Two weeks ago, Francesca Hong looked like the strong favourite to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin.
She was soaring ahead in the polls.
But yesterday, she lost to a guy who had already dropped out of the race, and who appeared 22 points behind her in the polls.
David Crowley had quit the Democratic primary earlier this year. Then Governor Tony Evers unexpectedly announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection.
Crowley jumped back into the race and somehow managed to beat Hong. He will now be the Democratic candidate in the upcoming election in November.
It was extremely close, so I won’t pretend Wisconsin Democrats delivered some overwhelming ideological verdict. They didn’t. Hong came within a whisker of winning.
And I’m not going to pretend that somehow I am an expert on Wisconsin politics. I’ve never even been to Wisconsin.
But the result is interesting because Hong had become a kind of test case for whether Democrats could simply move on from the excesses of 2020-era progressive politics.
Apparently we’re now calling that period “Woke 1.”
The phrase got its big political debut courtesy of New York City Councilman Chi Ossé. Earlier this year, someone dug up a 2021 tweet in which Ossé had declared: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”
His response?
“Woke 1 was crazyyyy.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez apparently liked that explanation enough to borrow it. Asked on Sunday about Francesca Hong’s old positions on abolishing the police, prisons and Thanksgiving, AOC laughed and quoted Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.”
Which raises an obvious question.
There’s a Woke 2?
Some have said that Woke 2 is just Woke 1 with open antisemitism. That’s a troubling thought.
Boo@IzaBooboo
Woke 2 is just Woke 1 with open antisemitism.
3:13 AM · Aug 10, 2026 · 73.7K Views
77 Replies · 457 Reposts · 4.79K Likes
Calling it “Woke 1” makes the whole thing sound like an early software release. There were some bugs. The developers got a little carried away. But don’t worry: we’ve patched the problems and the basic product is still good.
Maybe.
Or maybe a lot of the politics of the “Woke” era are just bad and unpopular.
Hong’s old comments are a good example. She talked about defunding or abolishing police. She called for Thanksgiving to be cancelled on the basis that Americans should “stop celebrating colonialism”. By 2026, unsurprisingly, she had back-pedalled and tried to explain away her comment to say that she didn’t actually want to cancel Thanksgiving and that she loved the holiday.
I think her explanation that she actually likes Thanksgiving is quite plausibly believable. Most Americans do.
But then what the hell was she thinking in 2020 when she decided that it was terrible and needed cancelling?
We know the answer: she got sucked into an ideological wormhole, just as very many people did that year.
And it was a crazy and frightening year, for many reasons. Being stuck in lockdown was horrible and scary for many people. For me, I spent most of that year playing video games, doomscrolling, reading, and writing.
I definitely was sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. But I never got sucked into the ideological orbit of “defund the police”, or “abolish America”, or any of that stuff.
Because I think it’s garbage. Yes, some people have legitimate grievances. What happened to George Floyd for example was wrong, and people had a right to feel aggrieved by it. If your family member got shot by a police officer, that’s a legitimate grievance. If you grew up poor, or experienced racism or discrimination, yes, that's a legitimate grievance too.
But we need to be constructive with legitimate grievances, and try to use them to actually make the world a better place. Don’t just use the fact you may have suffered to push idiotic and ideological slop about “cancelling Thanksgiving” or “defunding the police” or “land acknowledgments” or “turtle island” or whatever.
What happens after you defund the police? How do you deal with crime and criminals? Do you think Americans are just going to go along with abolishing Thanksgiving?
This is why such people end up back-pedalling so fast.
That doesn’t mean progressive economic policies are necessarily doomed. There is clearly a strong constituency for universal healthcare, stronger worker protections, taxing the rich, and a more expansive welfare state. Those ideas are actually popular with a broad segment of society.
However, it’s been pretty strange to watch the left over the past decade bundling leftish economic ideas together with a collection of bizarre cultural and ideological positions, and then acting surprised when voters dislike the package.
Yeah, it doesn’t shock me that Hong lost.
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