Ben Wikler, who heroically rebuilt the Wisconsin Democratic Party as its chair from 2019 to 2025, is fond of describing our election system as akin to an “electric grid.” The idea is that local elections are interconnected in obscure ways. Just as losing one substation can wreak havoc on electric power in nearby areas, local electoral outcomes can have ripple effects that are not immediately obvious but nonetheless prove hugely consequential.
Case in point: David Crowley’s upset victory over democratic socialist Francisca Hong in Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Crowley, the candidate of the Democratic “establishment,” defeated Hong by half a point. Yet this extraordinarily narrow win could have hidden, surprising implications that benefit the party more broadly, perhaps impacting Democrats’ ability to combat MAGA-GOP tactics in the 2028 presidential race and in the longer-term House redistricting wars.
Let’s connect the dots. Most obviously, a Crowley win in the primary probably makes it more likely that a Democrat will take over the Wisconsin governorship next year from incumbent Democrat Tony Evers. Republicans spent millions to boost Hong for exactly that reason. But that’s not all: With Crowley at the top of the ticket, Democratic strategists believe, wins in many down-ballot state legislative races in Wisconsin are now more likely.
On that front, the stakes are very high. Another top Democratic goal this year is flipping control of the Wisconsin state legislature, which is notoriously far more right wing than the state itself. To do so, they’re targeting 14 GOP-controlled legislative seats—10 in the State Assembly and four in the State Senate. Winning those seats would have been harder with Hong as the gubernatorial candidate, Democratic strategists say.
“Crowley’s path to victory runs through suburban Wisconsin and through holding down Republican margins in rural communities,” Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, told me. “That overlaps with exactly where Democrats need to win state legislative seats to get the trifecta next year.”
By contrast, Zepecki said, Hong’s path would have run through boosting youth turnout in Wisconsin’s urban centers and around college campuses. “That does not map on to where the competitive legislative races are,” Zepecki noted.
A Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin will be hard to pull off with Republicans enjoying a three-seat edge in the State Senate and nine-seat edge in the Assembly. But with Trump’s approval in the state stuck at around 40 percent, a very good year is certainly plausible. The large number of GOP state legislators who retired this cycle shows that Republicans very much agree.
And a trifecta suddenly makes possible big progressive legislative changes, Zepecki pointed out, like ending the state’s right-to-work status, restoring collective bargaining for public employees, a minimum wage hike, legalizing cannabis, and more. These have had “zero chance of passing since 2011,” Zepecki said, referring to when Republican Scott Walker was elected governor and lurched the state in a reactionary direction. “That’s a long time.”
Now note that the GOP gubernatorial nominee, Representative Tom Tiffany, is an election denier who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electors. There’s no telling what he’d do to sabotage the electoral count in the 2028 presidential election. Same with a GOP-controlled legislature. If Democrats can win the governorship—and even better, both legislative chambers—it would cut off that option, too.
Want more? Recall that Wisconsin’s congressional seats remain hideously gerrymandered due to the last decade of GOP redistricting: Right now, Republicans control six House seats and Democrats control two. That’s ludicrous in a state where Evers was elected governor in 2022 and in 2018 by very slim margins, not to mention where Donald Trump won in 2024 by less than a point after losing to Biden in 2020 by—you guessed it—less than a point.
That extreme gerrymander gives Democrats a big opening—if they can flip the state legislature. Republicans have unleashed the gerrymandering hounds nationally—the party has long gerrymandered, but Trump and MAGA supercharged it this year by demanding mid-decade chicanery across the country—and most Democrats grasp that they now must do the same.
But in this cycle they were hamstrung by structural obstacles. More redistricting opportunities will soon open up, and a big one could be in Wisconsin: As a recent Fair Fight Action analysis found, Democrats could potentially squeeze three additional House seats out of the state.
It’s not clear when this might be doable: The state constitution probably precludes a redistricting next year (though a Democratic trifecta could try). But if Democrats can assemble and keep this trifecta through 2031, then they can redraw the House maps to gain those three seats into the next decade. As Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath put it: “Flipping the Wisconsin legislature is critical to countering the GOP’s war on fair representation.”
There’s still more! The gubernatorial outcome could also impact the hugely contested House race in Wisconsin’s third congressional district, which could figure in a new Democratic majority. The party’s preferred candidate, Rebecca Cooke, just won her primary there. A source familiar with internal Democratic polling tells me Crowley’s victory makes it more likely that Cooke can compete against hard-core MAGA GOP Representative Derrick Van Orden with male independents, a key demographic in the district.
“That wasn’t going to happen with Hong at the top of the ticket,” the source said.
Admittedly, these sorts of calculations—the slicing and dicing of the electorate, the notion that long-term policy and redistricting advances live or die on such infinitesimal shifts—are not a particularly inspiring way to think about politics.
Yet this is how our system is constructed. The reversal of the GOP rigging of democracy in Wisconsin has been incredibly painstaking. It depended on hard-won victories like recapturing the State Supreme Court in 2025 in the face of $20 million in spending by Elon Musk. It has relied on arduous, unglamorous organizing, and on grinding victories akin to tiny movements in trench warfare.
As Wikler has put it, unrigging the GOP capture of democracy in Wisconsin taught him something about how power ebbs and flows—how seemingly isolated victories enable other gains elsewhere down the road. “I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood,” Wikler recently told Ezra Klein. “American political power is like that.”
Over time, in short, every little victory here and there adds up to something much bigger than the sum of its parts. In Wisconsin, the long-term unrigging of the GOP hammerlock on democracy still hangs in the balance—but it’s certainly more plausible now than it was only 24 hours ago.
