Some Democrats Want Ben Wikler to Run the DNC. Listen to His Answer.

Summary

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Bulwark Takes – "Some Democrats Want Ben Wikler to Run the DNC. Listen to His Answer."

Podcast Host: Sam Stein (The Bulwark)
Guest: Ben Wikler (Former Chair, Wisconsin Democratic Party; Author)
Date: July 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Ben Wikler, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and author of the new book "This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy." Host Sam Stein explores Wikler's experiences in state and national politics, the strategies needed for Democratic renewal, and debates whether Wikler might run the DNC in the future. The discussion centers on practical, ground-up organizing as the key to unrigging America's political systems, and the often-overlooked importance of state-level and local elections in safeguarding democracy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Write a Book in a World of Doomscrolling Media?

• Wikler’s Motivation: Contrary to the fast-paced, digital-first world, Wikler wrote "This Is the Plan" to offer a comprehensive, long-form roadmap for saving democracy through persistent, local organizing—not quick fixes or viral moments.
  • “The book argues essentially for a non doom scrolling approach to politics.” (02:11)
  • He encourages readers to embrace the "slow food" version of politics—a process that requires ongoing commitment over years, not just during elections.

2. The 2008 "Sugar High" and 2010 Backlash: Lessons Learned

• Post-Obama Victory Complacency: The Democratic surge in 2008 led to organizational letup, while Republicans corralled resources for state-level, down-ballot races—culminating in a massive conservative shift in 2010 through coordinated gerrymandering and legislative action.
  • "Democrats fell over like a house of cards. And Republicans took control of state governments across the country and then used their power... to rig maps... suppress the votes, they smashed unions..." (04:47)
• Long-Term Impact: The effects of state-level infrastructure, or lack thereof, have lingered for more than a decade, underscoring the need for sustained, local engagement beyond national headlines.

3. Wisconsin as a Case Study: How Real Change Happens

• Slow, Relentless Organizing: Wisconsin's journey back from 2010’s setbacks took years of local commitment, rebuilding from scratch, and focusing on seemingly small but consequential races like the State Supreme Court.
  • “It's a huge volume of work... We went from having like three staff in debt after the 2008 presidential election...” (09:05)
• The Snowflake Model: Wikler explains the "snowflake organizing model," fostered during the Obama campaign, as a critical framework for decentralized, persistent engagement.
  • "If you do it on a year round basis... you can blow it out of the water. And in the really big elections... maybe you can add a percentage point. But in Wisconsin, that is enough." (09:05)
• Motivation Matters: Success in obscure races built confidence and infrastructure to contest bigger races—and turnout increases in even the smallest elections can tip statewide balances.

4. The Real Plan: How to Actually Save Democracy

• Three-Step Strategy:
  1. Win Key State Races in 2026: Focus on battleground states to fend off antidemocratic efforts, especially regarding election administration.
  2. Secure Federal Trifecta in 2028: Gain control of House, Senate, and Presidency.
  3. Enact Sweeping Democracy Reforms in 2029: Structural reforms to voting, the courts, and legislative rules (e.g., filibuster reform) to permanently level the playing field.
  • “This is the plan. Step one... protect 28 by winning in 26 in the states. Step two, win federal trifecta... Step three is in 2029, you need to pass... major democracy reforms.” (21:35)
  • Warning: If these steps aren’t taken, the country could revert to a GOP-rigged system, as seen after 2010.

5. Practical Organizing: Beyond Trump and Federal Obsessions

• Why Local Matters: The voters who determine elections often view politics as remote or irrelevant, so campaigns should focus on immediate, tangible concerns—roads, groceries, safety—not just abstract democracy or federal personalities.
  • “The voters who wind up making the difference... often think of politics the way you and I might think of curling...” (16:07)
  • "If you want to save democracy, talk about roads." (20:44)
• Relational Organizing: Relationships drive action—convince your barber, your neighbor, your community.
  • “Statistically, it's the highest impact thing you can do.” (16:07)
• Micro-Impacts: Even one vote matters—Wikler shares an anecdote about a city council candidate losing because his barber didn’t vote.
  • "I tell the story of a local candidate who lost his city council race because his barber didn't vote..." (19:05)

