Why Democrats Need To Think Smaller To Win Bigger

Ben Wikler wanted to lead the Democratic Party after his party’s disastrous 2024. But Wikler, the former Wisconsin Democratic chair, may ultimately help Democrats even more with his new book: This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.

Equal parts memoir, political history and how-to guide, Wikler does what Democrats desperately need — he grabs them by the proverbial lapels and demands they pay as much attention to their structural and long-term challenges as they do Donald Trump’s latest outburst. He also has some fun along the way.

You may not agree with all his proposals. Some run the risk of deepening the cynicism he wants to thwart.

But Wikler, who as a youthful Democrat was shaped by the 2010 Republican wave and subsequent effort by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to neutralize public unions, grasps what too many of the hobbyist class in his party miss. Namely that while presidential elections and the biennial battle for Congress matter, Democrats will not attain enduring power unless they get serious about down-ballot elections.

In our conversation, Wikler and I discussed what about his party literally makes him nauseous, how “trifecta” is slowly moving from a horseracing term to a staple of the political nerd lexicon and how 2030 is the year that Democrats should actually be worried about.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book talks about Wisconsin history and the Wisconsin present a great deal. What does this governor's primary in Wisconsin tell us about your party — and your party in this cycle?

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin is neutral in primaries resolutely; it doesn't put its thumb on the scale. It works to prepare the general election grassroots organizing army for whoever becomes the nominee, and then it locks in with the nominee to fight through the finish. And right now, we have this playing out in a very vivid way. There's a highly contested five-way primary for governor. There are big differences in message and approach between different candidates. We don't know how it's going to play out.

What we do know is that the day after the primary, we're going to have a network of neighbor-to-neighbor organizers in every community in Wisconsin, in every county, in every small town, in every big city and suburb that are going to be ready to go to ensure that the nominee can defeat Tom Tiffany, who tried to overturn the 2020 election.

But you're talking in your capacity as a chairman and neutral party. I'm asking you in your capacity as author and historian who understands the soul of your party. You've seen cycles before like this; 2018 comes to mind. The party is pissed at its leaders because its leaders lost the previous election. 

When a party loses, it has to figure out what it can do better next time to be able to win. That is healthy. What is unhealthy is when a party doesn't have that kind of reckoning. We saw the Republican Party not have that kind of reckoning last time. It didn't mean that they lost in 2024. It means that they are having a total meltdown disaster in governance. And the Democratic Party won the presidency was able to pass some good things, but also didn't meet some of the fundamental needs that people have around the country. And now there's a real conversation happening about, "How do we do better next time? How do we earn voters’ trust? How do we earn their trust, that what we deliver when we win will be the thing that they are crying out for? And how do we win the election along the way so we actually have that chance to deliver?"

Ben, you're old enough to remember the 2010 election. Different party but similar circumstances. The grassroots of the Republican Party were furious that they had lost to [Barack] Obama, and they nominated some candidates in an otherwise good year who wound up losing the general election because the churn in the system and the wave was so strong that it wound up elevating some candidates who reflected the passions of the grassroots but maybe couldn't win over the general election voter. 

Do you worry that something like that could happen this year — an otherwise good cycle for your party, but because there's such churn, you might lose a couple of winnable seats in general?

If you look at 2010, there were both some missed opportunities on the Republican side and also enormous gains that fundamentally transformed the country. And I'm sure that some mix of those things is possible for Democrats in 2026.

I write a lot in my book about the opportunity to win state legislative chambers and unified control of states. A lot of these states are not a major part of the national conversation. There's not a lot of national news about the fight for the Arizona state legislative chambers or even Wisconsin. For all the attention Wisconsin's getting right now, so much of the action is in these state legislative fights. Both chambers are on the line for the first time now that we have fair maps in our state. Those battles are going to have massive long-term ramifications. There will be a lot of people who instantly become rising stars because they win in a way that you hadn't expected.

But, I think politics, in a sense, it's easy to hyperfocus on an individual name on a ballot. But the real power comes from the overall map, from who has majorities where, who has the power to actually pass laws where, who gets a supermajority because they rig the system to be able to make that happen, where there's a state majority that's willing to stand up to voter suppression or tries to overturn an election. My argument, and I feel like my primal scream, is for Democrats to focus on all those different levers of power that are going to add up to the question of whether democracy survives in this moment.

Do you feel vindicated that the term “trifecta” has, at least among the political nerd class, become mainstreamed as something that is not strictly confined to horse racing?

