Over coffee with Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, this summer, I was talking about my own unproductive tendency toward political despair, and my recurrent fantasies of moving abroad to give my kids a start in a less cruel country. Such thinking was completely foreign to him. I remember him saying that when he sees a crisis, his instinct is always to find the way through, no matter how narrow or convoluted the path. He seems to relish the opportunity to rise to a challenge.
I was reminded of this conversation when I spoke to Wikler on Sunday, after he’d announced that he was running for Democratic National Committee chair. The political discussions I’ve had since Donald Trump was re-elected have generally been bleak and depressive, at best leavened with a bit of gallows humor. But while Wikler admitted to the same anxiety many of us are feeling, he sounded animated, almost cheerful.
“The thing that I find energizing is the opportunity to fight back,” he said. “I’m drawn to big fights where if you pour everything you can into it, you can make a difference in a way that actually affects people’s lives.” This combination of focused pragmatism and deep, genuine optimism is part of what makes Wikler the obvious candidate to rebuild a broken and demoralized Democratic Party.
There may be decent arguments for some of the other candidates who’ve entered the race, though I confess I don’t quite understand them. The front-runner is reportedly Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, mostly because he’s a consensus choice. “If he wins, the party won’t be electing him as a force of personality, but as a safe pair of hands,” wrote Politico. But given the party’s losses in November, it’s hard to see the logic of going with an inoffensive, status-quo pick instead of political innovator with a record of wrenching power from Republicans.
When Wikler became chair of the Wisconsin Democrats in 2019, the party seemed consigned to permanent minority status in the state. After the Republican Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010, Republicans enacted shockingly lopsided electoral maps that all but ensured their continued dominance in the State Legislature, even if Democrats won more votes. When Wisconsinites elected a Democratic governor and attorney general in 2018, the Republican Legislature stripped them of some of their powers, a move that was in turn ratified by the state’s conservative Supreme Court. That court would go on to put in place a new set of even more gerrymandered maps, strengthening Republican control. Wisconsin politics seemed like a locked box.
But, as Wikler recognized, there was a key. Wisconsin Supreme Court justices are elected, and if voters could flip a Supreme Court seat, it would open the way for a reconsideration of the state’s maps, which would finally allow for fair legislative races. Wikler threw the party’s might into electing Janet Protasiewicz to the court last year, in what ended up being the most expensive State Supreme Court race in American history. On the bench, Protasiewicz cast the deciding vote to toss the Republican gerrymander. That, in turn, set the stage for Democrats to flip 14 seats in the State Legislature this year. Wikler is convinced that in 2026, Democrats could turn the State Senate and Assembly blue.
It’s true, of course, that Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin in November. But her margin there was closer than in any swing state, a bitter consolation prize but one that’s still testament to Wikler’s organizing skill. Meanwhile, he helped Wisconsin Democrats raise more money than every other state party this year and helped ensure the re-election of the embattled Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin. As one Republican strategist told Politico in 2022, Democrats had their “back broken” during the Walker years, “and they never got back up again until Ben Wikler came.”
Now the national party is in urgent need of such revitalization. “The fact that Democrats have a clear shot at winning a trifecta in Wisconsin in 2026, it was from years of work in Supreme Court races, and work with the legislative caucuses in Wisconsin,” Wikler told me. “And there are fights like that all across the country.”
For example, as he points out, if Republicans hadn’t won control of North Carolina’s Supreme Court in 2022, their party probably wouldn’t have won the House this year. That’s because last year, North Carolina’s new conservative court majority put in place gerrymandered maps that had previously been struck down. Those maps gave Republicans three new House seats. Now the party seems likely to end up with a three-seat House majority. If Trump succeeds in passing another gargantuan tax cut for the rich, it will be “a direct result of Republican investment in winning a Supreme Court majority in North Carolina,” Wikler said.
Democrats, by contrast, have often failed to give local races the money and attention they deserve, a problem Wikler could fix as D.N.C. chair. “The underlying plate tectonics of American politics are often these state-level races that happen far from the national spotlight, far from the headlines, and may have only a fraction of the resources needed to deliver the kind of outcome that democracy demands,” he said.
At this frightening, dispiriting moment, Wikler somehow sounds genuinely hopeful about the opportunities in front of us. Right now, as he acknowledges, some who abhor Trump are tempted to withdraw from politics altogether. But when the wrecking ball of the new administration starts swinging, he thinks there will be a new wave of oppositional energy, and that Democrats need to be ready to channel it.
“We don’t know yet which of the many promised hammer blows are going to fall,” said Wikler. “But we know that when we activate our shared values and work to try to thwart those attacks and stand up for each other, we create hope through our own actions.” While such hope might feel distant now, he said, “when we’re in the fight, especially when we win unlikely victories, as we did against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, that reminds us of our collective power.”
Those of us running low on faith in the possibility of a better country could use a leader with some to spare.
The post If Anyone Can Save the Democrats, It’s Ben Wikler appeared first on New York Times.
