This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
Crowley Won. Now Meet Tom Tiffany.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley is the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, beating Francesca Hong 39.8% to 39.4% — roughly 3,200 votes with 98% counted. The AP called it at 2:34 a.m. after Hong conceded. Crowley had dropped out of the race a month ago after failing to gain traction, then re-entered days later with Tony Evers’s endorsement. In late July, he was polling in single digits. He is now the nominee, and if he wins in November he’ll be Wisconsin’s first Black governor.
The polls showed Hong with a 22-point lead going into Tuesday’s primary, one week after Michigan’s polls overestimated El-Sayed’s margin, adding fuel to the left vs. center debate within the Democratic Party.
For my take, this wasn’t as much about left versus center as it was a Democratic electorate obsessed with winning. Hong spent the final stretch defending deleted tweets in an uneven CNN interview while running almost no television ads, and Crowley and the Republicans blanketed the airwaves. The Bulwark framed the whole cycle around primary voters who “care less about ideological purity than beating Republicans.” As the spotlight grew on Hong, she just didn’t seem as impressive a candidate. Her loss says less about her ideology than about candidate quality — though it’s worth noting she also lost by 0.4 points while Kelda Roys pulled nearly 11% in Dane County, splitting the left’s own base.
One pattern has held across the primaries. The left’s candidates keep struggling with Black voters. In Michigan, Stevens beat El-Sayed by eight points in districts where more than 15% of the population is Black, and won seven of the state’s twelve largest counties with significant Black populations — Wayne, Saginaw, Genesee — by an average of 8.5 points. July polling had El-Sayed at 21% among Black voters. He is the first Democrat to win a Michigan primary statewide without carrying Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb since Bernie Sanders in 2016. In Wisconsin, Sabato’s Crystal Ball found the same shape: Crowley’s Milwaukee coalition ran through the city’s Black wards, while Hong’s came from younger, whiter neighborhoods and Latino pockets.
Crowley is Black and Milwaukee’s county executive, so some of that is a hometown effect, but the geography tells the same story in both states. The “leftist” candidates are winning young, college-educated, urban and campus-town voters, and losing the Black voters and non-college areas that decide general elections in Michigan and Wisconsin.
That’s a problem, because the central argument from the left wing of the party is that an economic populist message will pull working-class voters back. So far it’s pulling college towns. It doesn’t mean the message can’t work — it means somebody should be figuring out why it isn’t yet.
But the primary is over. So let’s talk about the man Crowley has to beat, because Tom Tiffany is not some run-of-the-mill Republican.
Tom Tiffany tried to overturn the election in his own state.
In December 2020, Tiffany signed onto the Texas lawsuit — Ken Paxton’s attempt to throw out the presidential results in four swing states, including Wisconsin, and hand the decision to Republican legislatures. Tom Tiffany asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the votes of the people who elected him.
Then, on January 6, 2021, hours after the mob was cleared from the Capitol, Tiffany voted against certifying Biden’s victory in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He was one of 147. Most of Wisconsin’s delegation, Republicans included, voted the other way. And he told WISN he planned to vote to overturn Wisconsin’s results too. That vote never happened because the insurrection ran out the clock. His explanation, in his own words: those states “really have a lot of fixing to do with their election systems.”
When Congress later tried to prevent a repeat by reforming the Electoral Count Act, Tiffany voted no and called it “a solution in search of a problem.” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s assessment of Tiffany and the others who tried to upend the results: “It’s a betrayal of their oath of office.”
This is the man Republicans just nominated to administer Wisconsin’s elections. Wisconsin decided the presidency in 2016, 2020, and 2024. In 2028, the governor of Wisconsin will sit at the center of any dispute over its electoral votes. Tiffany has already shown you what he’d do.
The rest of the file.
On abortion, he co-sponsored the Heartbeat Protection Act, a six-week national ban. As a state senator, he voted for a 20-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest and criminal penalties for providers, and said afterward “that was the right vote to take.” As a member of the Republican Study Committee he co-authored a budget endorsing the Life at Conception Act — fetal personhood, a national ban from the moment of conception, overriding state law. He called Dobbs “a historic victory for human rights.” He voted against codifying the right to contraception. Then, when he decided to run statewide, he deleted the abortion sections from his website and started talking about “reasonable restrictions.”
On health care, he voted for the budget bill that gutted Medicaid, and in January 2026 he voted against extending the ACA tax credits that 60,000 Wisconsinites rely on. He’s called the Affordable Care Act a “problem” in a state with more than 300,000 marketplace enrollees. He voted to make the corporate tax cuts permanent. He’s defended the tariffs. And per the Democratic Governors Association’s new opposition file, he helped block the release of the Epstein files while dismissing the survivors’ fight for them as an attempt to “change the subject.”