Yes. The recognition that the person who signs the law is not the same person who passes the law — that you actually need legislative chambers, that you need trifectas if you're actually going to wield power — that is such a critical shift. And for so long, as a Democrat, I watched the national conversation in my party completely miss the fact that the basic rules of the road in this country are decided by trifectas at the state level.

Right now, the GOP is totally wrapped around the single person of Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is wrapped around his bank balance and the bank balances of his friends, which means that the GOP's eye is off the ball. So if Democrats and independents and disaffected Republicans focus on the races that actually meaningfully shift the power to make and change laws, there's an enormous possibility that this is a watershed year.

I feel like you're grabbing your party by the lapels, and really, grabbing everybody by the lapels and saying: The story of 2010 was not the congressional gains. The story of 2010 was the down-ballot success of the Republican Party, which set them up to redraw the maps of their states, to change state laws and to transform the following decade in their party. And we now have the challenge-slash-opportunity in our own party.

That’s exactly it. America's meltdown didn't start with Trump descending the golden escalator. It started with Project REDMAP flipping state legislative seats across the country.

In 2010.

In 2010, exactly.

Speaking of your party, something that I know you and I agree on is — especially among the Democratic donor class, but it has switched over to the kind of activist class in the digital era — the all-consuming obsession with the presidency and the Senate at the expense of gubernatorial races and, as you point out, state legislative races. How can you get Democrats to focus more on governors' races and less on this all-consuming Senate focus in nonpresidential years?

Well, I'm trying an unorthodox strategy of writing a book and then talking to every journalist I can find about it. I will also say, building organizations that focus on these less sexy races has had a positive effect. I think having groups like The States Project that are making the case that the state legislative chambers are absolutely critical, and you see several other groups, DLCC and Forward Majority, doing the same thing.

Work on state Supreme Courts is an area that needs a ton more focus. It kills me that there were so many people who voted for Keisha Lance Bottoms in the governor primary in Georgia — which was fantastic — but a ton of them did not vote in the state Supreme Court races, and one of them we lost by 2.2 percentage points. If we'd been able to win that race, then there would have been a path to a Democratic majority in the state Supreme Court by 2028.

In North Carolina, there's a state Supreme Court race this fall that is the only way to create a path to a majority on that court. The entire U.S. House majority that Mike Johnson oversees — the Republican control of the chamber was due to a Republican victory in a state Supreme Court race in North Carolina by 401 votes. The truth is that if a few hundred or a few thousand people decide to recruit their friends and neighbors to vote in some of these elections, you're going to tip the outcomes, tip legislative chambers, tip state Supreme Courts and change the rules in ways that will echo for decades.

If I were to tell you that Sara Gideon had more money on hand six years after her loss in Maine than David Jolly raised in the entire first half of this calendar year for the governorship of Florida, how would you feel?

I would wish I hadn't had an egg, bacon and cheese bagel sandwich for breakfast. It makes me physically nauseous to think about: that we're in an algorithmically driven world that makes shiny object syndrome even worse. We're constantly chasing squirrels — this or that exciting windmill that we can tilt at. But the races that determine who writes the rules for the country are right there.

Well, and it's ironic, right? Because the internet was supposed to provide people with more information and make them even savvier because they now have access to all this data that you're talking about. But instead, the algorithm has forced them just to whatever is sexy in that week, that day, that hour.

It's true, and it's also the case that we are in a moment now where people do have more access to the information about how to donate and how to operate strategically. Democrats have had a renaissance in the last few years on this front; they are doing better in these down-ballot races now relative to how they were doing a few years ago, to an astonishing degree that gets almost no press coverage. Democrats had more votes in state legislative races in 2024 in the battleground states than they did in the presidential races.

That kind of roll-off almost always goes in the opposite direction. There are so many critical offices that Democrats have lost simply because people didn't fill out their whole ballot. That is shifting in real time right now, and I want to accelerate that shift with both feet on the gas pedal. Whoever it is that focuses on the races that have the greatest strategic consequence, that get the least public attention — that is the party that is going to decide how the rules of democracy work for the future. And right now, only one party is in favor of democracy, so the urgency level is very high.

Let me ask you a cultural question: Is part of the disparity between the two parties and their focus down-ballot — does that owe to the money culture? A lot of Republican money comes from the business choices of executives and corporations who are engaged in the races that are going to impact their bottom line.

