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.
“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.
This post was not an anonymous screenshot or a disputed paraphrase — it was a direct message from Hong’s campaign account.
The dispute began after Tiffany warned that Hong had backed abolishing police, prisons and the Senate. Hong’s communications director responded by accusing him of lying and claimed he could not produce any single statement supporting the charge.
Hong’s campaign initially stated she did not recall writing the post, which they described as a frustrated reaction to the U.S. Senate’s acquittal of President Trump in his second impeachment trial — an event that occurred on February 13, 2021. Fifty-seven senators voted to convict, short of the two-thirds majority required.
The campaign later claimed Hong had never called for abolishing the Senate. However, when Tiffany’s team pointed to the post from February 2021, the campaign said it did not remember writing it and argued that it no longer reflected her current position.
The campaign has repeatedly stated: she did not recall the post, it was written in frustration after President Trump’s acquittal, and abolishing the Senate is not her current stance.
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 this issue before the campaign issued its denial.
Tiffany is now using this contradiction in his case against Hong.
Hong’s campaign also acknowledged that she previously discussed police and prison abolition as an aspirational goal, but stated she would not pursue either policy as governor. The campaign 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.
Hong is not endorsed by the national DSA organization, though her campaign website lists endorsements from DSA chapters in Madison, Milwaukee and northeastern Wisconsin.
Recent polling shows Hong at 38 percent among Democratic primary voters, giving her a commanding lead ahead of all other candidates as the August 11 election approaches. Former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes stands at 16 percent and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley at 7 percent.
A large bloc of voters remains undecided in the race.
The same survey found that 52 percent of Wisconsin voters believe the state Democratic Party is too liberal, with 59 percent of independents holding that view.
Hong’s campaign has urged voters to believe that radical positions in her public record are either outdated, misunderstood or no longer relevant to how she would govern. However, with the evidence of the post still available and the campaign’s denial, Wisconsin voters now have the post, the denial and the retreat in front of them.
The five-year-old post is only half the story. Her campaign issued a 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 claim is that the statement never existed.
