Wisconsin's August 11 Primary for Governor: What the Candidates Actually Say They'll Do

Polls open across Wisconsin at 7 a.m. Tuesday for the first primary in sixteen years with no incumbent governor on the ballot. Gov. Tony Evers announced on July 24, 2025 that he would not seek a third term, and the race to succeed him has since produced a Democratic field that reshuffled three times in five weeks and a Republican field that was effectively settled by a single social media post in January.

What follows is a comparison of where the candidates say they stand, drawn from their public platforms, candidate questionnaires and reporting by Wisconsin news organizations. It is not an endorsement, and it does not attempt to predict a winner.

The short version

If you read nothing else before voting:

• The Democratic race is genuinely unsettled. Francesca Hong, a Madison state representative and democratic socialist, led the last independent poll at 38% — but 34% of Democratic primary voters were undecided, and the poll closed before Mandela Barnes withdrew, so the 16% who named him were never asked for a second choice. David Crowley has Gov. Evers’ endorsement and led the field in cash with about $463,000 on hand in the final pre-primary reports; Kelda Roys has the state’s largest teachers union; Joel Brennan is running on management experience and low name recognition.
• The Republican race was effectively settled in January, when President Trump endorsed U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and his main rival quit the next day. Andy Manske, a medical technician with no prior office, remains on the ballot as his only opponent.
• The defining economic issue is data centers and your power bill — and it does not split along party lines. Wisconsin’s tax exemption for hyperscale computing is projected to cost more than $2 billion. Hong, who led the last Democratic poll, and Tiffany, the presumptive Republican nominee, both want it repealed — and disagree almost entirely about what replaces it: she would require clean generation, he would keep coal plants running past retirement.
• The money is lopsided. Tiffany entered the final week with roughly $5 million against a combined Democratic field holding well under $1.3 million. Because his own primary is uncompetitive, that is effectively general election spending.
• Nationally, this race is being watched as a test case for whether a democratic socialist can win a statewide primary in a battleground. Marquette’s general election testing had Tiffany ahead of Hong by 3 points — and the two tied among voters certain to vote in November.
• Before you go: polls are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., photo ID is required, same-day registration is available, and you must vote within a single party’s column or your partisan votes will not count.

Source: Wisconsin Elections Commission; Marquette Law School Poll, July 22–27, 2026

How the field got here

The Wisconsin Elections Commission certified the primary ballot on June 9. Since then, three Democrats have suspended their campaigns — but under Wisconsin’s ballot rules their names remain printed. Voters on Tuesday will see seven Democratic names and can still cast a ballot for a candidate who is no longer running.

The sequencing matters for reading the polls. The last independent survey of the race was in the field July 22–27 and released July 29 — before Barnes withdrew. The 16% who named him as a first choice, and the 21% who did so once leaners were included, were never asked where they would go if he left the race. No public polling has measured the field since.

The Democratic field

Four candidates are actively campaigning, and they divide roughly along two axes: how far to push on economic policy, and how much executive experience they bring.

Francesca Hong has represented Madison’s 76th Assembly District since 2020, when she became the first Asian American elected to the Wisconsin Legislature. A former restaurant owner and the daughter of Korean immigrants, she describes herself as a democratic socialist. Her campaign has centered on cost of living: universal child care, guaranteed paid leave, and a bill she introduced to raise taxes on high earners and corporations to fund public schools. She would expand BadgerCare and has proposed rural hospital districts modeled on school districts. She is the only Democrat in the race calling for a moratorium on new data center construction. In the campaign’s final weeks she faced criticism over years-old social media posts — including ones about canceling Thanksgiving and abolishing the U.S. Senate — and defended them in appearances on CNN, Fox News and Politico.

David Crowley has been Milwaukee County Executive since 2020, the youngest person and the first Black person elected to the post, and was reelected in 2024 by the widest margin in the office’s history. He served in the state Assembly before that. He carries Gov. Evers’ endorsement — a rare intervention in a contested primary — and campaigns on his executive record, including what his campaign describes as the largest property tax cut in county history. He backs an across-the-board property tax reduction paired with higher taxes on income above $1 million, expanded BadgerCare, and repeal of Wisconsin’s gasoline markup law. He explicitly rejects a data center moratorium, arguing instead for accountability requirements and union labor standards.