Democratic money tends to be more of a hodgepodge of "Yes, there is labor, and there is progressive causes, but a lot of it is rich people who have 1,001 different causes in mind," right? They give to whatever their passion is, right? Some of them are into the environment, others are into LGBT issues. The patchwork nature of the party makes it less coherent, giving-wise.

I think there's something to that. I think a lot of major Republican donors are what they call in the political business “transactional donors” who basically are calculating, "How much money do I have to put in to get even more money out." That happens in tax cuts. That happens in regulatory changes and regulatory capture. And when that's your focus, you realize pretty quickly that the person who can approve your project is the person who you want to elect and influence, which might be very different from the person who was on MSNOW last night.

All right, let's talk about the book. Ben, if there was a wand that was handed to you and made you chairman of the DNC, just to cite one job, for example, what would you wave that wand and do today?

Let me start by saying I ran for the DNC here. I lost the race. The most urgent thing that I would do is something I sense the DNC is working on in every state — to map out that state's strategy, to unrig the political system and build power for the long term. To me, the 50-state strategy has to actually be 50 state strategies because the only way you sustain interest in working on obscure state legislative races is when people can see how they add up to the big picture of what they're trying to do. And that's what feels like it’s missing right now.

We're in this tragedy of the commons where every candidate is screaming that their one election is the most important election that's ever happened, and that's why there's a 400 percent match and a deadline at midnight, and this is the make-or-break moment. It is almost impossible to cut through that noise.

What are those federal structural changes that you'd make? 

The first and most critical and most urgent change that unlocks the possibility of everything else is ending or changing the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Neither party is going to get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate anytime soon. And if you like every policy the way it is right now, other than tax levels for rich people (which Republicans love to cut) or who sits on the federal bench (Republicans love nominating judges), if you think everything else is hunky-dory, then you want to keep the filibuster in place. But the only way that we're going to make meaningful change otherwise is to change the rules of the Senate. All that takes is a majority in the Senate that's willing to do it. Once we do that, that opens the door to making the kinds of adjustments that used to happen routinely in American history, but essentially stopped half a century ago: the size of the U.S. House and the way that House members are elected.

I think we should be looking at proportional representation and things like ranked-choice voting in the number of states. There's a whole bunch of Americans who would like to cast meaningful votes. So let's do D.C. statehood and give Puerto Rico a chance to decide whether they should be a state. That addresses the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. We need a national gerrymandering ban so that state legislatures don't get rigged again in 2030 or even in mid-cycle redistricting, as we're watching happen in red states and then, in retaliation, in blue states month after month right now.

And then we need to tackle one of the core sources of corruption and rot in the American political system, which is the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court has become a partisan weapon for the right. It's not just conservative. It is actively Republican. It is the instrumental partner for the imperial presidency, where Congress basically lies on its back. The president, when it's Trump, can do whatever he wants, and the U.S. Supreme Court rubber-stamps anything that advances the biggest corporate and conservative interests. The U.S. Supreme Court is not going to earn back the public's trust unless people think that it's not in the tank for one side or the other.

So, do you go from nine to 13, Ben?

To me, the most compelling possibility is this idea of term limits for the U.S. Supreme Court, where you do 18-year term limits. Every president gets to appoint a justice in their first and third year. It changes over time with a lag, but reflects broadly the direction the voters are trying to go, and every justice has an incentive to build coalitions and craft rulings that can stand the test of time with people that might arrive through presidents of either party.

And you switch from the Electoral College to a popular vote for the presidency?

Yes, I think that the Electoral College is a small-d anti-democratic nightmare, and it deprives Republican and Democratic and independent voters in almost the entire country of any meaningful say in who becomes president. No other country has adopted the Electoral College system. When the United States tries to spread democracy abroad, we never tell anyone, "This is a good idea. You should try it." And there's a reason for that: It's preposterous, and there's a way around it just through state governments deciding to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

I was going to say some of this you can do with the vote of Congress; some of this you can do with state elections. But Ben, some of what you're talking about does require a constitutional amendment. That's a pretty high bar to get some of these reforms done. Is your assumption that the excesses of the moment are leading to a backlash that's going to make a lot of these reforms easier in the next 10 years? Or is that your hope-slash-prayer?