6. Butterfly Effects: Small Contests, Big Outcomes

• State Supreme Court Races: Obscure elections like Wisconsin and North Carolina’s court races determined control of U.S. House and even prevented electoral subversion.
  • “North Carolina has a Supreme Court election this fall... their Supreme Court justice... lost by 401 votes. That led to the gerrymandering of the state that granted Republicans enough U.S. house seats to give them a U.S. house majority right now.” (24:12)
• Dramatic ‘What-Ifs’: Wikler recalls the 2025 Musk-funded Wisconsin Supreme Court race (from his book’s opening), which could have permanently tilted the system if not for organizing and voter backlash.
  • “If he had won, we'd be in a much darker place right now. And instead, there's a backlash... And she wins by 10 percentage points.” (24:12)

7. Would Wikler Run the DNC? His Shermanesque Answer

• On Not Running: Wikler expresses gratitude that he’s not the DNC chair, notes the personal cost, and argues change must come from everywhere—not just the top.
  • “My kids were like, daddy, we're so excited that you lost. And it was like... at a personal level, I'm grateful. And it gave me time to step back and actually map all this out...” (29:25)
  • “Shermanesque: will not serve if nominated.” (31:24)
• Grassroots Focus: The real margin is in “the margin of effort,” not the margin of error—everyone’s engagement is how elections are won.
  • “We don't think about the margin of error in the polls. We try to win by the margin of effort...” (29:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On The Need for Organizing:
  • “If you think about all the steps in the chain, the series of dominoes you have to push over, you can actually get out of this mess.” (02:11)
• On the Myth of Quick Fixes:
  • “There is no one election, there's no one magic message, there's no one secret trick that can allow us to unrig the political system.” (02:11)
• On the Perils of Neglecting Local Races:
  • “In many ways we're still living in the country that was built by the GOP after the 2010 midterm elections.” (08:06)
• On Turnout Tactics:
  • “The most positive kind of fights... were both this overnight story of a response to his obscenity in that moment, but also the fruit of years and years of patient organizing by people on the ground in the state.” (24:12)
• On Personal Impact of Losing DNC Run:
  • “When I got home after losing that race, my kids were like, daddy, we're so excited that you lost.” (29:25)
• On Not Running the DNC:
  • “Shermanesque: will not serve if nominated.” (31:24)

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Segment Timestamps

• [02:11] – Why write a book about democratic organizing
• [04:47] – The tragedy of Democratic complacency post-2008
• [09:05] – The arduous, communal process of rebuilding in Wisconsin
• [13:29] – Wikler unveils his three-step plan to save democracy
• [16:07] – Importance of down-to-earth issues and relational grassroots organizing
• [19:51] – The Moneyball lesson: focus on overlooked, practical issues (e.g., deer accidents)
• [21:21] – The tension: to save democracy, often don’t talk “democracy”
• [22:17] – The necessity of structural reforms in 2029 (filibuster, court, etc.)
• [24:12] – Butterfly effects: How minor races create outsized impacts
• [29:25] – Reflecting on the DNC chair race, the power of local action
• [31:24] – Shermanesque refusal to run the DNC

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Tone and Style

The conversation is lively, earnest, and occasionally self-deprecating. Both Stein and Wikler balance big-picture warnings with practical optimism, rooted in lived organizing experience. Personal anecdotes and historical context support an argument for patient, neighbor-to-neighbor action rather than reactive, top-down strategies.

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Summary Takeaway

Wikler’s argument—whether in book form or this conversation—is that democracy is saved not by digital virality, charismatic leaders, or last-minute blitzes, but by patiently building local networks and winning the races no one else notices. Every conversation, every vote—even a barber’s—matters. His own journey, and Wisconsin’s, reflect that real change is possible, but only if people stop expecting instant results and roll up their sleeves for the long haul.

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For more, check out Ben Wikler’s book and consider listening to the audiobook—read by Ben himself!

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Refreshers contain caffeine.

[C]

All right.

[B]

Hey, everybody.

