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- [00:01]
Ben Wickler
This is maybe a scary bet to take. I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of voters, Republican voters as well as Democratic.
- [00:14]
Kara Swisher
That's a technical term. Piece of shit legislation.
- [00:16]
Ben Wickler
Piece of shit legislation, yes. That's the term of art.
- [00:19]
Kara Swisher
It's on. Hi, everyone from New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Ben Wickler, political organizer and author of the new book this Is the How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Ben has worked in progressive political organizing for over two decades, including as the former Washington director of Move on and later as chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. During his time as chair, Democrats won 10 out of 13 statewide. Ra Ben is credited with leading a political comeback for his state party and turning the Wisconsin Democrats into what the New York Times called a fundraising colossus. Ben ran for the chair of the Democratic national committee in 2025 and lost to Ken Martin. Later that year, he stepped down from his role as chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. He's now applying the grassroots organizing strategies that worked in Wisconsin to a national plan which he argues could defeat Trumpism and end America's slide into authoritarianism. I think it's really important to talk to all these various organizers as the Democrats try to figure out their way out of the wilderness and actually to winning back the American populace. It's a really important time to think about various ways to do that. And this is yet another. And Ben is one of the smartest thinkers in the country about this. Our expert question today comes from Ested Herndon, veteran political journalist and host of the Vox Media podcast America actually. So stick around.
- [02:11]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [02:45]
Kara Swisher
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- [03:19]
Ben Wickler
to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
- [03:34]
Kara Swisher
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy See
- [03:45]
Ben Wickler
terms It is on.
- [03:50]
Kara Swisher
Ben, thank you for coming on on.
- [03:52]
Ben Wickler
It's a delight to be with you today.
- [03:53]
Kara Swisher
I want to sort of set the table. You talk about the need to unrig America and build a quote government that works for people instead of plutocrats. It's a recurring theme in US Politics forever. When Teddy Roosevelt campaigned for the Progressive Party in 1912, he railed against the unholy alliance between corrupt businesses and corrupt politics. Obviously I talk about it a lot ever since the inauguration and the sort of rightward shift of the tech moguls who are the ones we're talking about here. Talk about how it's the same or different today. Are we always sort of doomed to this rigging of whatever particular business group is in on top of at any one time in the United States?
- [04:31]
Ben Wickler
Go back across the history of the country. There are waves of power that accumulate in a tiny number of hands and people trying to lock in their power and control. And then there are waves of the public rising up and then changing the rules to be able to protect the idea of democracy and expand the circle of freedom. That's a cycle we've always had. In this moment, there's a more rapid and bigger accumulation of wealth and power than we've ever seen. And Elon Musk is at the top of it. He's the world's first trillionaire. There could be more trillionaires.
- [05:03]
Kara Swisher
Well, he's not Ben. He's not a trillionaire.
- [05:05]
Ben Wickler
Not anymore. He was briefly the world's first trillionaire. That's right. There's a real possibility that with artificial intelligence that even more wealth and power will accumulate in an even smaller number of hands. In the United States we've had these waves of very rapid enormous wealth accumulation and then attempts to kind of like ossify and control the system. And there are so many levels of government that occupy so many different parts of the power structure that you have the local robber baron who then buys and sells the state legislatures. I think that right now, if you think about the way that Google sort of sucked all the advertising money out of the world and it meant that all these institutions supported through advertising fell over and a couple companies became worth multi trillions of dollars. Meta did the same thing. Artificial intelligence has the possibility of doing the same thing for all kinds of work. Right. Suddenly there's one place that you can go to do this one thing more efficiently and that threatens a more rapid and total wealth accumulation and could turn into a power accumulation than anything else that we've ever seen. So I do think there's something different about that time in this sense. But we have also seen versions of this movie before, exactly as you say. In the first progressive Era, we saw the American economy totally transformed. Mass dislocation of most people's jobs. People moved from like 90% agrarian to moving into cities to work in these factories. And it took the labor movement and it took the progressive movement. It took trust busting, it took creating workers Health and Safety Administration, all these different things to be able to get to a point where the explosion of growth actually led to an improvement in living standards for regular people. And that took the reassertion of Democratic control of how the rules of the American political and economic game are set.
- [06:47]
Kara Swisher
Well, we're going to get to how to do that in a second. But let's look at what you did in Wisconsin where you led the state Democrats for six years. You open your book with the 2025 Wisconsin State Supreme Court election, which was the most expensive judicial race in US History. The Republican backed candidate was backed. Elon Musk lost to the Democratic backed candidate Susan Crawford. The Wisconsin Elections Commission now says Musk likely broke election bribery laws by offering voters a million dollars. Those idiotic checks he put up. What surprised you most about the election and what he did there, aside from the cheese hat, which when he did that I thought it's over. He also didn't have a lot of power without Trump next to him in an interesting way. So money wasn't the only thing that mattered. So talk a little bit about this race and why it was important.
