Long before Francesca Hong’s current bid for governor, the party was revitalized when it nominated a Milwaukee “sewer socialist” for governor.
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong speaks during a campaign rally on August 2, 2026, in Milwaukee.
(Joshua Lott / Getty Images)
Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary has inspired intense nationwide coverage—mostly because a leading contender, Francesca Hong, is a democratic socialist. The strength of the bid by Hong, a state representative from Madison who has run an energetic grassroots campaign, has triggered endless scrutiny of her past social-media messages, along with hand-wringing by Democratic Party insiders who question her electability.
Much of the national media’s coverage of the primary—in which voters will choose between Hong and three other Democrats, including Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who is backed by outgoing Democratic Governor Tony Evers—has focused on the question of whether a Midwestern swing state is the right place for democratic socialist politics. Headlines like “Wisconsin governor’s race tests limits of Democrats’ leftward shift” and “Democratic socialist Francesca Hong tests how far left voters will go in battleground Wisconsin” are common.
But Wisconsin is a unique place. Its great progressive leaders of the past, including former Republican Governor Robert M. La Follette, worked closely with socialists and sometimes ran with their backing. The state frequently elected members of the Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas as congressional and legislative representatives—and as mayors of Wisconsin cities, including the state’s largest municipality: Milwaukee. Indeed, through much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was governed by so-called “sewer socialists”—Mayors Emil Seidel, Dan Hoan, and Frank Zeidler—who earned national reputations as visionary and efficient managers.
What a lot of the people who are now commenting on the 2026 race probably don’t know is that one of those socialist mayors played a critical role in building the modern Wisconsin Democratic Party.
Almost exactly 82 years ago, on August 15, 1944, Wisconsin Democrats voted by a landslide to make Hoan, a former Socialist Party stalwart who had recently joined the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their gubernatorial nominee.
Raised in a radical family in rural Waukesha County, Hoan arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1901 and quickly formed the campus’s Socialist Club. After passing his Wisconsin State bar exam in 1908, he joined Milwaukee’s vibrant Socialist Party and began working as a labor lawyer. In 1910, when the Socialist Party swept to power in Milwaukee, Hoan became the City Attorney at age 29. In 1916, he was elected mayor and went on to serve 24 years as one of the most respected municipal leaders in the country. So popular and so successful at the basics of governing was the “sewer socialist” that, after his tenure was finished, one of the city’s great landmarks—the Daniel Webster Hoan Memorial Bridge—was named for him.
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“He has won office year after year, while other Socialists [nationwide] failed, not only because of his reputation for personal honesty and administrative ability but because he is a colorful campaigner,” observed a 1936 Time magazine profile headlined, “Marxist Mayor.” (That same year, Hoan won his sixth term as mayor.)
“Meantime, he works toward [his political] ends as best he can under the current system. He talks his audiences’ language, knows how to make them laugh and cheer, keeps them fascinated by the way he thumps a table, shakes his finger, wrinkles his face, hunches his shoulders, strides up and down, leaps in the air,” explained the profile.
Hoan came up politically at a time when Wisconsin Socialists were a powerful force in the state’s politics. For many years, during the 1920s and ’30s, the party formed the second-largest caucus in the state legislature. Often working in alliance with liberal Republicans, and then with the state’s successful independent Progressive Party, the Socialists helped to shape electoral outcomes and policies in the state for decades.
But by the early 1940s, with the Socialist Party fading as a political force, Hoan was encouraged to consider running on the Democratic ballot line.
Hoan had maintained a good relationship with Roosevelt during the later years of his mayoralty, and was impressed with FDR’s progressive tendencies. That wasn’t surprising. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt had called for an “Economic Bill of Rights,” asserting that Americans had a right to “a useful and remunerative job” with fair pay, as well as decent housing, healthcare, education and “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.”
This was the context in which Hoan made his next political move. He bid that fall for the governorship on the Democratic line—as the nominee of a party that had struggled for decades to get its footing in state politics.
Hoan came to the Democratic Party as an outsider who had criticized many of its more conservative leaders and policies. (Following World War I, which was widely unpopular with socialists, he famously refused to sign on to a Milwaukee City Council resolution honoring President Woodrow Wilson as a great American.)
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Hoan’s promise to revitalize the withered Wisconsin Democratic Party—after it had won just 8 percent of the state’s gubernatorial vote in 1938, and just 12 percent in 1942—energized a new generation of voters seeking a home for their progressive politics. Running on a platform that echoed Roosevelt’s advocacy for economic democracy, he won more than 40 percent of the vote for the Democrats—a 28 percent increase from the previous election—and swept industrial counties such as Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha.
With his 1944 campaign, and another waged as the party’s nominee in 1946, Hoan began the transformation of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin from what historian William F. Thompson described as “a moribund collection of courthouse gangs,” which competed for federal patronage scraps but got wiped out in state and local elections.
Longtime Milwaukee alderman Paul Gauer, who had worked with Hoan in Wisconsin’s left-wing Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, said the former mayor’s Milwaukee record and dynamic campaigning won “the confidence of workers in unions and the rank-and-file of Socialists and former Progressives.” That helped a renewed Democratic Party replace the soon-to-collapse Progressive Party and become the chief competitor for the Republicans.
The modern Democratic Party that Hoan jump-started in the mid-1940s would, by the end of the following decade, control the governorship, most statewide posts (including a US Senate seat), the state Assembly and much of the state’s congressional delegation.
“The plain truth is, if Democrats have any memory, that it was Hoan who revitalized the Democratic Party in 1944, when he agreed to run for governor,” recalled Gauer. “It was like a shot in the arm; not only to the state party which had tickets in only seven counties, but to FDR and the national ticket, as well.… His entrance was then electric and an inspiration.”
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