Ben Wikler Has a Plan to Save Democracy

Ben Wikler, political organizer and former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, joins Kara to discuss his new book, “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.” Drawing on the grassroots strategies that helped Democrats restore a competitive democracy in Wisconsin, he lays out a national plan to defeat Trumpism and halt America’s slide toward authoritarianism. That starts, he argues, with building a year-round organizing operation capable of competing in races at every level of government. They also discuss the Democratic Party’s internal divisions, the future of the filibuster and structural reforms including a national popular vote, a national ban on partisan gerrymandering and Supreme Court term limits. Plus: how election officials should prepare for President Trump’s attempts to interfere with the midterms. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is maybe a scary bet to take. I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE Act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of Republican voters, as well as Democratic.

• 0:13Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's a technical term, piece of shit legislation.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Piece of shit legislation, yes. That's the term of art.

• 0:30Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Ben Wikler, political organizer and author of the new book, This is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Ben has worked in progressive political organizing for over two decades, including as the former Washington Director of MoveOn and later as Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. During his time as Chair, Democrats won 10 out of 13 statewide races. Ben is credited with leading a political comeback for his state party and turning the Wisconsin Democrats into what the New York Times called "a fundraising colossus."

• 1:12Kara Swisher?

  Ben ran for the Chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2025 and lost to Ken Martin. Later that year, he stepped down from his role as Chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. He's now applying the grassroots organizing strategies that worked in Wisconsin to a national plan which he argues could defeat Trumpism and end America's slide into authoritarianism. I think it's really important to talk to all these various political organizers as the Democrats try to figure out their way out of the wilderness and actually to winning back the American populace. It's a really important time to think about various ways to do that, and this is yet another, and Ben is one of the smartest thinkers in the country about this.

• 1:53Kara Swisher?

  Our expert question today comes from Ested Herndon, veteran political journalist and host of the Vox Media podcast, America Actually, so stick around.

• 2:11Speaker 02

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• 2:42Kara Swisher?

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 3:22Kara Swisher?

  Ben, thank you for coming on On.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  It's a delight to be with you today.

• 3:25Kara Swisher?

  I want to sort of set the table. You talk about the need to unrig America and build a, quote, "government that works for people" instead of plutocrats. It's a recurring theme in US politics forever. When Teddy Roosevelt campaigned for the Progressive Party in 1912, he railed against the unholy alliance between corrupt businesses and corrupt politics. Obviously, I talk about it a lot ever since the inauguration and the sort of rightward shift to the tech moguls, who are the ones we're talking about here. Talk about how it's the same or different today. Are we always sort of doomed to this rigging of whatever particular business group is on top at any one time in the United States?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Go back across the history of the country. There are waves of power that accumulate in a tiny number of hands and people trying to lock in their power and control. And then there are waves of the public rising up and then changing the rules to be able to protect the idea of democracy and expand the circle of freedom. That's a cycle we've always had. In this moment, there's a more rapid and bigger accumulation of wealth and power than we've ever seen. And Elon Musk is at the top of it. He's the world's first trillionaire. There could be more trillionaires.

• 4:35Kara Swisher?

  Well, he's not, Ben. He's not a trillionaire.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Not anymore. He was briefly the world's first trillionaire. That's right. There's a real possibility that with artificial intelligence, that even more wealth and power will accumulate in an even smaller number of hands. In the United States, we've had these waves of very rapid, enormous wealth accumulation and then attempts to kind of ossify and control the system. And there are so many levels of government that occupy so many different parts of the power structure that you have the local robber baron who then buys and sells the state legislatures. I think that right now, if you think about the way that Google sort of sucked all the advertising money out of the world, and it meant that all these institutions supported through advertising fell over and, you know, a couple of companies became worth multi-trillions of dollars. Meta did the same thing.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Artificial intelligence has the possibility of doing the same thing for all kinds of work, right? Suddenly, there's one place that you can go to do this one thing more efficiently. And that threatens a more rapid and total wealth accumulation and could turn into a power accumulation than anything else that we've ever seen. So I do think there's something different about that time in this sense. But we have also seen versions of this movie before. Exactly as you say, in the first progressive era, we saw the American economy totally transformed, mass dislocation of most people's jobs. People moved from like 90% agrarian to moving into cities to work in these factories. And it took the labor movement, and it took the progressive movement, it took trust busting, it took, you know, creating Workers' Health and Safety Administration, all these different

• 6:05Speaker 00

  things, to be able to get to a point where the explosion of growth actually led to an improvement in living standards for regular people. And that took the reassertion of democratic control of how the rules of the American political and economic game are set.

• 6:19Kara Swisher?