- [07:32]
Ben Wickler
So the first thing to move yourself mentally back to the spring of 2025 is to remember that not only had Musk been the biggest donor for Donald Trump, and not only was he effectively running the federal government and dismembering it from the inside, including defunding aid programs that keep millions of people alive, he was also threatening to fund primary challenges against anyone who got in his or Donald Trump's way. And so people in both parties were falling over themselves to find ways to not get the eye of Sauron upon them. There was this real sense that if he had figured out how to turn money into power, into votes, and win whatever elections he wanted, there was no stopping him and Trump from carrying out every one of their plans. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, I think, was supposed to be the ultimate demonstration of that. This wasn't the presidential race. This had been, until that point, a fairly sleepy local election in one state. And here he came with an amount of money that nobody had ever seen spent in this kind of context with tactics no one had ever seen. He was flying in people to knock on doors. He was offering these bribes. He was funding massive TV ad campaigns. The ads he was funding were actually all about how Trump was endorsing Brad Schimmel and how you needed to support Brad Schimmel to support Trump right after Trump had won in the state. So the strategy was very much to say, we have the power. We're in charge. Do not get between us and what we want. And what we saw with Susan Crawford, our amazing candidate, she started going around the state and saying, I never dreamed as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I'd be up against the world's richest man in a fight for democracy. And we also saw this grassroots army, basically these thousands of people who had been organizing continuously, often in races exactly like this, in multiple state Supreme Court races, in local races across the state, going neighbor to neighbor and talking to people that they had long relationships with about how this was a race. You had to vote. You had to show that Wisconsin could not be bought. But there was this even deeper principle about whether democracy in our state would be for sale, whether Wisconsin could be auctioned off based on these giant checks.
- [09:37]
Kara Swisher
In a lot of ways, he was kind of a perfect villain for you in that regard. In the kind of extensive efforts he took, including putting himself at the center of it, you know, looking like a lunatic. So that helped you. Correct.
- [09:50]
Ben Wickler
I do think that having the perfect villain allowed a message to really ring through very clearly, that the people who were ravaging and terrorizing the country wanted to do the same thing to Wisconsin. And you could fight back by getting involved in the state Supreme Court race, having a really clear, electrifying message like that really mattered, but also having the courage to get up and go out and keep showing up in a race where it seemed like the odds were overwhelming. A lot of people were shocked that Elon Musk lost that race. After everything that he poured in, a lot of people thought we were totally cooked. I remember vividly this question of whether it made sense to go after Elon Musk, because it could provoke him to do even more. And I think the fear that if you punch the bully's gonna crush you like a bug can make a lot of people want to shrink back. And to Susan Crawford's enormous credit, she did the exact opposite, and it worked.
- [10:39]
Kara Swisher
So when you think about what he was doing there, which I suspect he's going to be doing in the next race, possibly the upcoming midterm elections, he's already put $90 million across the country. What did he do right and what did he do wrong?
- [10:51]
Ben Wickler
So it's funny, I feel like he approached politics the way he approached Doge, which is to have a big theory and then apply it without paying any attention to whether it was actually working. And one part of his theory was very smart, which is that there's a whole bunch of research. And I dig into this in the book because a lot of my goal in the book is to equip individual readers with what is the most powerful thing they can do to get us out of this mess. And I write about the same research that I'm pretty sure whoever was advising him or he himself had looked at, which is that the most powerful thing to shape someone's vote is to hear from someone that they trust. It is to hear from someone they have a relationship with. I quote Abraham Lincoln, who says, in 1841, he wrote, Keep a constant eye on the most doubtful voters, and from time to time, have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence. So Elon Musk's strategy was to bribe people, pay people, possibly break the law, to sign a petition saying they opposed activist judges, and then to pay people for referring other people to sign the petition. He was going around trying to Manufacture relational organizing where people talk to other people that they know and, you know, giving this financial incentive to do it. And he's not wrong that if you are hearing from someone that you know to get involved in something, it has a really big effect and a lot like the huge share of Republican campaign finance at this point. This is the turning point USA strategy, it's the Faith and Family Coalition strategy, It's Elon Musk strategy. He has an America PAC that was doing this in a big way. That is a smart tactic. And on the Democratic side, I think there's a lot more to be done. There's some groups like Empowers one that are doing relational organizing. I think there's a ton more that is absolutely worth doing there.
- [12:26]
Kara Swisher
Like a lot of states Republican wave in 2010, going back further shape was the politics of this concert. So much so that one journalist called it a democracy desert in 2020. But you've shifted that. We'll get into some of the details, but as we go high level, what did you do and how does it apply to national politics?
- [12:42]
Ben Wickler
So Wisconsin experienced a mini version of what's happening to the whole country now. I argue that Project 2025 has reheated Project 2011 from the States.
- [12:50]
Kara Swisher
Right, right.
- [12:51]
Ben Wickler
And as we learned in Wisconsin, just as we learned nationally, while it's great and important to beat the guy in charge, we beat Trump in 2020, we beat Scott Walker in 2018, it is not enough. You actually have to fight for all the other levels of government too, because they all make the rules for all the other parts. So in Wisconsin, we've seen the same drama we've seen everywhere in the nation that the far right has reached down into local races, has tried to elect mayors who will block the absentee ballot dropboxes. They try to elect judges who will restrict their right to vote. They elect state legislators who are committed to gerrymandering House and state legislative districts. And you have to look at how the different parts of the power system interlock and figure out how to trace the path to being able to unrig the whole thing from the inside. In Wisconsin, we thought we tried a whole bunch of strategies to try to unrig our state legislative maps. There were federal court cases, there was having a governor who could veto Republicans maps. None of that wound up working until we flipped the majority in the state supreme Court. That wound up being the skeleton key to unlock the whole system in the state of Wisconsin. And that meant building a permanent campaign where a ton of people in small towns and cities and suburbs everywhere got involved over and over. Not about one candidate, often about people that they only were learning about a few months before the election. Not about one race or one office, but about this much bigger, deeper idea about being a democracy that works for everyone. That kind of permanent campaign, to me, is what we need at a national level now, right?
- [14:19]
Kara Swisher
A permanent campaign.
