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The man who has been hailed as “the best state chair in the country” is not a national household name. He’s not even a household name in his own state. But on a recent afternoon in the small village of Grafton, Wisconsin, Ben Wikler might as well have been Bono.
Two dozen middle-aged and retired volunteers stood in line to clutch the hand of the chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. “Thank you for everything you do,” they said, beaming at Wikler as he took a lap through the Ozaukee County party headquarters. “We’re so happy you’re here.” Like proud children before an admiring parent, the volunteers told him how much money they’d raised and how many doors they’d knocked on this summer.
“This is Connie,” someone said, patting a woman’s shoulder. “She just won the school-board race.” “Yay, school board!” Wikler cheered.
He was there to kick off the last day of door knocking for a Wisconsin state-assembly candidate who had very little chance of winning in solid-red Ozaukee County, an exurban district on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee. But the point was not to win, it was to lose by less. That afternoon, Wikler managed to deliver a speech with almost the same inspirational zeal as Aragorn at the Black Gate. “This election is a demonstration to ourselves as Democrats and to the country that there is change happening right now,” he told the volunteers—and a reminder to Republicans “that Democrats have not given up on democracy.”
Since becoming chair in 2019, Wikler has brought his party back from virtual irrelevance in Wisconsin. Four years after Donald Trump had demolished the so-called blue wall in the upper Midwest, Wikler’s leadership helped tip Wisconsin—and the entire presidential election—to the Democrats in 2020. Then, earlier this year, the millions of dollars Wikler had raised helped a progressive candidate prevail in the off-cycle state-supreme-court race, which will likely lead to a reworking of Wisconsin’s extremely gerrymandered maps.
Wikler’s talent is getting people to show up. He does this by framing every race as the election of a lifetime. “Resources tend to flow toward the places where they can make a difference or their imagination has been captured,” he told me.
Resources is something of a euphemism; he really means dollars. Thanks to legislation passed by Republicans a few years ago, Wisconsin is one of the few states in which individuals can donate unlimited amounts to political parties, which can, in turn, transfer unlimited funds to candidates. It is Wikler’s particular genius to have turned that weapon of fundraising against the party that made it law.
In the run-up to next year’s presidential election, American eyeballs will once again be on Wikler’s home. “If we could have a Ben Wikler in all 50 states, the Democratic Party would be in better shape,” Jon Favreau, the podcaster and former Obama speechwriter, told me. But people may be getting tired of elections with existential stakes, however much the party spends persuading them to go out and vote. Capturing imaginations once again, especially on behalf of an elderly incumbent with less-than-great approval ratings, could be Wikler’s most formidable challenge yet.
I hitched a ride to the Ozaukee County event with Wikler’s posse in their rented minivan. When I slid open the back door, I found the state party chair buckled into a seat in the middle row, his head grazing the ceiling. The 42-year-old Wikler, who is goateed and tall (6 foot 4), was wearing clear-framed glasses and a denim shirt over denim jeans. He looked like a Brooklyn dad—but Wikler is a dad from Madison, a fact he is very proud of.
I’d hardly sat down before Wikler launched into a 30-minute refresher course, for my benefit, on Wisconsin’s idiosyncratic past. Robert La Follette and the state’s socialist roots. Senator Joe McCarthy. Governor Tommy Thompson’s welfare reform. Then more recent history: Scott Walker’s ascension to the governor’s mansion in 2011, and Republicans’ success in flipping both chambers of the state legislature. Walker’s Act 10 legislation, which eroded the power of public unions. The GOP’s controversial and secretive redistricting project.
“How many times have you delivered that spiel?” I asked when he was done.
He smiled. “There’s actually an extended version.”
Today, Wikler lives in his childhood home on Madison’s west side with his wife, his three kids, and their enormous, excitable Bernese mountain dog. But before moving back to the upper Midwest, Wikler was the Washington, D.C., director of the progressive organization MoveOn, for which he led protests against Republican attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Prior to that, Wikler hosted a politics podcast called The Good Fight after a spell as a researcher and producer for Al Franken. The former senator from Minnesota remains a close friend. “He’s just brilliant—really funny and a really good writer,” Franken told me of Wikler last month, over the phone. “He has the full package, and that’s hard to get in a state chairman.” (The title of Franken’s 2003 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, was Wikler’s idea, Franken said.)
Then, in 2016, Trump hurtled through the blue wall, winning Wisconsin’s Electoral College votes for the Republicans for the first time since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Which is why Wikler ultimately decided to move back home and help revive his party’s fortunes.
As chair, Wikler is known for posting climactic Twitter threads about Wisconsin elections that go viral. He’s constantly giving interviews to convey the urgency of races up- and down-ballot. The central strategy of his chairmanship, Wikler told me, “has been to buy a bigger siren, and put it as high up as we possibly can.”
Most state parties in America have somewhere around half a dozen full-time paid staff members, but Wikler has expanded his staff from 30 to 70. He has a comprehensive digital operation, an in-house research group, and a full-time staff of youth organizers.
Since 2019, Wikler has used his connections in national politics to raise more than $110 million, an astoundingly high amount for a state party. His team’s most successful money-gathering endeavor was getting celebrities such as Robin Wright and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to care about the Badger State: In September 2020, the Wisconsin Democrats hosted a Zoom table reading of the 1987 film The Princess Bride that reunited most of the original cast. The event attracted more than 100,000 viewers and raised $4.25 million. So they did it twice more, with the casts of The West Wing and Veep.
