is more: Are you holding candidates to support that platform publicly? Do you allow your electeds to distance themselves from DSA’s positions when that seems to be the politically pragmatic choice to make? Or does that undermine the organization or even mislead the working class?

You see this a lot around anti-Zionism. There is a faction of DSA members who have been very critical of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, because they feel that she has been insufficiently public in terms of criticizing Israel. Initially, she voted “present” on the Iron Dome. She said she was not opposed to defensive military aid to Israel. She infamously said during the DNC in 2024 that she believed that Biden and Harris were tirelessly working for a ceasefire. 

And a lot of people within DSA have been critical of AOC for what they see as compromising with Democratic leadership when it comes to Israel and Palestine and not taking a very strong kind of unconditional stance against Israel. And there have also been a lot of people, particularly within NYC DSA, who have defended AOC. Their argument is that AOC needs to be pragmatic about these things. 

You see it with Zohran in terms of his relationship with the NYPD and with NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch. A lot of people in DSA are very critical of Tisch, who worked for [Eric] Adams. She is a billionaire and a Zionist — definitely not in keeping with DSA’s politics. And she is someone who helped to create the surveillance dragnet under the Adams administration and the De Blasio administration. 

So there have been people in NYC DSA who have called for Zohran to fire Jessica Tisch. And there are other people who say that they do not like Tisch, but they feel Zohran needs to make the pragmatic decision of working with her and not confront entrenched police power.

The DSA’s complicated relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Can you talk to me about the complicated relationship, the ups and downs between DSA and AOC over the years?

That relates to the tension between national and NYC. NYC DSA is really, really pro-AOC. They have a close relationship with her and work closely with her, and she really likes a lot of the leaders in NYC DSA. National DSA is much more skeptical of her, seeing her as willing to compromise and be opportunistic in ways they don’t like. 

AOC was first elected in 2018. In 2024, she was easily reendorsed for election by the NYC DSA, which then applied for the national DSA to endorse her as well. 

The national leadership dragged their feet because they were divided, particularly around her rhetoric around Israel and Palestine. 

Ultimately, they issued a conditional endorsement, saying, “we will endorse AOC if she agrees to support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and oppose all aid — defensive and offensive military aid — to Israel.”

NYC DSA was concerned that AOC would not agree to that and that requiring her to agree to those conditions would alienate her from the organization. So they told national DSA, it’s fine, if you’re only going to offer a conditional endorsement we don’t need it. 

Generally, I think it’s safe to say that NYC DSA believes DSA needs AOC more than AOC needs DSA. So they’re very wary of alienating her; they want to maintain a positive working relationship. 

And all this leads into the question of what will happen in the 2028 presidential race, right? If she runs, it doesn’t seem like there’s another plausible socialist candidate in the mix.

If you talk to people who are skeptical of AOC, they would say that they would love [Rep.] Rashida Tlaib to run, because she is obviously the most committed to Palestinian solidarity. All indications are that she is not interested in running for president, so that’s kind of a dead letter. You’ll also see people say they would like Shawn Fain to run, the head of the United Auto Workers, as a real left-labor candidate harkening back to the days when union leaders were major political figures. Again, he’s very unlikely to run.

And you have some people who say that they would support Ro Khanna, even though Ro Khanna is not a socialist and is probably worse on Palestine than AOC. 

So it really does seem like it’s going to be AOC or no one. And that’s why I think that even the people who are skeptical of AOC have largely resigned themselves to the idea that if she runs, DSA will endorse. 

I think the tension now is around how supportive DSA would be. DSA could spend 2028 being an AOC surrogate, deeply involved in the campaign, making their primary goal getting her elected president in 2028. 

I think there are also people in DSA who believe that, even if AOC is the best candidate and DSA should support her, they don’t want to fully kind of liquidate themselves into the AOC campaign. They want to maintain an independent organization where DSA could set up an independent expenditure and come out with messaging that says: we support AOC but we don’t agree with her on everything. 

The prototypical Democrat vulnerable to a primary this year has been old, in Washington a long time, and vulnerable from the left.

But in Massachusetts, there’s a race that’s scrambling that formula. Sen. Ed Markey is 80, and he’s been in Congress for 50 years. But he’s been a stalwart ally of progressives; he was, for instance, the main Senate champion of the “Green New Deal.” And the leaders of the Democrats’ left flank, like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are swinging into action to try and defend him. “It’s not your age, it’s the age of your ideas. And in this race, I’m the youngest guy,” Markey has said.

His opponent, Seth Moulton, a 47-year-old Marine Corps veteran, also goes against type. While “moderate” and “establishment” often are treated as synonyms, Moulton has a history of pushing back against both progressive activists and older Democratic leaders. In his current run, he’s made generational change his main issue, including some blunt warnings about Markey’s age. 

“If Democrats win the Senate, it will almost certainly be by one vote, and we can’t afford to lose that vote due to a medical absence or emergency,” Moulton told me in an interview. “That’s not ageism, that’s just actuarial tables.”

But his Senate campaign isn’t the first time he’s taken on Democratic leaders. In 2018, he led a (failed) effort to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker again, arguing again that the aging House leadership needed to clear a path for younger members. In 2024, he became one of the first prominent Democrats to bail on President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate, saying the president needed to “let new leaders rise up.”

The party establishment, Moulton told me, has “failed to be honest with the American people about the challenges we face.” He cited Democrats denying there was “an immigration problem at the southern border under Biden,” their insistence that Biden-era inflation was “transitory,” and their initial defense of Biden after the debate exposed his frailty.

Some of his criticisms of the party have rankled progressives. After President Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, he publicly criticized Democrats’ stance on trans athletes in stark terms, telling the New York Times he didn’t want his “two little girls” getting “run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete” — a statement that earned him intense backlash in Massachusetts. 

Now facing a Democratic primary electorate in a very liberal state, Moulton has tried to avoid being pigeonholed as a centrist. For instance, he said he supports abolishing ICE and prosecuting many of its officials, and he said he supports legislation like the Transgender Bill of Rights. Asked about his comments on transgender youth, he told me his intention “was not to hurt or offend anybody, but to say that we need to be willing to have these tough conversations as Democrats — and not simply cede this territory to Republicans.”

Instead, his principal argument has been that Markey should pass the torch — and that frustrations with what congressional Democrats’ ineffectiveness should in part be aimed at Markey. 

“One of the first votes I’ll take in the Senate will be against Chuck Schumer for leader,” Moulton said.

Markey, for his part, has accused Moulton of throwing trans kids “under the bus” and argued his own long record and support for causes from climate to Medicare-for-all shows him to be a reliable progressive ally. 