- [14:20]
Ben Wickler
A permanent campaign. And by that, I don't mean ads on TV in every ad break, in every state, every second of the day. What I mean is actually building, organizing at the local level, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood, all over the country, so that in all these races, at all levels of government, we're able to drive up participation, to encourage and persuade people to get involved in these races that otherwise go unnoticed. I talk in the book about race after race that comes down to a few hundred votes that winds up starting a row of dominoes that winds up giving Republicans control of the U.S. house years later. And those races are happening all the time right now. There was a Georgia State Supreme Court race just in this May where the Democratic candidate lost by 2.2 percentage points. And the reason she lost is that a whole bunch of Democrats voted in the governor's race, but didn't know about the state Supreme Court race, that they didn't know which candidate to vote for. If we can zero in on those kinds of races on top of the critical work in the House and Senate, but if we build that kind of muscle to be able to go after the whole ballot, that gives us the power to pick apart this knot that's been tied, that stops the public from ruling.
- [15:27]
Kara Swisher
What are some of the most consequential local races we need to pay attention to right now?
- [15:31]
Ben Wickler
I would say that the most critical ones in 2026 are the governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and state legislative races, especially in the battleground states. And the reason why I say that is this gift we have in the Constitution that elections are run at the state level, not the federal level. So Donald Trump keeps trying to take over the election system in the country, and he keeps getting slapped down in court. And the reason is it's literally right there in the Constitution. That means that in 2028, when he attempts his next coup, if there are governors, secretaries of state, election administrators, and if their law is passed at the state level to protect the sanctity of the electoral system, he will not be able to steal the next election. We came so close to Trump stealing the 2020 race in Wisconsin. It came down to a single vote on the State Supreme Court, a 4, 3 decision. I write about the moment in the book I was an elector in the Electoral College. That moment when we found out the decision came through. He knows exactly where the vulnerabilities are and he's going after them. The reason why he's flipping out and calling for these voter suppression laws and trying to nationalize the election system now before the midterms. It's not because he cares about what happens in the midterms. It's because he knows that his ability to run a successful coup in 2028 depends on winning control in the state and state legislative races in 2026. So I mapped in the book and I'm happy to say here, state by state. But basically which states are likely to tip the 28 presidential race. Those are the states where you have to win power at the state level now to make sure that the system is not vulnerable to sabotage. Which are Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona. All those states could become Democratic trifectas. Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms could win the governor's race and prevent Republicans from gerrymandering and passing anti democracy legislation before 2028. If we're able to pull that off. North Carolina was one of the closest battleground states in 24. There. Not only can we stop Republicans from getting super majorities in the state legislature, there's a state supreme court race that if Anita Earl wins reelection, there's a path to a pro democracy Democratic majority in the state Supreme Court by 2028. Those are the closest battleground states. The closest state that Harris won, New Hampshire, currently a red trifecta, has incredibly restrictive voting laws that could flip to a blue governor and both chambers of the state legislature this cycle. And winning there would give another margin of protection for democracy.
- [17:49]
Kara Swisher
We'll be back in a minute.
- [18:02]
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- [21:35]
Kara Swisher
Now, the Democrats are dealing with internal divisions right now. We just did an episode on the rise of insurgent progressive candidates winning primaries in New York and Colorado. Talk about the tensions with. And I was at a dinner last night here in Michigan where that was. You could feel it, like with the centrist versus the left, et cetera. What do you make of the tensions, including the popularity of the Democratic brand, and how does it impact the ability to organize and build a cohesive opposition?
- [22:01]
Ben Wickler
The first thing is, when a party loses power, that is the time to look in the mirror and most critically, look at the voters and try to figure out what is not working here. So it is healthy to have big debates right now. It's healthy for people to make different arguments about strategy, tactics, message, where we need to go. If you look at when parties lose power and then regain it in a durable way, it tends to be when they actually have this kind of hard conversation with themselves and try out different approaches. So I think we should welcome some conflicts, some debate, some life within the party. The second thing I'd say is that so many people, a, they want real change, they feel like the country's not working for them in their lives. They can't afford anything. The basic needs that everybody has. And secondly, they know that in order to get that change, they need to win. And so a lot of the frustration that Democrats have with the Democratic Party is the sense that it is not, not good enough at winning right now that we lost to the worst guy in the world, Donald Trump. How the hell is he in the White House? So all those things, I think, create an energy that you can see playing out in primaries right now. And the critical question is, after each primary is over, does everyone come together and say, we're gonna spend even more energy to win the general election in November? I'm from the state of Wisconsin. Big, very fluid, highly energized Democratic primary happening right there. That's on August 11th. My hope and my expectation is that everyone who was involved in the primary and a ton more people will say all right, this is time to go. The Republican candidate in Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany, tried to overturn the 2020 election, and the governor's in charge of certification of presidential elections in the state of Wisconsin. So lots of people have lots of disagreements with lots of different candidates in lots of different directions, and that's fine. The critical question is, do you then say, you know what, we beat each other up before, but now we're on the same big team that. That believes this country should actually work for everyone and not a tiny group of people at the very top.
- [23:49]
Kara Swisher
And do you see that happening in a state like Wisconsin, for example?
- [23:53]
Ben Wickler
Absolutely, I do. I see it happening in Wisconsin. I see that happening in Maine. I see that happening in Michigan. My sense is that people are going to be ready to roll up their sleeves and go to bat the day after the primary, the same way that they're scrapping it out in the primaries right now.
- [24:05]
Kara Swisher
Even Michigan?
