What is the Democratic Party? What Could It Be?

President Trump is very unpopular right now. But polls show the Democratic Party is just as unpopular – if not more so. So what can the party do about it? But to answer that question, you first have to understand what the Democratic Party is. That is, mechanically, what is it? What powers does it have? When you call the Democratic Party, who picks up the phone? And how can that party, the official party, be reinvented for this era? Ben Wikler has a unique perspective on this question. He transformed the Democratic Party of Wisconsin into a fund-raising, door-knocking powerhouse when he served as chair from 2019 to 2025. And he’s shared some of his insights from winning elections in a swing state in his new book, “This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy.” In this conversation, we discuss Wikler’s vision for a reinvigorated party, as well as the kinds of changes he thinks Democrats need to embrace if they want to build a bigger tent and a national majority.

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

• 0:25Ezra Klein?

  What is the Democratic Party? Actually, mechanically, what is it? What are its powers? Who comprises it? When you call the Democratic Party, who picks up the phone? And then what could the Democratic Party, the official party, actually be if it was reinvented for this era? Ben Wikler was a chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025. He turned that party into a fundraising, door-knocking powerhouse. And Wisconsin, where the state is very, very, very close, that might have made the difference. The 2024 election was a bit of a mixed bag there, to say the least.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by a single percentage point, but Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate, won the state. Wikler then launched a run for DNC chair, which he lost to Ken Martin. A lot of Democrats, seeing the difficulties DNC has had since in fundraising and organization and internal unity, very much wish Wikler had won that race. And now Wikler is back. He's the author of This is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. So I wanted to ask not just about his plan, but about the Democratic Party, about this flawed but necessary vehicle that is needed to carry his plan out. What's happened to it? What could be done to renew it?

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  As always, my email, [email protected]. Ben Wikler, welcome to the show.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's great to be with you, Azra.

• 2:03Ezra Klein?

  So we last spoke, I wonder if you remember this, at least on the show.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Vividly remember.

• 2:07Ezra Klein?

  It was July of 2024. Biden had just dropped out. Kamala Harris had consolidated the Democratic Party. We talked right after Harris had done one of her first rallies in Wisconsin. We had a very optimistic conversation. I ended up titling it, I believe, This is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin at the presidential level. They did not win in Wisconsin. What went wrong?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  So Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by less than a percentage point. It was the fifth of the last seven presidential races that came down to less than one percentage point. And on election night, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that nothing we'd done, that we'd tried everything, we'd done everything that we thought could make a difference. Maybe none of it had had any impact. What was I doing with my life? The last thing I saw before I let myself fall asleep that night was that Tammy Baldwin had won. And I thought, oh, and I collapsed. The next day, I did a little spreadsheet therapy for myself, which is my way of relieving electoral stress is to dig into data.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And in Wisconsin, Harris had done better than she had in any other battleground state in terms of how she did versus how Biden did. It wound up being the closest state in the country. A lot of Trump voters didn't vote down ballot. The Harris voters did. That's been a huge part of our work is to make sure people fill out their whole ballot. And so we actually gained 14 state legislative seats and won the US Senate race at the same time as we lost the presidential. But the underlying question of why Harris lost, to me, you not only have to look at the country, you have to look at the world. That if you consider every election in an advanced Western democracy, this is the only year on record where the ruling party, regardless of whether it was left, right, or center, lost ground.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And the overwhelming issue in races all around the world and with the voters who actually shifted their vote choice between 2020 and 2024, the number one thing was inflation, prices, affordability, the economy. The rise in prices after a long period where we didn't see broad-based inflation, especially for people who felt like they were at the economic brink already, was devastating. And I should say, there are many reasons when you lose by as little as Harris did, lots of things could have made the difference. But the biggest issue of all was this fundamental economic malaise that people felt, and they voted for change.

• 4:25Ezra Klein?

  So I agree that in the election, in the 2024 election, prices were the biggest issue. They were the biggest problem for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris. But I think I would have, off of that analysis, expected then after the election, as people got the Donald Trump presidency, as the Donald Trump presidency did not turn out the way they had hoped, to see a real resurgence in how people may be felt about the Democratic Party. But today, we're sitting here. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular as a brand. It is less popular than Donald Trump is as a brand. So as somebody who has run a Democratic Party in a state, and I think was quite successful in doing so, why is that? What is it that people don't like about the Democratic Party?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So I'll say it at two levels. One is that if you had Democrats in charge, you voted for change, and now you don't like the Republicans in charge, that doesn't mean that you're like, oh, let's go back to the old thing. That means you want something else yet again. You want change from the situation you have, and neither party so far has delivered it for you. The second thing is that if you look under the top lines in polls, there are Republicans who think Democrats are too liberal. There are Democrats who think Democrats are not fighting hard enough for change. And then there's a third category, people who feel like all of politics is messed up, that they can't trust either party. They feel like neither party has connected with them and actually solved the problems in their life that they're struggling with.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  So I would not expect for Democratic Party approval ratings to bounce back until people can see tangible results, that people are fighting on their side, not only speaking to their issues, but also making concrete differences in ways that they appreciate. And to me, that's the crisis of this moment, is this profound sense that the whole country is not working for regular people, that people who would like not to ever have to think about politics suddenly are feeling politics just pounding at the windows like a horde of zombies, because their lives are going off the rails. It is so hard to just be able to afford to live, and people are being shot in the streets. And there's this sense that lettuce might give you explosive diarrhea. All of this is wrong.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Like, most people do not want to have to think about who controls which chamber of Congress, let alone their state legislature. And for people who'd like to be left alone and able to lead their lives and pursue their dreams, free of politics, this is a very hard moment. And for people who pay attention to politics all the time, it's even worse. So you'd expect in that situation for people to be like, set this whole thing on fire. And that's what we see in poll after poll and at door after door, if you go out and talk to voters.

• 6:59Ezra Klein?

