Wisconsin Democrats may be on the verge of nominating a socialist for governor — and her campaign just ran straight into a post she left behind.

State Rep. Francesca Hong’s campaign accused Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany of inventing her position on abolishing the U.S. Senate. There was only one problem.

Hong wrote it herself.

“Abolish the Senate,” Hong posted on X in February 2021. The message was still live when the campaign insisted Tiffany could not produce any such statement because it did not exist.

The contradiction was captured in this side-by-side receipt:

This was not an anonymous screenshot or a disputed paraphrase. It was a post from Hong’s own campaign account.

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The dispute began after Tiffany warned that Hong had backed abolishing the police, prisons and the Senate. Hong’s communications director responded by accusing him of lying and claimed he could not produce a single statement supporting the charge.

Then the old post surfaced.

Fox News reports that Hong’s campaign first said she had never called for abolishing the Senate. After Tiffany’s team pointed reporters to the February 13, 2021 post, the campaign said Hong did not remember writing it and argued that it no longer reflected her position.

The explanation was that Hong posted the message one day after the Senate acquitted President Trump in his second impeachment trial. Fifty-seven senators voted to convict, short of the two-thirds majority required, and the campaign described Hong’s statement as a frustrated reaction to the outcome.

That may explain why she wrote it. It does not make the campaign’s original denial true.

There is a major difference between saying a candidate changed her mind and declaring that the documented statement never existed. Hong’s own account settled that question before her campaign ever issued the denial.

Tiffany is now making the controversy part of his case against the socialist frontrunner:

The Senate post is not the only position Hong’s campaign is trying to put in the past.

Her spokeswoman acknowledged that Hong previously discussed police and prison abolition as an aspirational goal, but said she would not pursue either policy as governor. The campaign also said Hong does not support replacing the presidency or eliminating national borders and does not agree with every plank associated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

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Hong is not endorsed by the national DSA organization. Her campaign website does, however, list endorsements from DSA chapters in Madison, Milwaukee and northeastern Wisconsin.

Hong’s campaign later repeated the same basic explanation to another outlet: she did not recall the old post, it was written in frustration after President Trump’s acquittal, and abolishing the Senate is not her current position.

That retreat comes at a dangerous time for Wisconsin Democrats. Hong is leading their August 11 gubernatorial primary, and the race is widely viewed as competitive in November.

The latest Marquette Law School Poll found Hong at 38 percent among Democratic primary voters, giving her a commanding lead in the final weeks before the August 11 election. She stood more than twenty points ahead of every named rival in a race that will determine who faces the likely Republican nominee in November.

Former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes stood at 16 percent. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley registered 7 percent.

A large bloc remained undecided, leaving room for movement before primary day. The survey interviewed 838 registered Wisconsin voters from July 8 through July 16, making it a current snapshot of the electorate as the campaign entered its closing stretch.

The full registered-voter sample carried a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. The Democratic primary subsample included 430 voters and carried a wider 6.1-point margin of error.

Marquette used a hybrid sample drawn from Wisconsin’s voter-registration list and the SSRS Opinion Panel. Most respondents completed the survey online, while 56 were interviewed by telephone.

The same survey found that 52 percent of Wisconsin voters believe the state Democratic Party is too liberal. Among independents, that figure rose to 59 percent.

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Hong is therefore asking voters to believe that the radical positions in her public record are either outdated, misunderstood or no longer relevant to how she would govern.

The five-year-old opinion is only half the story. Her campaign issued the categorical denial this week while the evidence was sitting in plain sight.

If Hong changed her mind, she can say so. What her campaign cannot credibly say is that the statement never existed.

Wisconsin voters now have the post, the denial and the retreat in front of them. They can decide for themselves which version they trust.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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