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A former Democratic Party chair's plan to save democracy
00:38:46
Ben Wikler chaired the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for six years, leading to victories in numerous key contests in the battleground state. In this episode of Settle In, Wikler talks to Geoff Benett about his new book, "This is the Plan," which deta...
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- [00:00]
A
Whether you live in a state like Wisconsin or not, you can be part of winning those tipping point fights that wind up affecting everything else.
- [00:10]
B
Ben Wickler, former chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025, now the author of the book this Is the How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Why write this book now? There is no shortage, as you well know, of analysis about what's wrong with the Democratic Party. What was missing from that national conversation?
- [00:32]
A
Jeff, first of all, thank you for having me on. I'm grateful to be here. And secondly, this is the plan. How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy starts not from a description about what's wrong, but rather from this question. For people that are watching so much go wrong and feel that everything's spinning out of control, I want to answer, what can you do to get us out of this mess? And how does it all add up to a big picture where we not only kind of stop the damage, but actually build a democracy that works for everyone better than we've ever had in this country? And that's what I sought to do through the book, step by step, drawing on lessons from a state that has walked that exact path over this last decade, which is my home state of Wisconsin.
- [01:15]
B
Yeah, we're going to break down some of those steps. So as you mentioned, you spent six years leading the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. What did you learn from winning elections at the state level that the national party could learn from?
- [01:29]
A
The most vital lesson that was just pounded into my head and my heart and my soul day after day in Wisconsin is that the big elections that everyone thinks about, the elections for president of the United States or U.S. senator Governor, those are shaped by what happens in far less noticed elections in obscure local races, in judicial elections and state legislative races that most people never even know are happening. But in those elections where the fewest people get involved, you can actually, as an individual person with a group of friends, have a huge impact on the outcome. I think a lot about how in Wisconsin at this moment, as we're talking with Wisconsin, is actually a democracy where both sides have an even chance of winning in November. In the governor's race, in the race for the majorities in the state legislature, all of that was only possible because the state Supreme Court moved from a majority that rubber stamped gerrymandered maps to a Supreme Court that insisted on uneven maps that demanded a set of maps that would meet basic requirements of fairness as well as meeting our Constitution. And what I argue in the book is that if you're concerned about the kind of crisis of democracy that's happening right now, you can roll up your sleeves, find a group of friends and get involved in these races that are far from the national spotlight and have an enormous effect that will echo through years and years to come.
- [02:53]
B
Well, how did Wisconsin become such a politically important laboratory? In many ways, how did it become a closely divided battleground?
- [03:03]
A
So the phrase laboratories of democracy goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, who said that about the state of Wisconsin. Cause Wisconsin more than a century ago was the heart of the progress, the capital P progressive movement. It was the place that invented direct primaries where voters got to choose who their party would nominate. It was the state that had the first successful progressive income tax. It was the state that invented workers compensation, unemployment insurance, all these different policies at the state level that then helped shape policy nationwide. But there's also a very right wing tradition In Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare that started in Wisconsin. We have a string of far right leaders and politicians and movements as well as progressive movements throughout our state's history and they've been in contention, they've been so evenly balanced that Wisconsin's the only state where five of the last seven presidential races have come down to less than 1 percentage point. That's maybe three or four votes per precinct across the state. And when elections are that close, you realize that if you can get a group of friends together and text a bunch of their friends and get them all to the polls, you might be responsible for winning a statewide race. Now the thing that I really try to lay out in this book and document in a way that sort of surprised me as I was digging into the research, is that no matter where you live in the country, if you get some friends together, get involved in volunteering in the races that have the biggest consequences for democracy, then, then whether you live in a state like Wisconsin or not, you can be part of winning those tipping point fights that wind up affecting everything else. So it was this experience of being in a state where over and over you have nail biter elections that keep you up until the middle of the night waiting for the results to come out that kind of taught me about focusing your efforts on the things that have the very biggest impact, tuning out the noise of which there is so much in our political system and thinking about as a citizen, as a member of this kind of political community, how can you make sure that this gift that each of us has of living in a country where the people decide who has power, how can that survive Even a moment of great crisis and peril.
- [05:11]
B
How do you get people to care? And looking at the experience in Wisconsin, when you're having this conversation with folks, how do you connect the line between a vote for a state legislature or a vote for. Or a local court and the impact on national elections?
