What is the Democratic Party? What Could It Be?

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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?

It was reinvented for this era.

Ben Wickler was a chair of Wisconsin Democratic Party for 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 mix bag there, does it at least? Kamal Harris lost Wisconsin by a single percentage point.

But Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate won the state. Wickler then launched a run for DNC chair, which he lost to Ken Martin. A lot of Democrats seeing the difficulties, the DNC has had since in fundraising and organization and internal unity, very much wish Wickler had won that race. And now Wickler is back, he's the author of this is a plan,

how to end America's meltdown and save democracy. So I want 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?

As always, my e-mail, Ezra Kancho at atwitons.com.

Ben Wickler, welcome to the show. Great to be with you, Ezra. So we last spoke, I wonder if you remember this, at least on the show, vividly remembered. It was July of 2024, Biden had just dropped out, Kamal 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? So Kamal 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 tried everything we'd done, everything that we thought could make a difference. Maybe none of it 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 one. And I thought, oh, and I collapsed.

The next day, I did a little spreadsheet therapy for myself, which is my way of relief electoral stress is to dig in the data. And Wisconsin Harris had done better than she had in any other battleground state. In terms of how she did versus how Biden did, it wanted to be in 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 as to make sure people fill out their whole ballot. And so we actually gained 14 state letters that have seats and won the U.S. 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. And the overwhelming issue in raises all around the world. And with the voters who actually shifted their vote twice 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 a 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. So I agree that the in the election, and the 2020 election prices were the biggest issue they were the biggest problem for Joe Biden and for Kamal Harris.

I think that this expected then after the election,

as people got the Donald Trump presidency, as a 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? So I'll say 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. Yeah, 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 and 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 of people who feel like all the politics is messed up, that they can't trust either party, they feel like neither party has connected with them

and actually solve the problems in their life that they're struggling with. 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 you're 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, you know, let us might give you explosive diarrhea.

All this is wrong, 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 it's you'd expect him, that's a duration, or people who'd be like, set this whole thing on fire,

“and that's what we see in poll after poll,”

and it door after door if you go out and talk to voters. So don't you remember this? In very early 2024, I did this big article where I talked to all the state chairs and Democratic politicians about what was the Democratic Party?

At a time when, actually compared to now, it seemed more subtle, but there are some questions of hit-rism. And you gave by far the best quotes in that piece,

and he told me the story about how there were these big piles of coal. I'm gonna think it was in Green Bay. Exactly. And Tony Evers, a governor and Kenny Baldwin,

and others who've been working, and they got money from Joe Biden to get the piles of coal gone. And he said to me, "By far the best part of the piece," he said, "That's who the Democratic Party is." There are the people who get rid of the piles of coal.

They were talking some years later, and you're like, "Post-a-gript." The piles of coal are still there. I looked into it, there are lawsuits, right in front of the lawsuits.

And it caught 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 that Democratic Party did that,”

they would support it. But they believed 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, you know, environmentalists or unions or whoever it may be that the people are upset about. Or the others who 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 because people don't want government to do in jobs.

They're not certain government can do." So I guess the question is this. Do you believe that two Democrats are? The people in politics make government work for people? And if that's true, what do they need to do to prove it?

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 schools. 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 jingle blocks like the monitoring for a cyclist or a, 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 gets in the way right now of having a government that's capable

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 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 Downey'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. I guess the question that that raises is when people think about the Democratic Party, when they hear those words from a pollster,

called them and says, "What do you think about 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? So it means whichever thing is most alien 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 systems. So we have a Democratic Party of Iowa County Wisconsin. There's also a 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.

They 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.

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. 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 in the International Osmond.

“But I mean, to 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? There were times in American life when parties were a huge part of your daily and monthly weekly existence 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 wig 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 and whom they have the most confidence." Which, first of all, is great advice about organizing. 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 at the political parties is incredibly annoying text messages and emails that you're constantly trying to find a ways to filter, or nightmare headlines that are screaming at you from the front.

Just like to be the name on the other side of those emails, I sometimes meet people who are like, "You text me all the time and I'm like, "You never write back."

It is a strange aspect of life. You have your public simulator account for yourself, you know this as a journalist, and then you have your actual human being self. But 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.

And it's fine. If they don't want to listen to you at that moment, you have to equip them with what it takes to make a decision about whether they want to listen to you by explaining what your messages about what the stakes are. That's very different from the messages that promise a 400% match with a zero replaced by an OSU. It can bypass this damn filter and all this kind of stuff that just 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. Well, there's also another interesting difference in 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 an including president came out of conventions. They didn't come out of primaries. And so 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 party regular saw it.