“Congressman Moulton is trying to walk a political tightrope,” Markey campaign manager Cam Charbonnier told Vox. “He’s working to appeal to moderate voters, but that coalition alone isn’t enough to win a Massachusetts Democratic primary. So, he’s also trying to appeal to progressives, but he doesn’t have the track record to back that up. The result is a campaign that’s trying to be everything to everyone, leaving voters questioning what he actually stands for.”

Polling in the race has been sparse, but the last two public surveys both showed a surprisingly close race ; Markey led by just 5 points in one and 6 in the other. However, there were many undecided voters, and we’ll soon see whether ad campaigns — like Markey’s new one featuring Sanders, Warren, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley — shift the numbers.

If Moulton wins the September 1 primary, or even comes close, it would suggest that the Democratic base’s frustrations with gerontocracy and Washington are more than stand-ins for a debate over ideology and reflect broader concerns about older politicians losing touch, being ineffective, aging, and even dying in office.

But if Markey ends up sailing to victory, it would send a message that it can be perilous for upstart Democratic challengers like Moulton to break with the progressive base — and that validation from the Sanders wing of the party can be a very valuable thing.

Sen. Ed Markey beat back a previous primary challenge by mobilizing progressives

Though Markey entered the House of Representatives 50 years ago, his team argued that his record shows he was frequently on the right side of history — that, for instance, he started focusing on climate change as far back as the 1980s and that he supported same-sex marriage in the 1990s. (Moulton bristled at this a bit, telling me, “He was elected as a pro-life Democrat who was opposed to the racial integration of Boston schools.”)

In 2009, he and Rep. Henry Waxman co-authored Democrats’ sweeping “cap-and-trade” climate bill, which was one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities. The bill, which became colloquially known as Waxman-Markey, died in the Senate.

When Sen. John Kerry joined Obama’s Cabinet as secretary of state, Markey ran for his open Senate seat. He was the more progressive candidate in a primary against Rep. Stephen Lynch, which he won by 15 percentage points.

But toward the end of Markey’s first full Senate term, an ambitious Democrat with a famous name — then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III, grandson of RFK (and nephew of RFK Jr.) — launched a primary bid against him, also with a message of generational change.

Markey’s initial polling was quite weak, he still wasn’t very well-known in the state, and he appeared to be in serious danger. But, unexpectedly, he became an online phenomenon of sorts, as young progressives, impressed by his Senate push for the Green New Deal and early endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has not weighed in this time), rallied to his side. His campaign’s message that he was a movement champion proved successful, and he ended up winning the primary by 11 points.

When Democrats had a trifecta in Washington again under President Joe Biden, they passed their climate bill. The new law, the Inflation Reduction Act, established the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a “green bank” of sorts. The concept, in various iterations, had been one of Markey’s main causes over the years, and its enactment was a major achievement. Yet, that success was short-lived, as the Trump administration is now attempting to dismantle the program.

Rep. Seth Moulton has been a thorn in the Democratic establishment’s side

Moulton, for his part, believes he can take down Markey, because he took down a long-time Democratic incumbent once before; that’s how he got his start in politics.

Rep. John Tierney had represented his northeastern Massachusetts district for nearly two decades, when Moulton challenged him in a 2014 primary. A longtime ally of Nancy Pelosi, Tierney became vulnerable due to a gambling scandal involving his family. (His wife’s brother was accused of racketeering for operating an illegal offshore casino, and Tierney’s wife was accused of preparing false tax returns. Both were convicted and sent to prison.)

In contrast, the 35-year-old Moulton was a fresh face — a Harvard grad and a decorated combat veteran who had served four Marine Corps tours in Iraq. He proved an effective fundraiser and campaigner, upsetting Tierney by 10 percentage points.

Yet, Moulton quickly grew frustrated with Washington. After Democrats’ 2016 defeat, he became one of the party’s most outspoken critics of Pelosi. Already, by 2017, there was talk he might run for president — and ample anonymous quotes from other Democrats disparaging him as opportunistic, grasping, and disloyal.

Moulton insisted throughout that he was making a case that went beyond personal ambition. Before the 2018 midterms, he started the Serve America PAC to try and elect more members with military or national service backgrounds who were skeptical of Democratic leaders — more people like him — to Congress. But when Democrats retook the House majority, Moulton’s high-profile effort to supplant Pelosi flamed out. 

So did his subsequent presidential bid. He was in the race for four months in 2019 but dropped out when he failed to qualify for debates, warning Democrats on his way out against “veering too far left” in their choice of candidate. 

But the latest round of Democratic failures — Biden’s debate face-plant and Kamala Harris’ defeat — spurred Moulton to make another attempt at higher office. 

“Someone who has been in Congress for half a century and will be 86 years old at the end of his next term is, in fact, too old,” Moulton told the Washington Post after launching his campaign last October. “If we haven’t learned the lessons of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden…then where are we going as a party?”

Is this a race about who’s the best progressive, or about who wants to shake up the way things are done?

In addition to the close polling in recent months, Moulton’s fundraising has been impressive — aided, Markey’s allies argued, by donors associated with private equity and crypto. (A pro-Markey Super PAC has fundraised heavily from unions, as well as some investors and corporate executives.)

But when Markey and Moulton faced off on the debate stage earlier this month, nothing even close to the Joe Biden catastrophe ensued. Markey insisted he’d never been more energized, and both candidates hit their preferred messaging points. For Markey, that meant portraying himself as a dependable progressive and Moulton as an unreliable ally.

“After the 2024 election, Congressman Moulton decided that he was gonna throw trans kids under the bus — the political bus — and blame them for the loss of the 2024 election.” Markey said. “Those kids are vulnerable. Those kids need love. Those kids don’t need to be scapegoated and blamed for what was wrong with the Democratic Party.”

But in Moulton’s interview with me, he said that “it’s very hard to find any fundamental differences in the issues” between him and Markey. 

“I’m an ally for all the people and causes on all these issues that Senator Markey and I agree on, and I’m very proud of how much my voting record aligns with Senator Markey’s on the major issues,” Moulton said. “But I’m not gonna just sit back and do what the establishment tells me to do, especially when the establishment is failing.”

Could you accidentally gamble away your right to vote?

If you live in Wisconsin, and you bought contracts on a prediction market like Kalshi about who would win elections there, you’ve done just that, according to state election officials. And they think that if you vote anyway, you could be prosecuted.

“We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a statement Tuesday, ahead of the state’s August 11 primaries.

The reason wasn’t a new law about online markets but a very old statute dating back to the year 1849 — just after Wisconsin became a state. 