- [05:29]
A
You know, for most Americans, or certainly many, many Americans, politics is kind of like curling. Curling is the Olympic sport where you push a big granite rock down a piece of ice, and if you get close to the target, then you get some points. And it's something that you think about for a little bit every four years. When it's on in the Olympics or when it's on in a presidential election, there are other people who think about politics 24, 7. And a lot of the people who volunteer and who donate in elections are people, you know, for whom politics is always on their mind. And my experience is that for the people who rarely think about politics, it's when they discover that they can actually play a role in. In making something better or worse, that. That the light bulb turns on. And for people who are very involved, who might be getting burned out and who want to tune out politics because it's too much, it's discovering a community of people that. That shares their values, that wants to do this work, and then discovering that that community, people, actually has an impact. That is what creates the stickiness, the kind of feeling of joy of being part of something bigger than yourself. You know, in politics or in anything else, I think living your life in a way that's in service of something bigger is a source of great meaning, and it's also a source of finding people that you become friends with forever. I met my. My wife doing activism. We. I fell in love with her when we were putting up posters for a protest. And, you know, 19 years of a very happy marriage bring me to this point. Writing this book, saying to other people, get off the dating apps and get involved in an organizing app where you can meet other people who share your values and want to do something about them.
- [07:06]
B
It sounds almost cinematic. Ben, meeting your wife as you're putting up posters for a protest. You mentioned in the book that Republicans have understood what you're describing about building power. They've understood this at a granular, granular level in a way that Democrats haven't. When I used to cover the Hill in the White House, that was the question I would put to Democrats all the time. Why aren't Democrats as tactically ruthless about the things they say they care about as Republicans are What have Republicans learned that Democrats need to catch up on?
- [07:37]
A
I talk in the book about how, Starting in the 80s, there was a right wing operative named Ralph Reed who was asked to put together this strategy that started with school boards and city councils and helped build this kind of movement from below that led to the toppling of the Democratic majority in the U.S. house in 1994. That strategy is still in effect. Ralph Fried now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which Donald Trump just addressed. A huge national network of hyperlocal organizing. And on the Democratic side, I think so many Democrats start with recognizing, I think rightly, that most Americans share the basic values that the Democrats bring. The belief that everyone should have access to healthcare when they get sick, the idea that if you work a full day's at work, you should be able to put a roof over your head and afford food for your family. Those are things that you think, well, most people agree with this. This is what my candidates fight for. Why wouldn't I win? And the reality is that there's a huge division in this country. There are people on both sides of the political divide constantly trying to figure out how can they win. And what we've seen on the Republican side is an effort to change the rules, to give a structural advantage to their party. The way that Donald Trump kicked off most recently with Texas gerrymandering the living daylights out of their congressional maps. And now there's this kind of arms race for gerrymander meandering on the Democratic side. I think what, what folks need to recognize is that even if you have the most amazing candidate in the world, you have a candidate like Barack Obama, generational talent come along, that doesn't solve the problem by itself. In fact, there is no candidate, no set of candidates who, who will ever permanently solve the problem of American politics. You have to think of it not as a problem, think of it as just part of life that you have to get together with people who share your values and get involved in building a community that takes action at every level of the ballot. In the book, I call it the permanent campaign. And by that, I don't mean TV ads, you know, filling up every available break 24 7. What I mean is for people to make it a part of their lives on a regular basis to go talk to people who might not yet agree with them and get involved in building a civic life that reflects all of our values. And, and that, that's another word for organizing, which is where you work to get people to take action with you. It means voting in elections that might come down to a single vote. I talk about a bunch of those elections in the book. They happen all the time across the country where literally one more person can tilt the outcome. Sometimes that's a city council seat, sometimes it's an entire state legislative majority. That happened in Virginia in 2017. If you view this as part of your civic life, as part of this country, then it's becomes not an obligation, but actually something that ties you together with other people. And we're, I think, in a crisis of loneliness and isolation. It's part of what makes the news sometimes feel so overwhelming is the sense that there's no one doing anything about it. Once you find out that you and many other people are doing something that it does matter, then you can feel better about everything, come what may.
- [10:37]
B
You mentioned community organizing, which is giving me strong 2008 vibes. But you also mentioned Obama by name. And I want to bring him up because you write about his 2008 campaign and you say the extraordinary organizing machine built to elect Obama never really figured out how to live within the party. Part of that was structural. So he layered on top of the DNC his Obama organizing apparatus. But the problem was that to your point, it didn't allow the Democratic Party to solve the greater underlying problem.