[C]

This is Sam Stein, managing under the Bulwark. And I am pleased to be joined by Ben Wickler, who was formerly chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, former DNC chair candidate, and now a book author. I don't know which one was the tougher job, but you have the. It's right there behind you just so people can buy it on Amazon.com it's called this is the how to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Ben and I were talking off camera a little bit about the tortuous process that I believe book writing is. But Ben seemed to enjoy it, so maybe he's a sadist. Ben, thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

[B]

Sam, great to be with you. It is easier than running a political party, I'll tell you that. There are fewer people mad at you at every given moment along the process. And for me, like, I was so in the trenches for years as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for six years before that, for years as the D.C. director for MoveOn.org and really, I talk in the book. My first campaign, I volunteered on. I was 11 years old when my godmother. Yes, so ate a deer. My godmother ran for Congress when I was 11. She became the first American Indian woman to win a congressional primary. She'd been the leader of the Menominee tribe. And when she won the primary, she went up and said, I've been waiting a long time to say this me nominee. And it was like this perfect political joke that seared itself in my memory and made me think, you could have fun with politics. This is great.

[C]

Little did you know that would lead you to this place. Let's talk about why, I guess why you felt like now in this era of influencers and everything's on online and people don't read past the headline and you watch 10 seconds of video and then you move on to the next thing because you're scrolling. Why a book?

[B]

The book argues essentially for a non doom scrolling approach to politics. And so maybe the people who are taking the time to read books or listen to audiobooks. I've read the audiobook myself. I should say, which is a delight to be able to do that if you have the patience to actually listen to a book or read a book that maybe you can, you know, find the energy to roll up your sleeves and get involved in essentially the slow food version of politics, which is what I argue for in this book, that there is no one election, there's no one magic message, there's no one secret trick that can allow us to unrig the political system. But what there is is the work of actually building a group of people to get involved on a regular basis for years that slowly but surely can unravel a system of anti democratic control, of domination of how public life works in this country by a handful of super wealthy powerful people. We've done this in Wisconsin and it took years to be able to do and there were no shortcuts. But if you think about all the steps in the chain, the series of dominoes you have to push over, you can actually get out of this mess. And that's the reason I wrote this and the reason why I think it takes a book to convey the whole thing, is that it's going to take a whole bunch of different steps to be able to get out of it. But so many people are carrying around the sense of fatalism and hopelessness and it's going to be like this for forever. And my argument is that in fact, if enough of us roll up our sleeves, there is a path to a vastly better, more small d democratic future. A country that works for everybody. And we've made huge strides in the past and we can do it now. And I traced out the roadmap, exactly what we need to do to get there.

[C]

It's funny that you mentioned it because I do want to start with 2010, the elections there, but actually should go back a little further to 2008 because I think what you're getting at is something that a lot of Democrats grapple with, which was 2008, Obama's elected. There's this intense sugar high of being politically active and an assumption, I think among a lot of people that things are going to change forever. The permanent liberal majority, the idea that there's potentially 60 Senate seats and in fact they got to 60 Senate seats. There's just euphoria and it feels like a chapter's been turned on Bush. And then frankly, it looks like in retrospect the eye was taken off the ball or the foot off the gas, whatever cliche you want. But can you speak to that sort of time period, the kind of the Rush of excitement and then how quickly people just sort of got complacent.

[B]

Absolutely. And you're exactly right. I literally was dancing in the streets on the night of 2008. I had poured my heart and soul into supporting the Obama campaign. I was at that moment working with MoveOn on their, their election campaign efforts. And I was one of millions of people who felt like this was this watershed moment that we turned a corner as a country that, you know, that things were going to go in the right direction. And then there was this titanic battle to pass the Affordable Care act, which works. And then, you know, kids up to 26 getting on their parents health insurance and millions more people got healthcare. Obviously huge amount left to do and lots of problems in law. But the sense of forward motion caught so many people. And what did not happen is that all of these neighborhood action teams that had formed to help elect President Obama through the Obama campaign in 2008, they did not become neighborhood action teams focused on politics in their neighborhood that then would work on city council races and mayoral races and then the state legislative races in 2010. In fact, the right started pouring huge amounts of money into state legislative races in a moment when Democrats were kind of ignoring them on a national level, aside from a few brave Souls. And so 2010 became this backlash. There's almost always a backlash against the president, the party, the president in a midterm election. But Democrats fell over like a house of cards. And Republicans took control of state governments across the country and then used their power in those states very much, including my home state of Wisconsin, to change the rules, to essentially wish for more wishes. With political power to rig maps, There was a huge wave of intentional gerrymandering. This is the red map project that I say in the book. Redmap is a little illustration of gerrymandering because red stands for redistricting, MA for majority, and P for projects. So they like packed some of the letters into one word and then spread the others out in other ways so they could fit stuff in. So they break the maps, they suppress the votes, they smashed unions, they passed anti union legislation in Wisconsin. They did all these things to prevent the public from being able to have a say in government. And then they defunded public services and started steering policy massively to the right, including huge attacks on school funding, infrastructure, and road building in my state of Wisconsin, lots of other states. In 2012, the pendulum swung as it always does, but it didn't work outside of the presidential election. 2012, Democrats won a majority of votes for the U.S. house, but they still lost the majority in the House of Representatives. They won a majority of the votes for state legislature in states including Wisconsin. Republicans expanded their majority in the state legislature. Republicans had essentially broken off a core aspect of how our democracy is supposed to work through their power in those midterm elections. And there was not a kind of permanent campaign infrastructure on the Democratic side to be able to contest and fight back against this. And so it just carried over year over year over year. In many ways we're still living in the country that was built by the GOP after the 2010 midterm elections. And you could say the argument in my book is we might have another chance to get this right. If we win in 26, we win in 2028. We have to use that chance both to build a permanent campaign infrastructure and to unrig a political system so that the question of whether we have a democracy is not on the ballot with every election.