“No person shall be allowed to vote in any election in which the person has made or become interested, directly or indirectly, in any bet or wager depending upon the result of the election,” the statute reads.

The bipartisan commission also said those voters could be on the hook for felony exposure, if they know about the prohibition and vote anyway. Intentionally voting while not being qualified to do so is a felony, per state law. “It’s important for voters to understand the consequences if they bet on an election outcome,” Wolfe said.

Many other states have laws on the books against gambling on elections. Wisconsin is the first where officials are saying people are banned from voting if they do it through prediction markets.

And it may not be the last, since New York has a very similar provision in both its constitution and state law. 

“In New York State, voting in an election in which an individual has placed any bet or wager on the result is prohibited,” Kathleen McGrath, director of public information for the New York State Board of Elections, told me. 

The New York attorney general’s office has not yet issued a formal opinion on whether Kalshi and Polymarket election bettors are barred from voting in elections they’ve wagered on. But they’re currently locked in a court battle to try and get Kalshi regulated under state gambling laws.

All this makes for a potentially explosive situation in the upcoming midterms, given the rapid growth of the industry, which has rolled out massive advertising campaigns and sponsorship deals to attract customers this election cycle. 

Prediction market companies have responded with fury. Benjamin Freeman of Kalshi posted on X that this was “insane,” blatantly unconstitutional,” “illegal,” “dishonest,” and “dystopian.” In an emailed statement, Kalshi said this was “incredibly dangerous to democracy.” 

Bettors may be less perturbed. “The reaction I am party to is almost amused by how idiotic it is — how unenforceable, and backwards, and emblematic of government regulators,” said Alex Keeney, who founded Eventual, a prediction market podcast he co-hosts with traders.

But Wisconsin Elections Commission member Ann Jacobs, who flagged the issue earlier this year and helped create the new guidance, told me in an interview that the decision was not taken lightly.

“This has been the law for a long time,” she said. “And if you don’t like the law, go talk to your legislator.”

So, where did this old law come from? Could it actually be enforced? And would it hold up against court challenges?

America’s hidden history of degenerate election gambling

It may seem surprising that a state would have such an old law of this nature on the books.

But, it turns out, many early 19th century Americans were degenerate election gamblers — so many that this became a topic of national conversation and condemnation.

In a 2012 paper, economic historian Paul Rhode and economist Koleman Strumpf wrote that betting on elections was “commonplace” since the US’s earliest years as a nation, but that it became “especially intense during the partisan conflicts of the Jacksonian era.” Newspapers, which in those days were mainly partisan, championed the practice.

Concerns eventually rose that election betting encouraged election rigging, just as people complain today that prop bets are corrupting sports. After the 1844 election, Rhode and Strumpf wrote, Whig Party members complained that “gamblers favoring Polk had committed voting fraud using the winnings from election bets to defray their expenses.” 

Then, in 1845, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, urged his state legislature to make “the extensive and rapidly increasing practice of betting on elections” illegal, due to the “corrupting tendencies which it exerts upon the election itself.” And, Rhode and Strumpf continue, evangelicals “preached long and hard against election betting” as part of the second Great Awakening movement.

The craze eventually faded, but it was peaking just around the time Wisconsin became a state in 1848. So its new state constitution specifically addressed the issue, saying “laws may be passed” excluding election bettors “from the right of suffrage.” Hence the 1849 law.

Why attention returned to this law in 2026

In recent years, in the rare occasions when the law has been noticed at all, it’s been treated as an amusing, antiquated curiosity. 

But the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket — and the corresponding surge in election betting — made it relevant again.

In March, after Jacobs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission heard a radio story about Polymarket, she posted on X: “WI friends – I know it’s all the rage to bet on everything, but you cannot bet on an election in Wisconsin!  If you do, your ballot can be challenged & thrown out.”

Kalshi has long taken the position that it doesn’t allow election “gambling,” but rather “financial products” called “event contracts.” But the commission’s legal staff studied the issue, and concluded earlier this month that it was “relatively clear” that a Wisconsinite “cannot, even indirectly” make a bet or wager on an election and then vote in that election. 

The press release warning voters — and the backlash from Kalshi and Polymarket — soon followed. 

How the law might (but probably wouldn’t) be enforced

So, what would happen, then, if an avid “event contract” trader decided to vote anyway?

Realistically, the answer is: probably nothing.

But if someone else had knowledge that this person was making election bets and voting, they could show up to try to get them disqualified.

“You would have to be there at the moment they showed up to vote — or when their absentee ballot is pulled out to be counted — and you’d say, ‘I’m challenging that voter,‘” Jeff Mandell, a Wisconsin election lawyer, told me. “But the chances that somebody is around with the right knowledge to block someone on one of these bases strikes me as pretty slender.”

The other theoretical risk is felony prosecution. Law enforcement officials could obtain information that people voted on elections they’d wagered on and, then, criminally charge them for  voting illegally. 

But Mandell pointed out that “that seems like a lot of work” for a prosecutor, adding, “I think that fears about enforcement, either civil or criminal, are probably overstated.”

Still, Jacobs argued, it’s possible. “This is the law,” Jacobs said. “It is a situation where, if people have placed a bet, they should consult with their own attorney and decide what to do.”

Would the law stand up to court challenge?

Since Wisconsin’s original state constitution specifically said the state could restrict election bettors from voting, the law would seem to be on firm ground.

There’s just one catch: That section of the constitution was repealed forty years ago. 

That repeal was made as part of a broader overhaul of the document and doesn’t appear to have been specifically targeted at the election betting issue. But it does mean that the statute doesn’t necessarily have the firm state constitutional footing it once did.

“The current constitutional language only authorizes the legislature to disenfranchise voters on two grounds — a felony conviction or incompetency — which does suggest that disenfranchisement on other grounds is impermissible,” Robert Yablon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor, said in an email.

The law could also be challenged in federal court. As written, the law appears to prohibit even someone making a $1 bet with their friend on an election outcome from voting. Challengers could argue that law isn’t narrowly tailored enough to justify depriving qualified citizens of their voting rights.

For now, though, the law is on the books, and it says what it says. 

“As a policy, it makes sense,” Jacobs told Vox. “You want people to make their voting decisions based on who they think is best for the job — not who’s going to make them the most money.”

The New York question

Though the Wisconsin situation has made national headlines this week, it has largely escaped notice that New York has very similar provisions in both its constitution and in state law.

New York’s constitution says that no person who “shall make or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of any election, shall vote at such election.”