  Well, we're going to get to how to do that in a second, but let's look at what you did in Wisconsin, where you led the state Democrats for six years. You open your book with the 2025 Wisconsin State Supreme Court election, which was the most expensive judicial race in US history. The Republican-backed candidate was backed by Elon Musk, lost to the Democratic-backed candidate, Susan Crawford. The Wisconsin Elections Commission now says Musk likely broke election bribery laws by offering voters a million dollars, those idiotic checks he put up. What surprised you most about the election and what he did there? Aside from the cheese hat, which, when he did that, I thought, it's over. He also didn't have a lot of power without Trump next to him in an interesting way. So money wasn't the only thing that mattered. So talk a little bit about this race and why it was important.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  So the first thing to move yourself mentally back to the spring of 2025 is to remember that not only had Musk been the biggest donor for Donald Trump, and not only was he effectively running the federal government and dismembering it from the inside, including just defunding aid programs that keep millions of people alive, he was also threatening to fund primary challenges against anyone who got in his or Donald Trump's way. And so people in both parties were falling over themselves to find ways to not get the eye of Sauron upon them. There was this real sense that if he had figured out how to turn money into power, into votes, and win whatever elections he wanted, there was no stopping him and Trump from carrying out every one of their plans.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  And the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, I think, was supposed to be the ultimate demonstration of that. This wasn't the presidential race. This had been, until that point, a fairly sleepy local election in one state. And here he came with an amount of money that nobody had ever seen spent in this kind of context, with tactics no one had ever seen. He was flying in people to knock on doors. He was offering these bribes. He was funding massive TV ad campaigns. The ads he was funding were actually all about how Trump was endorsing Brad Schimmel and how you needed to support Brad Schimmel to support Trump, right after Trump had won in the state. So the strategy was very much to say, we have the power, we're in charge, do not get between us and what we want. And what we saw with Susan Crawford, our amazing candidate, she started going around the state and saying, I never dreamed as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Wisconsin, I'd be up against the world's richest man in a fight for democracy. And we also saw this grassroots army, basically, these thousands of people who'd been organizing continuously, often in races exactly like this, in multiple state Supreme Court races, in local races across the state, going neighbor to neighbor and talking to people that they had long relationships with about how this was a race you had to vote, you had to show that Wisconsin could not be bought. But there was this even deeper principle about whether democracy in our state would be for sale, whether Wisconsin could be auctioned off based on these giant checks.

• 9:09Kara Swisher?

  In a lot of ways, he was kind of a perfect villain for you in that regard, in the kind of extensive efforts he took, including putting himself at the center of it, you know, looking like a lunatic. So that helped you, correct?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  I do think that having the perfect villain allowed a message to really ring through very clearly, that the people who were ravaging and terrorizing the country wanted to do the same thing to Wisconsin, and you could fight back by getting involved in the state Supreme Court race. Having a really clear electrifying message like that really mattered. But also, having the courage to get up and go out and keep showing up in a race where it seemed like the odds were overwhelming. A lot of people were shocked that Elon Musk lost that race after everything that he poured in. A lot of people thought we were totally cooked. I remember vividly this question of whether it made sense to go after Elon Musk because it could provoke him to do even more. And I think the fear that if you punch the bully, he's going to crush you like a bug can make a lot of people want to shrink back.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And to Susan Crawford's enormous credit, she did the exact opposite, and it worked.

• 10:10Kara Swisher?

  So when you think about what he was doing there, which I suspect he's going to be doing in the next race, possibly, the upcoming midterm elections, he's already put $90 million across the country. What did he do right and what did he do wrong?

• 10:24Speaker 00

  So it's funny. I feel like he approached politics the way he approached Doge, which is to have a big theory and then apply it without paying any attention to whether it was actually working. And one part of his theory was very smart, which is that there's a whole bunch of research. I dig into this in the book, because a lot of my goal in the book is to equip individual readers with what is the most powerful thing they can do to get us out of this mess. And I write about the same research that I'm pretty sure whoever was advising him or he himself had looked at, which is that the most powerful thing to shape someone's vote is to hear from someone that they trust. It is to hear from someone they have a relationship with. I quote Abraham Lincoln, who says in 1841, he wrote, "Keep a constant eye on the most doubtful voters and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence."

• 11:08Speaker 00

  So Elon Musk's strategy was to bribe people, pay people, possibly break the law, to sign a petition saying they opposed activist judges, and then to pay people for referring other people to sign the petition. He was going around trying to manufacture relational organizing, where people talk to other people that they know and, you know, giving this financial incentive to do it. And he's not wrong that if you're hearing from someone that you know to get involved in something, it has a really big effect. And a lot like the huge share of Republican campaign finance at this point, this is the Turning Point USA strategy, it's the Faith and Family Coalition strategy, it's Elon Musk's strategy, he has an America PAC that was doing this in a big way. That is a smart tactic. And on the Democratic side, I think there's a lot more to be done.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  There's some groups like Empower is one that are doing relational organizing. I think there's a ton more that is absolutely worth doing there.

• 11:58Kara Swisher?

  I think a lot of states Republican wave in 2010, going back for their shape with the politics of Wisconsin, so much so that one journalist called it a democracy desert in 2020. But you've shifted that. We'll get into some of the details, but as we go high level, what did you do and how does it apply to national politics?

• 12:14Speaker 00

  So, Wisconsin experienced a mini version of what's happening to the whole country now. I argue that Project 2025 has reheated Project 2011 from the states.

• 12:22Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And as we learned in Wisconsin, just as we learned nationally, while it's great and important to beat the guy in charge, we beat Trump in 2020, we beat Scott Walker in 2018, it is not enough. You actually have to fight for all the other levels of government too, because they all make the rules for all the other parts. So, in Wisconsin, we've seen the same drama we've seen everywhere in the nation, that the far right has reached down into local races, has tried to elect mayors who will block the absentee ballot drop boxes, they try to elect judges who will restrict their right to vote, they elect state legislators who are committed to gerrymandering House and state legislative districts. And you have to look at how the different parts of the power system interlock and figure

• 13:05Speaker 00

  out how to trace the path to being able to unrig the whole thing from the inside. In Wisconsin, we thought, we tried a whole bunch of strategies to try to unrig our state legislative maps. There were federal court cases, there was having a governor who could veto Republicans' maps. None of that wound up working until we flipped the majority in the state Supreme Court. That wound up being the skeleton key to unlock the whole system in the state of Wisconsin. And that meant building a permanent campaign where a ton of people in small towns and cities and suburbs everywhere got involved over and over, not about one candidate, often about people that they only were learning about a few months before the election, not about one race or one office, but about this much bigger, deeper idea about being a democracy that works for everyone.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  That kind of permanent campaign, to me, is what we need at a national level now.