Crowley needs to make Tiffany answer for this record.
Did Joe Biden win Wisconsin in 2020? Do you regret signing the Texas lawsuit that tried to throw out your own constituents’ votes? Would you certify a Democratic presidential win in this state in 2028? Do you still support a national abortion ban from conception? Will you commit to exceptions for rape and incest? Why did you delete the abortion page from your website? Will you vote to extend the ACA tax credits your constituents lost? Do you support Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting — in the state where you’ve voted absentee yourself?
Eighty-two days. Tom Tiffany has never had to answer for any of this before a statewide electorate. Make this the year he does.
Read more: NBC News, PBS Wisconsin, Talking Points Memo, Wisconsin Watch, The Cap Times, The Message Box
Trump Hid in a Catering Truck and Left His Cabinet as Bait
On July 8, after the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump walked up the stairs of Air Force One in front of the cameras. Then he went out a different door, got into a catering truck, was driven across the tarmac, and flew home on a smaller military jet. The plane he’d been photographed boarding took off anyway.
Still on it: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Stephen Miller, Steven Cheung, Will Scharf, White House aide Monica Crowley, and the entire traveling press pool. None of the reporters knew. The reason for the switch was an Iranian assassination threat relayed by Israel — the New York Times reported a specific threat involving a surface-to-air missile, with someone spotted near the summit carrying a shoulder-fired launcher.
Rubio and Bessent are fourth and fifth in the line of presidential succession. A senior official told the AP that Rubio knew about the switch and the threat and stayed on the plane anyway. Bessent, the official said, probably knew but not for certain. Nobody has explained why the plane was permitted to fly at all if the danger was real enough to justify the catering truck.
At the time, Trump told reporters the second jet had been sent ahead so U.S. troops in eastern England could get a look at the new Air Force One. That was a lie. He’s since confirmed the whole thing and, per Zeteo, he and senior officials have been privately laughing about the coverage.
Eighteen American service members have died in this war. Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed more than 200 days with no port call, have reportedly tried to jump overboard. And the commander in chief of that military hid in a food cart and let his own cabinet fly as bait. Loyalty in this administration runs exactly one direction, and everyone on that tarmac now knows which direction it is.
Read more: Washington Post, The Hill, AP, MS NOW, The Bulwark, Zeteo
Trump Signed an Order to Cut Childhood Vaccines by Seven
On Monday, with RFK Jr. standing beside him, Trump signed an executive order titled “Delivering Gold-Standard Vaccine Recommendations for Americans.” It cuts the list of diseases all children are recommended to be vaccinated against from 18 to 11 — seven vaccines removed from universal recommendation, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, COVID, and flu, which move to “high-risk groups” and “shared clinical decision-making.” It directs that the MMR shot be split into three separate injections given at different visits, against the scientific consensus and for no medical reason. And it directs the Justice Department to pressure states to reduce school vaccination requirements.
Trump used the signing to repeat, falsely, that vaccines are linked to autism, and described the childhood schedule as pumping “vats” into children. “We’re doing 20 percent of that at each visit,” he said.
RFK Jr. tried this in January, cutting the schedule unilaterally without his own advisory panel, and a federal judge blocked it in March. The same cuts came back seven months later with a presidential signature on them, and they’ll almost certainly be challenged again.
Robert Hubbell called the order a “publicity stunt,” and on the narrow legal question he has a point. An executive order can’t rewrite the CDC schedule by itself. The Vaccines for Children program, which covers roughly half of American kids, is protected by statute because it keys off the CDC advisory committee. Blue Cross Blue Shield and CVS both said they’d keep covering recommended pediatric vaccines without copays, “at least for the time being.”
But the goal here is to create as much confusion as possible. A parent in a pediatrician’s waiting room this fall doesn’t know whether hepatitis B is still recommended, whether their insurer will cover the MMR if it’s now three visits instead of one, or whether the doctor telling them to vaccinate is following federal guidance or defying it. The result of all of this will be fewer vaccines given and more sick children.
Read more: CNN, NBC News, NPR, Robert Hubbell, What A Day
That's your Thursday. Crowley won and now faces a man who tried to throw out Wisconsin's presidential results. Trump hid in a catering truck and let two cabinet secretaries fly as decoys. And the childhood vaccine schedule just got cut by seven.
Excellent set of questions for Crowley to ask about Tiffany.