[C]

Let's take your home state as sort of an example, a case study of how to move things back in the right direction. It's 16 years since 2010 and I would just argue Wisconsin sort of clawed back to maybe the status quo that existed prior to 2010. Obviously the redistrict is going to be, it looks like it's going to be undone but like it took a lot of effort and it took someone like you at top the state party to sort of make sure that the attention was placed on the right races. But more than that, that they got national converging, that people understood the importance of, for instance state supreme court races, which in Wisconsin do generate a lot of interest. That's not true of every other state. Talk about how arduous the process is because it's, I think people just assume one election cycle could undo some of the damage. But in your case it was a profoundly difficult, time consuming, labor intensive process.

[B]

So it's, it is a huge volume of work and I want to like underscore it. I write in the book it's the work of thousands of people, including the chairs before me of our state party. We went from having like three staff in debt after the 2008 presidential election to next chair, build it up to eight staff and some, you know, a positive bank balance. The next chair started the program of year round organizing. I came in and built on that. So it goes to well before me and many, many people across the state who refuse to give up. So the, the first thing is this idea that actually comes from the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign had this insight. They were, Obama was trying to run when he didn't have the support of the formal party that, you know, most people who'd been involved in the Democratic Party were supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary. Up with an organizing strategy that basically said to anyone who wanted to help, get a group of friends together, meet in your living room, meet in a coffee shop, go start talking to your neighbors, throw house parties, find people like a snowflake with the branches of the snowflake coming out from the center. Not a liberal melting snowflake, but a lattice of connection between lots of people. It's called the snowflake organizing model. And by doing that, they were able to win the primary across the country. Engaged tons of people, had millions of volunteers in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race in Wisconsin, my predecessor, chair Martha Lanning, went back and rediscovered this model, the snowflake model, and decided to try to raise money to build a year round snowflake style organizing program that would literally be a neighborhood by neighborhood across the state and would work on every race, not just on the presidential campaign, not just on one thing. But the core insight was that that kind of organizing gets stronger with every fight, whether you win or lose. And so if you do it on a year round basis, if people keep on building and this happens on the right, the Faith and Freedom Coalition on the right does this. The things like Turning Point are always on, they always exist and they, they just keep on growing from, from fight to fight. If you do that, then especially in the least salient, the kind of like obscure elections no one's paying attention to, you can blow it out of the water. And in the really big elections where there's hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, maybe you can add a percentage point. But in Wisconsin, that is enough. In Wisconsin, five of the last seven presidential elections have come down to less than 1 percentage point. So this started, I fell in love with it. It's what led me to run for a chair of the state party. And then I was able to help to grow it and work with all these amazing local volunteers around the state and, you know, raise money to be able to support campaigns with ads and all the other things that go into a campaign. The core thing is that we, we sort of kept our motivation going in these more obscure races by connecting to this bigger picture plan about how we end the gerrymander of the state that would allow us to get to our North Star, which in Wisconsin is to have a Democratic governor, Democratic majorities in the state legislature, a pro democracy state supreme court majority. And when you do all that, then you can actually pass laws that make a positive difference in people's lives and not have them get struck down and shut down. And that has been our kind of guiding goal. And now we're just a few months away potentially from actually making it exist in Wisconsin. If we win the governor's race this fall, if we win the state legislative majorities, we'll be there. We have a 5:2 pro democracy state supreme court majority now after just a gigantic amount of work nationally, things are not actually as bad now as they used to be in Wisconsin. Democrats have more power in the federal government now than they did in Wisconsin in the most, in the most far right days. The gerrymandering nationally is less bad now than it was in Wisconsin just a couple of years ago. The U.S. supreme Court is not as right wing as the state supreme Court was in Wisconsin just a few years ago. I look at the national scene and yeah, it's really grim, but it is not as bad as the thing we just thought about.

