Dave Cieslewicz

Since I last wrote about the Wisconsin governor's race a whole lot of water has rushed under the bridge. Let's review.

Being a socialist could well bury a candidate in the general election. The trouble for Democrats is that it could win a candidate their nomination in August.

At this point, based on the latest Marquette poll results , it looks like a certainty that Francesca Hong will be the Democratic nominee for governor. Tony Evers' Hail Mary in the form of David Crowley looks to be either falling to the end zone turf or being intercepted and run back the other way by Hong.

An article in yesterday's State Journal gave me some hope that the fall campaign between presumptive gubernatorial nominees Tom Tiffany and Francesca Hong might be more enlightened than I have thought. Okay, so probably not, but you never know.

Moderates might take some solace in Abdul El-Sayed's much narrower than expected victory in this week's Michigan Senate primary. But I don't think it provides much hope in heading off Francesca Hong.

It's likely to be too little too late. My very limited sample size along the Maple Mile (the mile-long walk I take each day through my Madison West Side neighborhood with my dog, Maple) shows that David Crowley lawn signs have popped up in the last few days. They now outnumber the Francesca Hong signs by about three-to-one. Maybe the recent revelations of Hong's comments about how she hates Thanksgiving have liberals freaking out about her electability come November.

Back in May I decided to once again take the summer off to focus on book writing projects. But I added one fateful caveat: I would occasionally write about the Wisconsin governor's race. How was I to know that the Democrats would turn their primary into a demolition derby? I couldn't look away.

I took the summer off — except for far more frequent check-ins on the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary than I had anticipated as the Democrats were a lot more entertaining than we had a right to expect.

Okay, folks, let's take a deep breath. Even though we've dodged the bullet of a Francesca Hong nomination, the predictable breathless babbling is oozing up from both sides.

One of my summer projects was to do some ideological remodelling. I ripped my convictions down to the studs and then rebuilt them. But I left the foundation in place. I never questioned being a moderate. The question was whether I wanted to build back as a nonpartisan, moderate Democrat or a conservative independent.