  So I remember this. In very early 2024, I did this big article, where I talked to all these state chairs and Democratic politicians about what was the Democratic Party at a time when, actually, compared to now, it seemed more settled, but there were some questions that had risen. And you gave by far the best quotes in that piece. And you told me the story about how there were these big piles of coal, I think it was in Green Bay.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  In Green Bay, Wisconsin, that's right.

• 7:28Ezra Klein?

  And that Tony Evers, the governor, and Tammy Baldwin and others have been working, and they got money from Joe Biden to get the piles of coal gone. And you said to me, it was by far the best part of the piece. You said, you know, that's who the Democratic Party is. They're the people who get rid of the piles of coal. They were talking some years later, and you're like, postscript. The piles of coal are still there.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Ezra Klein?

  I looked into it. There were lawsuits, environmental lawsuits. And it got me thinking, I mean, obviously, this is a little bit related to abundance work, but there are many different ways this plays out, where the Democratic Party wants to think of itself as a party that makes government work for people. And I think if people believed the Democratic Party did that, they would support it. But they believe typically one of two things that gets in the way. One is they don't believe the Democrats make government work for people. They believe it makes government work for their own set of interests, whether it's funders, or environmentalists, or unions, or whoever it may be that the people are upset about. Or the others, they just don't believe government works. And so the party that says, hey, I'm here to make government work for you, is not credible,

• 8:32Ezra Klein?

  because people don't want government doing jobs they're not certain government can do.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:38Ezra Klein?

  So I guess the question is this: do you believe that's who Democrats are? That they're the people in politics to make government work for people? And if that's true, what do they need to do to prove it?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  So I think that Democrats are the party that wants to make government work for people. Sometimes Democrats can trip over the shoelaces. Over and over, we have a government that gets blocked or seized apart because it actually can't respond to the public's goals. Our government, in so many ways, is set up to meet a million different goals other than delivering great public services, solving public problems, doing great work for people, despite millions of wonderful civil servants who do absolutely critical work all the time. Right now, we're pulling out Jenga blocks, like the monitoring for a cyclospora, and we can see how that leads to disasters across the public. So this is not to say government doesn't work or can't work, but there's a ton that

• 9:33Speaker 01

  gets in the way right now of having a government that's capable of being responsive and effective at the level that this moment calls for, especially a moment where a host of new threats and risks and concentrations of power unleashed by artificial intelligence are right on the horizon. In some ways, it's never been more urgent to have a government that is both responsive and effective. And so I do think that Democrats can rebuild the trust in government and in themselves by being excellent and actually delivering. And I think you can see that in some state and local governments across the country. You can see that in Mom Donny's, New York, with public services that people are celebrating, delivering on campaign promises, communicating the delivery of those promises. But there is work to do to change how the system itself works.

• 10:16Ezra Klein?

  I guess a question that that raises is, when people think about the Democratic Party, when they hear those words, when a pollster calls them and says, what do you think the Democratic Party? What do you think those words activate in their mind? What do people think the Democratic Party is? And then as somebody who ran one branch, what is the Democratic Party?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  So it means whichever thing is most salient to people. The first and the most common is the amorphous blob of every elected official, every pundit, every annoying person they see online, all the things that are associated with this kind of vast interconnected web of all things Democrat related. That is not one thing. There's no person who kind of controls that. There's, in a sense, if you have a Democratic president, that person's the head of the amorphous blob. Donald Trump very much is head of the blob on the Republican side. There's also the formal Democratic Party, which is the literal institutions. I was chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. There's the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. There's the Democratic County Party system. So we have a Democratic Party of Iowa County, Wisconsin.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  There's also the Democratic Party of Iowa County, Iowa. Very often people are mad at the blob, but they're blaming the formal institution without, you know, and why would they? Without a lot of recognition of exactly what it is that is in the control of the formal Democratic Party. The opportunity that the formal Democratic Party organizations have most of all is to create a home for people who want to fight for change, to do the kind of grassroots community, neighbor to neighbor organizing that can turn the Democrats, this kind of headline phrase, from some distant thing that is being defined by Fox News Channel every day into my neighbor who asked me if I wanted to put up a yard sign for a city council candidate who actually cares about building more housing where I live so that my kids can live near me and I can see my grandkids.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  That shift to me is what, what it means to build from the ground up and to try to rebuild civic life in this country through institutions that once actually had that kind of role in community after community, where people would associate the Democratic Party with that big dinner that I go to once a year or, you know, with somebody who checks in with me about who all the local candidates are. To me, the work of building the party is thinking from the ground up about how we actually reconnect with people so that we are human beings rather than slogans on TV.

• 12:36Ezra Klein?

  I want to hear you talk about that a little bit more. What parties maybe once were in American social life and political life and what they are today. I know you and I have both been interested in this hollow parties idea that has been in political science from Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlossman. But, I mean, as somebody who I think is interested in party machinery, what relationship might I have once had with a party? And then what, what does it become now?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  There were times in, in American life when parties were a huge part of your daily and monthly and weekly existence. When, when you became a naturalized citizen of the country, the local Democratic Party, and sometimes the Republican Party, more often the Democratic Party was there to greet you and ask you to register for the party at that moment when there was a block captain who was going to check in with you from time to time. I quote in my book, a letter that Abraham Lincoln sent to the Whig Party, and his advice then is the same as my advice now. He said, "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." Which, first of all, is great advice about organizing.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And secondly, presupposes that members of the party have a sense of which voters are doubtful and actually that those doubtful voters who might or might not vote, who might switch parties, they have confidence in someone who's associated with the party. And the idea that you'd have a personal relationship with somebody who might check in on you and ask what you're thinking about, that is so alien from the world where most people's experience of the political parties is incredibly annoying text messages and emails that you're constantly trying to find ways to filter, or nightmare headlines that are screaming at you.

• 14:12Ezra Klein?