In fact, state law says that if a voter’s eligibility is challenged on these grounds, they must swear what is known as the “Bribery Oath,” swearing that they haven’t been paid to vote a certain way — and that they “have not made, or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of this election.”

When I inquired with New York state officials about whether these provisions about bets and wagers applied to Kalshi and Polymarket election event contracts, they declined to comment specifically on that.

But the New York attorney general’s office has repeatedly taken the position, both in their public rhetoric and in court, that prediction markets are “gambling platforms” that should be regulated by state gambling law. (Earlier this month, a judge gave the state a favorable ruling in a suit brought by Kalshi over this, though Kalshi is appealing.)

If New York reaches a similar interpretation as Wisconsin, Kalshi or Polymarket bettors on elections would not be legally permitted to vote in those elections. Of course, doing that comes with a risk of voter disenfranchisement, especially if this guidance isn’t well-publicized or is only belatedly clarified.

So, in both states, these very old laws have collided with a modern trend — and the result is a big mess. 

A decade’s worth of grudges and feuds between the Democratic establishment and the insurgent left is coming to a head in one election this year: Michigan’s Senate primary.

The contest between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed has somehow unearthed every fault line that’s divided the two factions over the years — from gender and racial politics, to Israel and Gaza, to questions of electability and fair play, to money in politics, and much more.

On one side there’s Stevens, a four-term House member who is the preferred candidate of the Democratic establishment — and of AIPAC, which has spent nearly $30 million to support her campaign. 

On the other is El-Sayed, a former public health official who’s been backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their network of supporters and fans. 

But the race has quickly gone beyond just them and become about something bigger — the national struggle for influence in the Democratic Party. 

“This is the quintessential contest between the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the economically populist wing,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the left group Our Revolution.

In contrast, Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left group Third Way, argued that nominating El-Sayed — a “super extreme candidate who will alienate lots of voters in the middle” — is a dangerous risk.

In this one race, the Democratic factions are relitigating the 2016 presidential primary, the 2020 presidential primary, and several major controversies of the past few years, all at once. And whoever wins will have to find a way to somehow unite the party and win a competitive general election against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers. 

On gender and racial politics, we’re doing 2016 again

When Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination, her supporters frequently implied he had blind spots related to gender and race. They argued, for instance, that certain criticisms of Clinton (and remarks by Sanders) were sexist, and that Sanders’s poor performance with Black voters demonstrated the limits of his appeal. 

The discourse also sometimes focused on so-called “Bernie Bros” — online Sanders supporters who, critics argued, directed toxic abuse and vitriol toward people not in his camp. Sanders’s backers argued that the accusations of sexism were themselves a dishonest and inaccurate smear to distract from Clinton’s own shortcomings. 

All of this is happening again now in Michigan.

On gender, a comment from El-Sayed a few weeks back — he said Stevens was unable to “string together two coherent sentences” — was criticized by the Stevens camp as sexist. 

Then, last week, a video of an enthusiastic speech by Stevens on the campaign trail went viral as online El-Sayed supporters mocked her diction and delivery, viewing her way of speaking as self-evidently ridiculous. 

Seeking to tamp down this behavior, El-Sayed posted Friday that the way “people online” were making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies” was “unkind and unhelpful.” He also told Vox’s America, Actually podcast that the accusations of him being disrespectful to women have gotten back to his daughter, and been hurtful.

Meanwhile, on race, a poll last week shows Black Democrats splitting 67 percent for Stevens, and 21 percent for El-Sayed. Days later, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC endorsed Stevens. Just like Clinton in 2016, Stevens is hoping support among Black voters who are longtime stalwarts of the Democratic base will be enough to carry her to victory. And just like Sanders in 2016 and 2020, El-Sayed is facing questions about whether the party’s left vanguard can expand its support beyond white, college-educated voters. 

“The progressive brand really, really underperforms with Black voters all around the country,” said Adrian Hemond of the Democratic advocacy firm Grassroots Midwest. “I think it’s worth Democrats, media, and people in the nonprofit blob asking themselves why that is.”

The establishment vs. insurgent tension, and the Obama of it all

In both of Sanders’s presidential runs, his team griped about the behavior of the Democratic establishment, arguing that they weren’t truly playing fair. For instance, they pointed to how the DNC initially scheduled very few debates for the 2016 presidential contenders, arguing the supposedly neutral committee was in fact trying to help the frontrunner, Clinton, by limiting attention on her opponents.

To Sanders’s supporters, the bitterest pill was the perceived late intervention of former President Barack Obama into the 2020 campaign just as Sanders appeared well-positioned to win the nomination. (Days before the crucial Super Tuesday primaries, two other candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Obama was publicly neutral, but privately called Biden and Buttigieg during this key period, raising speculation about his role.)

In Michigan, again, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is officially neutral, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has long been understood to favor Stevens, and reportedly has privately asked donors to back her.

Obama, too, has become a flashpoint. An AIPAC-linked group has spent millions on an ad showing Obama praising Stevens — even though he has not endorsed her in this race. The praise is from comments Obama made during Stevens’s first House campaign, in 2018. (Stevens had worked on his presidential task force to rescue the auto industry during the Great Recession.)

El-Sayed’s supporters have argued that this is an attempt to mislead Michigan voters into thinking Stevens has Obama’s backing. “It is disgusting that AIPAC — which spent tens of millions attacking Obama — is now spending like crazy to lie and suggest he endorsed Haley Stevens,” Ben Rhodes, a former Obama White House official who supports El-Sayed, posted on X.

Others suspect that Obama does in fact tacitly support Stevens, and that’s why he’s letting the ad stand without clarifying things. (El-Sayed thought Obama was too “centrist” and “middle of the road,” he told Vox in 2017.) And yet again, people are fighting over 2016: Some Stevens supporters point out that Sanders used footage of Obama praising him in a 2020 primary ad despite the senator’s own criticism of the former president. 

Israel/Gaza, AIPAC, antisemitism, money in politics, Hasan Piker, etc…

Of course, the issue that has come up repeatedly in tense Democratic primaries this cycle — Israel — is present in this race in a major way. 

Many on the left argue that the war in Gaza contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat by disillusioning some of her potential supporters and dissuading them from turning out. The evidence that this phenomenon occurred in significant numbers due to Gaza specifically is thin. But it arguably may have been a factor in Michigan, where 2 percent of the population is Muslim and Trump worked hard to court disaffected voters with vague promises to end the war.

Here, Stevens is an unapologetically pro-Israel candidate who wants to continue US military aid to the country and does not believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. (She said during a Hanukkah event once that “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”) El-Sayed, in contrast, has been sharply critical of Israel throughout this race.