[C]

Let's be real about it for a second because sure, yes, statistically you can make the argument, I hear you and I'll grant it, but at its core, the Wisconsin voting electorate was more evenly divided than, I would say the Mississippi or Alabama electorate.

[B]

Yeah. But not more than the country. The country.

[C]

Well, sure, but if you want to, for instance, undo some of the voting, the gutting of the Voting Rights act in those states. Right. It's going to require you to win the state legislatures in those states.

[B]

Well, here's the. This is where we get to the plan. And this is the plan. Okay.

[C]

This is telling me the plan.

[B]

Step one is like we, let's be very clear. The whole idea of democracy is under a like battering ram assault right now. And there's Trump is doing everything through every federal agency, through state government allies, through, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in super PACs to try to take away the idea of popular of the public deciding who holds power in this country. The most important line of defense that each of us can affect is state governments, which constitutionally run elections. And the most critical state governments are those in the battleground states that will decide the 2028 presidential election. So the striking thing about this moment, that the public is furious at this administration, furious about prices, furious about a whole range of different things. ICE agents shooting people in the streets. If that gets channeled not just in The House and Senate races and things that you read about and see on tv, but also to state legislative races, to the North Carolina Supreme Court race with Anita Earls that's on the ballot this fall, to winning trifectas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona's within reach, New Hampshire's within reach. Alaska is a possibility. Amazingly, there's also the chance of breaking Republican state level trifectas in Iowa. Excuse. Yeah, Iowa, in Georgia, in a bunch of different states. If that happens, then come 2028, it will be vastly harder for Trump to invent votes that don't exist to seize ballots. You saw in Minnesota, you had a Democratic state leadership that refused to turn over the voter rolls, even though there were ICE agents marauding through community after community. And the Trump administration said, give me your voting rolls, we'll take the ICE agents out. And they said no. And they organized and dealt with both problems. So that's the central job for the future of democracy now is actually the state level fight as well as House and Senate. Yeah, by all means, go for that.

[C]

Yeah. Well, let me pick on that for a second. Let me pick on that for a second. Because Trump presents an interesting sort of dynamic here. And I'm curious how much you've, I'm certain you've thought about it, but I'm curious your experience, what was the name? Donald Trump. Yes. He's the president. Yeah, you might, you write it down. It's D O N A L anyways, to a degree. Obviously he's galvanizing. Certainly we can see it right now. There's a huge intense backlash against what he's doing. And yet, as someone who operates on this, who has operated on the state level and understands the importance of these state races, I do wonder, to the degree to which you are constantly fighting the temptation for Democratic activists and donors to simply just focus on Trump and the federal races and holding him accountable vis a vis the House and the Senate, to the neglect of statewide offices like the ones you described as so critical.

[B]