  What's it like to be the name on the other side of those emails?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I sometimes meet people who are like, "You text me all the time." And I'm like, "You never write back." Yeah, it's a, it is a strange aspect of life. You have your public simulacrum of yourself. You know this as a journalist, and then you have your actual human being self. But I used to work at an organization that used email to organize people. And one of the best maxims for sending mass emails is to imagine that you're talking to the most important person in the world. You have five seconds to give them a reason to listen to you at all anymore. So you need to be completely clear. And it's fine if they don't want to listen to you at that moment. You have to equip them with the, what it takes to make a decision about whether they want to listen to you by explaining what your message is about and what the stakes are. That's very different from the messages that promise a 400% match with a zero replaced

• 14:58Speaker 01

  by an O, so it can bypass the spam filter and all this kind of stuff that just, it makes me want to tear my hair out. But the reality is that right now, parties don't, they don't have in general the capacity and they also are pursuing this kind of algorithmic optimization. So they just are not in the business of earning trust with people for the long term.

• 15:16Ezra Klein?

  Well, there's also another interesting difference from the past, which is that parties used to have a lot of control over the product. The people they ran for all kinds of seats up to and including president came out of conventions, they didn't come out of primaries. And so the, the role of being a party is stranger now. You are organizing for a candidate who might have taken over the party, right? Might have been an insurgent against the party or just might not have anything to do with the way the, the party regular saw it. But you're not, you know, as the official Democratic Party, deciding who will be the next gubernatorial candidate for the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Not only is the Democratic Party of Wisconsin not choosing the next candidate, in Wisconsin's case, and I, and I say this for, for a reason that I'll get to, it's in the state party's constitution that it is neutral in primaries. Now, that's different state to state, but Wisconsin, my state, is both a place with a deep progressive tradition. It's also part of that tradition to have the public get to call the shots. So Wisconsin was the state that created open primaries. This was a, a reform against party bosses and against the, the kind of control of the smoke filled rooms. And in 1948, there was this watershed moment, Joe McCarthy had just become the Republican Senator in Wisconsin, and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which had been kind of

• 16:44Speaker 01

  a backwater at that moment, reformed with progressive Republicans, with the people who'd been in the progressive party in the state and with the more liberal Democrats. And it had a, a new charter, it had new constitution and bylaws. And it said, "We're going to be neutral in primaries unless there's extremely unusual circumstances, and then we're going to fight like hell in the general elections." And I think one of the strengths of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and I'm very proud to have worked alongside thousands of people that build up over the, the six years I was chair, and I still am an advisor and support the work of the party, is to create a, a civic fabric of people who are ready to go to bat for the nominee that comes out the other side, but actually have a democratic, small D democratic process to figure out who the nominee should be.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And you might not like who people decide in a primary process, but there's something important about the legitimacy that comes from being chosen by actual voters in a, in a process as the standard bearer that I think is valuable for the country.

• 17:40Ezra Klein?

  One of the reasons I bring this up is that we're, we're in this moment where primaries in the Democratic Party brawl, they're getting very heated and very contested. So you have sort of across the country, I mean, obviously here in New York, there are a bunch of very high profile primaries where DSA backed candidates knocked off either incumbents or establishment backed candidates. But in Wisconsin, you're having a gubernatorial primary where Francesca Hong, a DSA member, is leading in the polls and most polls at least against Mandela Barnes, a former lieutenant governor. And, you know, Barnes is a pretty progressive person himself, so I'm not sure these are like unfathomably dramatically different directions for the party, but you are, we are in a moment where there is a kind of hot contest over both what the Democratic

• 18:25Ezra Klein?

  Party should be, who should represent it. But I think also what the public wants, right? One job of these primaries is also try to figure out like who can win in a half and half state like Wisconsin. So how are you understanding that primary and the choices being offered?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  So first I should say, as an advisor to the state party, I'm bound and embrace my, my own neutrality in the process.

• 18:47Ezra Klein?

  I'm sure you do.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  My most important role will be to, to help ensure that whoever wins the nomination, that the party can come together around that person and fight to win. But the second thing that I'd say is that if you imagine a counterfactual world where there is some smoke filled room that overrides the wishes of voters, it's harder to be able to rally those voters to come together and support whatever comes out of the process. So whatever comes out of the primary, like I'm going to be there to fight for it. But I think if, if instead we had a, a, you know, a party that said, "This is the person everyone can, can, you know, suck out of if they don't like it," that actually would not serve well the, the work of building an engagement.

• 19:30Ezra Klein?

  I recognize that you're constrained on this. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to get more out of you than I'm going to get. But I think one thing that I struggled with reading the book, the book's very much about organizing and you're, you know, you're an organizer going way back. But organizing is both about the apparatus of organizing, the strategy of organizing. It's also about the product. I mean, more important than how you sell it is what you're selling. And one of the things that I think is a really up for grabs question right now is how the Democratic Party reimagines itself, if it has to reimagine itself for a new moment,

• 20:14Ezra Klein?

  right? And I remember talking to you, you know, for stories going way back while you were chair in your space as a neutral chair. And, you know, point you would make to me is, look, there's a lot of ferment online about what Democratic Party should be. But if you look at the Democrats who are winning in the swing states, you look at Tammy Baldwin, who's a senator from Wisconsin, you look at Tony Evers, Gretchen Whitmer, you look at Josh Shapiro, you see these very focused on fixing the roads, making government work well, sort of staying out of big culture war-y fights, right? There's a kind of Midwestern stolid nature to all of them. And now there's a heat coming from some of these same states,

• 20:55Ezra Klein?

  right? Abdul El-Sayed and Michigan, Francesca Hong in Wisconsin. I do think there is this question of what happens when the party is not able to, like, in any real way, like, articulate a view on what it thinks the public wants, or what it thinks, or what it can kind of say has worked.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  So I'm going to challenge your premise on two fronts. The first one is, if you look at candidates from DSA candidates all the way to kind of centrist Democrats, there is a essentially unified message of this election cycle around affordability. There's differences on on foreign policy, there's differences on what kind of, you know, healthcare system we should have. The central theme is connecting with voters about the lived experience of a country that feels like they cannot afford it, and delivering ideas about how they can change that. They can both change the economic reality and change who the government works for, because there's, I think, an accurate sense that right now our federal government works for a cabal of far-right billionaires and not for working