But you're not as the official democratic party deciding who will be the next gubernatorial candidate for the democratic party in Wisconsin.

Not only is the democratic party Wisconsin not choosing the next candidate in Wisconsin's case and I say this 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. 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 reform against party bosses and against 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 of Wisconsin. And the democratic party of Wisconsin, which had been kind of 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 new chartered 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. I think one of the strengths of the democratic party of Wisconsin, I'm very proud to have worked alongside thousands of people that build up over the six years I was chair, and I'm still an advisor and support the work of the party,

is to create 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, the democratic process to figure out who the nominee should be.

“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.”

One of the reasons I bring this up is that we're, we're in this moment where primaries in the democratic party, we're all they're getting very heated and very contested. So you have a sort of across the country. I mean, obviously here in New York, there are a bunch of very high profile primaries where DSA back candidates knocked off either. It comes in sore establishing back candidates. But in Wisconsin, you're having a governor told 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 from the party, but you are, we are in a moment where there is a kind of hot contest, over both what the democratic 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 in the choices being offered?”

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

My most important role will be 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 full of room that override 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 instead we had a, you know, a party that said, this is the person everyone can, you know, sort of if they don't like it. That actually would not serve well the work of building in the case of a student.

“And I think you can point right then I have to 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 is very much about organizing and you're, you know, you're an organizer going way back.

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-grab's question right now is how the democratic party we imagines itself.”

If it has to reimagine itself for a new moment, 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 Furman online about what the 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, with Gretchen Whitmer, with the Joshapiro.

You see these very focused on fixing the roads, making government work well, sort of staying out of big culture warry fights, right? There's a kind of Midwestern, solid nature to all of them. And now there's a heat coming from some of these same states, right? I'll do all I'll say, Ed and Michigan, Francesca Hong and 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.

So I'm going to challenge your premise on place sense. The first run is, if you look at candidates from DSA candidates all the way to centrist Democrats, there is essentially unified message to this election cycle around affordability.

There's differences 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 people.”

And that kind of message unity, you know, Democrats love to self-flagulate 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 and 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 D&C chair, I talked to the whole range of D&C members, 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.”

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 D&C chair Jamie Harrison said, if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don't run for an nomination, don't use our resources, don't rely on our volunteers, don't use our infrastructure. Folks, I'm building the party. You actually support James Carval and Ramen Man, you will 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 sit 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?

I think it's to be a very big tent. There is possible to get so far beyond the pale that party members and cells will vote to do something. I've seen Republicans running as Democrats in order to become spoilers. We saw Republicans super PACs funding, a valid anti-semites. In Texas, we saw 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 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 perpless places or the redest places in the country, and that does 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.

A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer, who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas, had been there for more than 30 years.

The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas's most notorious Cero pillars was actually innocent.

“It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make.”

I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it.

The last 12 weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts.

What do you think about the way that foreign policies becoming more of a litmus test in some of these primaries? So the way you sort of frame the party there was that there's a tremendous amount of agreement on affordability. You have everyone from Zorma, Donny, running on making your cheaper, or I cooper at North Carolina.

“I think his slogan is, "Make stuff cost less." 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. 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, not just what the goal is, but who is moral and who is immoral in it? So you know, as you're watching a playout, as you're counseling people how to navigate it, how do you see it? I think the fundamental thing is that there is a change. There's been change over years and decades and much more change recently. The realities on the ground that people are seeing playout, the horrors in the human suffering, there could be a big change in Israeli politics that could toward potentially change this year 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, a generation or two ago. Having a party that actually has a conversation about this, there are times when the conversation can be so vicious and extreme or violent, those things I do not like, and I think we should all fully oppose any kind of violence 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 front of mental 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 drawn that has the vast majority of Democrats and finds a path forward in 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 reflected 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 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, 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.”

So, come to this from maybe a different angle rather than get you to weigh in on primaries, you're not going to weigh in on, or should it? What is your theory of the median voter? Do you believe in the median voter? Do you believe in the median voter? Serum, how do you think about the people you're trying to win over at Wisconsin? 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% and a state-like Wisconsin is a huge amount of polling that suggests that there is roughly 10% in play, and 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.

They live in their real life and all these explosive squabbles between the two parties is just noise.

