Democrats’ Wisconsin Model Is On The Ballot In The DNC Chair Race

Few would dispute that Ben Wikler is a rising star in the Democratic Party.

A veteran digital organizer with groups like MoveOn, Wikler took over as chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 2019 and immediately scaled up fundraising, media and on-the-ground organizing. The results came quickly: With Wikler and incumbent Gov. Tony Evers at the helm, Democrats have been able to steadily break the GOP’s decade-long grip on power in the Badger State.

Now Wikler wants to take his talents to Washington and chair the Democratic National Committee. His argument is simple: He can do for the national party, now locked out of power, what he did in Wisconsin.

“In Wisconsin, we feel like we’ve seen this movie before. Republicans took over and tried to break everything to benefit those at the very top and prevent voters from ever removing them from power,” Wikler told HuffPost in a phone interview last week. “And as chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, I’ve worked with our full coalition to unite the party and fight back at every level of the ballot to win. That’s what we need nationally now.”

Wikler is one of four official candidates for DNC chair. His rivals are: Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party; former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley; and New York state Sen. James Skoufis.

Elections for the top post are set to take place on Feb. 1 in National Harbor, Maryland. The DNC plans to host four official candidate forums before then. Candidates will need to submit 40 signatures from among the 448 voting DNC members to qualify for those events — and for the final ballot, though DNC members can offer signatures to multiple candidates.

To date, the DNC chair’s race has focused more on who is the best person to manage the party’s nuts-and-bolts organizing and funding operations than on the kind of policy or ideological fights that defined the race in 2017 — the last time there was a competitive contest to lead the party.

Skoufis and, to some extent, O’Malley have marketed themselves as outsiders who can shake up a sclerotic DNC and effectively argue the party’s case in the media.

Wikler and Martin, a 14-year leader of his state party and chair of the Association of State Democratic Committees, are running on their existing experience as party managers.

Martin, who has occasionally rallied state party leaders in fights with DNC brass, now says he has pledges of support from 100 of the 448 voting members. He notes that Democrats have not lost a statewide office in Minnesota under his chairmanship, and while it’s true that Minnesota is more Democratic than Wisconsin, that distinction has also conferred on it less national money and attention.

Wikler, of course, has also presided over a handful of high-profile losses: Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris lost the state by less than a percentage point this year, and then-Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes narrowly lost to GOP Sen. Ron Johnson in the 2022 midterms.

But Wikler’s paradigm-shifting coup came in 2023 when he invested heavily in helping liberals seize the majority on the state Supreme Court. The court has since struck down Republican-gerrymandered congressional and state legislative maps, paving the way for Democrats to flip 14 legislative seats this cycle. Wikler also touts Harris’ stronger performance relative to every other battleground state and Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s reelection in a state Harris lost.

Thus far, Wikler’s biggest endorsements have shown a breadth of ideological support — from Third Way to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — but come from outside the DNC membership. HuffPost asked whether he had pledges of support from DNC members he’d like to announce.

“I also haven’t been running for this office for years,” Wikler said, in an apparent dig at Martin. “I have been focused on other work in the most closely divided state of the country, and we’ve been able to build something that has really moved the needle in Wisconsin. That’s what I want to do in the national party.”

Wikler did dodge two challenges from Skoufis, declining to say which states should vote first in the 2028 presidential primaries and whether Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier.

“The DNC chair can do a lot to shape what happens in the future, and we can do less to shape what happened in the past,” Wikler said. “For the primary calendar, the DNC chair’s essential job should be to run a process where all the DNC members are heard and that helps us to set a calendar that chooses a winning nominee, honors our traditions and our coalition and gives candidates a fair shot.”

That’s not to say Wikler has nothing to say about the party’s failure to appeal to a broader cross-section of voters, particularly those without a college degree.

Without mentioning Harris by name, he suggested that a bread-and-butter economic message was more effective than a focus on the dangers Trump poses to democracy and institutional norms.

“I remember saying in 2022, if you want to save democracy, talk about roads,” Wikler said. “In Wisconsin and Michigan, our governors won reelection by making the case that they’ve fixed a lot of roads since they were elected. And because they won, they were able to prevent foes of democracy from taking over the highest offices.”

It’s part of a broader understanding he says the party needs to have about voters who lack trust in institutions, and therefore don’t respond to appeals to the sacredness of a system.

“For the most cynical voters who have the lowest expectations of politicians, talking about democracy can feel like pie in the sky,” Wikler said. “We can see in the post-election data that a lot of those voters who start with the presumption that all politics is B.S. and the politicians are saying one thing and doing another — those are a lot of the voters that we lost in this election.”

To reach those voters more effectively, Wikler, the former Washington director for the liberal online organizing pioneer MoveOn.org, wants to expand Democrats’ “relational organizing” capacity — a term for the kind of political mobilization that occurs between people with existing relationships.

“There’s an imperative for us to get really good at supporting people talking to the people in their own communities and their own lives about the fights that are going to matter and then mobilize and take action,” he said. “So that’s a 3,244-county strategy, but it’s also an every-single-neighborhood-in-the-country strategy. That is going to involve empowering people to be their own messengers.”

Like nearly every other Democrat, Wikler also wants to find ways to communicate with Americans who no longer get their news from legacy media and are increasingly drawn to apolitical online influencers and platforms.

He envisions “having a team that can recognize what the next emerging platform is, that thinks about huge group chats as seriously as we think about cable hits, that thinks about streaming and YouTube and social strategy and vertical video, and recognizes that there will be a next thing every six months, probably for the rest of our lives” and then making sure state parties and down-ballot candidates employ a similarly rigorous and innovative approach.

“There are people who’ve been championing this kind of approach within the Democratic Party and Democratic campaigns going back years. We need to lift those folks up and find more of them because I think this is a new world we’re in,” Wikler continued. “Republicans, frankly, have lapped us on engaging in emerging media while we’ve been putting our biggest attention on traditional media.”

Wikler himself began his career working for the short-lived liberal radio station Air America. He went on to host a relatively early progressive politics podcast and has grown the size of his party’s communications team several times over.

The devil is always in the details, though. And while the DNC chair’s race may not be the forum for a policy-oriented battle royale, it’s hard to imagine the party meaningfully changing its standing with working-class people without reassessing at least some of the positions that go into its messaging, rather than merely the style and the delivery mechanisms of that message.

In an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” earlier this month, Wikler sounded, at one point, as if he thought marginal technical changes could have led to an entirely different outcome in the November election.

If not for Republican gerrymandering in North Carolina effectively eliminating three Democrat-held U.S. House seats, he noted, Democrats would have the 218 seats needed to control the House. Republican gerrymandering had been enabled by a GOP takeover of the state Supreme Court in 2022, he continued, underscoring the need for Democrats to compete more effectively in state Supreme Court races.

Pressed on whether he was diagnosing the problem too narrowly, Wikler clarified that bigger changes were needed to give Democrats a whole-of-government, working majority.

“It’s not just that if we had gotten a few things right, we would have won,” Wikler said. “Even if that’s true, we need to be able to win a lot more to be able to create a lot more positive change for people. It’s not that we want to go back to what was normal two years ago or eight years ago.”