• 21:56Speaker 01

  people. And that kind of message unity, you know, Democrats love to self-flagellate around this idea that Democrats can't agree on a message and, you know, can't all say the same thing. They are speaking with one voice about this biggest central issue. And I think there's a giant contrast, even with all the huge fights between Democrats, there's a huge contrast between that kind of unity of message and what we see on the GOP side right now, which is just constant fealty to Donald Trump. The Republicans in Wisconsin in the governor's race, they had a contested primary, and then it evaporated when Donald Trump tapped his favorite candidate who had tried to help him overturn the 2020 elections. So on one level, I think that this question about what the party is fundamentally about at this moment, when I ran for DNC chair, I talked to the whole range of DNC members,

• 22:41Speaker 01

  all of them were like, we need to be the party that is fighting for the economic lives of working people. Usually, the factions blame the other factions for pulling the party's eye off that ball. But right now, I think you actually do hear that from candidates.

• 22:52Ezra Klein?

  So the answer you just gave there is pretty optimistic about the level of unity in the Democratic Party. I've heard people being a lot less optimistic than that. Former DNC Chair Jamie Harrison said, "If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don't run for a nomination. Don't use our resources. Don't rely on our volunteers. Don't use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support." James Carville and Rahm Emanuel have been arguing that there are people who are running for Democratic nominations who should not be in the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party should set limits on who is part of it. This is an old debate in parties. How big of a tent should you be? Where do you come down on it?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  I think it should be a very big tent. There, it is possible to get so far beyond the pale that party members themselves will, you know, vote to do something. I've seen Republicans running as Democrats in order to become spoilers. We saw Republican super PACs funding avowed antisemites that, you know, in Texas, we saw these, these things happen. But there should be a big tent, and there should be big contests of ideas, and there should be different candidates who represent very different things in different places. I, and I hear the argument, and I'm sympathetic to the argument, that Republicans will wield whoever has the most extreme view anywhere in the country as a weapon against candidates in the purplest places or the reddest places in the country. And that does

• 24:13Speaker 01

  happen. But it's also the case that the voters who are most on the fence about who to support, they're not tracking the contested House primaries in New York. You have to have a kind of deep immersion in the Fox News cinematic universe for a lot of these names to mean anything to you. And swing voters just don't look at the world that way. And nor should they.

• 24:55Ezra Klein?

  What do you think about the way that foreign policy is becoming more of a litmus test in some of these primaries? So the way you sort of framed the party there was that there's a tremendous amount of agreement on affordability, right? You have everyone from Zohar Mamdani running on making New York cheaper to Roy Cooper in North Carolina. I think his slogan is "Make Stuff Cost Less."

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:15Ezra Klein?

  I agree that there's actually a lot of unity directionally on that, even if the different factions in the party have different ways of approaching how you make things cheaper. Israel and Gaza are not that way. And I think it's one reason those fights have been proving much more combative, at times much uglier. They've become more a question of a moral litmus test. That's the kind of thing that is more dangerous for a party, when the issues reflect not a disagreement on how to achieve a shared goal, but a fundamental disagreement on not just what the goal is, but who is moral and who is immoral in it. So, you know, as you're watching it play out, as you're counseling people how to navigate it, how do you see it?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I think the fundamental thing is that there is a change. There's been change over years and decades, and much more change recently in the realities on the ground that people are seeing play out, the horrors and the human suffering. There could be a big change in Israeli politics that could twerk and, you know, potentially change this yet again. But it's healthy to have debates when those kinds of changes play out. The Democratic Party has had huge changes in foreign policy approach. We've had much bigger, deeper divisions over the Vietnam War, for example, you know, a generation or two ago. And having a party that actually has a conversation about this, you know, there, there are times when the conversation can be so vicious and extreme or even violent. Those things I do not like.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  And I think we should all fully oppose any kind of violence and, and political disagreements. The point of democracy is to be able to settle conflicts nonviolently. But there are both issues of identity and issues of morality and basic, deep fundamental divides that are being hashed out. And that's part of why I think it's actually good to have a democratic process where those things can happen, where people can have those debates and they can decide how central that's going to be to their vote, and they can figure out how to draw a circle that includes, you know, enough people to be able to both win and feel comfortable living inside that circle. And there will be another side of it, a new circle that's

• 27:25Speaker 01

  drawn, that has the vast majority of Democrats and, and finds a path forward. And my hope, my deep hope is that that's a future that allows thriving and life and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. This is a moment where people have watched unimaginable horrors being inflicted on people who manifestly do not deserve it. And different people have seen different horrors on their screens, based on which algorithmic bubble they're in. But the question of how the United States should conduct its foreign policy in the wake of that is absolutely a legitimate thing for a democracy to think through. For better or worse, right now, there are two major viable parties in the country. And it is healthy for contests of different ideas to happen within the party, within primaries,

• 28:07Speaker 01

  and then to have a chance to elect very different types of Democrats in different places. This is a giant, incredibly diverse country. People are going to disagree about a whole bunch of different things. And for me, I think the Democratic Party is better if the tent is wide.

• 28:21Ezra Klein?

  So to come at this from maybe a different angle, rather than get you to weigh in on primaries, you're not going to weigh in on?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Appreciate it.

