A Democratic Socialist Disparaged Thanksgiving. Will Voters Forgive Her?

On Wednesday, Becky Fernette arrived at a crowded meet-and-greet for Francesca Hong, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor, having heard all about Ms. Hong’s social media kerfuffle this week over the nation’s holidays.

Yes, she knew that Ms. Hong had said she disliked Thanksgiving, a new issue to go alongside a past call for abolishing the police. The commentary had been fervently picked apart on cable news for days.

But Ms. Fernette, 64, who plans to vote for Ms. Hong in the primary, said, “I also do not support Thanksgiving.”

In her final push less than one week before the primary on Tuesday, Ms. Hong, a democratic socialist, has struggled to explain stances that many Wisconsinites would consider offbeat, inexplicable or even disqualifying at a time when many Democratic voters are just tuning into the campaign and she is hoping to solidify her lead in polls.

Asked on CNN this week whether she still believed that Thanksgiving should be canceled, as she once wrote on social media and later deleted, Ms. Hong referred to her own experience as a chef preparing Thanksgiving as a teenager. Then she added: “But Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities. So I think there I wanted to make sure that people understood there are multiple views, but views can evolve.”

For good measure, old social media posts have cropped up with Ms. Hong questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees on computer background screens.

On a recent podcast, Ms. Hong explained her previous statements on law enforcement, saying that she would not abolish the police and no longer believed that the police exist to uphold white supremacy, as she once wrote.

At least one of her old posts has been deleted, but Ms. Hong has generally left her social media untouched.

Her opponents have seized on both the original posts and her explanations, saying that her answers are evidence that she would lose in a November matchup against Representative Tom Tiffany, the Republican front-runner.

“If you can’t handle a simple CNN interview talking about Thanksgiving, how can you possibly make it through a general election?” said Eddie Vale, a spokesman for David Crowley, one of Ms. Hong’s Democratic opponents.

Allison Geyer, a Hong campaign spokeswoman, said that the increased scrutiny on Ms. Hong is “what happens when you are emerging as the front-runner.”

“I think it’s all to distract from the issues and the fact that you know Tom Tiffany doesn’t have a clear vision for how to bring Wisconsin forward,” Ms. Geyer said.

She added that some of the posts were written during “peak woke back in the 2020s.”

In the final week before the primary, Ms. Hong plans to crisscross the state and canvass for votes, adding to the more than 330 events that she has held since declaring her candidacy last year. On Wednesday morning, she arrived in Platteville in the Driftless region in southwest Wisconsin, joining a group of dozens of local Democrats, many of whom were still undecided.

Tom Loeffelholz, a retired maintenance worker wearing a WisDems hat, said he was unbothered by Ms. Hong’s old social media comments.

“The more they criticize her for what she does, the more I like her,” he said. “I just resent the garbage that they can dig up around people.”

Others were more skeptical.

Outside Ms. Hong’s event, John Wilson, a pharmacist in Platteville, was walking to City Hall, hoping to cast an early ballot in the primary before heading on a camping trip.

Mr. Wilson, 61, said he tends to lean Democratic. But the primary campaign on the Democrats’ side this year had left him so disillusioned and uninspired, he said, that he planned to vote for Mr. Tiffany for now.

“There’s just not a lot of outstanding choices,” he said.

While Mr. Wilson agreed with Ms. Hong’s messages about helping make life more affordable, the fact that she is a democratic socialist concerned him, he said. And her comments on social media about Thanksgiving helped push him to Mr. Tiffany.

“I understand a lot of this is hype,” Mr. Wilson said. “But on the other hand, you have to take people at their word.”