- [11:13]
A
The insight of the Obama campaign in 2008, it's rule one of organizing give people something to do. It is about not just telling folks to go volunteer for a few hours and come back. It's actually spending time with people who want to be leaders, who want to organize other people, teaching them those skills, teaching people how to tell their story and invite other people to tell their own story back. So you find where you have common ground. The Obama campaign organized neighborhood action teams that would have people go out and talk to people in their own neighborhood. They would work from living rooms and coffee shops across the country. And it's an incredibly powerful form of organizing, but it was about electing one person in that case. And the shift to making this not about it was called Obama for America. Then it was called Organizing for America. It was hard to make that pivot because it really started with people coming together around this amazing candidate at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. My, my predecessor chair actually went and found that model and decided to try using that not around one candidate, but around an always on organizing strategy where people would organize on a year round basis, neighborhood to neighborhood, friend to friend. And sometimes they'd be talking to folks about the state Supreme Court election coming up. Sometimes it'd be about the county board and sometimes it would be about the presidential. So I, I grew up in Wisconsin. I worked across the country and then moved back and discovered this amazing organizing kind of upwelling from, from below, all over the state. That's what led me to run for the state party chair in Wisconsin, to be part of building that and growing it on a year round basis. And what we found is that it's like a snowball that, you know, it's called the snowflake model because you start with some leaders at the center and then they shoot out like the branches of a snowflake. But that snowflake can turn into a snowball that gets bigger and bigger as it rolls downhill. Every election cycle we have more volunteers working in more places, whether or not there's a giant, well funded campaign on the ballot or something much more local. And I think to build that within the Democratic Party nationally, it takes a commitment to supporting local work year round. And it means a shift towards opening the door to people who might be disillusioned with the Democratic Party or never have identified with Democrats before, but they just know that they want to make a difference. And a lot of times local Democratic parties are just struggling to keep the lights on, let alone the doors open. I think if people are trying to decide where to put some time and energy thinking beyond individual candidates, but getting involved in their local party, their state party, and ultimately building up to the national party is the way that we can create this kind of civic energy within the party that can make a difference at every level of government.
- [13:53]
B
Is it harder now? One, because people are just exhausted and in many ways people are fed up with politics. But using the Obama model, it strikes me as being easier to organize around something when you're fighting in support of something, whether you're fighting in support of hope and change or Barack Obama as this transformational figure, it's harder to do and it's harder to sustain that energy when you're constantly focused on what you're against. And right now, the Democratic Party at the national level is really organized against Donald Trump and MAGA and Trumpism. That to me seems like it's harder to sustain that energy day after day, week after week.
- [14:32]
A
So I think energy comes from fighting for things that mean something deeply to you. And there's lots of different reasons why people oppose Donald Trump. The vast majority of Americans do right now. But I think at a deepest level, you want to have the love of your country, the love of your community, the belief that we should be A country where everyone has a shot, where no one can't afford the food that they need. And this idea of democracy, that's this incredible thing encoded in our constitution that says that the power of the government should come from the people themselves. You're fighting for that. When you're fighting against a government that is trying to strip away rights and freedoms. And so being able to locate that work in. In a set of common values that we hold, I think that can be a source of energy. And then it becomes about being in solidarity with other people. Like, if you've ever been to a strike, when workers are on strike, fighting for better wages and working conditions, there's principle involved, there's people's own interests involved, but the thing that really sustains people is the sense of camaraderie, the sense that if we all hold together, we can actually make this work. And then the joy that comes when you actually do. And that, to me is part of the magic sauce of democracy, is it's not everyone sitting in their room on their phone calculating which Act Blue link to click to support the candidate with the greatest percentage chance. All those things are important. But it's actually when you get out and you're in person with other human beings taking action together, that you find that this is something that political will can be a renewable resource. And that can happen when you're in power fighting for a legislative change that'll make a difference in people's lives, or when you're out of power fighting for something better that lies on the other side of the horizon right now. People are fed up, they're disillusioned. There's a deep sense that there's something structurally wrong in this country. And I think that sense is exactly right. The country's not built to serve regular people. Right now. There's a handful of the wealthiest people who've ever existed in the world who are rigging the system for their own benefit. And to get out of this mess, it's going to take not just winning some elections, but passing deep changes, deep reforms, changing how the Senate works, ending the filibuster. I think reforming the US Supreme Court, either adding more members or putting in term limits. It's going to take changing the Electoral College, which is such a ridiculous system that leaves the vast majority of Americans out of the process. And it'll take, I think, expanding the U.S. house and ending partisan gerrymandering nationwide, maybe proportional representation. Those are big changes. I recognize that. But they're also a realistic answer to the problems that People see when they look at politics. If you look at politics and say, this is a total message and someone says, vote for me and everything will be fine, it's not credible. You need to have a vision big enough to answer the questions that people sometimes might not be willing to ask in public. Because the sense that something's wrong can be answered by a vision for how we can make it right. And what I'm heartened by in this political moment is that so many people from the grassroots to candidates for elected office, are thinking big about how to make change so we don't wind up exactly where we are right now.