The center-left group Third Way has spent months attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, arguing that comments of Piker’s — that “America deserved 9/11,” and that a certain sect of Israeli Orthodox Jews was “inbred” — are un-American and antisemitic. (Piker has said he calls lots of different groups he dislikes inbred.)

Meanwhile, Stevens has been the beneficiary of that nearly $30 million in AIPAC-linked spending — a topic she generally tries to avoid discussing. The ads in question don’t talk about Israel at all and instead praise Stevens on other issues. “It is just a clear indication of where the base of the party is right now that AIPAC has to continually do this spending through their allied outside groups,” Dani Negrete of Indivisible, a progressive group backing El-Sayed, told me.

Electability and the question of: who can’t win?

After a decade of factional squabbling, the left and the mainstream factions have each honed their talking points for why, when a Democrat loses the general election, it’s the other faction’s fault.

To the establishment, left candidates are risky bets: They’ve taken positions that may alienate swing voters and are less dependable than candidates with longer electoral pedigrees. 

In endorsing Stevens this month, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) warned they needed someone who was “fully vetted.” El-Sayed’s supporters viewed these and other remarks from Stevens supporters as baselessly linking their candidate to Graham Platner, who dropped out of his race in Maine over sexual assault allegations that he denies. However, unlike Platner, who was plucked from obscurity, El-Sayed has been a political figure for nearly a decade and faced significant media scrutiny already. 

Another version of the critique is more about whether El-Sayed’s policy positions — for instance, his past support for defunding the police, and his backing of Medicare-for-all — are too far left for this swing state in the general election.

Meanwhile, the left’s argument for why establishment candidates flop is that they fail to excite the base and stimulate turnout. Therefore, they claim, El-Sayed is the safer choice.

Lately, this argument has focused on Israel and Gaza. Left commentators argue that the Biden administration’s support of Israel and failure to stop what they call a genocide in Gaza was a major — perhaps the major — reason Harris lost in 2024, because part of the Democratic base was disillusioned and didn’t turn out. So, some on the left have suggested, if Stevens is the nominee, Democrats are risking the seat by disillusioning the same voters.

The mirror of this argument, from the establishment, blames the left for causing this disillusionment. By criticizing rival Democrats in harsh terms and casting them as pawns of special interests, they prime their voters to sit out the general election after their own candidates fail to win the nomination. “Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” famed Democratic consultant James Carville said last week, arguing this was because Sanders convinced his own supporters the Democratic Party was corrupt. 

This fight has played out in miniature in Michigan. Stevens has accused El-Sayed of undermining Democrats in 2024 by backing the “Uncommitted” movement, which sought to protest Biden’s Israel policy in the primaries. El-Sayed, conscious of this criticism, has gone out of his way to emphasize his early support for Harris in 2024, in contrast to others who sat out the race. But he’s also warned that the wrong Senate candidate could recreate the conditions that led to her loss.  

Last week, a post from one El-Sayed supporter that he would not vote for Stevens in the general election went viral. “The Democratic Party needs to be anti-AIPAC, not pro-AIPAC, and it only happens if candidates like Haley Stevens don’t win in general elections,” Adeeb Hafeez posted on X.

The next day — after critics argued this could lead to an even bigger conservative Supreme Court majority — Hafeez walked it back a bit. He posted that he “may hold my nose and end up voting for” Stevens after all in the general if she advances — but that he’d “be very uncomfortable in doing so.”

The exchange underscored the challenge for Democrats in coming together after the primary. No matter who wins, they’ll carry the scars of not only this race, but election after election pitting left-wing candidates against moderates, each of which have left behind bruised feelings and mutual suspicion. 

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump fired one of his own appointees who was reportedly trying to stop his team from illegally interfering with the IRS.

What happened? Ken Kies headed tax policy at the Treasury Department and was simultaneously serving as the IRS’s top lawyer on an acting basis. 

But, according to the Wall Street Journal, he’s now been forced out. And his ouster comes after he’d clashed with White House officials over certain requests they were making about IRS audits — requests that, Kies believed, were illegal.

Federal law prohibits the president and White House staffers from requesting, “directly or indirectly,” that the IRS “conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer.”

What was the White House trying to do? We don’t know yet. Possibilities include that they were requesting that certain people or groups, perhaps political enemies, be audited — or that they were trying to make ongoing audits of Trump’s allies go away. 

Do we know Kies was fired because of this? Not for sure. The Journal reports that administration officials and conservative activists had other complaints about Kies, including that he wasn’t working fast enough to roll back Biden-era regulations, and that he was cracking down on wealthy investors’ attempts to get huge tax breaks by not developing certain lands. 

What’s the takeaway? In 1971, President Richard Nixon privately told his aides that, atop the IRS, he wanted “a ruthless son of a bitch” that will “go after our enemies and not go after our friends.”

When these and many other Nixon-era abuses came to light, new laws were passed, and new norms were established to prevent this.

But these norms have been fraying. Indeed, Vice President JD Vance recently argued that Nixon’s scandals weren’t actually so bad and shouldn’t have taken down his presidency at all.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The World Cup final between Spain and Argentina is this Sunday…or is it? That will depend on whether the wildfire smoke-ridden air in northern New Jersey (and much of the East Coast and Midwest) improves enough by then. 

Fingers crossed that it will, but while we wait, read Caitlin Dewey on how US cities had some of the unhealthiest air in the world this week.

Update, July 17, 1 pm: On Friday, one candidate — Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez — dropped out of the Wisconsin governor’s race, while another who had exited the race earlier, Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, said he was considering restarting his campaign. The moves raised speculation in Wisconsin media that Democratic leaders are scrambling to rally behind a candidate to defeat Francesca Hong. The article below was originally published earlier in July 17.

Democratic socialists have scored surprising wins in several mayoral and congressional races across the country.

But a swing-state governorship is a different story. In fact, there’s never been a socialist governor in any state in all of American history.

Francesca Hong is trying to make that happen in Wisconsin. A 37-year old former chef and restaurant owner, Hong first ran for office in 2020, when her industry was in crisis due to the pandemic, and won election to the state assembly. After six years there, she’s running for governor.

The primary is on August 11 and, so far, the state’s Democratic establishment has failed to consolidate around one opponent to stop her. (The leading contenders appear to be former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes and current lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez.)

Republicans in the state appear to be hoping they’ll face Hong in the general election. One GOP-tied Super PAC is spending $2 million to air ads that heavily feature Hong before the primary. And her past comments on policing — “Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option,” she tweeted in 2021 – will give them some ammunition.