• 13:51Kara Swisher?

  Right, a permanent campaign.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  A permanent campaign. And by that, I don't mean ads on TV in every ad break in every state, every second of the day. What I mean is actually building, organizing at the local level, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood, all over the country, so that in all these races at all levels of government, we're able to drive up participation, to encourage and persuade people to get involved in these races that otherwise go unnoticed. I talk in the book about race after race that comes down to a few hundred votes, that winds up like starting a row of dominos, that winds up giving Republicans control of the US House years later. And those races are happening all the time right now. There was a Georgia State Supreme Court race just in this May, where the Democratic candidate

• 14:36Speaker 00

  lost by 2.2 percentage points. And the reason she lost is that a whole bunch of Democrats voted in the governor's race, but didn't know about the state Supreme Court race, so they didn't know which candidate to vote for. If we can zero in on those kinds of races, on top of the critical work in the House and Senate, but if we build that kind of muscle to be able to go after the whole ballot, that gives us the power to pick apart this knot that's been tied that stops the public from ruling.

• 15:00Kara Swisher?

  What are some of the most consequential local races we need to pay attention to right now?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  I would say that the most critical ones in 2026 are the governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and state legislative races, especially in the battleground states. And the reason why I say that is this gift we have in the Constitution that elections are run at the state level, not the federal level. So, Donald Trump keeps trying to take over the election system in the country, and he keeps getting slapped down in court. And the reason is, it's literally right there in the Constitution. That means that in 2028, when he attempts his next coup, if there are governors, secretaries of state, election administrators, and if there are laws passed at the state level to protect the sanctity of the electoral system, he will not be able to steal the next election. We came so close to Trump stealing the 2020 race.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  In Wisconsin, it came down to a single vote on the state Supreme Court, a 4-3 decision. I write about the moment in the book when I was an elector in the Electoral College that moment, when we found out the decision came through. He knows exactly where the vulnerabilities are, and he's going after them. The reason why he's flipping out and calling for these voter suppression laws and trying to nationalize the election system now before the midterms, it's not because he cares about what happens in the midterms, it's because he knows that his ability to run a successful coup in 2028 depends on winning control in the state and state legislative races in 2026. So, I map in the book, and I'm happy to say here, state by state, but basically, which states are likely to tip the 28 presidential race? Those are the states where you have to win power at the state level now, to make sure that the system is not vulnerable to sabotage.

• 16:30Kara Swisher?

  Which are?

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, all those states could become Democratic trifectas. Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms could win the governor's race and prevent Republicans from gerrymandering and passing anti-democracy legislation before 2028, if we're able to pull that off. North Carolina was one of the closest battleground states in '24. There, not only can we stop Republicans from getting super majorities in the state legislature, there's a state Supreme Court race, that if Anita Earl wins reelection, there's a path to a pro-democracy Democratic majority in the state Supreme Court by 2028. Those are the closest battleground states. The closest state that Harris won, New Hampshire, currently a red trifecta, has incredibly restrictive voting laws. That could flip to a blue governor and both chambers of the state legislature this cycle.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  And winning there would give another margin of protection for democracy.

• 17:19Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 17:34Speaker 03

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• 18:01Speaker 04

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• 18:07Speaker 05

  I did, Mike Tyson.

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• 18:48Kara Swisher?

  Now, the Democrats are dealing with internal divisions right now. We just did an episode on the rise of insurgent progressive candidates winning primaries in New York and Colorado. Talk about the tensions with, and I was at a dinner last night here in Michigan where that was, you could feel it, like with the centrists versus the left, et cetera. What do you make of the tensions, including the popularity of the Democratic brand, and how does it impact the ability to organize and build a cohesive opposition?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  The first thing is, when a party loses power, that is the time to look in the mirror, and most critically, look at the voters and try to figure out what is not working here. So, it is healthy to have big debates right now. It's healthy for people to make different arguments about strategy, tactics, message, where we need to go. If you look at when parties lose power and then regain it in a durable way, it tends to be when they actually have this kind of hard conversation with themselves and try out different approaches. So, I think we should welcome some conflicts and debates, some life within the party. The second thing I'd say is that so many people, A, they want real change, they feel like the country's not working for them in their lives, they can't afford anything, the basic needs that everybody has. And secondly, they know that in order to get that change, they need to win.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  And so, a lot of the frustration that Democrats have with the Democratic Party is the sense that it is not good enough at winning right now, that we've lost to the worst guy in the world, Donald Trump. How the hell is he in the White House? So, all those things, I think, create an energy that you can see playing out in primaries right now. And the critical question is, after each primary is over, does everyone come together and say, we're going to spend even more energy to win the general election in November? You know, I'm from the state of Wisconsin, big, very fluid, highly energized Democratic primary happening right there, that's on August 11th. My hope and my expectation is that everyone who was involved in the primary, and a ton more people, will say, all right, this is time to go. The Republican candidate in Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany, tried to overturn the 2020 election,

• 20:43Speaker 00

  and the governor's in charge of certification of presidential elections in the state of Wisconsin. So, lots of people have lots of disagreements with lots of different candidates and lots of different directions, and that's fine. The critical question is, do you then say, you know what, we beat each other up before, but now we're on the same big team that believes this country should actually work for everyone and not a tiny group of people at the very top?