- [24:06]
Ben Wickler
Even Michigan. You know, any individual legislator doesn't have the power to change every policy. People have different positions on things. But. But the Democratic Party is a big tent. It is a coalition party, and the laws that pass are the sum of what can attract all the votes. Basically, across the whole thing, it becomes very clear when you step back from any particular battle that the fundamental difference between the gop, which right now is a cult of one person who's so corrupt and so bent on enriching and glorifying himself and his friends at the expense of everybody else, and a Democratic Party that the through lines are the idea that the economy should work for everybody, that everyone's rights and freedom should be protected, and that we should be a democracy. And those three principles. Very, very popular.
- [24:48]
Kara Swisher
Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.
- [24:52]
Ben Wickler
Hey, Ben, it's Esteban, host of Vox's America Actually podcast, and as you know, a fellow lover of Wisconsin. My question is about the fixes for state parties that are distinct from national parties. So much of the anger about Democrats 2024 Choices was about process and about how the public was or wasn't included in the conversation. I guess that's my question to you. What are the answers for the Democratic Party that are not ideology? How can they help make voters feel like they're included in decision making, particularly on the state and local level, in a way that's distinct than the conversation we're having nationally? Such a great question from Estad. The thing that I love that happens in Wisconsin and a few other states, a growing number of states, and I map out Step by step. How to build this in my book is that the Wisconsin State Party has neighborhood by neighborhood teams. These are groups of volunteers who sometimes meet in their living rooms. They map out who's gonna go where, and they go to community events, and they go door to door to the same voters, often year over year. And when we're not right before an election, we ask people questions. We call it bridge building. You go and you say what's most important to you right now? And we actually try to listen at scale. And the sense of, like, nobody consulted me changes when someone consults you. I think there's a huge power to actually going out and talking to people and finding out what's on their mind politically. I think of it like bumper bowling. If you put the bumpers in the sides, then the ball just doesn't go in the gutter. And if you're actually talking to the voters that you're trying to connect with and taking their opinions seriously, first of all, it pulls you out of your own head. I think Democrats often will want to go scream about the latest thing they saw on Ms. Now to a voter who's not paying attention to politics, and that doesn't resonate at all. This is why often talking about democracy is actually the worst message. If you want to save democracy, you should focus on what it is that people want to change in their own lives, how the government can be on their side. And I think the same thing is true as a party having actual connections to communities on the ground and not just being something that lives online or something that lives in fundraisers, but actually talking to people who don't put politics to the center of their lives and asking what is bothering them and how can we change that? So often the answers are actually from local government. They're things about the pothole on my street. And if you can hear those things and you can do something about those things, then you can build the trust that you need to ask someone to take a risk on a candidate. I think there's a lot of talk about attention, and attention is this very important currency. It's absolutely a powerful force. But I think trust is actually the thing that is most precious and rare at this moment. People are so fed up, they don't believe anyone. A lot of the people who either don't vote or swing between the two parties, they think both parties are messed up and corrupt and unresponsive. And the only way to change that is to actually earn trust from people by hearing them out saying how you're going to do something and then actually doing it and then going back to them to talk about how it went. That's something that is built over years. Something that each individual candidate cannot build by themselves. That, to me, is what local and state parties and any viewer of your show or reader of this book, they can get involved in doing. And the effects of doing that can echo for years to come.
- [27:58]
Kara Swisher
So what you're saying is that, like, doing something on the level where they see you answering, whatever, first of all, listening and actually listening, and not just fake listening, and the second part is actually doing something. I had an interesting argument with someone last night. They're fixated on Mamdani. And I said, well, he put the. He opened the soccer field. It was kind of interesting. And they're like, who cares? I'm like, those people who play soccer.
- [28:22]
Ben Wickler
I was like, that is exactly it.
- [28:24]
Kara Swisher
I was like, they work all day. They can't play soccer now they can play soccer. It was a tangible thing. I was like. But it was so much more than that. I was like, do you understand? They didn't want to talk about Trump. They wanted to play soccer. Anyway. It was a really interesting discussion. It happens all over the country. But I thought that's exactly what people want. They want to be listened to in some fashion rather than be told that democracy is dead, which, of course, they realize on some level. But at the same time, when it comes to election outcomes, you write that we're in, quote, an era of field margins now that makes it kind of impossible to govern if we have these small margins at nearly every level of government.
- [29:02]
Ben Wickler
This is the paradox of this moment. The vast majority of elections. You already know the outcome of the vast majority of congressional districts of states for statewide elections and the Electoral College. They're totally safe. And that's a problem in and of itself, which I want to speak to. But then the elections that wind up tipping the balance, that tip the House majority. Republicans have a House majority because of 7,309 votes across three congressional districts. That's a number of votes that the people listening to this right now could flip in the next election if they focus on the right places. The same thing is true in state legislative chamber after state legislative chamber. In the presidential race, it was 0.1% of all the votes cast across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that determine the outcome. So there are these tiny margins. The country's almost perfectly cleaved in half. In this way. Wisconsin is a microcosm of this national picture. And because it's so agonizingly evenly balanced. The country keeps toppling from one side to the other. We've had more changeovers in who holds power in the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the last 26 years, this century, than any other time in American history. And I make the case in the book that if we want to get out of this period of instability where people keep voting for change, not getting it, or not liking the change that they have, and then voting to throw the bumps out and get a different bunch of people who they immediately get disillusioned with too, we need to change the systems that block things from actually happening. And the first and biggest one of those is the Senate filibuster. We're in a period right now where no party is likely to get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and where both parties have a political incentive to stop the other side from doing big things, which means that voters screaming out for change, voting for change, do not get it from our political system on the biggest, most intensive issues of each individual moment. And that will continue to be the case as long as the Senate says that you need a super majority in order to pass legislation. The filibuster is the exact opposite of what the founders intended. They considered the idea of requiring a super majority, and they rejected it. It was not part of the Constitution. It was actually created by accident when they changed the the rules of the Senate. When Aaron Burr suggested revising the Senate rulebook, no one noticed that they could filibuster for years after that. Then there were 80 years where it was only used to block civil rights legislation. And then much more. Recently, Mitch McConnell discovered that he could use it to try to torpedo anything Barack Obama wanted. So we got the Affordable Care act, we got a few really important bills, but so much of the agenda that Obama ran on died in the Senate after passing the House. And then we've seen the same thing with President Biden. Some major, really important legislation, a ton that died in the Senate, including protections for voting rights and democracy itself, but also things on health care, on child care, and all these affordability issues that people are right now panicked about that Democrats lost over.
