The big story on CNN and MSNOW this morning is that Democratic-Socialist Francesca Hong lost the Democratic primary for Governor in Wisconsin. CNN is relieved, MSNOW is kind of sad. Meanwhile, Fox News wants to focus on the WNBA, because everything about it makes progressives, women, blacks, lesbians, and supporters of trans-males look terrible.
You can see the results above: Hong conceded a bit before 95% of the votes had been counted. Ann Althouse finds that susp…interesting. The Wisconsin bloggress observes,
“Why did Hong concede so quickly, with such a narrow margin? Why not wait at least until all the votes are in? Why not ask for a recount? She’s entitled to a recount if the margin is 1% or less, but it’s only paid for by the state if it’s less than 0.25%. To drag out the process after the primary would help Tiffany. That’s good reason not to indulge in a recount, but why not wait until all 100% of the votes are counted? She conceded when it was less than 95%.”
There is certainly a lot to trigger conspiracy theorists about this result. The winner, David Crowley, the black Milwaukee County executive, barely eked out a victory after his candidacy was resurrected late in the campaign. Democrats decided that Hong couldn’t win the general election, so Gov. Tony Evers (D), who had pledged to stay out of the race to replace him, became active in the effort to beat Hong. In July, Crowley had dropped out of the race, saying that it was “clear that I will not be the Democratic nominee for governor.” Then Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who was the leading “establishment” candidate left, dropped out of the race.
Crowley was being pressured to re-run, and said he was praying for guidance. His wife asked for a “sign”that her husband should rejoin the race: if she saw a red bird, her husband should jump back in to the primary. I’m not kidding, unfortunately. She said she did see a red bird, and so 10 days after quitting, he spouse was in the race again. This is how seriously American take democracy in 2021. Who would vote for a candidate for governor who makes decisions like that? Not me. I’d rather vote for the bird.
More ethics-related notes:
Ethics Alarms 
Polls are propaganda. They could be accurate or wild mischaracterizations depending on what impact the people who pay for the polls think they will elicit.
The bigger thing that will raise eyebrows is the “just enough” nature of Crowley’s win.
Most commentary says that it was the late campaign revelations like her anti-Thanksgiving twee that cost Hong the nomination. If that’s true, and it may well be, why does anyone support early voting? Early voting encourages ignorant, uninformed, blindly-partisan votes and insulate candidates from the fall-out from late campaign scandals and gaffes.
The question seems to answer itself, doesn’t it? If you’re a candidate or a party supporting a candidate, it seems that the earlier people vote, the better chance you have to get votes.
And that is why I vote on Election Day. I will not cast my vote so long as there’s still time for a candidate to say or tweet something stupid, for a skeleton to fall out of a closet or the four horsemen to start riding.
From a Real Clear Politics piece:
An apparent glitch in the results of roughly 20,000 Democratic absentee ballots in Milwaukee County also threw a late-night wrench in news outlets’ ability to call the race. Five of nine flash-drive memory sticks holding absentee-election results had the required audit information but not the actual results. The drives then needed to be returned to the central count location to be corrected and brought back to the county courthouse, delaying election results by at least an hour. Election officials attributed the glitch to “human error” and said a wrong button was pushed.
What? Flash drives were being delivered here and there around Milwaukee? By Uber drivers? Flash drives? Why not us print outs on green bar paper?
Also, I have to wonder whether the black Democrat had to be boosted above the Chinese Democrat.
The latter. It’s always the latter. I’d say that polling has become more and more analogous to scrying chicken bones than science based on how bad they are… But I’ve come around to the idea that they’re purposefully bad.
There was a point in time, right around when cell phones and the internet were newer, where I had assumed that what was happening was that pollsters were bad at adjusting to the new norms. That either they were ignoring new communication mediums or that they were hyper focused on them, or that people were lying to them in a variation of the Bradley effect, and it was skewing the results through an inadvertent Bradley effect. Now…. I think they’ve had enough time to adjust to the new norms, and so any continuing sampling problems are purposeful.
