David Crowley narrowly defeated Francesca Hong in the highly watched Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, where progressive Democrats had hoped to secure another win one week after their successful showing in a Michigan senate race.

Polls had placed Hong, a democratic socialist, way ahead of her rival, but with 98% of the votes counted, the Associated Press declared Crowley the winner by a slim margin of 39.8% compared to 39.4% for Hong.

Speaking ahead of the final vote tally, Hong told her cheering supporters, “It is an honor of my lifetime to be your candidate for governor.”

She, herself, was more subdued and measured. “Wisconsin,” she said, “we have built something that will change politics forever. The work we have done will be remembered forever. I know that we do not have the final results right now. But what I do know is that we are ready to keep fighting.”

Hong continued, “We are fighting to become once more what Wisconsin has always been, a place where our future is determined not by corporations and billionaires but a future that is determined by the working-class people who live here.”

“We have built a beautiful multi-generational, multi-partisan, multi-racial movement and it is a movement that meets the moment,” Hong said, adding, “this is how we are going to win together in November.”

Hong’s record on Israel and antisemitism is of concern to Wisconsin Jews, as well as Democratic figureheads more broadly. She has appeared on livestream fundraisers with Hasan Piker, the left-wing strident Israel critic who has also rallied with Hong, as well as twice with Michael Beyer, a.k.a. “Mike from PA,” who has called Jewish identity “a constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.” 

On one of her appearances with Beyer, Hong urged constituents to fundraise for people on the “front lines in Gaza.”

The party’s left flank had been buoyed by Abdul El-Sayed’s victory last week in the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, and hoped that a repeat success was possible in a neighboring Great Lakes state with a similarly purple voting bloc. But El-Sayed performed far short of the comfortable victory many polling outlets had predicted, squeaking a winning margin of just under 1%. 

Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive, re-entered the field after previously suspending his campaign. The flip came after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the preferred candidate of Crowley and many other institutionalist Democrats, dropped out of the race following an accounting scandal. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the party’s 2022 U.S. Senate nominee and a once-promising figure in the state, also dropped out after failing to gain traction.

During her campaign, Hong apologized for having called the police on a vandalized Israeli flag in her district in December 2023, which at the time she had called “highly antisemitic” and urged to be investigated as a hate crime. 

Explaining why she now regrets making the call, Hong recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “The image was cropped and incomplete to misrepresent anti-Zionism as antisemitism – a distinction I take seriously.”

Hong’s impact on Israel policy as governor of Wisconsin would be limited. But she has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “genocidal” and pushed the state to overturn a ban on government contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. She has also criticized Wisconsin’s current moderate Democratic governor for backing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s controversial definition of antisemitism.

This week a co-chair of the DSA drew further concern from Jewish Democrats after appearing in a viral interview on The New Yorker’s podcast. Megan Romer called the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel “largely inevitable” and said she “probably would have” joined a pro-Palestinian rally in New York the day after the attacks if she’d been able to attend.

Prior to Oct. 7, Hong’s state house campaigns had expressed some positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish causes. In January 2023 her campaign sold a Hebrew-language shirt, with proceeds going to Jewish Social Services of Madison.

“Team Hong has upped our commitment to uplifting multiculturalism,” Hong’s campaign wrote on Twitter at the time. She included praise of the symbolic significance of the number 18 in Hebrew and of the Hebrew phrase “L’chaim.”