- [31:48]
Kara Swisher
It's good that it's there because of Trump and the SAVE act, for example. It can be abused.
- [31:54]
Ben Wickler
It is true that if both parties have the chance to pass laws, then a party you don't like might pass laws that you don't like. That is absolutely the case. But you have to ask yourself, do you want to live in a democracy? That's in a straight jacket. And you also have to ask, why haven't Republicans gotten rid of the filibuster? Is it because they're so concerned about the genteel norms of the Senate, or is it because their actual top priorities, tax cuts for rich people and confirming judges, those can be passed with 50 votes. They're not subject to the filibuster. And when you start thinking that way, you realize that all of Project 2025 was about taking action through the executive branch and then ensuring that the U.S. supreme Court wouldn't strike down those actions. So we have a system right now that is tailor made for people who basically want a king as president, who want Congress to be on its knees doing whatever the executive wants and want a Supreme Court that will rubber stamp anything that benefits the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. All the other laws that could change those things, those are blocked by the filibuster. And that creates a ratchet effect where things keep lurching towards the Elon Musk of the world and away from the general public.
- [32:59]
Kara Swisher
So removing the filibuster would be your top priority. Removing it.
- [33:03]
Ben Wickler
It's the plug that you pull that out and suddenly the water can flow and it means we'll have more democracy. And it means Republicans will be accountable for their policies if they actually pass them. This is maybe a scary bet to take. I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of voter Republican voters as well as Democratic.
- [33:24]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, that's a technical term. Piece of shit legislation.
- [33:27]
Ben Wickler
Piece of shit legislation, yes. That's the term of art. It's kind stunt bill that most Republican senators are thrilled that they don't actually have to cast a vote on. We saw with the Affordable Care act repeal in 2017, there was a giant public uprising against that terrible bill. And a lot of Republican senators privately breathed a sigh of relief after John McCain turned his thumb down because they knew it was going to destroy them in the next election. As it was, the response to Republicans trying to take away people's health care was the biggest issue in 2018. The same way the huge cuts to health care that Republicans passed this time are going to absolutely blow back on them now. Millions of people losing access to health insurance and that there'll be people who die because of that. The GOP's policies, they just don't actually work out well in practice. And that's why the far right con and the con of plutocrats over and over, is to, with one hand, try to shred public services, and with the other hand, try to block democracy so there's not accountability for it, so they
- [34:20]
Kara Swisher
don't have to pay for their choices. So you ran for Dancy chair last year and lost to Ken Martin, former chair of Minnesota's Democratic Party. He's come under fire for failing to broaden the committee's fundraising operations and its overall financial troubles. The latest filing shows the the DNC is nearly $15 million on hand, but is $18 million in debt. Republicans have enormous amounts of money. You describe the DNC as the top of the pyramid, resting on the strength of county and state Democrats. But it is essential to fundraising. So what needs to change within the DNC itself in order for your plan to work?
- [34:53]
Ben Wickler
Well, I will say for every person, there's a million things that you can do to start building the party at the local level. I think for the national party, the thing that draws people to want to chip in is seeing how their money can affect the outcome of the election. And there's often this sense, and you do see it in politics, and you see it all the time with the Trump administration, that donors want specific policies to pass, and that's why they want to give money, because they want to have certain policies.
- [35:18]
Kara Swisher
Sure.
- [35:18]
Ben Wickler
Those are called transactional donors, and they exist. Parties are actually not the place that transactional donors focus, because what they want is they want to have a relationship with a politician who could actually pass a policy. What parties do is, is that they can say, we can win this election. And so the thing that I think is going to energize voters for the donors for the DNC is the thing you see at state parties that are having success with fundraising is mapping out this is the strategy, this is the tactic that we're going to be able to use. The U.S. supreme Court just changed the rules for parties to allow federal party committees like the DNC to be able to fund candidates campaigns to an unlimited degree. And that could open the door to a strategy to say, like, we're going to zero in on the races, where an extra push could make the biggest difference. We're going to, you know, be really rigorous about finding the messages that really resonate with these voters. And then we're going to fund those programs, and that could be a way to be able to raise a lot more funds. That's a huge part of what we did in Wisconsin. I write in the book about the Scott Walker Loophole, which is essentially the state level version of what the U.S. supreme Court just did nationally. Just like nationally, the Republicans created it to benefit themselves, betting that Democrats wouldn't find the money to use that law to fight back. And in Wisconsin, part of how we beat Elon Musk was raising money into the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and then using that to support the state Supreme Court candidate.
