Francesca Hong says ‘no’ to abolishing police, backs away from 2020 ‘white supremacy’ claim

Francesca Hong wants Wisconsin voters to know she's serious about public safety now. That's a nice sentiment. It's also a complete reversal from someone who spent 2020 saying police exist to uphold white supremacy, which is not a minor policy footnote you quietly walk back years later when you're running statewide. That was the actual argument. It wasn't a slip of the tongue at a rally, it was the framework.

Here's what's actually happening: she's not evolving, she's calculating. "Abolish the police" plays fine in a Madison assembly district. It plays terribly in a general election where you need votes from people who live in places where 911 response time actually matters to them. So the rhetoric gets sanded down the moment the audience gets bigger. That's not growth, that's arithmetic.

We'd have more respect for a candidate who said "I was wrong, here's why, here's what changed my mind" than one who just says her views "became stronger" while quietly deleting the parts that were unpopular. Voters aren't stupid. They can tell the difference between somebody who learned something and somebody who got caught holding a position that doesn't poll well anymore.

If Hong genuinely believes policing needs reform, fine, make that case honestly. But pretending the "white supremacy" framing was never really the point, when it very much was the point for half a decade of progressive politics, is the kind of rewrite that deserves more scrutiny than it's getting.