A Political Technocrat Makes His Pitch for Saving the Democratic Party
What if the problems aren’t actually massive in scope?
POLITICAL PARTIES OUT OF POWER often turn for salvation to those pledging bold, radical fixes. The aftermath of the 2024 campaign has been no different: The prevailing sentiment among Democrats is that they desperately need not only to rethink policy but to reimagine tactics if they want to taste influence again.
As he vies to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee, however, Ben Wikler, the current head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, is suggesting a simpler, less elegant approach.
If Democrats hope not just to regain power but to build sustainable majorities, he argued in an interview with The Bulwark, they must undertake two somewhat brutish, fairly work-intensive tasks: direct confrontation with Republicans and direct communication with voters.
[Watch Sam’s interview with Ben Wikler on Bulwark+Live here / YouTube here]
Wikler packages his prescription under the label of “permanent campaign.” By this he doesn’t mean waging a presidential race twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for four straight years, but rather a “fifty-state strategy,” akin to what Howard Dean adopted as DNC chair in the aughts, but with tailored engagement to races and needs in each state. And that includes efforts to reclaim huge swaths of the media landscape from conservatives.
“I think that the message for us to remember as Democrats is that if we just walk out of the room, then someone else is the only person talking,” Wikler said. “We can’t let Republicans be the narrators about what Democrats are about.” Democrats, he explained, should be “talking on every platform and in every place, including places where people disagree with us a lot.”
There is no tried and true mechanism for Democrats to reclaim power after losing it. After the 2004 election, the party elevated more conservative candidates and took back Congress two years later. After 2016, resistance movements (led by the Women’s March) made up much of the opposition to Donald Trump.
Wikler’s pitch is, largely, that political technocrats with experience in partisan trench warfare can lead the way this time around. He’s been on the frontline in the most critical battleground state in the nation and has a record of success, clawing back power and helping to stave off losses . . . until Kamala Harris’s this year.
But even in the 2024 results he sees green shoots—not least because Wisconsin Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state Senate and flipped assembly seats (in addition to sending Tammy Baldwin back to the U.S. Senate). Wikler believes that there is a misperception that abortion no longer moves the dial for Democrats, arguing that the results would have been substantially worse for the party had its candidates not run on protecting economic rights. He argues that Democrats were not hurt by their record but because a significant portion of what they achieved (much in the form of COVID relief) was eventually stripped away. He says that the data shows that where the party engaged voters most aggressively, it did the best.
The issue wasn’t so much the Democratic brand as it was the misperceptions of it. The goal, in turn, is simple: do the work to make sure those misperceptions don’t take hold.
“What we know is that the core values and the policies that Democrats propose are generally quite popular and people’s perception of what Democrats want is wildly unpopular,” said Wikler.
Wikler is running for the chair against a number of other prominent state and local officials, including Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and former New York Assemblymember Michael Blake. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha have both said they’re mulling bids. Rahm Emanuel and Sherrod Brown have also been rumored for the post.