- [36:34]
Kara Swisher
The local candidates.
- [36:35]
Ben Wickler
The local candidates, exactly.
- [36:37]
Kara Swisher
But you don't think it wipes out the fundraising edge Democratic candidates have ahead of midterms?
- [36:42]
Ben Wickler
I think that that's exactly the threat is that the Republican committees now can fund candidates who've been struggling to raise money on their own. And that's a big part of why it's such a priority for the gop. They have, I mean, as we've discussed, an extreme, like an unbelievable amount of money that they're willing to spend to protect their money and power. And I think a whole lot of people who are thinking through right now, you know, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to keep a roof over their head and buy groceries. But if you're somebody who's lucky enough to have some extra money, this is time to donate to people, organizations, party committees that you think are going to do really good work to be able to win this fall. Because the stakes right now are going to affect the rest of our lives for whether democracy works. And I know that sounds like a cliche, but I think it's pretty clear right now that 2024 was one of those years, too. And we're still on a nice edge for whether we're going to have free and fair elections in 2028 and beyond. That gets determined over these next four months and this is time for folks to throw down and do everything they can.
- [37:41]
Kara Swisher
We'll be back in a minute.
- [37:54]
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- [40:20]
Kara Swisher
it's Christy from Lululemon. I'm here at the office and we just dropped some really fun new summer colors in the Flow w styles. If you're like me, you've loved the flow y tank and bra for years and as of this year it also comes in a dress and a crop tank. These are made in our buttery soft Nuulou fabric and my favorite part is the built in bra. It makes it super easy to wear for yoga or honestly as an everyday basic. You can find Flow y styles in store or online@lululemon.com now you emphasize that the Democrats have to run this permanent campaign which Republicans seem to be doing and it worked for the Wisconsin Democr. A permanent year round campaign is expensive and difficult to sustain, especially on the national level. Talk a little bit about this because President Obama built an expansive volunteer organization during his 2008 presidential campaign. To organize this machine is expensive and to have it live on is difficult.
- [41:17]
Ben Wickler
So it does take some money. But the vast majority of campaign budgets is spent on what they call paid media. It's ads, it's digital ads, it's TV ads. That's where the lion's share of the money goes. It is comparatively very inexpensive to pay organizers to build teams of volunteers to do this work on a year round basis. That is a sliver of campaign budgets. Most campaigns don't even do that because this is money that only really works if you spend it early. A lot of campaigns will hire people to knock on doors in the final weeks. That doesn't create something that has a snowball effect over time. What you want to do is invest in real organizing, which means leadership development, finding people who are going to get involved and keep talking to voters that they have relationships with. On the right, you can see this with Ralph Reed's organization. He used to do the Christian Coalition, now it's the Faith and Freedom Coalition. On the Democratic side, there are groups doing versions of this kind of work. I think Swing Left is doing amazing work. Moveon, where I used to work, does a ton of organizing at the grassroots. Indivisible. I could go on with that list. And some Democratic Party organizations do this. But if you just wait until right before an election, you cannot build that trust from scratch. You actually have to show up long before you're asking someone for their vote and actually listen to them. As we talked about before, to me, the amazing thing about the Obama campaign was that and they started outside the Democratic Party infrastructure. They had to figure out a different way to win. They did this hard work of actually building local teams of people who were acting on their own values and building community, and they were able to win the White House. But because it was built around one candidate, it didn't wind up creating this kind of permanent infrastructure. And that to me, we beat Trump in 2020, it was this incredible thing. And then in so many places that organizing infrastructure melted away. So much of the funding for this kind of work melted away, and it is now reared right back and Trump is back in power. So this next time, when we win, first we gotta win. But when we win, we have to keep going. And if we don't keep going, then 2030, the midterm elections after the next Democratic president is elected will take us right back to 2010. There'll be a backlash. Republicans will rig all the state houses. Then they'll rig the Congressional maps, and they will have tilted the playing field for the next decade.
- [43:26]
Kara Swisher
So back and forth for the next. Back and forth for the next. So let's finish by talking about what happens if Democrats actually win a governing trifecta in 2028. People are very skeptical the party can pull that off, but let's say it does. You write a lot needs to happen in a short period of time to get to real structural reform, which I think is at the heart of what you're saying, including abolishing the filibusters. You just mentioned reforming the Supreme Court. Court, which you haven't mentioned yet. Passing a national ban on partisan gerrymandering, D.C. statehood, safeguards for union organizing. It's an ambitious list. If there was ever a Democratic trifecta, there's going to be debate within the party about the details of these major structural reforms. The filibuster alone continues to divide Democrats. What is the most important from your perspective or all of them at the same time? I mean, Pete Buttigieg was the one that brought up reforming the Supreme Court, and that was sort of slapped down when he did many years ago. That was one of his first bigger ideas.
- [44:19]
Ben Wickler
Look where we are now.
- [44:20]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, exactly. He was correct. They all need to happen at once. And what should be the plan?
- [44:25]
Ben Wickler
This is part of why I wrote this as the plan, because there actually is a sequence for these things to happen. One of the biggest reforms is something that happens through the states in 2026. If Democrats win unified control of the battleground states that I mentioned before, they can pass something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
- [44:42]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, this is the nipvic.