So what's so striking? I argue in the book that the voters who wind up making the difference in most elections, especially in, you know, let's say, race for governor in a state like Wisconsin, they're voters who often think of politics the way that you and I might think of curling, which is to say I don't think I'm curling for a little while every four years. It's like not something that is part of our lives, you know, and the, if you follow curling, then you probably have a strong feeling about the broom gate. Controversy about whether directional pads on the. On the sweepers are, you know, legal for. Should be legal in competition play. That's how. How most political like uproars sound to a lot of these voters. And some of these are people who would definitely vote for Democrats if they voted, but they're not sure, you know, if it makes sense to vote. Some of them are swing voters who might vote for either side, some might vote for Republicans. But the thing they all have in common is that politics is so far from the center of their lives. And generally, they think the whole political system's corrupt. All the politicians are crooked. They probably believe both sides attack ads if they, if they pay attention to them at all. And meeting them where they are about the things that they're frustrated about in that moment is the essential thing. And usually they're not actually thinking about Donald Trump. Trump looms large over people who are involved in Democratic politics and Republican politics. He's not the main character in the lives of people who never want to think about politics in the same way. And I think for national donors and for blue and red state activists who might think about joining a phone bank for a battleground state, they're often very motivated in thinking about Trump. But when you're, like, knocking on doors with a state legislative candidate and you talk to someone about, you know, what's the biggest issue for you, very often it is it's grocery prices and gas prices right now. Like, those things come up all the time. And people are not thinking about the war in Iran or the War powers Resolution. They're just thinking about the fact that it costs $70 to fill up their, you know, their minivan or whatever, and talking to them credibly about things that are like, local, relevant, direct, becoming a human being in their lives as opposed to being an avatar for some distant political party or group of billionaire donors or whatever. Like, showing up as an actual person in their community. Especially if you find some link between, like, you went to elementary school together or, you know, like something that drowns you outside of the political sphere. That's what makes the biggest difference to voters who hate politics, but who might vote. And that the sort of practice of doing that is, in a sense, what I'm arguing for people to do if they have the ability to show up. Do what's called relational organizing, where you have a relationship with the voter that you're talking to. Statistically, it's the highest impact thing you can do. It's something that can a lot of local elections literally come down to A single vote. If you find the person cutting your hair and convince them to show up, that can. That can flip a city council race. I tell the story of a local candidate who lost his city council race because his barber didn't vote in that election.

[C]

No.

[B]

Yes. I don't.

[C]

Can't go back to that barber. Can't go back to that barber. Can I tell you a story I want? Because you spurred a memory of mine. So post Citizens United. For folks who don't recall, Citizens United basically opened the floodgates for unlimited giving to allied PACs. And so it was like a whole new world of campaign finance. And I was kind of curious if, like, what candidates who were underfunded would do in this world. And one of the things that I was. That I decided to do to find out, like, how you should go about doing it if you were a penny pincher and you need to get every cent going as far as possible, is I called the guys who were behind Moneyball, which is the baseball idea of, like, making good with a frugal budget. And so I called up Bill James. I don't know if you know who Bill James is.

[B]

Yeah, I read that.

[C]

Sabermetrics, Father. Sabermetrics. Bill James was a Kansas resident and he had written the book on statistical analysis of baseball that was the inspiration for Moneyball. And I got him on the phone someh and I said, well, you know, like, Bill, let's say you were running a campaign these days, like, and you had to do the Moneyball philosophy. What would you do? And he had this insane answer that actually was kind of stuck with me. He said, I would focus on all the deer, although all the cars running into deers and trying to pass policies to stop deer overpopulation, on how they're affecting the roads. He's like, it's a huge issue here in Kansas and no one's talking about. And I was like, what the hell is he talking about? I looked it up in some statistical. Some government record database, and it was, like, insane how many car fatalities were happening in Kansas because of deer population. And so he was just thinking sort of differently about how to come around these issues and get more voters motivated.

[B]

That's perfect. It's a perfect example. And that deer are an issue in Wisconsin as well. And yeah, that. I mean, I had this. I had this mantra in the 2022 midterms, if you want to save democracy, talk about roads. Because the voters who are like most on the fence about whether to vote at all or who to vote for by Definition, they're not thinking about democracy all day, but they think about roads every time they drive, going to the thing that is in people's minds when they're not thinking what is a political issue, but they're just thinking like, what is pissing me off today? That's the magic of messaging. And doing it well requires actually going and talking to voters and listening to them, interacting with them.

[C]

There's a tension here, right, because your book is about salvaging democracy. It literally has the words save democracy in the title. And it's like, to save democracy, don't necessarily talk about democracy.

[B]

I want democracy to not be an issue that we have to think about or vote on. I want democracy to seed into the background. And the way to do that is to have people who believe in democracy win enough power. This goes back to this plan. Step one, protect 28 by winning in 26 in the states. Step two, win federal trifecta, House, Senate and White House in 2028. Also keep winning at the state level. And then step three is in 2029, you need to pass, I think, a suite of major democracy reforms, like things that have passed in many times in the history of the country, but we have to do a whole bunch at once, otherwise we'll revert to 2010.

[C]

They tried that, but they didn't do it. I know. So why would they, why would it get done in 2029?

