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

Summary

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Episode Overview

Theme:
This episode of The Bulwark (July 14, 2026) features Sam Stein in conversation with Ben Wikler, former Chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, DNC chair contender, and author of the new book This Is the How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. The conversation explores the challenges of sustaining pro-democracy activism and rebuilding Democratic infrastructure after years of setbacks—using Wisconsin as a case study—and debates how to create lasting change in the face of anti-democratic forces at the national and state level.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Write This Book Now? — Rejecting "Doomscrolling" Activism

• [01:41] Ben Wikler explains the motivation behind his new book: offering a roadmap for systemic, sustained activism—an antidote to hopelessness and "doomscrolling".
  • Quote ([01:41], Ben Wikler):
    "The book argues essentially for a non doom scrolling approach to politics... if you have the patience to actually listen to a book or read a book, that maybe you can find the energy to roll up your sleeves and get involved in... the slow food version of politics."
  • Ben contrasts the need for long, deliberate engagement with the quick, sugar-high engagement common on social media.

2. The Lessons of 2008–2010: From Euphoria to Backlash

• [04:17] Sam and Ben discuss how Democrats lost long-term momentum after the 2008 Obama win, failing to maintain activist energy at the local level.
  • Quote ([04:17], Ben Wikler):
    "What did not happen is that all of these neighborhood action teams that had formed to help elect President Obama... did not become neighborhood action teams focused on politics in their neighborhood that then would work on city council races and mayoral races and then the state legislative races in 2010."
• Ben recounts the Republican strategy: pouring resources into state and local races, enabling gerrymandering (the “Red Map” project), suppressing votes, and pushing anti-union and right-wing policy, fundamentally shifting the balance of power.

3. Wisconsin: A Case Study in Rebuilding

• [07:36] Sam frames Wisconsin as a laboratory for how Democrats can claw back from setbacks.
• [08:34] Ben details the arduous work of building year-round, neighborhood-based organizing.
  • Quote ([08:34], Ben Wikler):
    "The first thing is this idea that actually comes from the Obama campaign... called the snowflake organizing model... like a lattice of connection between lots of people."
• He credits his predecessors and thousands of volunteers for incremental progress, emphasizing that the same “always-on” strategies used by Republicans (like Faith and Freedom Coalition, Turning Point) must be modeled on the left.
• Success is measured not by one-off wins, but by the creation of permanent infrastructure that gets stronger with each fight, especially in lower-salience races (like the State Supreme Court).

4. Building to a Pro-Democracy Majority Is Years in the Making

• Ben describes organizing around a clear, multi-cycle “North Star”:
  • Quote ([10:43], Ben Wikler):
    "Our guiding goal... in Wisconsin is to have a Democratic governor, Democratic majorities in the state legislature, a pro democracy state supreme court majority. And when you do all that, then you can actually pass laws that make a positive difference in people's lives and not have them get struck down."

5. National Parallels and Limitations

• Sam reminds listeners that Wisconsin is more evenly divided than states like Mississippi or Alabama ([12:24]), highlighting the difficulty of nationwide replication.
• Ben acknowledges national gerrymandering and anti-democracy tactics but asserts changes are possible when infrastructure is built over the long-term.

6. The "Plan" for Restoring Democracy

• [13:00] Ben lays out the plan to defend and rebuild democracy:
  • Step 1: Focus on state governments, especially in battleground states.
  • Step 2: Channel voter anger into state legislative and “down-ballot” races—these are constitutionally empowered and affect election administration.
  • Step 3: Winning control in key states in 2026 and 2028 ensures that democracy itself is not at risk in every future election.
  • Quote ([13:00], Ben Wikler):
    "The most important line of defense that each of us can affect is state governments which constitutionally run elections... the central job for the future of democracy now, is actually the state level fight."

7. The Trump Factor — Danger and Distraction

• [14:43] Sam probes how Trump’s presence impacts activism: does the focus on federal races hinder investment in crucial but less glamorous state contests?
• Ben is about to answer, highlighting a frequent challenge for Democratic organizers—convincing donors and activists not to overlook state-level battles, even as Trump galvanizes opposition at the national level.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Opening Banter ([00:33])
  Ben Wikler: "It is easier than running a political party, I'll tell you. There are fewer people mad at you at every given moment along the process."
• Childhood Political Memory ([00:37]) Ben Wikler: "My godmother ran for Congress when I was 11... she went up and said, 'I've been waiting a long time to say this: Me nominee.' And it was like this perfect political joke that seared itself in my memory and made me think, you could have fun with politics."
• On the Slow Work of Democracy ([01:41])
  Ben Wikler: "There is no one election. There's no one magic message. There's no one secret trick that can allow us to unrig the political system. But what there is is the work of actually building a group of people to get involved on a regular basis for years."
• On Rebuilding in Wisconsin ([08:34]) "The core insight was that that kind of organizing gets stronger with every fight, whether you win or lose."
• The Plan, Clearly Stated ([13:00]) "If that gets channeled not just in the House and Senate races and things that you read about and see on TV, but also to state legislative races... that's the central job for the future of democracy now, is actually the state level fight."

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Key Timestamps

• 00:33 – Ben Wikler on writing vs. running a party
• 01:41 – Why write a book? Advocating the “slow food” of politics
• 04:17 – 2008-2010: The rise and fall of Democratic momentum
• 07:36 – Using Wisconsin as a case study for party infrastructure
• 08:34 – The “snowflake organizing model” and importance of year-round work
• 12:24 – National limits to the Wisconsin organizing model
• 13:00 – Wikler’s plan for restoring democracy, focusing on state governments
• 14:43 – The Trump effect: galvanizing activists, but often distracting from critical state-level contests

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Tone and Style

• The episode is practical, motivational, and occasionally wry, with both host and guest trading good-natured banter about the frustrations and hopes of political work.
• Wikler is methodical yet optimistic, repeatedly returning to the idea that political change is possible—but only through patient, organized, and collective action.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode is essential listening for anyone concerned about American democracy’s future. Ben Wikler, using both tough lessons from Wisconsin and national perspective, stresses that sustainable change is a marathon, not a sprint—requiring years of grassroots coalition-building and a relentless focus on state-level power, even in the shadow of dominating national personalities like Trump. His call: stop doomscrolling, pick up real tools, and join the slow, determined fight for democracy.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Sam, great to be with you. It is easier than running a political party, I'll tell you.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Okay. This is telling me the plan.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah. Well, let me pick on that for a second. Let me pick on that for a second. Because Trump presents an interesting sort of dynamic here. And I'm curious how much you've, I'm certain you thought about it, but I'm curious your experience, what was the name? Donald Trump. Yes, he's the president.

[B]

Write that down.

[A]

Yeah, you might. You write it down. It's D O N A L. Anyways, to a degree. Obviously he's galvanizing. Certainly we can see it right now. There's a huge, intense backlash against what he's doing. And yet, as someone who operates on this, who has operated on the state level and understands the importance of these state races, I do wonder to the degree to which you were constantly fighting the temptation for Democratic activists and donors to simply just focus on Trump and the federal races and holding him accountable vis a vision.