- [44:44]
Ben Wickler
Nipvic, yes. Thank you. This is my way to pronounce an unpronounceable acronym. So NIPVIC would basically join a bunch of states together to say, we're going to give our Electoral College votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. And if they do that, it means the end of swing states and safe states. It means that every New Yorker, Californian, Texan, Wyomingite, everybody's votes count the same in choosing the President of the United States, which would be a revolution in American democracy for the people. Better in so many ways. It would give people everywhere a reason to organize and get involved in order to affect the most powerful office in the world. And it would mean that the government, federal government, has to be responsive to everyone on an equal basis in a totally different way. So that can happen even without Congress. And that is one of the things you can do when you win at the states in 26. As soon as Democrats have a majority in the Senate, I think they immediately should end the filibuster. And there's different proposals for reforming it and different proposals ways. The most critical thing to me is it has to be a majority rule institution. That has to happen before any of the other reforms can pass because all these things will take passing through both chambers of Congress and then going to the President for signature. But if Democrats win in 2027, I hope that they'll abolish a filibuster right away. Let's just get that over with and put that behind us. So after that happens, then you have the chance to pass a new Voting Rights act, to pass a national gerrymandering ban. I argue, I explore different ideas for reforming the U.S. house. I think we're in a situation right now where almost every House district will be decided in advance by state legislators drawing the maps.
- [46:12]
Kara Swisher
And it's ridiculous partisan gerrymandering.
- [46:14]
Ben Wickler
One great idea is to have proportional representation and multi member districts and expand the size of the House. That's something that, you know, there's not a majority for yet. But the more you look at how it would actually work if, you know, if a state said we're going to give our House seats based on the proportion of votes that each party wins, it means that if you're a Republican in a blue state, you have representation. If you're a Democrat in a red state, you have representation. And it means you just get a lot more democracy and responsibility for the Senate, ensuring that D.C. residents elect senators, that Puerto Ricans have a chance for a referendum to elect senators. It allows the Senate to be a much more representative body. And it ends this ridiculous situation where American citizens are governed by people who they have no voice in electing.
- [46:54]
Kara Swisher
Yes. I'm a D.C. resident, I'm not happy about it.
- [46:56]
Ben Wickler
Yeah, you know exactly what this is like. Taxation without representation. Not something America is traditionally really into, or at least in theory, not into. And then you need to reform the U.S. supreme Court. As you noted, there's several ideas for this. My favorite idea is the idea of term limits where Supreme Court justices serve for 18 years in active status, then they take senior status where they're not voting on active cases. And it means that every president appoints a Supreme Court justice in their first and their third year. And that not only changes the membership of the Supreme Court over time, more importantly, it creates a world where every member knows that the body is going to evolve. And so they should think about how to create rulings that can endure in different political conditions. You want to turn down the partisanship of the Supreme Court. You don't want it to ping pong or be a pendulum in this way. I want an even playing field for everyone. I don't want to rig this thing
- [47:46]
Kara Swisher
for Democrats rather than expansion term limits. I agree.
- [47:48]
Ben Wickler
Exactly.
- [47:49]
Kara Swisher
Yeah.
- [47:49]
Ben Wickler
And that to me is the goal is, you know, parties can get things wrong, presidents can get things wrong of both parties. You want the public to have the ultimate. You want to have a system that's not rigged for one side or the other, and that allows you to have the flexibility to adapt to a world that is being transformed by AI and by so much else. As long as the public can write the rules, and as long as when people are hurt, they have some recourse to do something about it, I think that we can get through just about anything that the world throws at us. But in a world where all the power and the decisions are made by a tiny group of people who are interested in serving themselves, then things can go terribly for millions of people.
- [48:24]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, this is my issue with the tech people. They're like, well, they're smart. I'm like, I don't really care if they're all nice. If they were all agreeing with me. I don't want them in charge.
- [48:32]
Ben Wickler
Mark Jassen is this Nobel Prize winning economist and he did this deep study that found that there's never been a famine in a democracy. And the reason for that is that having a democracy means that if people are starving to death, it becomes a political problem for the people in charge. You have famines in colonies, in places where someone is in charge who's not accountable to the public. And I feel like we sort of have a political famine right now because we don't have enough democracy. There's so many ways the government is not responding to basic needs that people have for childcare, for housing, to be able to afford the food they need, all this kind of stuff. This only happens because you have a government that is not ultimately accountable to the needs of the public. And it could get worse or it can get better. And this is the plan, is my roadmap for how we make it better.
- [49:16]
Kara Swisher
Last week, President Trump claimed that American elections were rife with, quote, hacking, manipulation, corruption. It's part of his whole song that he's done for a while. He had a speech that he tried to push off. It didn't get a whole lot of resonance, I would say, but he still did it. Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen Also threatened local election officials with prison time if they didn't comply with the administration's efforts to change election policies. So what concerns you most about the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the federal government ahead of the midterms? And how should local election officials prepare?
