Ben Wikler.
Photo: Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times/AP Photo
Earlier this month, as Democrats in Wisconsin and across the country celebrated a victory in the most scrutinized state Supreme Court races in recent history, the leader of the state’s party decided it was time to step down.
Ben Wikler was elected to lead the Wisconsin Democratic Party in 2019 and since then molded the organization into the gold standard for a Democratic state party. Under Wikler’s leadership, Democrats retained control of the governor’s mansion as well as the Senate seat still held by Senator Tammy Baldwin, and flipped the state from Donald Trump in 2020, though his record wasn’t perfect. In 2022, incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson defeated Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes and last year Trump took back the state. Wikler’s exit from office, for now, comes at a critical moment for his party as it tries to figure out what went wrong in 2024, while also trying to position itself as a viable opposition to Republicans. We discussed what Democrats across the nation can learn from Wisconsin and what he thinks the party needs to do before 2026 to fight the Trump administration.
As you leave this job, what are you reflecting on? What did you learn?
We’re in a moment of national emergency with an attempted eternal coup by the administration. And there’s a huge amount of work to do to fight back, to just try to contain damage and to set the stage to be able to swing back power for people who actually believe in democracy. And at the same time there’s an enormous political backlash that’s already afoot and is only going to be visible when elections take place or when people pour into the streets for protests.
But what strikes me is that this is a moment everywhere in the country to start building the kind of year-round infrastructure to contest fights at every level of the ballot that we’ve been able to successfully contest in Wisconsin. What you want is a political structure that is capable of giving people the kind of year round infrastructure to contest fights at every level of the ballot that we’ve been able to successfully build in Wisconsin. What you want is a political structure that is capable of giving people something meaningful to do when they’re furious, so that when elections arrive you’ve already built the thing that you’ve wished that you had.
What did you learn from your ultimately unsuccessful DNC chair campaign?
I learned a lesson in the DNC that I had long ago internalized in Wisconsin, which is that building trust with an electorate takes time. And Ken Martin, to his great credit, had been building relationships with DNC members for years. He’d been doing local events, he’d been doing the kinds of things that we support candidates doing in Wisconsin and all that meant that he started with a deep well of trust and goodwill with the voters of the DNC electorate.
I jumped into the race on December 1 and had run a two month blitz until February 1 and I’m really proud of the race we ran, but for many DNC members, I was introducing myself for the first time to people who had known Ken for years.
You’ve mentioned potentially writing a book or running for office again. Do you have any more sense of what you’d like to do on either front?
I do think there’s a lot of lessons from the shape of the fight and the role that thousands of people of Wisconsin [played] which is going to be valuable to the rest of the country as well as to Wisconsin in the future. So the idea of writing a book to help share what we’ve learned, which I hope would help equip people wearing all kinds of different hats to find ways to lead into the long fight that’s ahead of us, that’s something that I find really exciting.
I could imagine running for office at some point. I think it really matters who’s in elected office. We’re lucky to have an extraordinary group of Democratic leaders in office in Wisconsin right now but I think if there’s an opportunity to make a difference that way I would encourage others to run and I think I would be remiss not to take my own advice about that.
Would you primary someone?
I can’t think of an elected official in Wisconsin who I would want to primary. I think we have a great group of leaders in our state.
I’m very interested to hear what you think of this moment in politics and Democratic politics. It doesn’t feel like the party at large is flailing as much as it was a few weeks ago or months ago but it doesn’t have its footing still in how to address the economic back-and-forth, the tariff war, or the discussion on how to address Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s unjustified deportation to El Salvador. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on that.
So I think the rules of political gravity have not been suspended. The question is whether the structures of democracy still exist so that when you hit the floor you’re not able to float into the sub-basement. Voters are furious. If the election were today I believe to my core that Democrats would turn out in record numbers, Trump would lose, and Republican candidates would lose up and down the ballot.
At the same time, the administration has issued executive orders to try to dismantle voting protections across the country and Republicans are trying to move legislation that would disenfranchise millions of people. The administration is disappearing people from the streets. They’re causing profound economic chaos in a way that could give them the power to selectively remove that chaos as a form of political patronage on steroids.
They’re speedrunning an autocratic playbook. I think the Democrats have two big jobs. One is to contest elections and do the normal work of driving down the Republican popularity by showing how they’re hurting people and presenting an ultimate credible vision and building a winning coalition. That’s all with one hand. And with the other hand, to be fighting every day, each second to try to contain the blitzkrieg of damage to our democracy itself. And I actually think it’s both possible and necessary to do both. But we’re not living on Earth One anymore where you can just do the regular political work. Now there are these fundamental questions about whether political opponents of this administration will be disappeared on a massive scale in the way they’ve already begun to be disappeared on a small scale.
If you could address the entire Democratic Party and get their full attention to all work in unison, what would you tell them to do?
I would say start with waking up every day and thinking about how to connect what Republicans are doing to the real damage on the lives of folks who think of politics as a peripheral influence in their lives.
What do you think of the AOC and Bernie rallies?
I think what AOC and Bernie are doing is explicitly important and it’s something that I’m thrilled to see other Democrats doing now. Hitting the road and doing town halls and events that are drawing hundreds of thousands of people across the country to get people together so that they can see each other and see their own power. Because the core goal of the Trump administration at this moment is to cow the public into thinking that it’s powerless, to flood the zone so much that people think they just need to run and hide.
There’s a burgeoning discussion in some Democratic circles about if and when people need to just take to the streets. In an interview with David Remnick, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U, floated a point where that organization may encourage people to “shut down the country.” What do you think of that?
I think there’s enormous wisdom in the millions of people who make the decision each week and each day about where they’re going to put their time and energy. I think the millions of people who went out on April 5 sent a powerful message to their fellow citizens to say that they’re not going to be cowed, they’re not going to be so intimidated that they won’t lift their voices, even with an administration that appears ready to purge every political database so they can go after their political opponents using extralegal means. I think that kind of political courage is necessary and likely to become more necessary. But the specific strategies and tactics that the public uses needs to be built from a theory of change about what the fight is at a given moment and how it fits into the bigger picture.
I also wonder what you think about the Trump administration fighting with these large law firms and more recently Harvard University. It feels like in both cases — the Ivory tower and the white shoe law firms — the range of responses to being bullied by the Trump administration is vast.
Fear is contagious and courage is contagious and the more courage we see, the more crises this administration is going to have. Their capacity to wage war on all civil society simultaneously is ultimately constrained by the number of things they have to pay attention to at the same time. The number of people who are willing to be held in contempt of court — the United States is much harder to melt down into a lump of dictatorship, is much tougher than other countries, because we have a federal system, because we have a court system, because we have a huge civil society that has a lot of different components that are governed by different state and federal laws.
Don’t you think that’s a lot of faith in our governing system that appears to be pretty shaky? Just today the Supreme Court said it would hear arguments on a challenge to birthright citizenship. It shouldn’t even get to that point, right?
I’m not saying everything’s rosy. I’m saying hope is not lost. If everyone fights back and nobody caves, then I think Trump loses — and we’re in a moment where clearly some people are caving and some institutions are caving and the Republicans who run Congress are cowering in fear and some judges are giving the administration a free pass. In that scenario, the future is very much in doubt. But the public’s job in this moment is to make Trump and his regime so toxically unpopular that anyone who wants to run for office at any level of government runs and screams in fear that they’re independent of this administration, and fight back and show some spine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Source link
