Tuesday night, when Representative Nancy Pelosi spoke in front of an audience in San Francisco, she recalled her experience leading the California Democratic Party in the early 1980s and the many other state party leaders she has met over the years. “I’ve seen them all, and Ben is absolutely the best.” The man she was introducing is Ben Wikler, who was at the Commonwealth Club for a talk with West Wing actor Bradley Whitford about Wikler’s revival of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from the dead and its applicability to the rest of the country.
What Wikler was doing so far out of his home state of Wisconsin was selling his new book This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy. But what he was doing for his party was sharing a workable strategy for being successful in extremely partisan times, when the partisanship runs not just between the parties but between wings of the same party.
From Maine to Michigan and beyond, Democrats are at each other’s throats. Progressives have successfully primaried moderate incumbents in some Blue seats; moderates are angrily trying to rally around more centrist candidates. Meanwhile, the national party is in financial turmoil, being beaten in the money game by the GOP, despite it being a “Democratic year” with expected gains in the U.S. House and Senate.
The party’s troubles are the focus of a new report by Dr. Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics and San Francisco’s own Joan C. Williams, both progressives. Notes NPR’s Tamara Keith, “Their message is that the Democratic Party would be making a huge mistake if it keeps catering to social justice warriors and fails to understand, respect and appeal to working-class voters.” Williams told Keith, “”I am tired of losing.”
Abbott and Williams aren’t suggesting progressives shed their ideals, but their basic message dovetails with Wikler’s strategy for electoral success. It, too, does not rely on convincing persuadable voters that their party has the best four-point strategy to save democracy; Wikler says you instead go out and talk to the voters and find out what concerns them — and it’s not the issues that consume the political class.
In a separate talk in Chicago, in which Wikler was introduced by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and was interviewed by Stacey Abrams, Wikler noted that something like one third of Democratic volunteers in his state cited climate change as their impetus for getting involved; but that’s not the issue that matters to the voters they’re trying to win over, who tend to be people who don’t pay attention to politics and just want to get on with their lives.
“Start by realizing you know nothing about what’s going on in their life,” Wikler said at the Commonwealth Club program. The voter might be dealing with a dying loved one, or they’re focused on writing a novel, or whatever it is that is their focus; it isn’t politics. They’re trying to figure out if a candidate gets them, understands them, is on their side, and can be trusted once in office. And to convince them, you have to find out what they care about.
That is just part of his strategy, but it’s the foundational part. It also includes voting in every election, for every office, and not being afraid of differences between members of the same party. He naturally has a to-do list he thinks Democrats should tackle when they next end up in power in Washington, and he focuses them around de-rigging a system that has been captured by special interests.
Wikler might not be a household name, even to people who do pay attention to political news, but it would be hard to overstate the magnitude of Wikler’s achievements in Wisconsin. The Dairy State was considered to be the most gerrymandered state in the union not too long ago.
Republican activists “understand that politics is the way you create your moral vision,”Bradley Whitford said.
What had once been a state noted for its clean government — Illinoisans across its southern border were sometimes amused at what minor infractions were considered to be scandals up north — became a cautionary tale of government abuse after Republicans gained the governorship and solid control of the legislature in 2010. Along with a hard-right state supreme court, the GOP moved quickly to strip labor protections from public school teachers and other public employees, as well as enacting a right-wing agenda that included some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. Even after the Democrats regained the governorship with Tony Evers, the Republicans used their huge majorities in the gerrymandered legislature to essentially strip him of power.
Back when the GOP had its majorities in the legislature and control of the governor’s office and the supreme court, things looked dark for Democrats. But the party’s savior came in the form of an activist named Ben Wikler, who moved back to his home state to help wrest control from the Republicans. Slowly and steadily, and then with surprising success, he changed his party’s fortunes in Wisconsin. And he did it by having local volunteers talk with people — not lecture them, not tell them what they wanted, but instead listening to what worried or pleased them. Neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, the Democrats began to grab back power, resulting in landslide victories in recent years that resulted in flipping the state supreme court to a solid majority of Democratic-aligned judges.
In Chicago last week, Wikler told his audience that Wisconsin was the Progressive state (though he didn’t mention that capital P Progressivism was originally an offshoot of middle class Republicans). A schoolhouse in Ripon, Wis., is the birthplace of the Republican Party, founded as an anti-slavery party that soon propelled Abraham Lincoln into the White House. In San Francisco, he noted that Wisconsin had pioneered many political and social reforms that later went national, including direct primaries, unemployment compensation, regulation of monopolies, and workplace protections for LGBT workers. He might also have pointed out that those first-in-the-nation LGBT protections were supported and signed into law by Lee Dreyfus — a Republican — in 1982.
Bradley Whitford said the state was also a laboratory for other, less helpful policies. “Wisconsin was a test run for Project 2025,” the Wisconsin-born actor and activist said. The Republicans, who have had such success in Wisconsin and now nationally restricting voter access, removing government transparency, and shifting power to corporate interests, “understand that politics is the way you create your moral vision.” Whitford said.
When your opponents are that organized and that active over the long term, Wikler says it takes the kind of ground-level, permanent campaign approach he advocates to fight back successfully.
As Whitford said, “We don’t just get a democracy; we make it day by day.”
