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MORGAN, Minn. — Rep. Angie Craig is trying a familiar tactic in her Senate Democratic primary battle against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan: warning that her more progressive rival is far more vulnerable than her to Republican attacks.
Craig has used the closing days of their neck-and-neck race to tell primary voters that Republicans will try to make the November election about fraud in the state’s child care system and other categories of government aid. Flanagan served under Gov. Tim Walz at the time of many of the fraud allegations; Vice President JD Vance and House Republicans have sought a Justice Department probe of Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
Many Democrats, including Craig, still worried that Flanagan would be dragged down by GOP attacks focusing on the fraud cases — even her own DOJ probe — should she win the nomination.
“The number one issue among general election voters right now is fraud,” Craig said after Wednesday’s FarmFest candidate forum, where Michele Tafoya, the GOP’s likely Senate nominee, repeatedly talked about the fraud scandal. “The lieutenant governor has a unique vulnerability that I certainly don’t have.”
She’s hardly the first swing-state Democrat to urge primary voters to reject left-wing candidates, warning that Republicans would find a progressive easier to beat. But the challenge, as party leaders learned in Michigan and may soon learn in Wisconsin, is convincing liberals that Republican attacks which they find ludicrous or unfair might work on other voters.
In Wisconsin, where the Republican Governors Association has spent more than $3 million boosting democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong ahead of Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary, Democrats have relied on negative media coverage to make the case against her.
Gov. Tony Evers, who endorsed Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley to succeed him, has argued that Hong could “probably” not win in November. He saw her dragged down by Republicans raising questions about her old tweets, including one that condemned Thanksgiving as a celebration of “colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women.”
“I think she’s in a tough place,” Evers told reporters at the Wisconsin State Fair. “She has spent her entire campaign dealing with – not with the issues, but what’s on the Twitter.”
Flanagan has more clearly countered warnings about her record than Hong has when it comes to her tweets — the Wisconsinite deleted, then defended, then recanted her unorthodox views on Thanksgiving and what it means to “indigenous folx.”
At a Democratic picnic where she and Ellison mingled with candidates and activists, Flanagan told Semafor that she was ready to rebut any Republican attack on fraud.
“Republicans are running on fraud, and they’re going to run against every Democrat on this issue because they don’t have a whole lot else to talk about,” she said. “They’re going to have to answer for the corruption that’s happening under Donald Trump right now, enriching himself right out of the White House with sweetheart deals for the people who are paying for his ballroom.”
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Evers’ warning about Hong came very late in the campaign, after the democratic socialist had raced ahead in public polls. Last week, in their only televised debate, none of her challengers took a chance to attack her over previously endorsing the abolition of prison and defunding police — positions, they said offstage, that would alienate voters.
“I do not know how a person recovers from that, but that’s not for me to decide,” said former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, D-Wis., who suspended his own gubernatorial campaign two days after the debate. “This is for primary voters to decide.”
Crowley’s campaign, which he suspended then restarted after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez withdrew from the race, worked quickly to get on the air and consolidate votes against Hong. Two independent expenditures began this week, promoting Crowley, but not attacking Hong directly.
Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this week also tested whether the party’s primary voters would turn defensively against the threat of Republican attacks. Now-nominee Abdul El-Sayed faced more of a direct, Craig-style critique from establishment Democrats who criticized him for campaigning with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, an early supporter of rival Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens, suggested that the association was so offensive that she might not be able to support El-Sayed. He won the nomination anyway, and Republicans are now aggressively trying to tie the former public health official to Piker’s more polarizing comments.
El-Sayed has characterized the attacks as phony “cancel culture” that Democratic voters don’t truly care about.
“I’m not going to be told who I can and can’t talk to,” El-Sayed told Semafor in June. “I’m not going to be told that I can’t talk to certain audiences, and I’m not going to be gate-kept by the likes of people who’ve made careers out of laundering the same old ideas that have destroyed so many of our communities.”
Notably, the bulk of the spending in the Stevens-El-Sayed contest came from groups funded by AIPAC that attacked him from the left rather than warning about his viability in November.
One accused him of undermining the Democratic ticket in 2024 by voting for the “uncommitted” option in the Democratic presidential primary; one accused him of sexism.
David’s view
There’s a kind of prisoner’s dilemma hurting Democrats who want to beat the left in swing-state primaries.
They know that their voters are increasingly progressive and agree more with left-wing candidates on some major issues. (As I wrote last week, Hong’s rise was powered by her early and clear support for a data center moratorium.)
They know that Republicans would rather run against progressives than centrists.
But Democratic primary voters aren’t talking to GOP strategists. They wouldn’t trust those Republicans if they did. They see a lot of bad faith in the “electability” game; some may recall that Hillary Clinton’s campaign assumed Donald Trump was the weakest major GOP candidate and wanted him to win his party’s 2016 primary.
Some Democratic voters are also frustrated that Republicans seem to say whatever they want and win, from Trump on down, while progressives are told to be careful.
The reality is more complicated; Kari Lake lost two elections in Arizona, for one, showing that Republicans can be vulnerable when they nominate their most right-wing candidates.
Room for Disagreement
Hong, the left-wing candidate taking the most flack this week, sometimes fights back by questioning her critics’ credibility. She recently wrote that David Axelrod’s accusation that she alienates voters with “faculty lounge” language was “why the consultant class keeps losing elections.”
But she’s also taking a more sincere tack in response to the intraparty questions about her viability in November by touting her campaign infrastructure.
“We are prepared on Day One to make sure that we have the resources and the people,” she said. “Our volunteers have now hit over 100,000 doors. This means that the organizing infrastructure that we had will only enhance the one that the Dems have been building.”
Notable
- In the New York Times, Shane Goldmacher broke the news of a $15 million Third Way campaign to beat socialist candidates in future primaries.
- In Vox, Andrew Prokop looked closely at Hong’s record as a progressive Madison legislator and activist, and how “woke” language and ideology remain a stumbling block for left-wing populists.
- In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Molly Beck and Mary Spicuzza covered how Crowley was responding to the left’s main criticism of the Democrats who insist they’re more electable: that they were part of the loser “establishment.”