The backlash is already here. We've been watching a slow-motion backlash over the last three election cycles, maybe more election cycles than that. There's a huge chunk of the country that is not aligned with either party, but is just hammering the remote control trying to change the channel. They do not like what is happening. They want change, and they keep voting for it and not getting it. And I think that the door is open to actually saying "Hey, maybe the system needs to be changed." That is actually Trump's explicit promise over and over. It just turns out he's changing it to give himself a few extra billion dollars instead of doing anything about what the public is furious about.

That said, in the book, I'm very careful to map out a series of strategies that don't require change to the U.S. Constitution, that can be executed by winning the specific offices, the state legislative trifectas, then the House and the Senate. This is mapped out with an actual plan to get it done. I don't have any illusions that Republican state governments are about to pass a constitutional amendment. So we've got to do everything we can with tools that we have that allow us to have more democracy down the road.

Every cycle is basically a change election, and we can't laugh at the Brits for having seven prime ministers in 10 years because we effectively, every two years, have a change election. And one body changes hands in Congress.

Let me just speak to that for one second. I went through and realized, while I was writing the book, there has never been a period as politically unstable in American history as the one we're in right now. We've never had this many change elections in a row. There have been periods with a lot of changes in the House, or a lot of changes in the Senate, or a lot of changes in the presidency. This is the first time we've had turnovers in all three in the numbers that we're seeing in the 21st century.

Is that promising to you?

Well, that says to me that people are trying to get something that they're not getting.

The fear that if we change the system to allow the government to be more responsive to elections, that that's going to lead to some terrible outcome that we have to be afraid of — that fear misses the fact that if we don't change the system to be more responsive to what the public votes for, then we're gonna stay frozen in place. And people are gonna stay mad and keep throwing at whoever's in power over and over and over.

If you want to build a New Deal coalition, then you need to deliver New Deal-scale responses to the problems that people have in their lives. And Republicans have their own Herbert Hoover-y ideas, and we can see how that works out for them if they actually get a chance to pass them.

Let me challenge you for a minute, because if you do some of these big changes, big reforms, you would call them, some people are going to become more cynical about institutions because they're going to see this as a power grab by one side, and that could even further corrode faith in institutions and sort of increase partisan warfare. Is that unfair?

In my view, the partisan warfare and the procedural hardball is already underway from the right. That's why Merrick Garland didn't land on the United States Senate. That's why Texas fired the first shot in a gerrymandering war that is now an arms race at the expense of the public — but neither side can afford to withdraw from it. There are wars being fought by changing the rules every second of the day across the country right now, and it's Trump's obsession. Trump is doing nothing to try to actually end the war and address the price of gas, and doing everything he can to rig the midterms so that even if people want change, they won't get it.

You mean the SAVE Act?

Yeah, the SAVE Act, the trying to jail election officials and seize ballots. He reminds me of when you try to insulate a house, they force air into the house to see where the air leaks out. He's doing that to our electoral system right now to see where he can force through and break out of the straitjacket of voters deciding who's in charge.

But the other side of the coin is that the voters who wind up determining close elections overwhelmingly tend to be people who are not focused on process; they're focused on what's happening in their day-to-day lives. And all the yammering about "democracy's on the line" and "your side did the first gerrymander" — all that sounds like distant noise. What they want to know is: "Can they actually afford the medicine that their doctor just prescribed them?" If you can't meet that basic need, then they're not going to vote for you. That's why the fear of figuring out how to get it done, because you're worried that that'll turn people off, is misplaced.

So what you're saying is Democrats should focus on kitchen-table pragmatic issues. If you want to address structural issues, don't talk about structural issues, right? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. If you want to win elections and then get reelected, then what you need to do is deliver real changes in people's lives, and the structural issues are the way that you do that. But process is boring to people who hate politics: They're not focused on what Rule 22 of the Senate says. They're focused on something that will keep them up at night with anxiety — if they can't figure out how to buy a new backpack for their kid the next day.

There’s an anecdote in the book where you’re like, "We're gonna unrig the system by talking about fixing bridges," right? 

If you want to save democracy, talk about roads.

Pamela Gantz was running for De Pere City Council against a fake elector, who was on the city council and had participated in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. How do you beat a fake elector in an election? You talk about local highway construction. That person got into office not because of their participation in right-wing conspiracies, but because people thought they might be able to deliver local services that would matter. And you beat them by talking to voters about what they care about, and then figuring out how you can actually deliver for them. Then you get the luxury of being able to safeguard our democracy. That's the prize. That's not the means to win the election.