[B]

Because if they don't, then 2030 will repeat 2010. We'll be right back where we started, and maps will get rigged at every level. We will meaningfully competitive elections until 2042 if we, if we don't get this right by 2030. So this is like, there's a, you know, even beyond the immediate crisis, there's enormous stakes for the next whole generation of people of whether we're going to have competitive elections for House and for state legislatures across the country, whether, whether, whether everything will be frozen. The U.S. supreme Court, I think, has gone completely rogue. And I would argue like, we either got to expand it or create term limits, which is a proposal that several people have, have, have looked at so that to, to ideally turn down the level of partisanship so that it's not being used as a partisan club by one side and then the other, like. And to do all this requires ending or, you know, maybe radically restructuring the filibuster in the U.S. senate. There's a bunch of things you have to do. All those things are precursor to then having, you know, a democracy where both sides can make their case about what kind of economic policy we need or, you know, how to, how to think about different social issues. But there's these structural things that basically are built to support far right domination of the country and hyper polarization in a way that I think is bad for everybody right now. And to take that kind of gun off the table in the grand drama of American politics, it means winning in 26 and winning in 28 and then doing a whole bunch with power in 2029 to unrig the American political system. So that's the big plan that everyone's. Their neighborhood teams talking to their neighbors feeds into is how do we, how do we defuse this kind of political time bomb that we're all living through.

[C]

When you were going through all your old memories and the stories to write this book and you're charting it down, was there one or two moments where you felt like there's kind of like a butterfly effect or you just. Like that really set us on a bad path. And I wish we could have done that over.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, in both directions. So the most positive kind of fights. There are really two of them that I think about. The first is the opening anecdote of the book. It's 2025, the spring of 25. Elon Musk is dismembering the federal government. He's just fed the US Agency for International Development into the wood chipper and consigned hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people to their deaths by ripping away the basic food medicine that they need. He's defunding federal agencies that do food inspections. So brave dose of diarrhea raging across the country. Now, obviously we didn't know that in 2025, he's also threatening to fund primary challenges for anyone in politics who gets in his way. And Democrats and Republicans are trying to figure out everything they can do to avoid being caught in his crosshairs. And he decides as a demonstration of his power and a way to ensure that the US House stays rigged and to help his own lawsuit in Wisconsin, potentially to try to buy the US to try to buy the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin, and he pours $56 million into the state Supreme Court race, more than anyone's ever spent on any judicial election in American history. He comes to Wisconsin, he puts a cheese head on his head at a stage in Green Bay. He hands out giant novelty checks written out for a million dollars to people who pledged, who signed his petition. He says it's not a bribe for an election, it's a payment for People who become spokespeople for my petition, this ridiculous thing that's being criminally investigated. And. And for all the world, it looks like he's about to succeed. And demonstrate that even down to state judicial elections, to cross Elon Musk is to sign your own political death sentence. If he had won, we'd be in a much darker place right now. And instead, there's a backlash led by our candidate, Susan Crawford, who says, growing up as a little girl in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I never thought I'd be up against the richest man in the world. And she wins by 10 percentage points. And he is pushed out of the White House. Within. Within. Well, Trump said the next day that his time at the White House was drawing to a close. He goes out on his ass. He then tweets about how Trump is in the Epstein files and helps to kick off this entire push for the Epstein files, because you've driven a wedge between the kind of two worst people in American politics, and maybe among the worst in the world. And the voter uprising that made that possible was both this kind of overnight story of a response to his obscenity in that moment, but also the fruit of years and years of patient organizing by people on the ground in the state. And it meant that Wisconsin's state Supreme Court majority stayed pro democracy. And it meant that I think collectively as a country, we saw that we could actually fight back, even at a moment when it seemed like everything had fallen apart. So I think of that and I think of the 2020 State Supreme Court race that happened during COVID It was the first statewide contested election during the COVID pandemic, and it only took place because Republicans in the state legislature sued and got the State Supreme Court to override the governor's executive order to delay that election. And everyone went to the polls. And in that election, then, too, it felt like Republicans had figured out a way to kind of short circuit things. And on Election Day, I had this pit in my stomach. I felt like they were going to win. And voters showed up and won that one by 10 percentage points also. That's because of that state Supreme Court victory. The state Supreme Court rejected Trump's attempt to overturn Wisconsin's presidential election in 2020 by a single vote. So that state Supreme Court fight, when people contracted Covid by going to the polls on Election Day, the COVID rates jumped in places with higher rates of in person voting. They put their bodies on the line to defend democracy. And that's why Wisconsin's election wasn't Overturned. And both of those races were the kinds of races that normally get no attention at all. And just now there was a state Supreme Court loss in Georgia by 2.2 percentage points for people who voted Democratic. And other parts of the ballot, they didn't know who the state Supreme Court candidate was. I'm grateful to the state party there for doing a ton of great work with great candidates. But nationally, if we'd all been a little bit more obsessed with the Georgia Supreme Court election, they would have had a path to a Democratic majority by 2028. North Carolina has a Supreme Court election this fall. If you go back to 2020, their Supreme Court justice, chief justice candidate lost by 401 votes. That led to the gerrymandering of the state that granted Republicans enough U.S. house seats to give them a U.S. house majority right now. Mike Johnson would not be Speaker. Hakeem Jeffries would be speaker if it wasn't for North Carolina having 401 votes that went in a certain direction in 2020. It's mind, like, once you realize how these little things have this giant ripple effect effect, it. It makes you want to, like, scream from the rooftops. This book is my attempt to do that is to say, like, fight here, fight here, fight here. Here's what you can do. If we do all these things, then we can get out of this mess. And that's. That's the goal of this is the Plan.