Yet, when I reviewed Hong’s platform, I was struck by its relative pragmatism, especially compared to the grander goals often put forward by socialists running from Congress who have fewer budget and political constraints than governors. Many of her top goals, like expanding access to child care and pushing back on data centers, have been adopted by Democratic leaders elsewhere.

Hong doesn’t see it that way, exactly. “Incrementalism is irresponsible,” she told me. “Pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.”

But as she acknowledged, many of her ambitions will depend on whether non-socialist Democrats manage to win enough state legislative seats to topple a 16-year GOP majority, and, then, what they’d be willing to pass. 

I spoke with Hong about how she thinks about being a socialist, about how she hopes to govern differently from traditional Democrats, and about how she’d work to use the powers of the governor to advance some of her more controversial causes like police abolition (which she’s said is still “a very long term vision”). Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

Would a socialist governor do things differently?

If you win this governor’s race, you’ll be the first socialist governor in United States history. How should we think about what that means? And how would you govern differently from more traditional Democrats, like your state’s current governor?

I think it means that the people are ready for power to answer to them — ready for a new type of politics. The same plays and players, the policies that we have enacted in the past, have gotten us here. With the struggles with affordability, with the climate crisis, all these different existential crises that are happening — folks are pragmatically demanding a new type of government.

And as a democratic socialist, I plan to govern by ensuring that every policy is focused on bringing more democratic control into our economy and making it work for working class people.

So, let’s drill down into the office of the governor itself. I’ve covered a lot of races with different socialists or left candidates around the country. There are a lot of bold sweeping promises that are made in congressional races. 

But, as governor, you’re going to actually have to balance the budget. You’ll have to deal with the legislature. As you were shaping your campaign agenda and your platform, how did you think about these constraints? 

Incrementalism is irresponsible. I’m a community organizer. This is a grassroots powered campaign. We have volunteers and supporters who are talking to their neighbors right now about the importance of winning a trifecta and flipping the legislature in both the senate and the assembly — that the work to govern begins now.

And I think that I’ve built relationships with Republicans and many of my Democratic colleagues, who disagree with me on different issues when it comes to more democratic-socialist-centered policies. The executive has a responsibility to work collaboratively with the legislature, make the decisions in determining when to use executive order, but also be willing to govern unafraid and wield the full power of the executive.

How is Francesca Hong’s platform different from a typical Democrat’s?

So, tell me about some of your top priorities on that front — both what might be able to be done with the executive power of the governor itself and also other things that you would probably need a legislative majority for.

Public education. There is no strong democracy without strong public education.

And so, here in Wisconsin, we’ve been defunding public education under the Republican legislature for the last 16 years. Fully funding public education, to me, means ensuring public dollars stay in public schools, phasing out the voucher program; reimbursing special education at 90 percent; and moving to “two-thirds,” an equitable funding formula [in which two-thirds of public school funding is paid for by the state government].

We have to fund local governments adequately. So many essential programs and services that our local governments provide have been compromised because the state has been hoarding our state dollars and resources and not giving their fair share back to local governments.

And for executive order, I think it’s important to look at what can be done in the calling for special sessions — to bring the legislature in to take up high priority items like a moratorium on AI data centers. We’ve pledged that within the first hundred days, we’d like to see a special session for passing common sense gun safety legislation.

These are bills that Democrats have introduced, that are ready to go. We need that majority to enact them with the swiftness that we need.

A lot of what I see in your platform — public school funding, taxing the rich, child care programs similar to that in states like New Mexico, gun safety — these are definitely strong progressive proposals. But they don’t seem to me inherently different from what Democrats are advocating elsewhere in other states and from what your rivals in this primary are advocating.

What would be the biggest contrast issues where you would be really offering something different, or going further?

When it comes to health care, I have not seen my opponents or heard about their plans to lower health care prices, to look at how our corporate hospitals are taxed here in the state.

How to prevent private equity and take on monopoly by investing in our attorney general’s office — it is the regulation piece of taking on corporate control and corruption that we have not seen very many specifics about from my opponents.

And we are the only campaign to support — and I’ve introduced the legislation — calling for a moratorium on the construction of hyperscale AI data centers.

Data centers and local control

Talk to me about the data center issue, because it’s becoming so important in so many places around the country. What did you see, what did you hear that led you to take this stance and decide that this is what the state needs?

We’re hearing from communities across the state — whether it’s Wisconsin Rapids or Menominee, Beloit, Janesville — that people don’t want to be controlled by big tech and developers. They feel like we’re selling out our natural resources, that we already have rising utility bills, and we’re risking sending those energy costs even higher.

And the reason the moratorium is the most practical and responsible legislation is the scale and speed in which these data center proposals are popping up across the state and the resources that our local governments lack.

We cannot govern by promise. We cannot go into deals with developers where taxpayers could potentially be on the hook. We cannot afford to be Foxconned again. 

We need communities that have a say. We want there to be long-term investment in local economies, and we don’t have the enforceable mechanisms in place to hold polluters and developers accountable so that taxpayers aren’t on the hook.

So, would the goal be to permanently put a halt to this because AI is bad? Or is it more that the goal is to come up with frameworks, a consensus of some kind that can allow maybe certain data center construction that makes sense in certain areas to proceed?

This is very much about local control, with the statewide enforcement mechanisms to protect natural resources, rate payers, and make sure that our local communities have the strongest negotiation tools that they need, should this be something the community decides they want to move forward with.

Israel and Gaza

So, let’s shift gears and talk about another issue that has been really common in these contested primaries around the country, which is Israel and Gaza.

You were part of the “Uncommitted” movement in 2024 to try to pressure Joe Biden to change course on Gaza. You’ve been pretty clear in describing it as a crucial moral cause, a moral test. If you win the governorship, what would be your major priorities as governor on this issue?

Protest is free speech and direct democracy. And right now, we have an anti-BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions] law on the books that we’ve had legislation we’ve introduced to repeal, so that the state is not interfering in the right to protest.

We have passed the IHRA definition of antisemitism: the IHRA legislation, here in our state, that was quite controversial. I would be looking at potentially repealing that legislation.

In continuing to make sure communities, all communities, regardless of faith, feel safe, it’s imperative that the executive use their microphone — the governor has one of the largest microphones in the state — to ensure that Wisconsin is not a place that will tolerate hate and discrimination of any kind. 

And I think, oftentimes, the genocide in Gaza has led to a lot of very painful conversations. And I want folks to know that feeling safe and the right to practice faiths is something that is of utmost priority to me and a future Hong administration.

Francesca Hong’s political history

Tell me about how you got into politics, because it’s a very unusual trajectory. You were a chef, you co-owned a restaurant, what inspired you to actually make the leap and say, “I’m going to run for office”?

