Wisconsin Democrats are less than two weeks from handing their gubernatorial nomination to a candidate who believes the nation’s oldest holiday should never have happened. Not that it should be reformed, or observed more thoughtfully, or paired with a land acknowledgment before the turkey. Canceled. From 1621 forward.
According to reporting from Fox News, state Rep. Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America member now leading the race to replace outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, wrote in a since-deleted November 2020 post that Americans should “Cancel Thanksgiving,” adding that the country “should have done this in 1621.”
She reportedly went on to call the holiday a celebration of colonialism and “the original superspreader event,” reasoning that a global pandemic was as good an occasion as any to retire it permanently.
Dismissing this as an old tweet misses the point. It was not a joke that aged poorly or a clumsy phrase ripped from context. It was a worldview, stated plainly: the American founding story is a catalog of crimes, and its traditions are artifacts to be discarded.
That worldview is now polling at 38 percent among Wisconsin Democratic primary voters, according to the Marquette Law School survey released this week — more than double the support of any rival before the field collapsed around her.
A Primary That Keeps Clearing Itself Out
And collapse it has. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who entered the race with the best name recognition of any candidate after his narrow 2022 Senate loss, dropped out Thursday. In a video announcement, Barnes told supporters, “It’s become very clear who our nominee is going to be.” He did not say Hong’s name. He did not need to.
Barnes’ exit came the same day the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported it had asked him about allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior lodged with the state Democratic Party — allegations that remain unproven and under review.
Whatever the full story turns out to be, the practical effect is the same. The establishment’s most viable alternative to Hong is gone, following Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who ended her own campaign earlier in July after major inaccuracies surfaced in her campaign’s financial reporting.
That leaves Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who briefly quit the race himself before reviving his campaign with Evers’ endorsement, as the last obstacle between Hong and the nomination. The Marquette poll had him at 7 percent.
The Mamdani Playbook Comes to the Midwest
Hong is running the same play that put Zohran Mamdani in Gracie Mansion, and she is not hiding it. Her platform includes government-owned grocery stores, a state-run bank, abolishing ICE, and what Fox News describes as race-based grants for social workers.
She frames her socialism as making sure “working-class people have their fair share,” and she has collected endorsements from Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna along with roughly $709,000 in contributions as of late June, per state records cited by Fox — nearly triple Crowley’s haul.
The Thanksgiving post was not even Friday’s only resurfaced material. A 2019 post from Hong’s own account described nearly having an anxiety attack at a Culver’s in Black River Falls because there were “to many old white people who didn’t think we spoke english.” One can debate what that reveals about her temperament. What is not debatable is how it plays in a state where Culver’s is closer to a civic institution than a fast food chain.
The general election stakes are enormous. Wisconsin backed President Trump by less than a percentage point in 2024, the narrowest margin in the nation, and the likely Republican nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, carries Trump’s endorsement into an open-seat race.
Democrats are about to test whether a dues-paying democratic socialist who wanted Thanksgiving abolished can win the most evenly divided state in America. Republicans could hardly have scripted the experiment better themselves.
There is a deeper irony here that a politically engaged reader should not miss. Thanksgiving survives precisely because it asks nothing ideological of anyone. It asks only gratitude — a discipline of the heart that predates every political movement now trying to litigate it. “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.”
A candidate who sees only a superspreader event where generations of Americans have seen providence is telling voters exactly how she reads the country she proposes to govern.
Wisconsin’s primary is Aug. 11. Fox News reported that Hong’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