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  What is your theory of the median voter? Do you believe in a median voter? Do you believe in the median voter theorem? How do you think about the people you were trying to win over in Wisconsin?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  So I start with the fact that maybe 90% of voters already know who they're going to support, even before they know who the candidates are. So then you ask, who are the remaining 10%? In a state like Wisconsin, there's a huge amount of polling that suggests that there is, you know, roughly 10% in play. And the, the counterintuitive thing is that the people who might vote for either party have a lot in common with the people who are on the fence about whether to vote at all. What sometimes voters and swing voters have in common is that they don't think about politics all the time. Politics feels very distant, feels like something that happens over there, and they live over here. They live in their real life, and all these explosive squabbles between the two parties is just

• 29:22Speaker 01

  noise. If you knock on the doors of those voters, what you find is people who have a bunch of opinions that don't neatly align with either political party, that are not how they define their identities. They define their identities based on their role in their family, or their role in their job, or the, the team that they love, or the hobby that they throw themselves passionately into. They have deeply held values and deeply held views, but politics is just not their jam. And if you want to persuade that voter to side with you, you have to show them that you care about them, that you like them, that you have common sense, you get how the world works, you get what they care about, you're not, you don't have some blinkered, wild opinion that they think kind of disqualifies you. But also, your priorities are the things that they care about in their day-to-day

• 30:06Speaker 01

  life. And if you can do that, if you can enter that kind of circle of trust, then you can make the case for this or that solution. If they think this person doesn't get me, is not on my side, wants something from me, then they're just not going to listen to your message at all.

• 30:21Ezra Klein?

  How much do you understand the way voters like that, or non-voters like that for that matter, assess politics as being, they have their kind of set of issue positions in their head, and, you know, what they do and don't like. And maybe that's more, you know, jumbled together than the parties would like to have it, right? You can have somebody who believes in, you know, full-on marijuana legalization and, you know, believes in, you know, universal healthcare, but is also pro-life, like, there are a lot of voters.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you get that all the time.

• 30:52Ezra Klein?

  You get that all the time. There are a lot of voters that just don't fit the way the parties have grouped. What goes with what? When those voters are sort of assembling the picture of the world that is in their heads, and when they're hearing about candidates, like, how do you understand what they are facing decisions on?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  So, last time I was on the show to pull a deep cut, I talked about this book, The Reasoning Voter, that marshaled a lot of, I think, persuasive evidence that has not been shaken by the last few years, that for voters who are paying attention to other things, the, the things that they learn about a particular candidate are like stars in the sky. And if they see a few stars, they draw a line around those stars and draw a constellation, and that's their picture of who that candidate is. And once a star's in the sky, you cannot get someone to unsee that star. The most that a campaign can hope to do is to add a couple of stars that allow you to draw a different constellation. That's a very abstract way of saying, for all the many, many issues, most of the issues

• 31:52Speaker 01

  that a candidate talks about, has positions on, are not going to play any role in the election. It's going to be the one or two, really, probably not three things that crystallize what it seems like this person's about. I remember vividly in 2004, that George W. Bush decided that John Kerry was a flip-flopper, and he drove home that message over and over and over. And once you're a flip-flopper, it doesn't matter what you say your positions on the issues are, because you can't trust that person to hold that position the next day. That was message discipline that allowed people to not trust the Democratic nominee. And the Obama campaign in 2012 was a masterclass in defining Mitt Romney, who, you know, many Democrats now pine for as a Republican opponent, but defining him as someone who is ripping

• 32:37Speaker 01

  off working people, was on the side of the wealthy against the middle class. That was the central issue, and so many, many other issues were not relevant. And I think that, as we, you know, think about each election cycle, there's a few issues that become the central things that determine whether someone's trusted, whether someone's a threat, whether someone's on your side. And it's not as simple as left or right. At this moment, it's often top versus bottom, or trusting, you know, institutions people feel have failed versus recognizing and speaking to the truth that they, they do need to fundamentally change. The GOP has announced they're going to run a campaign of hate, that they're, Axios had this report, that they're going to run a campaign trying to make this about, you know, Democrats holding disqualifyingly left-wing views.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And the question is, will that be more salient for voters, that Republican message, than this fundamental question of whether you're supporting an administration that is both ripping people off and terrorizing them across the country? And that giant arm wrestling match between which of those stars burned more brightly in the sky will ultimately determine the outcome of the midterms.

• 33:39Ezra Klein?

  Why does Ron Johnson keep winning elections in Wisconsin?

• 33:42Speaker 01

  So, it's very painful. He's our US Senator. I, I think part of the magic of Ron Johnson is that he's had the very good luck of being on the ballot. Once in 2010, when there was a historic GOP wave, once in 2016, when Donald Trump swept in, and Johnson had both MAGA voters and traditional Republican voters at a time when the Republican Party was riven in the state of Wisconsin. And then the last time was 2022, which had a Democratic president, he won by one percentage point, but he, he did well enough that he was able to pull it off. So, at one level, it's that. I also think that Ron Johnson holds teletown halls all the time. He speaks to the concerns of people who feel that they're marginalized from the political

• 34:27Speaker 01

  system. He's, I don't like this at all. He's a huge vaccine skeptic and COVID vaccine skeptic. I totally disagree with him about those issues, but there are a lot of people who see him speaking to concerns that they have, that they feel they've been made fun of for, or excluded from, from public life for, and he's a champion on their side. And I think noticing when people feel unheard and sticking up for them is smart politics, even if he's propagating views that I think have led to the loss of life in my state. So, there are aspects of how Ron Johnson comports himself politically that I think are smart politics. And I think that one thing that he's good at, that Tammy Baldwin's very, very good at, is a lot of listening. That's part of how you win in a state like Wisconsin, that has almost perfectly evenly

• 35:11Speaker 01

  divided voters across the two parties. And any pocket of 20, 30,000 votes could actually tilt a statewide election one way or the other. The Republican Party mostly listens to Donald Trump right now. And as Democrats, I think, our job, and for anyone who believes in democracy, it's to listen to voters and connect with the things that matter most to that man.

• 35:31Ezra Klein?

  I think one question here that people have is what it would mean for the Democratic Party to listen to voters. So, that's sort of heartbreaking for Wisconsin Democrats, for national Democrats, Senate race in 2022, where

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Heartbreaking for Wisconsinites.