This was COVID in 2020. And seeing a failure in our state legislature, and responding to a pandemic that was hurting — and so many communities. I think, it wasn’t one moment, it was a combination of grief, frustration, and wanting new leadership and representation.

I was asked multiple times to run. They say you have to ask a woman six times before she’ll run for office.

Who was asking you?

Actually, a couple of fellow chefs. Not a lot of folks who were involved in local politics. But I found out that some of my regulars were actually Republican staffers and folks who worked in the Capitol, because my restaurant was right next to the Capitol.

But I think in times of chaos and crisis, there’s opportunity for change and a desire for change.

I think our community was ready for a foul-mouthed, cussing at [longtime GOP speaker of the Wisconsin assembly] Robin Vos restaurant worker who just wanted to make sure people were fed during the pandemic, too.

What would you say you’ve learned from the legislature? You’ve been there six years, and it’s been Republican-controlled the whole time, so you’ve been in the minority.

I’ve learned being a service industry worker serves you very well in politics. Whether it’s from work ethic — I didn’t go to culinary school, and so when I was line cooking and working my way up to becoming a chef, I had to outhustle everyone. I also learned the importance of working on a team in high-stress situations.

I learned that relationships and information are currency, that you have to be persistent in building these relationships. Did I have beers with Republicans at the bar to talk about economic development? I absolutely did. I also talk to Republicans on the assembly floor. And I passed bipartisan legislation. A lot of folks are surprised that a Madison lib was able to move a bill. It was a bill that would require K-12 public schools to teach Asian American history.

Crime and policing

Of course, the other thing going on in 2020 to 2021 was the racial reckoning and talk of police reform. You came out pretty strong on that, saying things like: “Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.” 

Some on the left have disavowed those views, but you told CNN earlier this year that this is still “a very long term vision.”

As governor, you’d have influence over the state patrol, prison administration, and pardon power. What sort of things would you do differently with those tools when it comes to criminal justice?

To be tough on crime, we must be tough on causes.

To be serious about public safety requires community investment in our public schools and mental health resources and decriminalizing.

We criminalize poverty. The safest communities in Wisconsin are ones where the people have good jobs with benefits; there are great public parks, community centers; people have housing; there’s not food insecurity; there are lots of grocery stores.

So, building in these investments, but also having a more efficient pardon process. Our governor has a relatively efficient pardon process, he also just reinstated commutation. 

We have some of the highest incarceration rates in the country when it comes to incarcerating Black and brown folks. And our prison system is currently — to folks who are incarcerated, many of the conditions are unsafe and inhumane.

And the cost to this state in both human lives, but also in terms of it costs more to incarcerate an individual in our state than it does for a year’s tuition at UW Madison.

There are practical, common sense reforms that we can do within the state budget and through standalone legislation when it comes to the carceral system, community investments, in ending juvenile life sentencing. We still try juveniles as adults in our state.

So, moving to ensure we have safer communities. Everyone has a right to feel safe. I plan to address all of that comprehensively. And if anyone has been defunding police, it is Robin Vos and the Republicans who have hollowed out our local governments of their funding and shared revenue for the last 16 years.

Can Francesca Hong win?

What do you say to the people who are concerned that you’ve taken positions that are too far left to win and that the party would be better off with a more traditional choice as the nominee?

If you talk to Trump voters, independents, democratic socialists, new voters, the issues and the solutions are more important than the labels.

We’re in a moment right now where there is a working class reckoning, of people feeling like they’re getting screwed — working multiple jobs and still putting bills on hold or not being able to pay them.

This is not left-right. This is about building working-class people power, and the issues are top down.

I think that pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.

We’re going to need to pass the most comprehensive legislation that will materially improve the people’s lives, in order for folks to look up and say, “Hey, Dems are in power and some good things happen.” Maybe then they’ll want to vote for them again.

Among Democratic voters, Israel’s reputation is in tatters.

Polls show Democratic voters have dramatically unfavorable views of Israel. Three incumbent Democrats who’ve supported Israel lost primaries in recent weeks; pro-Israel groups are spending millions of dollars to try to defeat high-profile candidates in other races. And there’s been dwindling Democratic support in Congress for weapons sales and even aid to the Jewish nation.

The basic reason is obvious: the devastation of the Gaza war. Yet though Democrats and especially young voters soured on the war soon after it began, rank-and-file Democrats did not initially turn so sharply against the country of Israel itself.

Indeed, a review of years of polling data shows that, in retrospect, the turning point — the year the bottom fell out — was 2025.

That year, a confluence of events — Donald Trump succeeding Joe Biden as president, Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran, and that summer’s intense hunger crisis in Gaza — spurred a shift in which hostility toward Israel was no longer just for the Democratic left. Much of the party’s mainstream began feeling it too.

What’s resulted, pollster and University of Maryland scholar Shibley Telhami argued to me, has been “a paradigm shift.” The young generation of Democrats, Telhami said, quickly came to see Israel as “a genocidal villain” — and then many in the older generations came to a similar conclusion. 

That’s not to say that Democrats are now all-out opposed to Israel’s existence. In an email, Jake McClory of the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC pointed to his own group’s polling of Democrats from last October, which found that 75 percent say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland.

But as bad as things are for Israel now, there’s still room to get worse. In one alarming sign for those sympathetic to the country, polls show that Democrats are now unfavorably disposed not just to the nation’s leaders — but also to its citizenry. A new Pew Research Center poll found that just 43 percent of Democrats say they view the Israeli people favorably — down from 58 percent in 2024.

This is partly why the question of timing matters. While Israel has struggled to maintain its support over the years, the arc of its decline suggests a complete collapse was not inevitable: Instead, the polling tells a story of Israel’s specific actions and partisan politics mixing together at a sensitive time to turn public opinion decisively against its government — and raise its importance in Democratic primaries.

How mainstream Democrats turned against Israel last year

In a sense, Democrats’ turn against Israel has been in the works for years. Gallup has polled voters about whether they are more sympathetic with the Israelis or the Palestinians for more than two decades. Among Democrats, a historic advantage for Israel tightened in the 2010s and vanished in the early 2020s.

Sympathy for Israel after the October 7, 2023, attacks quickly disappeared, as the country became viewed as the aggressor rather than the victim. In February 2024, 43 percent of Democrats sympathized with Palestinians more, and 35 percent sympathized with Israelis more.

“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced. And the Biden administration was going back and forth.”

Indeed, Biden had attempted a kind of “middle ground” approach to the conflict, in which he tried to rein in Israel’s actions in Gaza somewhat while remaining sympathetic to the Israelis’ war aims. 