If you knock on the doors of the voters, what you find is people who have a bunch of opinions that don't neatly align without their 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 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 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 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 as not on my side, want something from me, then they're just not going to listen to your message at all. 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 what they do and don't like. And maybe that's more jumbled together than the parties would like to have it.

You can have somebody who believes in, you know, fall on marijuana legalization and, you know, believes in, you know, universal health care, but it's also pro-life, like, absolutely.

“There are a lot of folks at all the time. 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? So, last time I was on the show to pull a deep cat I talked about this book, the reasoning voter, that martial the 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 is 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 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, the George W. Bush decided that John Kerry was a flipflopper, and he drove home that message over and over and over.

And once you're a flipflopper, 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 master class in defining Mitt Romney, who many Democrats now pine for as a Republican opponent, but defining him as someone who is ripping 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.

“I think that as we 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 institutions people feel have failed versus recognizing and speaking to the truth that they do need to fundamentally change. The GOP has announced they're going to run a campaign of hate that they're actually has had this report that they're going to run a campaign trying to make this about, you know, Democrats holding disqualifyingly left-wing views. And the question is will that be more salient for voters?

That Republican message, then this fundamental question of whether you're supporting the administration that is both ripping people off and terrorizing them across the country.

That giant arm wrestling match between which of those started burdened more brightly in the sky will ultimately determine the outcome of the midterms.

What is Ron Johnson keep putting elections in Wisconsin? So, that's very painful. And he's our U.S. Senator. 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 then the last time was 2022, which had a Democratic president, he won by one percentage point, but he did well enough to do is 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 system. He's, I don't like this at all. He's a huge vaccine skeptic and COVID vaccine skeptic. I totally disagree with them 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 public life for and he's a champion on their side.

“And I think noticing when people feel unheard and sticking out 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 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 can actually with the things that matter most of that matter. I think one question here that people have is what it would mean to the Democratic Party listen to voters. So, that's sort of heartbreaking for Wisconsin Democrats for national Democrats Senate race in 2022. Very good for Wisconsinites for where Mandela Barnes loses to Ron Johnson.

The campaign against Barnes is kind of borderline racist. That's an understatement of best. There you go. Dark into skin tone in their minds. Yes.

And, you know, goes very hard on painting Barnes a soft on craft.

“That's a major attack Johnson uses and I think to some real effect.”

And Democrats won Senate races at 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 of Wisconsin and you're seeing versions of this playout in other parts of the country. You have Barnes running again. And you have, in in Hong, a candidate, well, the Barnes left who is, 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 it a bit, which is, there was an old Democratic Party that might kind of look at the situation and say it's 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 algorithmic attention age work very differently.

“But I think one of the things that Democratic Party is going to have to wrestle with is whether or not primaries are leading to sort of electrically optimal candidates.”

And so this is what I'm trying to get a little bit of this question of what is the voter want. But given what you've seen and given your point about the reasoning voter, I guess this question of even if the Democratic Party, like to the extent that such a thing exists, wants to listen to the voter, can it? 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 vying to 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 elections 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. It often comes down to the final, you have 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. 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 people have in a democracy, I think there's something incredibly sacred about protecting that fundamental principle.

It is, I hope we win every election. I hope that people who believe in democracy would 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. And that's an important and valuable process as well. This is an iterated process where each time you learn lessons from the last, you learn lessons from where things stand now and then hate forward in the next one.

“And I think there's a healthy debate both about how the Democratic party 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 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 collapse public trust that having systems that are manifestly and clearly and genuinely accountable to the public is vital to be able to preserve enough of the legitimacy to be able to move forward. And this is a moment when 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 when those elections is absolutely vital.

You ran for national DNC chair after the 2020 for election. What was your pitch to the DNC delegates? It's a funny experience to run for DNC chair. I found that there was actually the basis for 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. And it's a pleasure to be able to see how it feels to be able to move forward.

I also found that the DNC voters were a lot like voters in maybe any context, which is familiarity and trust, was a huge factor in how people may the decision.

And as his credit in that election, Ken Martin had been building trust and building relationships with the DNC members for years. I've been focused on Wisconsin. I missed a lot of the state party chair 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 are like, yeah, that idea sounds great and who are you again?”

[music] I'm Winnello. I write the game connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you. I'm Sam Azarsky, and I create the game spelling bee and letterboxed on a daily basis. And I have this thing called promisthisia. I see color when I'm listening to music. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the word word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds.

A fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem.