• 35:42Ezra Klein?

  For where Mandela Barnes alludes to Ron Johnson. The campaign against Barnes is, I'd say, kind of borderline racist.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's an understatement of best.

• 35:52Ezra Klein?

  There you go.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  They darkened his skin tone in their mailings.

• 35:54Ezra Klein?

  Yes. And, you know, goes very hard on painting Barnes as soft on crime. All right, that's a major attack Johnson uses, and I think to some real effect. And Democrats won Senate races that year, and Johnson was able to survive in that category. It was not a year that was such an incredible year for Republican Senate candidates. Now, in the governor's race in Wisconsin, and you're seeing versions of this play out in other parts of, of the country, you have Barnes running again, and you have, in Hong, a candidate, Weldon Barnes left, who has, you know, made, I think, more expansive statements that are, you could paint a soft on crime. So I think this is something I've been trying to get at a bit, which is, there was an old

• 36:35Ezra Klein?

  Democratic Party that might kind of look at the situation and say that its nominating convention, look, we tried Barnes a couple of years ago, it didn't work. This is what we think the Wisconsin voter needs. Primaries work very differently. Primaries in the algorithm that contention age work very differently. But I think one of the things the Democratic Party is going to have to wrestle with is whether or not primaries are leading to sort of electorally optimal candidates. And so this is what I'm trying to get a little bit of this question of what does the voter want? But given what you've seen, and given your point about the, the reasoning voter, I guess it's a question of, even if the Democratic Party, like, to the extent such a thing exists, wants to listen to the voter, can it?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  There are five candidates for governor in Wisconsin right now, and they represent kind of the, a big part of the range of the Democratic spectrum. And they're vying for support from voters, they're bringing, they get donors to chip in so they can put their ads on the air. That process will play out for another couple of weeks, and then we'll have this blitz sprint through November to define what the election's fundamentally about. And however someone might feel about the choices of the voters in the primary, I do think, you know, I want to, I want to underline for people that even when you can't imagine that an election is going to be close in Wisconsin, it's often incredibly close.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  It often comes down to the final ballots that are counted through the Milwaukee Central Account System. It comes down to the margins in red rural counties that have voted 70% for the GOP, but this time they vote 68%, and you're able to win. There are voters all across our state who are furious about the way things are right now, who have not yet been reached by any message from either candidate. And I genuinely think there's a path to victory in whichever configuration we come out of the Democratic primary. But I will also say that the risk in an autocracy is not just the lack of freedom that people have when, when one person gets to make the decisions.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  It's also that throughout history, throughout the history of political parties, throughout the history of the world, when one or a tiny group of people gets to call the shots, they can get things terribly wrong and people have no recourse. And for all the messiness and all the challenge and all the disagreements that, that people have in a democracy, I think there's something incredibly sacred about protecting that fundamental principle. And the, you know, I am, I'm, as you can see, I'm not participating in the debate about who should win the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, but I'm fiercely protecting the principle that this should actually be up to the voters. It is, I, I hope we win every election. I hope that people who believe in democracy win every possible election in 26. But part of the lessons that will be drawn from 26 will inform an open primary process in 2028 for who the next Democratic presidential candidate could be.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  And that's an important and valuable process as well. This is, this is an iterated process where each time you learn lessons from the last, you learn lessons from where things stand now, and then paint forward to the next one. And I think there's a healthy debate, both about how the Democratic Party should, should operate, and which kind of Democrats voters should support in these primaries. But I think we should preserve the advance that we made in, in political technology of actually having a process where the public gets to weigh in. I think that partly because we are in this moment of collapsed public trust, that having systems that are manifestly and clearly and genuinely accountable to the public is, is vital to being able to preserve enough legitimacy to be able to move forward.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And this is a moment when our, our democracy is under threat writ large, and I think this is a moment where people pouring themselves into the project of winning a contest in a democracy and ensuring that people who want the rules to give everyone a voice win those elections is absolutely vital.

• 40:25Ezra Klein?

  You ran for National DNC Chair after the 2024 election. What was your pitch to the DNC delegates?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  It's a funny experience to run for DNC Chair.

• 40:35Ezra Klein?

  I bet, actually.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  It's, I compared it to a cross between a student council election and a papal conclave. You're running a national campaign, you're crisscrossing the country, and you're talking to around 400 voters. When I ran, I found that there was actually the basis for a, a common message and a common vision around year-round organizing that took place everywhere to fight for every level of the ballot, and a message that was centrally focused on this overriding economic concern that people feel across race and ethnicity, across the country, in red areas and blue areas and purple areas alike. That gave me a lot of hope for where we could go as a party. I also found that, that the DNC's voters were a lot like voters in maybe any context,

• 41:19Speaker 01

  which is familiarity and trust was a huge factor in how people made their decision. And to his, his credit, in that election, Ken Martin had been building trust and building relationships with DNC members for years. He led the State Party Chairs Association. I'd been focused on Wisconsin. I missed a lot of the State Party Chair, you know, Association meetings, because I was in the middle of Supreme Court races in my state. And so I was the guy parachuting in two months before the election and saying, I've got a great idea, you know, come with me. And people were like, yeah, that idea sounds great. And who are you again?

• 42:11Ezra Klein?

  So as you note, the DNC chose Ken Martin. I think it is fair to say that the broad view is it has not been a successful tenure as DNC Chair. I think he's had a very difficult time, sort of internal insurgencies, you know, kind of a debacle around the autopsy from the 2024 election.

• 42:27Ezra Klein?

  I think it actually speaks to a little bit of what you're saying. I mean, Martin did win that election because he was more institutionally connected as a candidate. And to something we were talking about earlier, I think we're in a kind of strange moment for institutions, which is, I think, many of them are beginning or have been for some time failing. And that tends to make them defensive. An institution that is under stress is often not risk-taking and creative. It is scared and it retrenches.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:58Ezra Klein?

