{"id":49690,"date":"2026-08-13T13:07:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T20:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=49690"},"modified":"2026-08-13T22:59:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T05:59:34","slug":"democratic-voters-are-fired-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/08\/13\/democratic-voters-are-fired-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Democratic voters are fired up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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COOPER ON TAP<\/strong> (Prospect.org)<\/td><\/tr>
August 12, 2026

2018 was a historic blowout for the Dems. This year, primary turnout is much higher.<\/em>

It was a mixed bag for the left in Tuesday\u2019s primary elections. In Wisconsin, DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was far ahead in the polls and expected to win easily, instead lost in a squeaker<\/u><\/a> to David Crowley. But in Minnesota, the state\u2019s lefty lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan easily whipped<\/u><\/a> the moderate Rep. Angie Craig in the primary for that state\u2019s U.S. Senate seat, by a nearly 20-point margin.
While the Wisconsin result was disappointing, if progressives had to pick, it was likely more important for Flanagan to win than Hong. In Wisconsin, what state Democrats can do will depend more on whether they can take control of the state legislature in the upcoming election and win total control of state government for the first time since 2010. Moreover, by all accounts Crowley is a fairly standard-issue liberal who would probably sign most progressive legislation; he has already announced plans<\/u><\/a> to campaign alongside Hong. Craig, by contrast, is a loud centrist who voted for the Laken Riley Act<\/u><\/a>, which granted sweeping powers to ICE\u2014which would, of course, go on to mercilessly gun down two Minnesota residents\u2014as well as for a resolution thanking the agency.
Whatever these races say about the state of the left\u2014I would call it a story of gradual building success over time, with some unsurprising setbacks\u2014the polls and turnout numbers have some more reliable lessons. They show that the Democratic base is boiling with energy and champing at the bit to vote against Republicans.
The polls for the Wisconsin race were off by roughly 20 points<\/u><\/a>\u2014about the same amount they were off in Minnesota (though in that case, they underestimated the progressive Flanagan<\/u><\/a>), and in the Michigan race<\/u><\/a> last week. Clearly, something is rotten in the state of cellphone autodialers. Polling primaries was tough business even 30 years ago when everyone had a landline and calls from strangers were not 95 percent spam, because one has to gather data and then estimate how many people are actually going to turn out. That can vary wildly depending on the state, the party, whether it is a competitive race, the national environment, and so on.<\/td><\/tr>
<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
Incidentally, the vaunted prediction markets also completely flubbed<\/u><\/a> this one. They couldn\u2019t even sort out who was likely to win when votes started coming in and the political pros could guess with increasing accuracy who was likely to win based on where the remaining votes were located. They were quite obviously just swinging wildly back and forth with the headlines. It turns out markets are not some infallible distillers of Truth<\/u><\/a> from the celestial ether.
I\u2019d guess that the pollsters are not getting good samples for these races, but they almost certainly missed the turnout. Let\u2019s compare this year to 2018, the last time there was a contested Democratic primary in Wisconsin and an uncontested Republican one, to make it a fairly apples-to-apples comparison. Six years ago<\/u><\/a>, about 539,000 people cast Democratic ballots, as compared to 455,000 Republicans. This year, with a few thousand votes still to count, it was more like <\/u>825,000<\/u><\/em><\/a> Democrats and 490,000 Republicans.
It\u2019s a similar story in other recent primaries, where 2018 is once again the most recent similar year. In Minnesota in 2018<\/u><\/a>, about 584,000 Democrats and 320,000 Republicans turned out; this year, the numbers were 700,000 and 405,000, respectively. In Michigan in 2018<\/u><\/a>, about 1.1 million Democrats and 990,000 Republicans turned out; this year, the numbers were 1.5 million<\/em> and 931,000, respectively.
The 2018 elections were nearly a clean Democratic sweep in these states. They won the U.S. Senate seats and the governorships in all three, and missed control of the Minnesota Senate by one vote. They would have won the Wisconsin State Assembly too if Republicans hadn\u2019t rigged the district boundaries so egregiously that an eight-point defeat<\/u><\/a> in the popular vote became a nearly two-thirds majority in seats. (Luckily, thanks to Democrats flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the state legislative maps are now reasonably fair.)
Primary turnouts are a decent, albeit imperfect, historical proxy<\/u><\/a> for general-election performances. And if there is any major difference between today and 2018, it\u2019s that Donald Trump, with his lunatic tariff obsession and unwinnable war in Iran, is substantially less popular<\/u><\/a> than he was back then. Unless something big changes, Republicans are liable to be looking at a generational wipeout in November.<\/td><\/tr>
\"\"Ryan Cooper<\/strong>
Senior Editor<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COOPER ON TAP (Prospect.org) August 12, 2026 2018 was a historic blowout for the Dems. This year, primary turnout is much higher. It was a mixed bag for the left in Tuesday\u2019s primary elections. In Wisconsin, DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was far ahead in the polls and expected to… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2088],"tags":[2376,2375],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49690"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49697,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49690\/revisions\/49697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}