Well, amazing. And I'm Joel Follyano. I create your daily mini crossword. I've been making these puzzles for the times for over 10 years now, which is like 3000 minis.

I am begging the universe for any new five letter word. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com/games to start playing today. What's everyone's fastest many times? Four seconds.

No. What? I'll go find it. I have my screenshots on where.

“So as you note, the DNC chose, "Can Martin, I think it is fair to say that the broad view”

is that it has not been a successful tenure." As DNC chair, I think he's had a very difficult time sort of internal and surgencies, you know, kind of a debacle around the autopsy from the 2024 election. I think it actually speaks 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. Yeah.

And there's not, I got my criticisms of Martin, but I also think it's a tough time to be DNC chair.

If it moved into position where it says, I mean, it is currently 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.

“Are you to a lot of work was constant building something I think the people actually were quite excited about?”

If you were advising a hypothetical DNC chair on what could be done, what do you think the Democratic Party could be if we're willing to sort of reinvent itself as machinery? 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 power if they're elected.

They threw their actions and their messages. They define the brand ultimately in the biggest possible way.

So I don't think that messages, 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. It was 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. 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 of 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, 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, most people have no idea who their state representative for state senators, most people have no idea who the city council candidate is, or the candidate for district attorney in their county. Often, as an experienced many people have, they see those names on the ballot, and they think who am I going to text to ask them to vote for in this election?

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 400 one votes. That led to the rejerry mandering 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 a 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, 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 was constant 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.

In small towns across the state of Wisconsin building that kind of deep thick year round organizing for 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 so many 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 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 in service of people who believe in the idea of democracy itself. One of the most common frustrations I hear from listeners with the show just politically engaged people find my email. Is look, we're sitting, you're talking in a podcast studio in Manhattan. Some of the people listening may live in Wisconsin or Michigan or Carolina and a lot of them live in California or New York or New Jersey or Vermont.

“And they say, 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 exciting to get my, you know, letter writing in the mail.

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. 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. But when it was content 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 who 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 legislatures on the brink of winning a majority.

The state's project organizes these giving circles about 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 2020 election.

“There are essentially you have to plug into effectively run organizing it.”

I want to hold you on this for granted because actually there's some people email me this question all the time which is they get a million very loud emails.

They're not earlier about where to donate and they don't know what is a grift. What is maybe well-meaning but ineffective and what is effective. So on the Republican side, I said 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. It does amazing work that I'd recommend is the is called the state and local election alliance. S. L. E. A. 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. It was constant a whole bunch of other states. The state's product is amazing work. I think the Democratic Attorney General Association also dynamite attorneys general are suing Trump over and over often working with outside groups democracy defenders as a group that I'm an advisor for that is does amazing work in court. But 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 never expect the state representative from on a lasco west of the country.

But his ability to win when Republicans had drawn hyper-dairy-mandered 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. In a district that went for Trump and because of him and Lori Palmerian Oskasht was constant, Governor Evers was able to veto the Republican attack attack laws trying to threaten democracy and was constant at a free and free election in 2024.

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 core unifying ideas behind the democratic party. And I hope people who believe in those things, both through them into the work of building something bigger than anyone race.

“I think it's a good place to end. Always a final question. What if the books you'd recommend to the audience?”

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 unregid our state which wound up requiring the flipping of the state Supreme Court. At a national level, if we want to reform expand the U.S. Supreme Court, if we want to pass a new voting rights act, if we want to ban partisan jerrymandering, the only way to do it is by abolishing the filibuster and changing the way the U.S. Senate works. And Robert Caro's book talks about the U.S. Senate at a time when it was totally more abundant. 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 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, GMC Scott. And it's about the ways that you'd hope you'd 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 indulges a perfect example of that that's now costing, you know, just give me the passwords.”

Yeah, exactly. I can see the whole thing through the passwords and data transmissions. 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 changes, I do. There's something incredibly important about having a level of humility and a capacity to listen and learn about what it's actually going on. But also, the thing that defines the worst catastrophes,

it's always this combination of a kind of planapose imposed from above and a lack of democracy,

that means that the people who are affected have no ability to demand resource. You have famines in famously, a Marcha Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist wrote about this. The only famines have been in places that are not democracies. 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 "Salon Gabby Break the Universe."

And what I love about this book, it's said in a near future, there are AIs that are typically involved in the kids' lives. 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 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, "Salon Gabby Break the Universe" is a great place to start. Ed Booker, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Ed. [Music]