Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America member leading Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, now says she "won't defund the police", but her own social media posts from 2021 tell a different story.
Hong, a Wisconsin state representative and dues-paying DSA member since 2020, sat for a live interview on Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Friday, where host Dana Perino walked her through a trail of past statements that read like a DSA wish list: abolish police, abolish the Senate, abolish ICE. One by one, Hong tried to put distance between herself and positions she had publicly embraced.
The result was an exchange that laid bare a pattern now familiar in Democratic primaries. Candidates court the activist left to win nominations, then scramble to soften the record before a general electorate gets a close look.
Perino asked Hong directly whether she was a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Hong confirmed it without hesitation.
"In my home chapter in Madison, I have been since 2020," Hong told Perino.
But when Perino pressed on whether Hong disagreed with anything in the DSA platform, a platform that includes abolishing ICE, dismantling the Senate, defunding police, and abolishing the Supreme Court, Hong began hedging. She called abolishing the Senate "nonsensical and non-practical at this time." She rejected eliminating the Supreme Court, citing a belief in checks and balances.
Those are welcome concessions to common sense. The trouble is that Hong's own record suggests they are recent arrivals.
In 2021, after the Senate failed to convict President Donald Trump during impeachment proceedings, Hong posted on social media calling to abolish the Senate. Her campaign later told Fox News Digital she did not recall making the post. That is a striking lapse of memory for a sitting state legislator commenting on the structure of the federal government.
The broader fractures inside the Democratic Party over its socialist wing have only deepened. Progressive and socialist factions have openly challenged Democratic leadership in recent months, and Hong's candidacy is one of the clearest tests yet of how far left the party's base has moved.
The sharpest moment of the interview came when Perino confronted Hong with her own words on policing. In 2021, after federal prosecutors chose not to charge the officer accused of shooting Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Hong posted on social media calling for abolishing police.
Perino did not let it slide.
"Why shouldn't people take you at your word when you say that you want to defund the police and go towards abolishing it?"
Hong responded that she "won't defund the police" as governor. She framed the shift as personal growth.
"I believe that people can evolve. We meet Trump voters from previous elections who now would like to vote for me."
Perino's follow-up landed cleanly: "So who needs to evolve, the voter or you?"
It is a fair question. Hong described herself as "a democratic socialist," "a good single mom," and "a service industry worker." Those personal details may be genuine, but they do not resolve the contradiction between her DSA membership card and her new posture as a law-and-order moderate.
In a statement to Fox News Digital in May, Hong said, "There is no way I want to cut resources for public safety. I don't like crime. I don't like unsafe streets. I also don't like when a member of law enforcement abuses their power." But in that same statement, she did not say whether she still supported abolishing the police, the position she had publicly endorsed just a few years earlier.
Wisconsin voters weighing Hong's candidacy should note that Democrats have already scrambled to stop the socialist frontrunner in this race, a sign that even members of her own party recognize the liability.
Hong's Friday interview did not happen in a vacuum. Roughly one month earlier, she appeared on a broadcast hosted by Hasan Piker, a left-wing internet personality, where she defended many DSA policies. In a separate appearance on Piker's stream in June, Hong confirmed her support for a slate of progressive positions: universal childcare, free school meals, abolishing ICE, public grocery stores, and legalizing cannabis.
That is the audience Hong has been courting. On Piker's stream, she was comfortable embracing the full DSA menu. On Fox News, facing questions from a mainstream interviewer, the menu suddenly shrank.
The pattern is not unique to Hong. DSA-aligned candidates have notched primary wins in New York and Colorado, and local Wisconsin DSA chapters have backed her campaign. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna have offered public support. The coalition is real, and it is organized.
But the coalition's platform remains deeply unpopular with general-election voters, and Hong's attempt to split the difference, keeping the DSA membership while rejecting the DSA platform on live television, asks voters to ignore what she has said and done in favor of what she now promises.
That tension mirrors a wider fight inside the Democratic Party. Some prominent Democrats have drawn explicit lines against socialist nominees, arguing the party must decide what it actually stands for. Hong's candidacy in a major swing state makes that question harder to dodge.
Hong is described as the frontrunner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin, though no specific polling data, pollster, or margin has been published to support that characterization. If she wins the primary, she would carry the DSA label into a general election in one of the most closely contested states in the country.
Her record gives a general-election opponent a straightforward case to make. A candidate who called for abolishing police after the Kenosha shooting, called for abolishing the Senate after an impeachment vote, pays dues to an organization that wants to eliminate ICE and the Supreme Court, and then claims on national television that her views have "evolved", that candidate is asking voters to trust the new version over the documented one.
Wisconsin has its own recent history of officials who put ideology above the law. A former Wisconsin judge was convicted of obstruction for helping a man evade ICE, a case that showed what happens when officeholders treat enforcement agencies as enemies rather than institutions.
Hong may yet win the nomination. DSA energy in primaries is real, and low-turnout contests reward organized factions. But Wisconsin voters deserve to know exactly what they are being asked to buy, and Hong's Friday interview made the price tag a good deal harder to hide.
When a candidate's biggest challenge is explaining away her own words, the problem is not the interviewer. It is the record.