Kelda Roys is a state senator from the Madison area and sits on the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, after two earlier terms in the Assembly. An attorney and small business owner, she has made wages and labor law her core message: a $15 minimum wage, restored collective bargaining rights, paid family leave. On education she would restore two-thirds state funding for public schools and phase out the private school voucher program — a platform that won her the endorsement of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union. On health care she proposes letting residents buy into the state employee insurance plan at cost.

Joel Brennan ran the Department of Administration under Evers and previously led Discovery World and the Greater Milwaukee Committee. He is running as the operations-and-execution candidate, with a three-part “Build Roots, Build Wisconsin” plan on housing affordability, the school funding formula and expanded tax credits. He supports Medicaid expansion plus a state public option aimed at small businesses, and would work to repeal Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. He has been candid about his central problem: “I am just not as well-known as other candidates.”

The Republican field

The Republican primary was decided, for practical purposes, in January.

Tom Tiffany has represented Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District since 2020, after eight years in the state Senate and two and a half in the Assembly. He previously ran a river cruise business and worked as a dam tender. Trump’s endorsement in late January prompted his main rival to exit within a day, and he has since run largely as a general election candidate. His platform centers on what he calls ending the property tax escalator, easing regulation on energy, housing, health care and child care, requiring price transparency in health care, auditing state spending, and tightening enforcement on crime and immigration. He voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election results. Of the Democratic field, he has said: “There really isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the candidates.”

Andy Manske is a medical service technician from Franklin running as an anti-establishment outsider with no prior office. His platform is the least documented of the six — he has not drawn significant press coverage or independent expenditure — but in candidate questionnaires he proposes cutting state spending by 30% through technology modernization, targets the state’s gasoline markup law, and is the only candidate in either primary calling for an outright ban on new data centers.

The issue that crosses party lines: data centers and your power bill

The clearest economic fault line in this primary is not one that separates the parties neatly. It runs through both.

Wisconsin has become a national destination for hyperscale computing. Microsoft completed construction on its first Mount Pleasant facility — the Fairwater campus — on June 23, 2026, part of a $7.3 billion Wisconsin investment that includes a second building of similar scale. A $15 billion facility is under construction in Port Washington and a $1 billion facility in Beaver Dam, alongside a smaller Epic project in Verona. Two of the facilities near Milwaukee alone account for about 3.9 gigawatts of electricity demand.

The state courted that investment with a sales tax exemption adopted in the 2023 budget. When the exemption passed, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau did not estimate its cost, because the scale of the buildout was still unknown. Its 2026 projection puts the figure at about $1.5 billion in forgone state sales tax revenue during construction, plus roughly $369 million a year once the facilities are running — more than $2 billion in total.

That demand lands on top of rate increases already approved. In late 2024 regulators signed off on an overall electric rate increase of about 8.79% for We Energies across 2025 and 2026 — an estimated $7.62 more per month for the average residential customer in 2025, and another $9.73 in 2026. The utilities attributed the request to forestry and reliability work and to the cost of building renewable and natural gas generation; it was not driven by data center load directly. Utilities are now building for that load too: We Energies has two new gas plants planned, and scheduled coal plant retirements are being rolled back.

In April 2026 the Public Service Commission instituted a special electricity rate for data center customers, intended to prevent ordinary ratepayers from covering the cost of serving them. Whether that protection holds as the load grows is much of what the candidates are arguing about.

Every candidate in both primaries has taken a position. They do not sort by party:

Hong, who led the last Democratic primary poll, and Tiffany, the presumptive Republican nominee, agree that the tax exemption should go. They disagree almost entirely about what should replace it. Hong would condition any construction on clean generation; Tiffany would keep existing coal plants online past their scheduled retirement to meet the load. Tiffany has framed his concern in terms of existing customers, telling PBS Wisconsin that the state will “probably have to find a new template” so current ratepayers and manufacturers are not harmed.

The progressive wing, and why this primary is being watched nationally

The reason this race has drawn national coverage is not the data center fight. It is that a self-described democratic socialist is leading a statewide primary in a battleground neither party can count on.