• 21:04Kara Swisher?

  And do you see that happening in a state like Wisconsin, for example?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely, I do. I see it happening in Wisconsin, I see that happening in Maine, I see that happening in Michigan. My sense is that people are going to be ready to roll up their sleeves and go to bat in the day after the primary, the same way that they're scrapping it out in the primaries right now.

• 21:20Kara Swisher?

  Even in Michigan?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Even Michigan. You know, any individual legislator doesn't have the power to change every policy. People have different positions on things, but the Democratic Party is a big tent, it is a coalition party, and the laws that pass are the sum of what can attract all the votes, basically, across the whole thing. It becomes very clear when you step back from any particular battle, that the fundamental difference between the GOP, which right now is a cult of one person who's so corrupt and so bent on enriching and glorifying himself and his friends at the expense of everybody else, and a Democratic Party, that the through lines are the idea that the economy should work for everybody, that everyone's rights and freedoms should be protected, and that we should be a democracy. And those three principles, very, very popular.

• 22:01Kara Swisher?

  Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Hey Ben, it's Ested, host of Vox's America Actually podcast, and as you know, a fellow lover of Wisconsin. My question is about the fixes for state parties that are distinct from national parties. So much of the anger about Democrats 2024 choices was about process and about how the public was or wasn't included in the conversation. I guess that's my question to you. What are the answers for the Democratic Party that are not ideology? How can they help make voters feel like they're included in decision making, particularly on a state and local level in a way that's distinct than the conversation we're having nationally?

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Such a great question from a stead. The thing that I love that happens in Wisconsin and a few other states, a growing number of states, and I map out step by step how to build this in my book, is that the Wisconsin State Party has neighborhood by neighborhood teams. These are groups of volunteers who sometimes meet in their living rooms. They map out who's going to go where, and they go to community events and they go door to door to the same voters often year over year. And when we're not right before an election, we ask people questions. We call it bridge building. You go and you say, what's most important to you right now? And we actually try to listen at scale. And this, the sense of like, nobody consulted me, changes when someone consults you. I think there's a huge power to actually going out and talking to people and finding

• 23:28Speaker 00

  out what's on their mind. Politically, I think of it like bumper bowling. If you put the bumpers in the sides, then the ball just doesn't go in the gutter. And if you're actually talking to the voters that you're trying to connect with and taking their opinion seriously, first of all, it pulls you out of your own head. I think Democrats often will, you know, want to go scream about the latest thing they saw on MS Now to a voter who's not paying attention to politics, and that doesn't resonate at all. This is why often talking about democracy is actually the worst message. If you want to save democracy, you should focus on what it is that people want to change in their own lives, how the government can be on their side. And I think the same thing is true as a party, having actual connections to communities on the ground and not just being something that lives online or something that lives in fundraisers, but actually talking to people who don't put politics to the center of their

• 24:13Speaker 00

  lives and asking what is bothering them and how can we change that? So often, the answers are actually from local government. There are things about the pothole on my street. And if you can hear those things and you can do something about those things, then you can build the trust that you need to ask someone to take a risk on a candidate. I think there's a lot of talk about attention, and attention is this very important currency. It's absolutely a powerful force. But I think trust is actually the thing that is most precious and rare at this moment. People are so fed up, they don't believe anyone. A lot of the people who either don't vote or swing between the two parties, they think both parties are messed up and corrupt and unresponsive. And the only way to change that is to actually earn trust from people by hearing them out, saying how you're going to do something, and then actually doing it, and then going back to them to talk about how it went.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  That's something that is built over years, and it's something that each individual candidate cannot build by themselves. That, to me, is what local and state parties and any, any viewer of your show or reader of this book, they can get involved in doing, and the effects of doing that can echo for years to come.

• 25:12Kara Swisher?

  So what you're saying is that like, doing something on the level where they see you answering whatever, first of all, listening and actually listening, not just fake listening. And the second part is actually doing something. I had an interesting argument with someone last night. They're fixated on Mom Donnie. And I said, well, he put the, he opened the soccer fields. It was kind of interesting. And they're like, who cares? I'm like, those people who play soccer. I was like.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  That is exactly it.

• 25:39Kara Swisher?

  I was like, they, they work all day. They can't play soccer now. They can play soccer. It's like, it was a tangible thing. I was like, but it was so much more than that. I was like, do you understand? Like, they didn't want to talk about Trump. They wanted to play soccer. Anyway, it was a really interesting discussion. It happens all over the country, but I thought that's exactly what people want. They want to be listened to in some fashion rather than be told that, you know, democracy is dead, which of course they realize on some level. But at the same time, when it comes to election outcomes, you write that we're in, quote, an era of field margins. Now, that makes it kind of impossible to govern if we have these small margins at nearly every level of government.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  So this is the paradox of this moment. The vast majority of elections, you already know the outcome of. The vast majority of congressional districts of states for statewide elections and the Electoral College, they're totally safe. And that's a problem in and of itself, which I want to speak to. But then the elections that wind up tipping the balance, that tip the House majority, Republicans have a House majority because of 7,309 votes across three congressional districts. That's a number of votes that the people listening to this right now could flip in the next election if they focus on the right places. The same thing is true in state legislative chamber after state legislative chamber. In the presidential race, it was 0.1% of all the votes cast across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that determine the outcome. So there, there are these tiny margins. The country's almost perfectly cleaved in half in this way.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Wisconsin is a microcosm of this national picture. And because it's so agonizingly evenly balanced, the country keeps toppling from one side to the other. We've had more changeovers in who holds power in the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the last 26 years, this century, than any other time in American history. And I make the case in the book that if we want to get out of this, this period of instability where people keep voting for change, not getting it or not liking the change that they have, and then voting to throw the bums out and get a different bunch of people who they immediately get disillusioned with too, we need to change the systems that block things from actually happening. And the first and biggest one of those is the Senate filibuster. We're in a period right now where no party is likely to get 60 votes in the Senate to

• 27:46Speaker 00

  overcome a filibuster.