Wisconsin could have gone the way of neighboring Iowa, which has turned sharply to the right in these past six years. In the Badger State, the trend toward Democrats began in 2018, when many voters revolted against Trump. But thanks in large part to the machine that Wikler has built, the party has continued to win by bigger and bigger margins in the state’s metropolitan areas in the past few cycles, and it’s losing by smaller margins in the Republican-leaning suburbs of Milwaukee. Although Democrats nationally have been hemorrhaging voters in rural areas, they’ve managed to at least stop the bleeding in rural Wisconsin, Craig Gilbert, the retired Washington bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, told me.
Statewide elections have proved to be the most rewarding battlegrounds for Democrats. In Wisconsin, Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 20,000 votes, and last year Democratic Governor Tony Evers narrowly won reelection. The only major disappointment was Mandela Barnes’s loss to the incumbent Republican senator, Ron Johnson. But just this past spring, Wisconsinites elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court in a race that broke turnout records and attracted donations from George Soros, Steven Spielberg, and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker.
Wikler’s legacy as a Democratic leader will be the nationalization of the state party’s donor base—something he’s achieved by arguing that Wisconsin is at the epicenter of America’s political battle. Whether that’s good for democracy is another matter.
The wealthy Democrats from California or Illinois who’ve done much of the donating are not ideal stand-ins for regular Wisconsinites. “Elections shouldn’t be a tug-of-war between a handful of billionaires on the right and a handful of billionaires on the left,” Matthew Rothschild, the former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, told me. “But Ben didn’t make the playing field. Republicans in Wisconsin made the playing field. The U.S. Supreme Court made the playing field.”
If Wikler’s strategy is to make politics in Wisconsin national, he is also committed to hyperlocal campaigning: Democrats should have a presence everywhere, Wikler believes. Which is why the van drove another two hours west from Grafton to Baraboo for an annual agricultural-equipment expo.
The state party’s Rural Caucus had set up a tent between the crop-spraying-drone display and a demonstration area for grinding forest products. Wikler gave a pep talk to some of his members before striding over to the Sauk County Republicans’ tent. “Hi, I’m the Democratic Party chair,” he said, extending his hand toward a trio of 60-something men chatting in the shade. For a few minutes, the four men went back and forth, a little awkwardly, about the successes and failures of the former Governor Walker and whether any of them were particularly excited about a second nomination of Trump. (They weren’t.) It was all pleasant enough.
Then, as Wikler turned to leave, one of the men took him aside. “I gotta tell you something,” he said, in a low voice. “I spoke with a gentleman over at your tent this morning, and I have never met a finer man or had a more reasonable conversation.” Wikler beamed. “As a party chair, that’s a delight to hear,” he replied.
We left Baraboo in the late afternoon for a volunteer picnic in Middleton, a leafy Madison suburb along Lake Mendota. The gathering was held in a lush backyard, full of unruly flowering shrubs and the kind of wacky animal lawn ornaments that seem to announce, A Democrat lives here!
The yard was full of gray-haired volunteers from different neighborhood door-knocking teams. “I don’t think we could have done anything without Ben,” JoAnna Richard, the host of the event, told me. “His leadership has been key: his connections, and how we fundraise and organize year-round.” A few minutes later, Wikler was giving his third and final motivational speech of the day, thanking people for their work over the past few years. We’re “building something bigger than any of us,” he told them. “You’re at the heart of that project, in a place that is the most key furnace for democracy—the key engine, the center of the web.”
Republicans are working hard for a rebound in Wisconsin. Later this month, they’ll host the first debate of the GOP presidential primary in Milwaukee, and the Republican National Convention will be held in the same city next summer. That national attention will be good for the state party, which has recently under-raised Democrats.
“They’ve been very good at getting Hollywood money,” Brian Schimming, the state GOP chair, told me by phone, with what sounded like a mix of shade and envy. “It’s hard to compete with” the Democrats’ celebrities and wealthy out-of-state donors, he said. “I need to nationalize Wisconsin a bit more.”
This time around, Republicans are certainly going to be more focused on fundraising. “Ben would be kidding himself if he thinks he or his successor can always win the money race,” Rothschild told me. But money is not the race that ultimately matters.
“I’d rather have my problem than the problem Ben has, which is an extraordinarily unpopular sitting incumbent,” Schimming told me. “Our folks are really fired up about this race.”
Wikler, in fact, does seem a little nervous. He worries about a low-turnout election—and that people aren’t taking seriously enough the very real possibility of a second Trump presidency. “In 2020, people were ready to do anything to beat Trump. I had people retiring early and moving to Wisconsin to volunteer,” he told me in the car. “None of that’s happening right now.”
Every recent presidential election in Wisconsin has been decided on a razor-thin margin, and Wikler’s job is to engage more than just the highly educated, high-income activist types. He’ll need to stitch together a delicate coalition and get them all to fill out a ballot: young people in Dane County; Black voters in Milwaukee; moderates in the suburbs and the small cities around Green Bay. The hurdles are already high, and Biden doesn’t exactly get many people’s blood pumping. “I’ve been concerned about that since 2020,” Favreau said. “It’s easy to see a scenario where a couple people say, ‘[Biden’s] too old. I’m going back to Trump.’” It’s even easier to see a situation in which some Wisconsinites, weary of it all, simply don’t vote.
In JoAnna Richard’s backyard in Middleton, Wikler was winding up his pep talk, a little breathlessly. They’d be working “throughout this year, and into next spring in the local elections, and into next fall in 2024,” he said. “And then we’ll continue six months after that in the 2025 local elections! And the next state-supreme-court race—”
A few people audibly sighed at this point, likely in anticipation of another two exhausting years door knocking and phone banking and envelope licking in defense of democracy. A man near me shouted, “We’re tired!” But that moment of wavering enthusiasm lasted only a fraction of a second before the whole group began to laugh.
Sure, they’re tired. But for Wikler, they’ll show up.
Will everyone else?
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Elaine Godfrey
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