Tom Tiffany Has a Plan for Wisconsin, While David Crowley Has Progressive Platitudes

A win by four-tenths of a percentage point is not exactly a mandate, but that hasn't stopped anyone from treating David Crowley like the sensible grown-up in the Wisconsin governor's race. He beat Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist state legislator, by the width of a coin flip. That's not moderation winning out. That's a party so far left that its "establishment" candidate barely edged out someone running to his left, and now everyone's supposed to pretend the primary settled something.

It didn't. Crowley spent the campaign talking about equity audits and "systemic" this and "systemic" that, the usual Milwaukee County executive vocabulary that sounds compassionate in a press release and means nothing on a factory floor in Wausau. Wisconsin voters who lost jobs to trade policy, who watched their kids' schools get worse while spending went up, who just want the lights to stay on and gas to stay affordable, are not going to be moved by a man who talks like a nonprofit grant application.

Tom Tiffany, on the other hand, has actually run something besides a county budget with federal pandemic money propping it up. He's been in Congress representing a district that isn't Madison or Milwaukee, which means he's had to answer to people who farm, log, manufacture, and generally produce things rather than administer programs. That's not nothing in a state where the electoral map runs through exactly those places.

Democrats keep nominating candidates who win by accident and then act like they won by conviction. Crowley's 0.42 percent should be a warning sign, not a coronation. Wisconsin voters aren't looking for platitudes dressed up as policy. They're looking for someone with an actual plan, and right now that's not who they just nominated.