  And this is not, I got my criticisms of Martin, but I also think it's a tough time to be DNC Chair. But rather than ask you to criticize him, which I don't think you'll do, what do you think the DNC could be, right? If it moved into a position where it says, I mean, it is currently at a terrible fundraising disadvantage. It is a flailing organization. But just more broadly, going back to what we were discussing, I don't think there is a model for what a party can be in the 21st century that anybody is all that excited about yet nationally. Right? The parties are not what they once were. I did a lot of work in Wisconsin, building something I think the people actually were quite excited about. If you were advising a hypothetical DNC Chair on what could be done,

• 43:44Ezra Klein?

  what do you think the Democratic Party could be if we're willing to sort of reinvent itself as machinery?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Nancy Pelosi has a three-item list for what it takes to win elections. She says it's message, money, and mobilization. When you ask someone out in the street what they wish the Democratic Party did differently, usually the first thing that they will say is messaging. It's something about how Democrats can never say what they mean. They're always going through a laundry list. They should get it down to a bumper sticker. They should have one clear thing that every Democrat says, and if we did that, we'd be able to win elections. And while I appreciate that, and I think at this moment affordability, in fact, is the one-word bumper sticker that Democrats are running on across the country. It's actually not something that the party is in a position to enforce or create. Ultimately, candidates, what they say, what they say in their ads and their speeches and the media coverage they get, the people who will wield the power if they're elected,

• 44:35Speaker 01

  they, through their actions and their messages, they define the brand ultimately in the biggest possible way. So I don't think that message is the thing that the Democratic Party organization can solve. Money is actually a significant one. And it's worth saying, and I speak frankly in the book, that part of how we've been able to be successful in Wisconsin at the Democratic Party is by raising a lot of money. In the book, I talk about the Scott Walker loophole, a Wisconsin law that allows the state parties to fund state candidates to an unlimited degree. That was part of how Scott Walker, you know, won his reelection. So the Democratic Party of Wisconsin can receive big donations and then make big donations to state candidates that allow them to fight back even when Elon Musk comes to town, as you might remember him doing in our Supreme Court race.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Now, the same thing is on the table for the National Party and National Party committees. The US Supreme Court has changed federal laws to allow the national parties to play a bigger role with their money than they did before. There used to be limits for what a party organization could do for a candidate, for House or Senate. Those limits have been obliterated. And for better or worse, until there's big changes in the Supreme Court or the Constitution, we're in an era where money does matter and the party using money effectively, I think, is one of the essential things for the party to do. But the last and biggest thing that any person can do, whether or not they're a trillionaire or a thousandaire or have negative net worth, the thing that any person can do of any generation,

• 46:04Speaker 01

  no matter what geography they live in across the country, is they can help to build the Democratic Party as a home for people who want to organize to make a positive difference and build the trust at the local level in their community that can make especially a difference on the races that nobody's paying attention to. In a lot of elections, voters find out who the candidate is when they walk into the polling place. For state legislative races, you know, most people have no idea who their state representative or state senator is. Most people have no idea who the city council candidate is or the candidate for district attorney in their county. Often, as an experience many people have, they see those names on the ballot and they think, who am I going to text to ask who I'm supposed to vote for in this election?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And I do think that there's a meaningful and incredibly powerful thing for a party to build a network of folks who are that trusted person, who people text and ask who they should vote for. I read about a North Carolina state Supreme Court race that the Democratic candidate lost by 401 votes. That led to the re-gerrymandering of the state and the United States Republican House majority now, because Republicans picked up enough seats there. And if you'd been in North Carolina with a group of friends, you could have produced the margin of victory in that election. So even though it is the case that for candidates, it's a very different environment now because it's not enough to win over the editorial board of your local newspaper, if you can effectively become the editorial board for some people in your community

• 47:29Speaker 01

  or support people who are going to be that editorial board in a place where elections come down to a hairline, you can have a huge impact on what happens next. And that, the secret sauce for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on one hand, it's been using the Scott Walker loophole and the financial laws to fight back against a GOP that is funded by much wealthier people who are spending a huge amount of money in our state. But it's also been that we've built hundreds of neighborhood teams across our state that actually know everyone in their community, that in places with apartment buildings, they have someone who will unlock the door and let them in so they can check in with everyone on the hallway. They know who actually is going to be on their farms at different times of year. You know, they know everyone along the main street and which businesses would be willing to put a poster in the window.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  In small towns across the state of Wisconsin, building that kind of deep, thick, year-round organizing from the bottom up is something that any person can get involved in their local party organization and create that every state party potentially could do. And although it does cost some money to do, it's so much cheaper than running an ad hundreds of times on broadcast television in order to reach a tiny fraction of the voters who might be relevant in a particular race. So I do think there's something, in fact, for all of us to do, who think this is bigger than any one election, one office, one candidate, which is to build the power at the community level. And the Democratic Party can be a vessel for that work that can be transferred and moved from election to election

• 48:56Speaker 01

  in service of people who believe in the idea of democracy itself.

• 48:59Ezra Klein?

  One of the most common frustrations I hear from listeners of the show and just politically engaged people who find my email.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Ezra Klein?

  Is, look, we're sitting here talking in a podcast studio in Manhattan. Some of the people listening may live in Wisconsin or Michigan or North Carolina, and a lot of them live in California or New York or New Jersey or Vermont.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:23Ezra Klein?