I feel like you should put an asterisk on the cover of the book saying, "Attention, candidates! Don't talk about this stuff while you're running for office."

It's not that it hurts you. It's just that if that's your central obsession as a candidate, then you're saying to the voters who have already given up on our political system that you're not like them, that you spend all day thinking about these things that sound like power games instead of thinking about their problems.

It's like a plumber. What they're delivering to you is the ability to turn on the faucet and get hot and cold running water. If they pitched to you which gauge of steel they're going to use and which kind of wrench they're going to use, you do not want to talk to that person. You want to know whether they're going to actually solve the problem in your life.

I get the sense from reading this book that you're pretty optimistic about the next couple of elections and the coming backlash to Trump because we are living through a kind of series of change elections, and that's bad for the party in power. I get the sense that Ben Wikler is more concerned about 2030 and 2032 than anything else.

I think in these next two elections, the public clearly won't change. I think the existential question is whether we're going to have free and fair elections, and the most important way to do that is to elect people to run the elections who believe in democracy. So I think that is an open question, and that's an urgent fight.

But in terms of which side the public is going to want to vote for, I'm most concerned about 2030 because the laws of political physics say that if there's a couple cycles where Democrats win, sort of like 2006 and 2008, then you get a cycle where the pendulum swings the other way in 2010. The pendulum swing in politics — that's fair enough. The risk is that 2030 is a redistricting year, and whoever is elected that year, if the law and the courts allow them to do it, they could have the power to rig maps and lock in control for themselves. And that means that what Democrats need to do is carry the ring to the top of Mount Doom and then cast it into the fire, so that it's melted down forever.

We need to take the redistricting gun off the table. It's sort of like the debt ceiling. You do not want to have this disastrous thing that could ignite a political and economic meltdown just sitting on the table. Neither side should be able to break the maps for its own benefit. And it's ironic that the only way to get to that point right now is for Democrats to do retaliatory gerrymanders. But we have to map out step by step, "How do we get to the point where nobody gets to break the American political system for the long term?"

You're a progressive from Madison, but you also led a state party that reflects the kind of purple nature of our country right now, the split-personality nature of our country. Wisconsin famously has always had two personalities: a state that elects Tammy Baldwin and Russ Feingold, also elects Tommy Thompson and Ron Johnson. You can go back further in history to Gaylord Nelson and Joe McCarthy. Just talk for a second about what being a Wisconsinite means in terms of informing your view of politics nationally.

I have the gift of not only being from, objectively, the best state in any number of respects, but also the state that most perfectly mirrors at this point the huge split between the two parties in a country that elected Barack Obama and then Trump and then Biden and then Trump. Wisconsin voted for Barack Obama and then Trump and then Biden and then Trump. To live in Wisconsin is to know every day that you're going to interact with people who voted for someone that you find politically horrific and who's threatening your fundamental values. And also to realize that the people on the other side of the divide feel the same way about your party. And when you're in that environment, you have to try to figure out "What are the values that we actually hold in common and how do you invite people to join you in taking action based on those values?"

I do think that there's a kind of sharpening that comes from living in a place where elections are decided by a hair's breadth. It makes you focus not just on your own opinions in your head, but actually listening to people to figure out what it is that can allow you to build a coalition that can win when the stakes are impossibly high and the margins are impossibly thin — that's the world that the country is living in. My dream with this book is to try to share what it's like and how to act accordingly, so that people who share my view — that this country is in crisis — can do the most effective and powerful thing that they can in the next four months, and then in the next four years, and the years beyond that, to get us out of this mess.

Let's end with: Fighting Bob. In the echoes of the late 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century, Wisconsin was the laboratory for democracy. But as you cite in the book, it wasn't just Fighting Bob La Follette, it was other folks in the Wisconsin Legislature. How did they reclaim power, and how did they use power for progressive ends? And what does that tell us about today?

The capital-P progressive movement in Wisconsin that spread across the country — Teddy Roosevelt and so many others 000 came from a shared recognition that the economic system at the time, even though it was enormous growth and enormous change in dynamism, was not delivering for regular working families, for people that were dying on the job because they had no protections in the workplace, for people whose strikes were being gunned down by Pinkertons. We had multiple labor massacres in my own state in Wisconsin. People organized and fought at every level until they had the power to change the rules. That was the critical prelude to the ultimate boom after the New Deal and after World War II, benefiting everybody, not just the tiny group of people at the top. And that's the path that we have the opportunity to watch today.