But Biden’s status as the leader of the Democratic Party also complicated the debate. Protests against Israel, like the “uncommitted” movement, were divisive not just because of disagreements over the war, but because many Democrats saw them as undermining Biden (and later Kamala Harris) ahead of the 2024 election. When pro-Israel groups successfully backed challenges to left-wing incumbents that cycle, the ads often focused not on Israel but on their targets’ perceived disloyalty to Biden. 

Once Trump took office and began working closely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, this concern dissipated — and what Bendaas calls the “partisan-ization” of Israel took place. The pro-Israeli view of the conflict became much more associated with the GOP — and many older Democrats with more mainstream views began viewing Israel more negatively, as polarization did its work.

Milan Singh, a commentator at the center-left publication The Argument, concurred, recently writing: “When Trump came back into office, it was like a pressure valve was released. Older Democrats no longer felt conflicted between loyalty to their party’s leader and the arguments of elites they trusted.”

Indeed, by February 2025, the gap between Democrats’ sympathy for the Israelis and Palestinians in Gallup polling had turned into a chasm. 59 percent of Democrats now said they sympathized with Palestinians more, and just 21 percent sympathized more with Israelis. (In the same period, the share of Republicans and independents who said they were sympathetic to Israel also decreased, though by much less dramatic margins.)

These changes put public support for Israel on very shaky ground. But the events of the next few months sent it crashing through that floor, while also raising the issue’s importance among primary voters. 

In March, a brief ceasefire collapsed and fighting in Gaza resumed. 

Then in June, Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear program, a decision that was overwhelmingly opposed by Democratic voters. 

And later in the summer, a hunger crisis in Gaza, widely blamed on Israel’s mishandling of food aid, was heavily covered and drew condemnations even from typically reliable defenders within the party. That July, a majority of Senate Democrats voted to block a weapons sale to Israel, a high watermark at the time that’s only grown since then.

All the while, Israel’s polling among Democrats kept on worsening. A Quinnipiac poll last August found that 77 percent of Democrats thought Israel had committed genocide (a sharp increase from earlier polls), and that just 13 percent of Democrats sympathized with the Israelis more than the Palestinians.

But perhaps the most striking shift has been in views of the Israeli people. 

In Pew Research Center polls both before and after the October 7 attacks, Democrats’ views on the Israeli people had remained fairly stable — suggesting many were making a distinction between government policies they opposed and affection for the country’s people. 

This mirrors the way Democratic politicians often talk about Israel, with many criticizing Netanyahu and his governing coalition while stressing their support for the country’s people and their security. That’s true even of some candidates who’ve made criticism of Israel central to their campaigns: Brad Lander, who defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in New York with left-wing support last month, identifies as a “liberal Zionist.” 

By September 2025, though, the number of Democrats saying they viewed the Israeli people favorably had dropped significantly — from 58 percent the previous year, down to 48 percent. 

And another Pew poll released last week found that number had dropped yet further, to 43 percent. Conversely, Democrats’ views of the Palestinian people (67 percent favorable, in last week’s poll) haven’t changed much over this period.

This new reality is already having major ramifications in Democratic primary elections across the country — and is likely to weigh heavily on contenders for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination. What once was a split on Israel among the Democratic base has become a consensus: Most of their voters view the country very negatively indeed.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Remember the policy changes we wrote about in this newsletter on Monday and Tuesday? Neither lasted more than 24 hours — both fell victim to presidential posting.

What happened? On Monday afternoon, the Logoff covered how President Donald Trump said he would charge a 20 percent fee to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. 

But he reversed course on that yesterday morning, posting on Truth Social that he’d “replace” the fee with trade and investment deals that Gulf nations would purportedly make in the US.

Yesterday afternoon’s Logoff then covered how, after two recent deadly shootings, ICE had been ordered to temporarily stop making traffic stops nationwide.

But this morning, Trump declared that traffic stops were back on, posting: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”

Why did Trump flip-flop? The Hormuz fee was a Trump whim that many of his own aides had deep logistical and political qualms about. For one, they believed the move could push gas prices higher. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said just last month that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway.”

As Monday stretched on, Trump was deluged with lobbying from Gulf nations who rely on the strait — such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and ultimately decided to back down.

The ICE traffic stop pause followed the opposite trajectory. This was a decision made by administration officials without Trump’s knowledge — and when he watched press coverage and heard right-wing criticism of it, he was irate, per CNN.

What’s the takeaway? The reversals show whose criticism and feedback Trump actually cares about. 

Wealthy Gulf leaders and the spectre of higher gas prices helped talk him down from his Hormuz fee. And on traffic stops, he ultimately cared less about tamping down national outrage over deadly shootings than he did about preserving his “tough on immigration” reputation and agenda.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

A 67-million-year old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton sold at auction for a record $50.1 million yesterday to an anonymous bidder. Mystery bidder, if you’re reading this, can I stop by and see it?

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump followed days of intense US strikes on Iran by declaring the US is taking charge of the Strait of Hormuz — and demanding payments of 20 percent of the value of all cargo shipped through it.

What happened to the ceasefire? Last week, the hazy ceasefire deal that the US and Iran struck in mid-June fell apart, as Iran attacked several oil tankers traversing the strait. The US responded by striking more than 300 targets in Iran and reimposing sanctions. Iran resumed attacks on US bases in the Gulf as well.

So what did Trump say now? On Monday morning, Trump said that he was reinstating the US’s naval blockade on Iran and declared the US to be “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT.”

Trump further declared that the US “will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job.”

What’s the context? Since Trump launched the war in February, Iran’s most effective response has been the attacks on ships that effectively “closed” the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil corridor — posing the risk of a major spike in oil prices.

Trump has made his deep desire to reopen the strait obvious. But Iran has been unwilling to give up this leverage so easily: It has asserted the right to charge fees for passage — and to fire on ships that don’t play ball.

So Trump is essentially saying, You don’t take me hostage; I’ll take you hostage (since Iran also needs to ship oil through the strait). And in typical Trumpian fashion, he wants to take a percentage for the US. 

Is the war fully back on? Things don’t look good right now, but both sides have emphasized that talks are still ongoing. But though Trump clearly isn’t eager for a return to full-scale conflict, he may feel emboldened by the fact that the world adapted surprisingly well to the strait’s closure earlier this year. 

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Have you listened to Unexplainable, the great Vox podcast delving into scientific mysteries? Well, you can now watch it: Starting today, it’s on Netflix! Episode 1, “Are you a lyric person or a music person?”, is live. (I’m most definitely a music person.)