  And they say, I don't, I don't know how to matter here, right? I'm in a blue state. My state has Democrats statewide up and down. I'm worried about Donald Trump if that's their politics. And I don't really think writing letters to people in Wisconsin, I don't think people are like super excited to get my, you know, letter writing in the mail. What does it mean to try to be useful and engaged in this moment if you don't live in a state that swings? If you don't live in a place where elections are decided by a percentage point or two?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  So there are people in New York and California and across the country who go through a training with our state party and learn how to staff the voter protection hotline so that when a Wisconsin voter finds out that they can no longer mail in their absentee ballot and they want to know where they can drop it off, they call this number. And low and behold, there's someone on the other end of the line who walks them through the process. And that person just helped ensure that a voter could successfully cast a ballot in a swing state that might come down to three votes per precinct. There are ways to volunteer like that. There's another thing called giving circles, where you get a group of friends together. Everyone puts in 50 bucks. Not everyone has 50 bucks, but if you and your friends do, you can help sponsor a state legislative candidate in a state where the state legislature is on the brink of winning a majority.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  The States Project organizes these giving circles around the country. There's another group called Movement Voter Project that does the same thing, that could have a gigantic effect on whether you fortify election laws and protections before the 2028 election. There are essentially, you have to plug in to effectively run organizing.

• 50:59Ezra Klein?

  I want to hold you on this for a minute because I actually, there's some people who email me this question all the time, which is they get a million very loud emails, as we were talking about earlier.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Ezra Klein?

  About where to donate, and they don't know what is a grift. What is maybe well meaning but ineffective? And what is effective?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  So on the Republican side, I am sad to say that the Republican State Leadership Committee has been devilishly effective for a lot longer than a lot of the groups on the Democratic side. A group that is relatively low profile, that does amazing work that I'd recommend is called the State and Local Election Alliance, SLEA, which is pronounced SLAY, which I love, having an acronym that you can actually pronounce. Not enough Democratic aligned groups do that. They zero in on the democracy critical state and local races and then they do very smart and strategic things to support the people who are working on those fights. SLAY has made a difference in Wisconsin and a whole bunch of other states. The State's Project does amazing work. I think the Democratic Attorneys General Association, also dynamite attorneys general,

• 52:04Speaker 01

  are suing Trump over and over, often working with outside groups, Democracy Defenders, is a group that I'm an advisor for that does amazing work in court. There's Protect Democracy and Democracy Forward, you might find a common thread in the word democracy in each of those. These are organizations that are working alongside elected officials. I think they've been one of the most successful lines of resistance to the Trump administration. But it's, you know, this is a big, complicated picture. I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood. American political power is like that. It's a system where certain offices, you'd never expect the state representative from Onalaska, Wisconsin, to be one of the most important elected officials in the country.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  But his ability to win when Republicans had drawn hyper gerrymandered maps prevented Republicans from getting a super majority in the Wisconsin state legislature. If they had won that super majority, they could have destroyed the Wisconsin Elections Commission and guaranteed future victories for themselves. But he won in a district that went for Trump and because of him and Lori Palmerian, Oskos, Wisconsin, Governor Evers was able to veto the Republican attack laws trying to threaten democracy and Wisconsin had a free and fair election in 2024. All these different parts that add up to the system of who gets to write the rules of our democracy, which then dictates in whose interests our democracy actually works. And I hope that that, the idea of an economy that works for everyone, that everyone's rights and freedoms are protected and that we have a democracy, those are the three

• 53:30Speaker 01

  core unifying ideas behind the Democratic Party. And I hope people who believe in those things will throw them into the work of building something bigger than any one race.

• 53:38Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. Also, final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  So the first book I want to recommend is The Master of the Senate by Robert Caro. I talk in the book about the fight in Wisconsin and the way that we unrigged our state, which wound up requiring the flipping of the state Supreme Court. At a national level, if we want to reform, expand the US Supreme Court, if we want to pass a new Voting Rights Act, if we want to ban partisan gerrymandering, the only way to do it is by abolishing the filibuster and changing the way the US Senate works. And Robert Caro's book talks about the US Senate at a time when it was totally moribund, nothing was passing, and then a senator came along who helped to make the whole thing actually function and started passing laws that people thought could never have been passed. I think there's something to learn from that about how to reinvigorate this institution

• 54:28Speaker 01

  that is currently where policy goes to die. Not all policies, but many policies that we need. The second book that I want to recommend is a book called Seeing Like a State. And this is a book by someone who used to be a University of Wisconsin professor, actually, G M C Scott. And it's about the ways that utopian projects often fall apart and totally backfire. He talks a lot about how governments sometimes look at this sort of high level view, the synoptic view, the view from above and come up with a game plan. And then when it actually happens, it plays out disastrously. I think Elon Musk and Doge is a perfect example of that, that's now costing, you know-

• 55:09Ezra Klein?

  Just give me the passwords.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:11Ezra Klein?

  Like I can see the whole thing through the passwords and the data transmissions.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  He, and millions of people are probably going to die, hundreds of thousands have already died as a result. And I think for people who want big positive change, as I do, there's something incredibly important about having a level of humility and a capacity to listen and learn about what is actually going on. But also, the thing that defines the worst catastrophes, it's always this combination of a kind of plan imposed from above and a lack of democracy that means that the people who are affected have no ability to demand recourse. You have famines in, famously, A. Marches End, the Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about this, "The only famines have been in places that are not democracies."

• 55:56Speaker 01

  If the people who are starving to death have a voice and a vote, then they can create enough noise that they ultimately get the food that keeps them alive. And Seeing Like a State, I think, was very helpful for me in thinking about what it takes to have the suppleness and the accountability to be able to create positive change by looking at the examples of when things have gone disastrously wrong. And then the third book I want to recommend is probably my favorite book these days to read to my kids, which is a book called Sal and Gabby Break the Universe. And what I love about this book, it said in the near future, there are AIs that are triply involved in, you know, the kids' lives.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  But it's a future that is actually positive and hopeful, as opposed to the kind of Elon Musk controlled totalitarian techno state that he, his rise seems to pretend. It's a deeply inclusive vision of the future. It's something that is full of like art and culture and it is a delight. And my kids love listening to it and laughing to it and I love it too. So if you want something that paints a picture about how things can actually be better than they are now, which is in such disastrously short supply, Sal and Gabby Break the Universe is a great place to start.

• 57:10Ezra Klein?

  Ben Buckler, thank you very much.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on.