• 27:47Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And where both parties have a political incentive to stop the other side from doing big things, which means that voters screaming out for change, voting for change, do not get it from our political system on the biggest, you know, most intensive issues of each individual moment. And that will continue to be the case as long as the Senate says that you need a super majority in order to pass legislation. The filibuster is the exact opposite of what the founders intended. They considered the idea of requiring a super majority, and they rejected it. It was not part of the Constitution. It was actually created by accident when they changed the, the rules of the Senate, when Aaron Burr suggested revising the Senate rulebook. No one noticed that they could filibuster for years after that. Then there were 80 years where it was only used to block civil rights legislation.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  And then much more recently, Mr. McConnell discovered that he could use it to try to torpedo anything Barack Obama wanted. So we got the Affordable Care Act. We got a few, you know, really important bills. But so much of the agenda that Obama ran on died in the Senate after passing the House. And then we've seen the same thing with President Biden. Some major, really important legislation, a ton that died in the Senate, including protections for voting rights and democracy itself, but also things on healthcare, on childcare, and all these affordability issues that people are right now panicked about that Democrats lost over.

• 29:02Kara Swisher?

  It's good that it's there because of Trump and the SAVE Act, for example. It can be abused.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  It is true that if both parties have the chance to pass laws, then a party you don't like might pass laws that you don't like. That is absolutely the case. But you have to ask yourself, do you want to live in a democracy that's in a straitjacket? And you also have to ask, why haven't Republicans gotten rid of the filibuster? Is it because they're so concerned about, you know, the genteel norms of the Senate? Or is it because their actual top priorities, tax cuts for rich people and confirming judges, those can be passed with 50 votes? They're not subject to the filibuster. And when you start thinking that way, you realize that all of Project 2025 was about taking action through the executive branch and then ensuring that the US Supreme Court wouldn't strike down those actions. So we have a system right now that is tailor made for people who basically want a king

• 29:52Speaker 00

  as president, who want Congress to be on its knees, doing whatever the executive wants, and want a Supreme Court that will rubber stamp anything that benefits the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. All the other laws that could change those things, those are blocked by the filibuster. And that creates a ratchet effect where things keep lurching towards the Elon Musk of the world and away from the general public.

• 30:13Kara Swisher?

  So removing the filibuster would be your top priority, removing it?

• 30:18Speaker 00

  It's the plug that you pull that out, and suddenly the water can flow. And it means we'll have more democracy, and it means Republicans will be accountable for their policies if they actually pass them. This is maybe a scary bet to take. I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE Act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of Republican voters as well as Democratic.

• 30:39Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's a technical term, piece of shit legislation.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Piece of shit legislation, yes. That's, that's the term of art. It's kind of a stunt bill that most Republican senators are thrilled that they don't actually have to cast a vote on. We saw with the Affordable Care Act repeal in 2017, there was a giant public uprising against that terrible bill, and a lot of Republican senators privately breathed a sigh of relief after John McCain turned his thumb down because they know it would, they knew it was going to destroy them in the next election. As it was, the response to Republicans trying to take away people's healthcare was the biggest issue in 2018, the same way the huge cuts to healthcare that Republicans passed this time are going to absolutely blow back on them now. Millions of people losing access to health insurance, and that there'll be people who die because of that. The GOP's policies, they just don't actually work out well in practice.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  And that's why the far right con and the, the con of plutocrats over and over is to, with one hand, try to shred public services, and that the other hand, try to block democracy so there's not accountability for it.

• 31:34Kara Swisher?

  So they don't have to pay for their choices. So you ran for DNC chair last year and lost to Ken Martin, former chair of Minnesota's Democratic Party. He's come under fire for failing to broaden the committee's fundraising operations and its overall financial troubles. The latest filing shows the DNC has nearly $15 million on hand, but is $18 million in debt. Republicans have enormous amounts of money. You describe the DNC as the top of the pyramid resting on the strength of county and state Democrats, but it is essential to fundraising. So what needs to change within the DNC itself in order for your plan to work?

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Well, I will say. For every person, there's a million things that you can do to start building the party at the local level. I think for the national party, the thing that draws people to want to chip in is seeing how their money can affect the outcome of the election. And, you know, there's often this sense, and you do see it in politics, you see it all the time with the Trump administration, that donors want specific policies to pass. And that's why they want to give money, because they want to have certain policies.

• 32:32Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Those are called transactional donors, and they exist. Parties are actually not the place that transactional donors focus, because what they want is they want to have a relationship with a politician who could actually pass a policy. What parties do is that they can say, we can win this election. And so, the thing that I think is going to energize voters for donors for the DNC is that the thing you see at state parties that are having success with fundraising is mapping out, this is the strategy, this is the tactic that we're going to be able to use. The US Supreme Court just changed the rules for parties to allow federal party committees like the DNC to be able to fund candidates' campaigns to an unlimited degree. And that could open the door to a strategy to say, like, we're going to zero in on the races where an extra push could make the biggest

• 33:15Speaker 00

  difference. We're going to, you know, be really rigorous about finding the messages that really resonate with these voters. And then, we're going to, we're going to fund those programs. And that could be a way to be able to raise a lot more funds. That's a huge part of what we did in Wisconsin. I write in the book about the Scott Walker loophole, which is essentially the state level version of what the US Supreme Court just did nationally. They're, just like nationally, the Republicans created it to benefit themselves, betting that Democrats wouldn't find the money to use that law to fight back. And in Wisconsin, part of how we beat Elon Musk was raising money into the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and then using that to support the state Supreme Court candidate.