Hong has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Madison Area chapter since 2020. That chapter endorsed her in May 2024, and Milwaukee DSA had joined by February 2026. She has not been endorsed by DSA nationally — a distinction her critics and some of her supporters both tend to elide. Asked about it in a debate, she said plainly: “I do not support the full platform of the national DSA and I am not endorsed by DSA National.” Her national backers include Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna.

Her platform includes a public bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota, repeal of Wisconsin’s right-to-work law, reversal of the Act 10 union restrictions, universal childcare, and a refusal of corporate PAC money.

The comparison every national outlet reaches for is Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 win in New York, and Hong has borrowed from that playbook: universal childcare, public schools funded by taxes on the very top, a cost-of-living message repeated relentlessly. The strategic argument from that wing is about organizing rather than ideology. The American Prospect, making the case for Hong, pointed to Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate primary win as evidence that field organizing beats spending — citing a rough per-vote spending comparison that has not been independently verified. Hong’s campaign has made a similar bet on volunteers over donors.

Two things make Wisconsin a harder test than New York:

The establishment never consolidated. Wisconsin Democrats cycled through Missy Hughes, then Sara Rodriguez, then Mandela Barnes, then landed on Crowley — three of those four exited within five weeks. Gov. Evers’ endorsement of Crowley on July 18 was an unusual intervention in a contested primary, and it came so late that the poll released eleven days afterward still showed Crowley at 7%. Roys, meanwhile, holds the WEAC endorsement, splitting institutional labor support rather than concentrating it.

Hong has been recalibrating. NBC News reported that as electability concerns mounted she softened her democratic socialist message and distanced herself from some past remarks; she spent the final weeks defending old social media posts on CNN, Fox News and Politico. Her opponents have argued a democratic socialist cannot hold northern and western Wisconsin in November. Marquette’s general election testing gives that argument some support and some trouble at once — Tiffany led her by 3 points statewide, but the two were tied among voters certain to vote.

The counterargument from her side is that the electability frame is circular, and that a candidate who expands the electorate is worth more than one who protects a coalition that has not held the Legislature since 2011. Tuesday is a rare statewide test of that claim in a battleground state.

Foreign policy in a governor’s race

Governors do not make foreign policy. Wisconsin’s next governor will not negotiate treaties, set tariffs, or direct military aid. But three genuinely foreign-facing issues have shaped this primary, and one of them hits the state’s economy directly.

Tariffs are the issue with the most direct economic stake. Wisconsin’s dairy and manufacturing sectors depend on export markets, and Democrats have made the argument that recent tariff policy has squeezed farmers and manufacturers a central line of attack — a causal claim that is contested, and one this article reports as a campaign argument rather than a settled finding. Tiffany has backed President Trump’s tariffs, saying “I’m in support of the President’s policies,” and pairs that with deregulation as his answer to input costs. Crowley’s campaign has attacked him directly, arguing Tiffany “already voted to keep the tariffs.”

A governor cannot impose or repeal a tariff. What the office does control is the state’s own economic development, agriculture and export-promotion programs. It does not control state litigation: in Wisconsin the attorney general directs the state’s cases, so whether Wisconsin sues over a federal trade or funding action is largely Josh Kaul’s call — or his successor’s — not the governor’s.

Tiffany brings an actual voting record. Unlike every other candidate in the race, he has cast votes on foreign policy. In April 2024 he was the only member of Wisconsin’s House delegation to vote against all three foreign aid bills — $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific and Taiwan — writing that it was “$95 billion in FOREIGN aid with NOTHING to stop the FOREIGN invasion of our own country.” He supported the TikTok divestiture bill. On China he has been notably hawkish, introducing a resolution urging the U.S. to abandon the One China policy and formally recognize Taiwan, and an amendment barring federal funds for maps depicting Taiwan as part of China.

Israel and Gaza became a live issue in the Democratic primary — unusually so for a state race. Hong signed a November 2023 resolution calling for an “immediate de-escalation and cease-fire,” has introduced legislation to repeal Wisconsin’s 2018 anti-BDS law barring state contracts with businesses that boycott Israel, and has criticized Gov. Evers for adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. She has said Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide and called saying so a “litmus test” for leadership. Days after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks she posted: “To the Jewish community here and around the world, I love you with my whole being and am praying for your safety.”

