I reported a couple of weeks ago on how Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary was turning into a three-ring circus. Lt Governor Sara Rodriguez's campaign had imploded with all sorts of campaign finance issues. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley resurrected his campaign from the dead, because what good is a primary without a zombie, right?
Shortly thereafter, the first runner-up, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, dropped out after Team Zombie launched a smear campaign rife with baseless innuendo. That left Francesca Hong as the big frontrunner going into the final weekend. Or so everyone thought.
Election Day came, and with it came a few irregularities, Lac County was showing 50% write-in votes, which became votes for Crowley. Officials claim it was a glitch in the machines that sorted itself out. Winnebago County's servers crashed, and the vote tallies couldn't be sent directly to the main counting area electronically, but had to be hand-delivered. And in Milwaukee County, not one, not two, but five jump drives that were supposed to have the absentee ballot tallies were improperly loaded with audit files. The staff had to go back and reload all the files, and so the final count didn't come in until the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
The result was that David Crowley, the establishment zombie, was declared the winner by about 3,000 votes, or by 0.2%. Thanks to an influx of a lot of dark money - and I do mean a lot - and the Party putting their thumbs on the scale, a campaign that was dead won the nomination.
Fortunately, the other races went pretty much as expected.
In WI-03, Rebecca Cooke won the nomination to take on Drunken Van Orden for the third time. She has been consistently outperforming him in both fundraising and in the polls. Hopefully, three times is the charm.
And far up in the Northwoods, the nepo-candidate Michael Alfonso, son-in-law of Sean Duffy, became the nepo-nominee, readily beating his three opponents.
The Republicans were also having their own shitshow, too. Will Martin, a Black man who was the endorsed candidate for Lt. Governor, got bumped out by a white guy, David Varnam. The word on the street is that Tom Tiffany, who is racist af, was working behind the scenes to get Martin out and Varnam in. And for Secretary of State, the Republicans rejected the endorsed candidate, Nathan Pollnow, and elected election denier and mostly illiterate Jay Schroeder. I'm sure that will work out well for them.
PS: Establishment Zombie would be a great name for a punk band.