- [17:38]
B
Once again, you write about the importance of focusing political resources on the voters and the races that can actually make a difference. And so here is my hopefully insightful, potentially controversial question for you, based on reading what you wrote about that. Does the Democratic Party waste too much money and attention on long shot candidates and emotionally satisfying fights instead of the races that actually determine political power?
- [18:08]
A
The short answer is yes. The, the long answer is that when people say the Democratic Party, they mean two different things. They mean the formal legal institutions, the Democratic National Committee, Democratic state parties, Democratic county parties. That's the, the Democratic Party. If you, you know, look it up in the, in the law books. Then there's the Democratic Party, the amorphous blob of every elected official, every consultant, every pundit, everyone who chips in, you know, $27 on ActBlue, independents who caucus with Democrats, the, maybe the voters themselves. The amorphous blob can suffer from shiny object syndrome. You know, you're talking about one thing. A shiny object whizzes by and everyone gets distracted. And that phenomenon often means that a huge amount of the national kind of energy in Democratic politics gets focused on a candidate running against a particularly heinous Republican or, or a particularly charismatic Democratic candidate in a place that it's extremely hard to win and then completely skips an election that would have had huge consequences if it had gotten more attention. That is absolutely a problem. The Democratic formal party, the DNC, and the state parties, they often don't get to make those decisions. Most of the time they're doing all they can to just stay afloat. I argue in the book that both the formal party and the, the kind of everyone big tent, amorphous blob party could do more to focus on the hinge moments, the hinge elections, where one more push could get things over the edge. And it's not just the House races and the Senate races that get most of the national attention in a midterm election like the one we're about to see, it's also races like state supreme courts. In North Carolina in 2020, there was a state supreme court race that most of the country did not pay attention to. But the Democratic candidate lost by 401 votes after two recounts. The Republican candidate, when he later became the Chief justice of a majority, he rammed through a pretty much unprecedented reversal of a recent decision to re gerrymander that state and that granted Republicans nationally three more congressional seats, which, if you do the math, is the exact size of the Republican national majority right now, which means that Mike Johnson might be speaker of the House right now. And all those cuts to health care, trillion dollar cuts to Medicaid, the confirmation of Elon Musk and Donald Trump's massively deadly cuts to foreign aid, all these different things they've done would not have happened if it hadn't been for 401 votes in North Carolina in 2020. And there are elections like that all the time. North Carolina has another Supreme Court race here in 2026. In Wisconsin, we have a chance to win the state. Legislative majorities in both cham probably come down to a few hundred, maybe a few dozen votes in a tiny handful of legislative districts in our state. And I go through in the book, state by state, the places that are right on the cusp of a sea change in one direction or another, where if you put your time and energy, you don't have to do them all. Just pick one, pick one, pick a couple. You can, you can have a hugely outsized effect. I would love for the, the kind of Democratic Party writ large, anyone who's dissatisfied with what they're getting from the Trump administration right now to focus their attention on the obscure race where a little push can change everything. And I write in the book about which races those are, because if we can do that, you can. I call it the skeleton key to American politics. There's this very complicated lock, but if you can turn that key, there's so much that we can make possible that will make a difference for everybody, for the better.
- [21:44]
B
I want to return to what you said about the systemic reforms that you are calling for. Eliminating the filibuster, reforming the Supreme Court, effectively replacing the Electoral College. When Democrats controlled the White House and Congress during the Biden presidency, they failed, chose not to enact many of these same reforms. So why should voters believe that Democrats would behave differently if given the option again?