• 33:49Kara Swisher?

  The local candidates.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  The local candidates, exactly.

• 33:51Kara Swisher?

  But you don't think it wipes out the fundraising edge Democratic candidates have ahead of midterms?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  I think that that's exactly the threat, is that the Republican committees now can fund candidates who've been struggling to raise money on their own. And that's a big part of why it's such a priority for the GOP. They have, I mean, as we've discussed, an extreme, like, an unbelievable amount of money that they're willing to spend to protect their money and power. And I think a whole lot of people who are thinking through right now, you know, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to keep a roof over their head and buy groceries. But if you're somebody who's lucky enough to have some extra money, this is time to donate to people, organizations, party committees, that you think are going to do really good work to be able to win this fall. Because the stakes right now are going to affect the rest of our lives for whether democracy works. And

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I know that sounds like a cliche, but I think it's pretty clear right now that 2024 was one of those years, too. And we're still on a knife's edge for whether we're going to have free and fair elections in 2028 and beyond. That gets determined over these next four months. And this is time for folks to throw down and do everything they can.

• 34:55Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop, because the weather is shifting, and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 35:39Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brook-Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:17Speaker 07

  What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested? And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable? No, it's not protein. It's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient

• 36:37Kara Swisher?

  of all. But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is a powder you stir into some water going to do it for you? All that, plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop-obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:59Kara Swisher?

  Now, you emphasize that the Democrats have to run this permanent campaign, which Republicans seem to be doing, and it worked for the Wisconsin Democrats. A permanent year-round campaign is expensive and difficult to sustain, especially on the national level. Talk a little bit about this, because President Obama built an expansive volunteer organization during his 2008 presidential campaign. But to organize this machine is expensive, and to have it live on is difficult.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  So it does take some money. But the vast majority of campaign budgets is spent on what they call paid media. It's ads. It's digital ads. It's TV ads. That's where the lion's share of the money goes. It is comparatively very inexpensive to pay organizers to build teams of volunteers to do this work on a year-round basis. That is a sliver of campaign budgets. Most campaigns don't even do that, because this is money that only really works if you spend it early. A lot of campaigns will hire people to knock on doors in the final weeks. That doesn't create something that has a snowball effect over time. What you want to do is invest in real organizing, which means leadership development, finding people who are going to get involved and keep talking to voters that they have relationships with. On the right, you can see this with Ralph Reed's organization. He used to do the Christian Coalition. Now it's the Faith and Freedom

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Coalition. On the Democratic side, there are groups doing versions of this kind of work. I think Swing Left is doing amazing work. MoveOn, where I used to work, does a ton of organizing at the grassroots, Indivisible, I could go on with that list. And some Democratic Party organizations do this. But if you just wait until right before an election, you cannot build that trust from scratch. You actually have to show up long before you're asking someone for their vote and actually listen to them, as we talked about before. To me, the amazing thing about the Obama campaign was that they, and they started, you know, outside the Democratic Party infrastructure, they had to figure out a different way to win. They did this hard work of actually building local teams of people who are acting on their own values and building community, and they were able to win the White House.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  But because it was built around one candidate, it didn't wind up creating this kind of permanent infrastructure. And that, to me, you know, we beat Trump in 2020. It was this incredible thing. And then, in so many places, that organizing infrastructure melted away. So much of the funding for this kind of work melted away. And it is now reared right back, and Trump is back in power. So this, this next time when we win, first, we got to win. But when we win, we have to keep going. And if we don't keep going, then 2030, the midterm elections after the next Democratic president is elected, will take us right back to 2010. There'll be a backlash. Republicans will rig all the state houses, then they'll rig the congressional maps, and they will have tilted the playing field for the next decade.

• 39:35Kara Swisher?

  So back and forth for the next?

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Back and forth.

• 39:38Kara Swisher?

  For the next thing. So let's finish by talking about what happens if Democrats actually win a governing trifecta in 2028. People are very skeptical. The party can pull that off, but let's say it does. You write, a lot needs to happen in a short period of time to get to real structural reform, which I think is at the heart of what you're saying, including abolishing the filibusters you just mentioned, reforming the Supreme Court, which you haven't mentioned yet, passing a national ban on partisan gerrymandering, DC statehood, safeguards for union organizing. It's an ambitious list. If there was ever a Democratic trifecta, there's going to be debate within the party about the details of these major structural reforms. The filibuster alone continues to divide Democrats. What is the most important from your perspective, or all of them at the same time? I mean,

• 40:21Kara Swisher?

  Pete Buttigieg was the one that brought up reforming the Supreme Court, and that was sort of slapped down when he did. Many years ago, that was one of his first bigger ideas.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Look where we are now.

