The big news from last night is that “sure thing” Francesca Hong narrowly lost to on-again, off-again candidate David Crowley by a little over three thousand votes in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Polls I’d seen prior to the race were showing a Hong blowout. Once again for those in the back: primaries are hard to poll.

If I thought Republicans were smart enough to play chess not checkers, I’d think their big ad buys supporting Hong, who they claimed was the weaker candidate, were used to signal timid Democrats to vote for Crowley. As I wrote the other day, at least one Republican consultant thought that Hong was a strong candidate. Outgoing Gov Tony Evers also supported Crowley.

Last night’s NBC News live blog is down, but one of the voters interviewed said they liked Hong, they liked all of Hong’s policies, but they were concerned that she couldn’t win the general, so they voted for Crowley. I find this kind of attitude problematic. It adopts a centrist pundit mindset that hasn’t helped the Democratic Party elect better candidates, or even more candidates. It also tends to lead to electing defensive crouch candidates, and to ugly slugfest elections where issues aren’t discussed but instead it’s 24/7 TV ads and personal attacks.

Moving on to the North Star state, Peggy Flanagan easily beat Angie Craig for the open Senate seat in Minnesota. Since Amy Klobuchar didn’t have any serious opposition, she won her race to replace Tim Walz. I’ve seen rumors that she’ll appoint Craig to the Senate seat that will be open if she becomes governor. Perhaps all the crypto money that was spent to support Craig won’t be wasted if that happens. That link also shows that Craig’s issue page red-boxed attacks on Peggy Flanagan. Like Hayley Stevens in Michigan and Diana DeGette in CO-1, the consultants these candidates hire want to run 1990’s style air-bombing slugfest negative campaigns that don’t put forward a positive vision from the Democratic Party.

The other race of note for Democrats is that John B Larson, a 78 year-old Democrat who was first elected to Congress in 1998 was beaten, soundly, by Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin. Larson had suffered a seizure on the floor of the House last February, yet he still decided to run. This is a D+12 district to Bronin will almost certainly hold the seat.