We’ve been having that conversation up here. For the record: Carney’s Liberals are much more traditional Liberals than Trudeau’s were. We’re not seeing the same progressive bullshit out of him, and Canadians are fairly uniformly (and justifiably) annoyed with Trump, so he’s enjoying a very high polling rate right now. But how high is it, really? Because the polls for the last 20 years have been weighted more Liberal than the election results we get. Are the pollsters polling through methods more friendly to Liberals? Are Liberals more likely to take a polling call? I don’t know. Probably a little of each. But a guy running one of Canada’s larger polling operations pointed out that this is at least partially artificial and purposeful: He’s been able to control for whatever selection bias the process has by asking people who they voted for in the last election, and giving extra weight to people who represent groups that are disproportionately not represented in their total group compared to the last election. Basically: “We know we never poll enough people who voted Conservative, so the ones we do poll, we count a little more”. And he’s right: His polls tend to be outside the pack, a little heavier on the Conservative side, and also more accurate once the election is done. Meanwhile, Nick Nanos hasn’t been able to conduct a poll within two standard deviations in more than a decade. It’s a choice.
Hong has no credentials for office, is such a radical that even the mainstream radicals don’t support her, yet her competitor just squeaked out a win. It is frightening how close this vote is.
I just posted an essay from a different perspective, it’s titled “I Was Wrong!“.
Something about this election bothers me.
David Crowley won this election after he dropped out, then got back in, I saw absolutely no political ads supporting him. The local news stations didn’t cover anything he said, at least not that I heard. I barely knew he existed before he dropped out and I didn’t know much about him after he got back in, except that Governor Evers endorsed him. It was as if Crowley was running for election from his basement during the COVID Pandemic with no public statements or interviews, much like Biden did. This could be because I live in this irritating Dane County progressive ideological bubble that’s always pushing hard towards the extremes, but it all seems really weird to me that he actually won.
As Ann Althouse wrote…
How the heck did the Marquette Poll, usually one of the best in the USA, get it so terribly wrong? I usually don’t put much stock in political polls, but , I saw those polls too and I’m sure it was an unconscious part of the reason I thought that Hong was going to have a landslide victory. That poll might have biased me more than I thought.
The whole thing bothers me.
I had completely forgotten about this Marquette Poll. I updated my blog post to include this information.
I do think the premature concession is a little telling.
The part of me that wants to reinforce my priors will point out that parties do their own polling, which they do not release, and I have the feeling that Hong’s internal polling might have been bad enough that she went into the night believing that it would be close, but she was probably losing. I know it was only .4%, but that’s 3000 votes, and maybe they knew the polls that hadn’t reported yet weren’t going to be enough to recover that.
But there’s also a part of me that thinks that there are people out there that run as vote-collecting mechanisms for their party, or to split a vote, or to try to force their opponents to take certain positions, without ever thinking that they might actually win, and end up as victims of their own success as they near the finish line, with no one more surprised they were able to win than they are. I wonder if she might have seen an off-ramp to a job she had no real interest in.
But there’s also a part of me that thinks that there are people out there that run as vote-collecting mechanisms for their party, or to split a vote, or to try to force their opponents to take certain positions, without ever thinking that they might actually win, and end up as victims of their own success as they near the finish line, with no one more surprised they were able to win than they are. I wonder if she might have seen an off-ramp to a job she had no real interest in.
Or who want to make a particular point, get some publicity, maybe prompt some pubic awareness of an important issue, have some fun, annoy some pompous jerks. I don’t think Donald Trump ever thought he was going to be elected om 2016.
I’ve made the same point re: Trump.
There was an election up here in Canada, 15 years ago. The conservatives were in charge, they were going to win again, and the Liberals had debased themselves so thoroughly that they went down to third party status (For literally the first time in the history of Canada). No one expected them to do as badly as they did. Particularly not the crop of young NDP candidates who thought they were running as vote collectors (Parties get an election subsidy based on the number of votes they collect), and ended up being elected. Including not one, but two, who were vacationing in Vegas on election day.
I’ve made the same point re: Trump.
I remember.
So democrat candidates are now being selected by voodoo and portents like the flight of birds? If not for a substantial lack of familial resemblance, we might wonder if Crowley has an ancestor named Aleister.