- [49:49]
Ben Wickler
We should have the expectation that Trump will use every one of his powers to try to stop the democratic process from working. We've seen him testing things like seizing ballots, trying to seize voting machines, prosecuting local election officials, claiming that election results were invalid. We saw him trying to have elections retroactively canceled after 2020. He's going to pressure everyone who he has power over to manufacture ballots, like he tried to do with Brad Raffensperger in Georgia after 2020. And we can see him using the machinery of the state to do it. The good news is that the people who have been suing against these, they keep winning in court. And so all the lawyers that are preparing, I advise a group called Democracy Defenders that's preparing legal actions to go immediately after Trump when he tries to pull this stuff. That creates some measure of protection in places where the courts are functional and on the up and up, which is not all the courts at this moment, but the most critical line of defense is actually the local officials. If you look at Minnesota, when Trump sent in in ICE and people were being shot in the streets, and then the attorney general said that they would pull ICE out if Minnesota turned over private voter data, the state and local officials said no. And that is why people's Social Security numbers and private driver's license, all this kind of stuff didn't flow to the federal government. They were trying to get their hands on it. And right now, local officials should be running scenario plans. And I know a lot of them are doing this. They should be looking at all things, these different vulnerabilities and sort of lines of attack. They should be building plans with their emergency operations centers in the public. People should be doing the kind of local organizing, making sure that everyone has someone that they can check in with for if the shit hits the fan in the fall. Everyone should have a plan to be able to vote. People should figure out who they're going to go voting with, and we've all got to be ready for what could be a moment that I hope and pray doesn't come. But I think we should have the expectation, assume the worst, that they're going to try to pull something off that prevents. Prevents power from actually changing hands. The more we prepare, the less likely the emergency becomes, the more we win in court. Along the way, the fewer tools they have at their disposal to mess with the elections, the more poll watchers sign up, observers, poll workers in the local communities. The more people vote early, the fewer people, the shorter the lines on Election Day itself. There's all these things that people can do, but we've got four short months to do this kind of organizing and get ready. I'm grateful to everyone who's been preparing along the way. And now it's a sprint. If we win this fall, especially for the state and local offices, then we have people who can continue to say no to Trump's attempts to overturn the elections in the future. And that's the first acid test for whether this big movement to make the government actually work for the public, rather than for Elon Musk and friends, is the first test for whether we can pull this off.
- [52:28]
Kara Swisher
Let's look ahead 10 years. What does our electoral system look like if just 50% of your plan is implemented?
- [52:35]
Ben Wickler
50% would be a giant improvement. This is an ambitious, bold plan. I'll be realistic about that. If we have a national popular vote for the presidency, but we, let's say, haven't been able to reform the way the United States House works, the national popular vote in itself would be such a change. You know, right now, presidential candidates spend all their time in, like, seven states, maybe five, maybe four states. Most people are essentially ignored. Most people feel like they're spectators in our democracy. There's no stakes for them. The level of turnout in many states is below 50%. In my state, it's like 3/4 of people cast a ballot because. Because everyone can see that their vote might be the thing that determines the outcome. And building a civic culture in this country of this is not a spectator sport. This is something where everyone actually has power, has a voice. What you do matters. That can affect government at all levels. So much of what everyone's frustrated about is not about which party controls government. It's about whether government itself has accountability to the public and has to move and deliver to be able to make life better for people. And there's so much that people in red and blue areas can do even though their elections aren't close. But it's hard for that to feel real when it feels like your vote doesn't count because you already know in advance who's going to win. And so I think there are multiple paths. I think the same thing is true in House races. If we have competitive House races across the country, if gerrymandering bans are enacted, and especially if we get to something like proportional representation, then many more people will have a meaningful say in who represents them in a chamber of Congress. If we can reform the U.S. supreme Court, then maybe we can actually do something about money in politics. Which right now the Supreme Court is
- [54:04]
Kara Swisher
on the the money side.
- [54:06]
Ben Wickler
They're on the money side, they're on the money side. But imagine if that can change.
- [54:10]
Kara Swisher
So, last question. If you were made head of the DNC right now and could do anything you wanted, what would that be?
- [54:17]
Ben Wickler
Well, I first don't want to re litigate the DNC chairs race. I don't want to be that head of the day ahead of it, maybe a different life. But let's say I am the head of the DNC now. I think the first thing that I do is start working with states to write a plan in each state state to unrig the political system in that place and make those public. In Wisconsin we had a plan that was years out. This is actually something that I learned from Ken Martin, who was the chair in Minnesota next door. After I was elected, he brought me to Minnesota and he said when I was elected chair, we made a 10 year plan, mapped out all the races that we needed to win and Minnesota traveled this path, won a Democratic trifecta and passed things that made the lives of everyone in that state better. In Wisconsin we mapped out a long term plan and we've been moving through that plan step by step and it culminates this fall. We could win a Democratic trifecta this November. Governor, both chambers of the legislature, we have a pro democracy Supreme Court. I know that the DNC has folks that are talking to different states about this. I want to see those plans in each place. I want to sing them from the rooftops. I want people to see how their work adds up to something bigger. Because when it feels like every election is the most important one we've ever had and then suddenly there's another one, it is exhausting. You need to see a path from what you do to actually delivering change in people's lives. And that has to be built from the bottom up everywhere in the country. I think that's a thing that the party can facilitate and support. And I think it's something that people can do whether or not the party where they are is doing it. And they can get involved and build the kind of party that they want. But to me, all these things are connected to each other. And until you understand the connection between what a state legislature does and how the House maps are drawn, and then who controls Congress and what laws pass? If you're not fighting on all those playing fields at once, you're losing. The right has been fighting on those. Elon Musk came to Wisconsin for exactly that rank reason. But we can fight back and win if we look at the whole picture.
- [56:00]
Kara Swisher
All right, Ben, thank you so much. It's a terrific book. It really is. Very smart. There's a lot of these books out, but I like this one. I appreciate it.
- [56:07]
Ben Wickler
Thank you. Really grateful for having me on.
- [56:15]
Kara Swisher
Today's show was produced by Michelle Aloy, Katherine Milsop, Megan Birie, Madeline laplant, Duby and Kayn Lynch. Nishat Kirk is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff, Julia Sharpe Levine, Bradley Sylvester and Dave Shaw. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you've staved off authoritarianism for another day. If not, good luck wandering the democracy desert for the next 40 years. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.
- [57:03]
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Kara Swisher
It's here.
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