[C]

I got to ask you before I let you go, you did run for DNC chair. You did not get it. The person who did, Ken Martin has had a rocky run at it. The stuff you're talking about in this book is stuff you could have implemented as chair of the dnc. Do you think about that ever?

[B]

I sometimes think about. Ken Martin has said that he's been home four times since he got elected DNC chair. I have three small kids. When I got home after losing that race, my kids were like, daddy, we're so excited that you lost. And it was like, you know, at a personal level, I'm grateful. And it gave me time to step back and actually map all this out. Like, I think being able to write this book, I want to do everything I can to support folks who want to, you know, be part of this fight. Now. I also really recognize that this kind of energy has to come from below. This is. This has to come from people, neighborhood by neighborhood. I write in the book, in Wisconsin, we. We don't try to think about the margin of effort in the poll. Excuse me. Margin. Margin of In Wisconsin, we don't think about the margin of error in the polls. We try to win by the margin of effort, which is like, are, are enough people showing up day after day to be able to, to win by the skin of our teeth. And I think it's just going to take a whole lot of people getting involved in, in the Democratic Party and other grassroots and starting new organizations that might not have a name or a legal designation, but that are going to make sure that their neighborhood jumps up 5% in turnout this fall and might tip a statewide election. And that's going to take all of us. I don't think there's any one role or any one position that has the power to make that change. But I hope that millions more people get involved and that, like me, when they do that, they find people that they love. I fell in love with my wife putting up posters for a protest. The kind of the collapse of American community. One path to trying to address it is for people to actually get involved in real life, not just on their phones, meeting people and getting involved in building a better community.

[C]

You're saying political organizing is really a way to meet your significant other. I gotcha. Your kids are several years older now, more mature, probably ready to go out on their own. Would you reconsider doing a stint at the dance?

[B]

See, I'm, I'm, I'm good. That's a, It's a very, very tough job, and I've got other, other things I'm up to these days. But, you know, I know a lot

[C]

of people would like you to reconsider. Let's put it that way. How about that?

[B]

I, I, I. Shermanesque will not serve if nominated.

[C]

Okay, That's Sherman ez.

[B]

Not in the cards.

[C]

All right, Ben, thank you so much, man. Good luck with the book. We're gonna hawk it for you, so don't worry. It's right there on the wall. This is the plan.

[B]

Right there in his hand paper right here. And I read the audio. So if, if you enjoy.

[C]

Okay, you keep mentioning that it seems like you have a very high opinion of your own voice.

[B]

Well, I specifically, you know, maybe it's my broken brain. I find it so much easier to consume audiobooks than I do books. And some people might be listening to this podcast who like listening to things. So it just seems to me like it's a perfect marriage of, you know, medium, message and messenger here.

[C]

All right, you heard it first. If you like Ben's voice and you just want him to, like, talk you to sleep while he reads his book. You can download it as well as buying it. Do both download it and buy it. Ben Wickler makes a great gift. Ben, thank you so much, man. Take care.

[B]

Appreciate it.