- [22:10]
A
Well, the first thing is to choose Democrats who are ready to Take action if they have the power to do so. Now, some of these things came very close to passing during the last Democratic administration. The national gerrymandering ban was contained in the for the People act and that passed the U.S. house was the first bill that the House majority passed. In the US Senate, there were almost enough senators to amend the filibuster to allow pro democracy reforms to go through. And Joe Biden called for that to happen, said he would sign it into law. The two senators who stood in the way on the Democratic side are not in the Senate anymore. That's Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Every major Democratic nominee for Senate that I'm tracking across the country is committed to either amending or ending the filibuster to do pro democracy, pro voting reforms if they, if they get into power. And that's a really big shift from where we've been just recently. Down the road, we'll think through who will be in the presidential primary. And I don't know who the right person to meet the moment is going to be, but I do think that it's on all of us to look out for people that are not going to try to restore some status quo that frankly was, was broken in and of itself. But ra want to move to a future where things actually work for everyone. And the thing that I kept kind of bumping into as I was working on the book is that to shift the way our institutions work in order to build a better democracy is actually in line with the best and oldest traditions in our political system and our country's founding. There were horrific problems and crimes. There was slavery. There were only about 6% of people had the right to vote when the Constitution was enacted. But there was also embedded in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. The fundamental idea that the legitimacy of government came from support of the majority of, as James Madison wrote, the great body of the people, that that was the basic idea. And over and over we changed the number of Supreme Court Justices, we changed the size of the House, we amended the Constitution, we added states, we changed the way people were elected, we all those changes were commonplace. It was a matter of course that as the country evolved, we were going to adjust how these things worked to be able to meet the moment. And the circle of freedom kept expanding in fits and starts and contractions sometimes. But we became a better democracy over time. And then things got stuck. About half a century ago, it's like it all got frozen in place. The filibuster got more and more restrictive. We stopped amending the Constitution. The House got stuck about a century ago, and now it's treated as though all these things were etched in stone, you know, written from on high. We can't change any of those things. We have to wriggle through these tiny passageways to make any kind of change. And right now, the way our rules are set up, it's easy to cut taxes for rich people. It's easy to confirm Supreme Court justices who want to overturn Roe versus Wade and strip away, you know, protections for people across the country. But it's very, very hard to do anything that helps protect the right to vote or supports people organizing a union or doing things most people across the country, across party are crying out for. So we don't have to live like this. We can elect people and then advocate and push those people to deliver changes to how laws are made that then allow us to make laws that serve everyone, that serve the common interest.
- [25:28]
B
I love what you said about the expanding circle of freedom. That's such great imagery. Thank you. All right, so here's the question. Why did Democrats lose the 2024 presidential election?
- [25:40]
A
So first I'll say if you look at the number of votes that would have shifted the outcome, it's 1/10 of 1% of the total number of votes that were cast in that election. It's about 114,000 across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And when the election, if. If that many voters had switched sides in the other direction, then Kamala Harris would be president right now, as I'm talking to you. And when an election is that close, there are a thousand things that could have changed the outcome. So if you're watching right now and thinking, oh, this was the issue, you're right, that probably could have changed the outcome right there. But stepping away from that, as I write about in the book, and a few people documented right after the election result, 2024 was an unusual year. Globally, in every single developed democracy, whatever party was in charge lost ground at the polls. There's a database that tracks the kind of wealthy democracies around the world. And the entire history of the database going back more than a century, there was no other year where every ruling party lost ground in an election. And the overriding issue, globally, from all the data that we can amass, the biggest single thing was prices, affordability, inflation, the sense that things cost too much and that voters wanted to change it. And what strikes me, as I dug through frantically, a huge amount of information about this, is that the people who are Furthest from day to day politics were the people most likely to switch sides, either to people who voted for Biden, who stayed home, people who hadn't voted in 2020, who did vote in 24. Trump won among those people, people who voted for Biden and then switched to Trump. There's a larger number of those than people who voted for Trump in 2020 and switched to Harris. Whichever way you cut it, it was the people furthest from the ads, furthest from the campaigns, but who saw every day in real life hitting them in the face that the economics of this country were not working for them, that they were paying too much and they weren't making enough to be able to afford it. And that issue of prices, when you poll people, it was by far the biggest predictor of switching to vote for the other side. And now the shoe's on the other foot. That exact issue is exactly what is making people so frustrated about Trump. Now. Trump is doing things to actually drive prices up. Inflation had been going down by the election day in 2024, prices were still high. Now prices are going up again. Grocery store prices, gas prices, because the war in Iran. And Trump owns this issue that he campaigned on, relentlessly, promised to do something about. He's made it worse. And that means that both for people that are in a state of near panic about the assault on democracy and our rights and our freedoms, and for people who. Who would rather never think about politics, but who know for damn sure that they never want to Pay, you know, $10 for a side of beef at the grocery store ever again in their lives, people who are just thinking about how politics affects them directly in their pocketbooks, all those folks want change right now. And that opens the door to candidates who are ready to create that change. That's why I think as long as we. We do everything we can to ensure that there's a free and fair election, there could be an enormous swing of the political pendulum in 2026 and, and possibly also in 2028 in the direction of people who recognize that this economic system is not serving regular people at this moment and who want a democracy that can deliver.