Her appearances on podcasts and livestreams associated with the online left drew sustained criticism. As reported by the Times of Israel and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ann Jacobs — the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission — wrote that Hong “is willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks,” and Jewish Federation leaders in the state raised concerns about a political climate in which antisemitic rhetoric is minimized. Hong has maintained that criticism of Israel should not be conflated with antisemitism.

Of these, only the anti-BDS repeal is something a governor could actually sign — and only if the Legislature passed it first. The rest is a proxy fight about what kind of Democrat leads the ticket.

Polling and money

The final independent poll of the Democratic primary was conducted July 22–27 among 407 registered voters who said they would vote in the Democratic primary, with a margin of error of ±6.6 percentage points. Two caveats matter: Mandela Barnes was still a candidate when it was in the field, and a third of respondents had not made up their minds.

Hong’s support skewed sharply young — 66% among voters aged 18 to 29 — while Crowley polled better with voters 45 and older. Crowley remained largely unknown statewide: 67% of Democratic primary voters said they had not heard enough about him to form an opinion, against 22% favorable and 10% unfavorable.

The money runs in nearly the opposite direction from the polling.

Tiffany entered the final week with roughly $5 million available — including about $4 million transferred from the state Republican Party in July alone — against a combined Democratic field holding well under $1.3 million. Because his own primary is uncompetitive, that money is effectively general election spending, and he has been running introductory biographical ads for weeks while the Democrats spend against each other.

Marquette’s general election testing showed Tiffany ahead of Hong by 3 percentage points statewide, and the two tied among voters who said they were certain to vote in November.

What Tuesday actually decides

The governorship is not the only thing on the ballot. Wisconsin also holds primaries Tuesday for lieutenant governor — nominated separately from governor, then paired with the nominee in November — as well as attorney general, where Democratic incumbent Josh Kaul and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney are each positioned for a rematch of their 2022 race, plus secretary of state, treasurer, all 99 state Assembly seats, the 17 odd-numbered state Senate districts, and all eight U.S. House seats.

Legislative control is the quieter stake. Democrats have a path to full control of state government for the first time in sixteen years by flipping legislative seats Republicans have held since 2011 — which would determine whether whichever governor is elected can pass a budget or spends four years negotiating with an opposing legislature. Several Democratic candidates have argued their own nomination should be judged partly on whether it helps or hurts those legislative races.

How to vote Tuesday

Polls are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. If you are in line at 8 p.m., stay in line — you are entitled to vote.

Wisconsin holds an open primary — you do not register with a party — but every party’s primary appears on one ballot and you must vote within a single party’s column. If you mark candidates in more than one party’s column, the partisan contests on your ballot are not counted. There is no penalty for which column you choose, only for mixing them.

Same-day registration is available at your polling place. Bring a proof-of-residence document showing your name and current address — a utility bill, bank statement, pay stub, lease or qualifying government document will work.

Photo ID is required. A Wisconsin driver’s license or state ID, U.S. passport, military ID, tribal ID, or a qualifying student ID are all accepted. If you do not have one, the state issues a free ID for voting purposes, and DMV service centers extended hours until 6 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday.

Absentee ballots had to be requested by Aug. 6 (Aug. 7 for military and indefinitely confined voters) and must physically arrive at your municipal clerk’s office by Election Day to count. A postmark is not enough. If you are holding a completed absentee ballot, deliver it to your clerk rather than mailing it.

Results will not all arrive at once. Municipalities that process absentee ballots at a central counting location generally report later in the evening than those that count at the polls.

Where to check your own ballot

• MyVote Wisconsin — Enter your address to see your exact ballot, find your polling place, and check registration status
• Wisconsin Elections Commission — Official 2026 election information, deadlines and results
• WPR 2026 Primary Voter Guide — Candidate survey responses organized by issue
• WUWM Governor Candidate Guide — Side-by-side answers from each gubernatorial candidate
• Marquette Law School Poll — Full crosstabs and methodology for the polling cited here
• Votebeat Wisconsin — Nonpartisan reporting on election administration and rules

Wisconsin has not held an open race for governor since 2010. Tuesday’s ballot narrows six active candidates to two — and with a third of Democratic primary voters undecided a week out, and no public polling taken since the second-place candidate left the race, the result may say as much about who turns out as about who was ahead.