• 40:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, exactly. He was correct. They all need to happen at once. And what should be the plan?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  This is part of why I wrote this, is the plan. Because there actually is a sequence for these things to happen. One of the biggest reforms is something that happens through the states. In 2026, if Democrats win unified control of the battleground states that I mentioned before, they can pass something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

• 40:51Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, this is the NIPVIC.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  NIPVIC. Yes, thank you. This is my way to pronounce an unpronounceable acronym. So, NIPVIC would basically join a bunch of states together to say, we're going to give our Electoral College votes to whoever wins the National Popular Vote. And if they do that, it means the end of swing states and safe states. It means that every New Yorker, Californian, Texan, Wyoming, Wyomingite, everybody's votes count the same in choosing the President of the United States, which would be a revolution in American democracy for the better in so many ways. It would give people everywhere a reason to organize and get involved in order to affect the most powerful office in the world. And it would mean that the government, federal government, has to be responsive to everyone on an equal basis in a totally different way. So, that can happen even without Congress. And that is one of the things you can do when you win at the states in 26. As soon as Democrats

• 41:38Speaker 00

  have a majority in the Senate, I think they immediately should end the filibuster. And there's different proposals for reforming it in different ways. The most critical thing to me is it has to be a majority rule institution. That has to happen before any of the other reforms can pass, because all these things will take passing through both chambers of Congress and then going to the president for signature. But if Democrats win in 2027, I hope that they'll abolish the filibuster right away. Let's just get that over with and put that behind us. So, after that happens, then you have the chance to pass a new Voting Rights Act, to pass a national gerrymandering ban. I argue, I explore different ideas for reforming the US House. I think we're in a situation right now where almost every House district will be decided in advance by state legislators drawing the maps, and it's ridiculous.

• 42:22Kara Swisher?

  Correct. Partisan gerrymandering.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  One great idea is to have proportional representation in multi-member districts and expand the size of the House. That's something that, you know, there's not a majority for yet. But the more you look at how it would actually work, if, you know, if a state said, we're going to give our House seats based on the proportion of votes that each party wins, it means that if you're a Republican in a blue state, you have representation. If you're a Democrat in a red state, you have representation. And it means you just get a lot more democracy and responsiveness. For the Senate, ensuring that DC residents elect senators, that Puerto Ricans have a chance for a referendum to elect senators, it allows the Senate to be a much more representative body. And it ends this ridiculous situation where American citizens are governed by people who they have no voice in a life thing.

• 43:03Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I'm a DC resident. I'm not happy about it.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  You know exactly what this is like. Taxation without representation, not something America's traditionally really into, or at least in theory, not into. And then you need to reform the US Supreme Court, as you noted. There's several ideas for this. My favorite idea is the idea of term limits, where Supreme Court justices serve for 18 years in active status, then they take senior status where they're not voting on active cases. And it means that every president appoints a Supreme Court justice in their first and their third year. And that not only changes the membership of the Supreme Court over time, more importantly, it creates a world where every member knows that the body is going to evolve, and so they should think about how to create rulings that can endure in different political conditions. You want to turn down the partisanship of the Supreme Court.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  You don't want it to ping pong or be a pendulum in this way. I want an even playing field for everyone. I don't want to rig this thing for Democrats.

• 43:56Kara Swisher?

  Rather than expansion, term limits, I agree with you.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that, to me, the goal is, you know, parties can get things wrong, presidents can get things wrong of both parties. You want the public to have the ultimate say. You want to have a system that's not rigged for one side or the other. And that allows you to have the flexibility to adapt to a world that is being transformed by AI and by so much else. As long as the public can write the rules, and as long as, you know, when people are hurt, they have some recourse to do something about it, I think that we can get through just about anything that the world throws at us. But in a world where all the power and the decisions are made by a tiny group of people who are interested in serving themselves, then things can go terribly for millions of people.

• 44:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, this is my issue with the tech people. They're like, well, they're smart. I'm like, I don't really care if they're all nice. If they were all agreeing with me, I don't want them in charge.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Mark Justin is this Nobel Prize winning economist, and he did this deep study that found that there's never been a famine in a democracy. And the reason for that is that having a democracy means that if people are starving to death, it becomes a political problem for the people in charge. You have famines in colonies, in places where someone is in charge who's not accountable to the public. And I feel like we sort of have a political famine right now because we don't have enough democracy. There's so many ways the government is not responding to basic needs that people have for childcare, for housing, to be able to afford the food they need, all this kind of stuff. This only happens because you have a government that is not ultimately accountable to the needs of the public. And it could get worse or it can get better. And this is the plan, is my roadmap for how we make it better.

• 45:26Kara Swisher?

  Last week, President Trump claimed that American elections were rife with, quote, hacking, manipulation, and corruption. It's part of his whole song that he's done for a while. He had a speech that he tried to push off. It didn't get a whole lot of resonance, I would say, but he still did it. Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen also threatened local election officials with prison time if they didn't comply with the administration's efforts to change election policies. So what concerns you most about the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the federal government ahead of the midterms? And how should local election officials prepare?

• 45:58Speaker 00

  We should have the expectation that Trump will use every one of his powers to try to stop the democratic process from working. We've seen him testing things like seizing ballots, trying to seize voting machines, prosecuting local election officials, claiming that election results were invalid. We saw him trying to have elections retroactively canceled after 2020. He's going to pressure everyone who he has power over to manufacture ballots, like he tried to do with Brad Raffensperger in Georgia after 2020. And we can see him using the machinery of the state to do it. The good news is that the people who have been suing against these, they keep winning in court. And so all the lawyers that are preparing, I advise a group called Democracy Defenders that's preparing legal actions to go immediately after Trump when he tries to pull this stuff.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  That creates some measure of protection in places where the courts are functional and on the up and up, which is not all the courts at this moment. But the most critical line of defense is actually the local officials. If you look at Minnesota, when Trump sent in ICE, and people were being shot in the streets, and then the Attorney General said that they would pull ICE out if Minnesota turned over private voter data, the state and local officials said no. And that is why people's social security numbers and private driver's licenses, all this kind of stuff, didn't flow to the federal government. They were trying to get their hands on it. And right now, local officials should be running scenario plans, and I know a lot of them are doing this. They should be looking at all the different vulnerabilities and sort of lines of attack.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  They should be building plans with their emergency operations centers. In the public, people should be doing the kind of, like, local organizing, making sure that everyone has someone that they can check in with for if the shit hits the fan in the fall. Everyone should have a plan to be able to vote. People should figure out who they're going to go voting with. And we've all got to be ready for what could be a moment that I hope and pray doesn't come, but I think we should have the expectation.