- [28:59]
B
There are certainly people who will watch this and who will listen to this, who are ideologically aligned with you and will wonder, why isn't Ben running the DNC? And we should say, you ran to run the DNC back in 2025 and lost to Ken Martin. There has been all sorts of headlines and ink spilled about the challenges facing the current leadership of the DNC and all of problems Connected to that. But what did that race teach you about how power actually works inside the Democratic Party, the establishment of the Democratic Party?
- [29:33]
A
It's funny, I ran for DNC chair, arguing, you can't show up two months before an election. You have to organize year round. You have to listen to and build trust with the people whose votes you want to earn when it comes to an election. And then I lost that race because I launched my campaign two months before the election and ran against somebody who'd been building trust and listening to the voters in that election for years. And all credit to him. He had a vision for how he wanted to run that race, and he executed it. I had been so focused on my own state in Wisconsin, which is at this tipping point in American politics in presidential races and Senate and House majorities, and I had not put in the legwork with the electorate in that race. Voters, whether they're DNC members or they're swing state voters in a presidential race, people everywhere want to be heard and listened to and connected with. And so I kind of came away from that experience thinking I hadn't spent years thinking about how to win a DNC race, but I had spent years thinking about how to win races in the toughest places, like Wisconsin, where we faced, two months after the DNC race, Elon Musk coming in, spending $56 million in a state Supreme Court election. Unprecedented spending. We defeated him by 10 percentage points. So I decided my next project would be to try to write down what I learned from all this work in Wisconsin and from the people who'd been in the trenches for much longer than me in our state and see if we could bring those lessons to how we can organize in a different way and hopefully a joyful way to build a democracy worthy of the name nationwide. The product of all that is this is the plan.
- [31:08]
B
Well, yeah. So we've talked about the plan. And from where you sit, looking at the Democratic Party and surveying the political landscape, are things going according to plan?
- [31:21]
A
The thing that is most going according to plan is that there are millions and millions of people who are taking personal responsibility to take action and try to create change. I think we saw that most extraordinarily in Minnesota when ICE came in in this calculated assault that the Trump administration said they would call off if Minnesota turned over their voter rolls. And the leadership in the state refused to do that, to trade their democracy, like the famous quote, those who trade security for liberty deserve neither. Minnesota said no. And people organized neighbor to neighbor, they're still organizing right now to keep their neighbors safe and to ensure that they would still have a democracy after, after the ice assault was over. You see the same thing all over the nation. There are people gearing up to make sure that their, their neighbors are safe. There are people gearing up to get involved in local elections. And that, to me, is a source of incredible hope. Democrats are overperforming in elections at all levels, including races like the Georgia Public Service Commission race last year, tw 20 point victories in a environment where Democrats rarely win in a squeaker. These were massive, kind of wave elections that most people weren't paying attention to. All that says to me that in 2026, if we can ensure that, you know, ballots aren't being seized and agents aren't being deployed without being immediately countered in court, if we can ensure that the election's free and fair, there are huge opportunities for change. And the other thing that gives me enormous hope at this moment that is going according to plan is the sense that it's, it is not just returning to some previous golden age, that it is about doing the work to actually build towards the future. You see candidates from across the kind of ideological spectrum, and there's, you know, lots of healthy debate within the Democratic Party right now about which policies to pursue, which flavor of a Democratic Party to present to voters. But everywhere people are calling for change that benefits regular folks. And that, to me, is very energizing. So as messy as it might look, I actually think that the fundamentals are very good right now to have a party that is trying to learn from having lost disastrously in recent elections and people demanding change, demanding a sense of a fight and a vision for the future and all that. There'll be twists and turns, but I think that opens the path to actually doing the plan, to doing the big long fight beyond any specific candidate, to, to make this a moment for a new kind of reconstruction in this country.
