David Crowley Just Demonstrated How Woke He Really Is

A margin of 0.42 percent is not a mandate. It's a coin flip that landed his way, and the fact that Wisconsin Democrats are now scrambling to sell Crowley as the sensible, grown-up alternative to Francesca Hong tells you everything about how thin their bench actually is. Hong didn't lose because voters rejected her ideas. She lost by a hair, and the party establishment breathed a sigh of relief because they thought they'd dodged the socialist label for another cycle.

Except Crowley isn't the moderate they're marketing. Scratch the surface and you find the same activist-class instincts Hong ran on, just wrapped in softer language and a better press strategy. That's the trick Democrats keep pulling in places like Milwaukee: swap out the candidate who says the quiet part loud for one who says it quietly, then call it a win for the center. Voters aren't stupid. They can tell the difference between a change in tone and a change in substance, and Crowley's actual record and positions keep giving away the game.

None of this is really about Crowley the person. It's about a party that has convinced itself it can keep winning close primaries and calling the survivor a moderate no matter what he actually believes. Wisconsin deserves better than a candidate whose main selling point is that he isn't the other guy by less than half a percentage point.