TGIF: For Now, We Polka

Hi there! This is Will Rahn, filling in for TGIF Generalissimo Nellie Bowles. Where is Nellie? Beats me. All I know is that she sent me the following Slack message at 2:03 this morning: “Need you to do TGIF this week. No time to find someones [sic] better. I’m on a yacht owned by [REDACTED] and I just took a handful of [REDACTED] and so did [REDACTED] like 20 mins ago and now she’s tweaking out.” Nellie will, presumably, return next week. Until then, roast me in the comments. I promise it won’t be all politics. Just the first few items. And maybe a few at the end, and just a handful in the middle.

Some housekeeping first: Last week, Nellie announced we’re doing a Free Press Forum Book Club. Today, we’re happy to say the winner of the Forum Book Club is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden! Use this link to get book club announcements, and read and discuss alongside the other literate Free Pressers in the forum.

And ask Coleman Hughes anything! This Tuesday, August 18, at 3 p.m. ET, Coleman will take all of your questions—on music, race, writing, the precarious stack of books on his piano, and whatever else you can think up. Start dropping your questions in the forum now. Now let’s do the news!

→ The empire strikes back: It turns out the Democratic establishment has some fight left in it. After being consistently humiliated in primary elections by their socialist rivals since Donald Trump returned to power, they finally notched a victory on Tuesday when Milwaukee County executive David Crowley became the party’s candidate for governor in Wisconsin.

Who is David Crowley? Who cares! The point is that he’s not state representative Francesca Hong, a socialist and an inept campaigner whose campaign was already planning a “staff overhaul” should she win the nomination. Her preelection team included a deputy campaign manager who’s moonlighted as an OnlyFans model and who also won “Penthouse Pet of the Year” in 2024. Lest we forget: Hong called for the cancellation of Thanksgiving in 2020 because it’s a “colonizer holiday” and “the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and women.” And just for good measure, she also had major issues with Fourth of July fireworks, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and the Pledge of Allegiance. If it’s not Indegenous [sic] People’s Day, forget it.

Needless to say, this all made Hong the runaway front-runner for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin even as Bernie Sanders and AOC kept their distance from her. Polls had her leading by roughly 20 points in the weeks before the election as her opponents dropped out.