- [33:46]
B
So looking ahead to 2028, we've got a short list now that will likely include Harris and Newsom and Buttigieg and Bashir and Pritzker and Rahm Emanuel potentially. I know you said earlier that you haven't settled on the candidate who likely would win or who should win or who you would support. But what should Democrats be looking for in their standard bearer going forward, especially as you say, that the country will likely be ready for a change candidate. The folks who I mentioned for the most part, are known quantities, not to say that they couldn't somehow be fashioned as changed candidates. But right now, at the moment, it would suggest that they're not.
- [34:23]
A
Well, if you think back to 2008, by the time we got to the presidential election, we were in a world historic economic meltdown, the Great Recession, the collapse of the global financial system. Think back to 2020, the other, most recent time a Democrat beat a Republican in a presidential race to get things started with the new administration. We had the COVID pandemic, and life had changed for everybody. Millions of people were dying. We don't know whether we'll be in a crisis like that and which crisis it'll be. And so I think it's literally impossible to say right now who the right person will be to meet that moment and in a sense, what qualities they'll have. I think we know, or I know that I want someone who's committed to making real change, not just at the surface, but to the structures of how power works, to make this a freer and fairer democracy for everyone and who's focused on the lives of working people. And I think all these candidates, everyone you mentioned, many people you didn't, people we've never heard of, who are probably thinking about running for president, are thinking about those things. Now. The other thing I think that's really critical is that excellence. It's the idea that the government should be really good at delivering for people, be able to move decisively, make sure that it's hearing from everybody, and then take action to actually make a difference in people's lives. Part of what I write about in the book is that the way that our politics is structured right now, you elect someone, maybe they pass some bills, the results come years later, and they are not really associated with whoever passed them in the first place. And so, you know, Trump's cuts to health care are going to be playing out even during the next presidential administration. People will be mad at the administration in power for having cut their health care, even though it happened in Trump's first year of his second term. The more we make government responsive and effective and nimble and make our system of democracy actually work, which has to involve ending the filibuster, the more people can try something, see if it works, and then vote for more of that if they like it, or something different if they don't, and that's where we want to get. You want to have a government that is responsive to what the public wants. I talk a lot in the book about the Princess Bride, my favorite book and favorite movie. And the Princess Bride starts with this scene where the farm boy always says, as you wish and when he says as you wish, he really means I love you. You want the government to say as you wish to the public, both in the I love you sense and also the this thing you asked for, here it is. Do you like it? Do you like how I'm giving it to you? You can keep it if you want it. That's where we want to get. And I think my advice for people thinking about the presidential race is to keep all those things in mind and on the other hand, to get involved in building the kind of organizing apparatus, the kind of energy that we'll need for a presidential nominee, no matter who it is. This is something I did in Wisconsin with all my colleagues at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and our allies and partners, and especially our grassroots activists who are. We decided to build the presidential campaign of our dreams before we had a nominee, before we had a clue who it would be. So we were building neighborhood teams across the state, opening storefront offices on main streets. You'd go to a Democratic county party meeting and they'd go around the room and ask people to sponsor one day of rent in the coming month to keep that, that office's doors open. We were making the list of local elected officials and local leaders who might be up for, you know, endorsing the nominee once we had them. And all that work then became the presidential campaign in the state after the primary was over in 20, 20, 20. And that's work that we can start everywhere right now for 2028. And guess what? All of it will help us to win in 2026 and then the off year elections in 2027. So the message is, don't wait for the savior. Be the person that you're waiting for. Find friends, get them involved. It's going to take all of us to beat the biggest concentration of wealth and power, the first trillionaire in American history. But I really do think we have the tools in front of us. If we're, if we're willing to pick them up and do this hard work, we can set the stage now for victory in the next presidential election and to deliver on the promise of that election in 2029.
- [38:24]
B
Ben Wickler, the book is this is the how to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. I have to say, politics aside, this is a crystal clear diagnosis and prescription. Definitely worth your time and worth your reading. Really great to speak with you. Thanks so much.
- [38:37]
A
Thanks so much. It's really been a pleasure.