• 47:50Kara Swisher?

  Assume the worst.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  That they're going to try to pull something off that prevents power from actually changing hands. The more we prepare, the less likely the emergency becomes. The more we win in court along the way, the fewer tools they have at their disposal to mess with the elections. The more poll watchers sign up, observers, poll workers in the local communities, the more people vote early, the fewer people, the shorter the lines on election day itself. There's all these things that people can do. But we've got four short months to do this kind of organizing and get ready. I'm grateful to everyone who's been preparing along the way. And now it's a sprint. If we win this fall, especially for these state and local offices, then we have people who can continue to say no to Trump's attempts to overturn the elections in the future. And that's the first acid test for whether this big movement to make the government

• 48:32Speaker 00

  actually work for the public, rather than for Elon Musk and friends, is the first test for whether we can pull this off.

• 48:38Kara Swisher?

  Let's look ahead 10 years. What does our electoral system look like if just 50% of your plan is implemented?

• 48:44Speaker 00

  50% would be a giant improvement. This is an ambitious, bold plan, and I'll be realistic about that. If we have a national popular vote for the presidency, but we, let's say, haven't been able to reform the way the United States House works, the national popular vote in itself would be such a change. You know, right now, presidential candidates spend all their time in, like, seven states, maybe five, maybe four states. Most people are essentially ignored. Most people feel like they're spectators in our democracy. There's no stakes for them. The level of turnout in many states is below 50%. In my state, it's like three quarters of people cast a ballot because everyone can see that their vote might be the thing that determines the outcome. And building a civic culture in this country of, this is not a spectator sport, this is

• 49:28Speaker 00

  something where everyone actually has power, has a voice, what you do matters, that can affect government at all levels. So much of what everyone's frustrated about is not about which party controls government, it's about whether government itself has accountability to the public and has to move and deliver to be able to make life better for people. And there's so much that people in red and blue areas can do, even though their elections aren't close. But it's hard for that to feel real when it feels like your vote doesn't count because you already know in advance who's going to win. And so I think there are multiple paths. I think the same thing is true in House races. If we have competitive House races across the country, if gerrymandering bans are enacted, and especially if we get to something like proportional representation, then many more people will have a meaningful say in who represents them in a chamber of Congress. If we can reform the US Supreme Court, then maybe we can actually do something about

• 50:11Speaker 00

  money in politics, which right now the Supreme Court is on the...

• 50:14Kara Swisher?

  The money side.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  They're on the money side.

• 50:16Kara Swisher?

  They're on the money side.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  But imagine if that can change.

• 50:20Kara Swisher?

  So, last question. If you were made head of the DNC right now and could do anything you wanted, what would that be?

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Well, I first don't want to relitigate the DNC chair's race. I don't want to be the head of the DNC now. Leading a different life. But let's say I am the head of the DNC now. I think the first thing that I do is start working with states to write a plan in each state to unrig the political system in that place and make those public. In Wisconsin, we had a plan that was years out. This is actually something that I learned from Ken Martin, who was the chair in Minnesota next door. After I was elected, he brought me to Minnesota, and he said, when I was elected chair, we made a 10-year plan, mapped out all the races that we needed to win. And Minnesota traveled this path, won a Democratic trifecta, and passed things that made the lives of everyone in that state better. In Wisconsin, we mapped out a long-term plan, and we've been moving through that plan step by step. It culminates this fall.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  We could win a Democratic trifecta this November, governor of both chambers of the legislature. We have a pro-democracy Supreme Court. I know the DNC has folks that are talking to different states about this. I want to see those plans in each place. I want to sing them from the rooftops. I want people to see how their work adds up to something bigger. Because when it feels like every election is the most important one we've ever had, and then suddenly there's another one, it is exhausting. You need to see a path from what you do to actually delivering change in people's lives. And that has to be built from the bottom up everywhere in the country. I think that's a thing that the party can facilitate and support, and I think it's something that people can do, whether or not the party where they are is doing it. And they can get involved and build the kind of party that they want. But to me, all of these things are connected to each other, and until you understand the

• 51:54Speaker 00

  connection between what a state legislature does and how the House maps are drawn, and then who controls Congress and what laws pass, if you're not fighting on all those playing fields at once, you're losing. The right has been fighting on those. Elon Musk came to Wisconsin for exactly that reason, but we can fight back and win if we look at the whole picture.

• 52:09Kara Swisher?

  All right. Ben, thank you so much. It's a terrific book. It really is very smart. There's a lot of these books out, but I like this one. I appreciate it.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Thank you. Really grateful for having me on.

• 52:24Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Burney, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff, Julia Sharp Levine, Bradley Sylvester, and Dave Shaw. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rich Kwan, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, you've staved off authoritarianism for another day. If not, good luck wandering the democracy desert for the next 40 years. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.