Ben Wikler dishes on the secret to grassroots success ^⁠22%

8/6/2026, 5:01:00 PM

Topics: Political Strategy, Voter Engagement, Campaigns

Keywords: Ben Wikler, Grassroots Organizing, Democratic Party, Elections, Midterms, Wisconsin, Political Strategy, Voter Turnout

BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Indoctrination as the most egregious example at 22.2% saturation with 552 hits. Analysis detected 1,895 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,486 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28.1% and a BS Rank of ⁠22% (24,114 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 78.80% of the article peer group.

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Daily Kos chatted with former Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler about his new book, “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy,” in which he details how Wisconsin Democrats built successful grassroots infrastructure to win critical local and statewide elections.

As Democrats stare down the 2026 midterms—as well as the 2028 presidential election—Wikler shared how readers can translate the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s work to their own communities.

He also shared his thoughts about the state of the midterms and the current debate within the Democratic Party regarding what kind of leaders we need moving forward.

Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Daily Kos: You just released a book, “This is the Plan,” about lessons learned from your time helping build the Wisconsin Democratic Party and how Democrats can take those lessons and translate them on a national level.

Do you want to give a synopsis of the thesis of the book and a pitch to Daily Kos readers on why they should go out and buy it?

Ben Wikler, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party: Daily Kos readers are some of the most passionately and intensively politically engaged people on planet Earth, and my goal in the book is to equip people who care about the disaster that the country's in with the best research and information and roadmap for how they can be part of unrigging the American political and economic system.

[That] starts with local races of the kind that the Daily Kos elections community often zeroes in on and winds up through a series of fights over years to come, changing the way we elect presidents and members of the House, expanding the Senate, putting term limits on the Supreme Court, and building a democracy that actually responds to the wishes of the public, including the public's wish for an economic system that works for working people.

DK: I think a lot of people right now are just tuning out because they feel so dejected, and they want to be disengaged because everything just feels so horrible.

What's your advice to people who feel like they don't even want to get involved because they're so burnt out and exhausted by the constant bad news?

Wikler: The key to building a lifetime of political engagement is finding a group of people that you actually enjoy politically engaging with.

And then with that group of people, as [author] Margaret Mead supposedly put it, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”

Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has itself illustrated the power of the quote.

Because there’s no evidence Margaret Mead actually said it, which means Margaret Mead said her thing and changed the world.

And someone came up with a quote, and some, possibly third, person tried to get the quote to Margaret Mead, and some fourth person put it on inspirational posters everywhere.

And that small group clearly changed the world.

The way to sustain political engagement often is to actually feel that you have power—that you're making a difference.

So a lot of what I zero in on in the book is that there’s specific fights where a little extra push can have gigantic long-term consequences.

If I could go back to one election and add 402 votes, it would be the North Carolina Supreme Court race in 2020 that led, over years, to the gerrymandering of that state's congressional maps and the Republican U.S.

House majority today.

But there are races like that one coming up in 2026—and probably also in ‘27, ‘28, ‘29, and 2030.

So if you and your merry band of political happy warriors can zero in on the fights that no one's paying attention to, but which wind up writing rules that affect the whole structure of American political power, you can realize the enormous power that a group of people can have.

And, especially, you can have a great experience if you're doing things that actually move the greatest number of votes, and I get into the art and science of how to do effective organizing as well.

DK: So it's the morning after the Michigan Senate primary, which kind of became this proxy battle between the insurgent left and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

What do you think about that race and the outcome?

What do you think it means for the future of the Democratic Party?

Wikler: Well, there's clearly some big debates that are happening within the Democratic Party right now about foreign policy, about domestic policy and healthcare, about big change vs. incremental change, and fight vs. conciliation and coalition building.

And Michigan is one part of a big national conversation.

Step one is what happens in primaries, and step two is what happens in general elections.

And the evidence that any part of the Democratic coalition can point to will be based on both questions.

I think it is healthy and normal for political parties that have been shut out of power nationally to have big internal debates about the right direction for the future.

And you don't see that kind of debate in the Republican Party because the entire party is dominated by one overweening would-be king whose opinion is the only one that actually counts.

In the Democratic Party, people get to make decisions—and you know we're going to have the biggest interparty conversation before the 2028 presidential primary.

But it is good to try out different things in the meantime and see what flies in what places, and also to see which factors—when it comes to candidates—make the biggest difference.

There are 100 different ways in which [Michigan Democratic Senate nominee] Abdul El-Sayed and [Democratic Rep.]

Haley Stevens differ from one another, and we might be able to trace any one of those differences to the kinds of coalitions that they're able to assemble in the primary and to how things go in the general election.

So I think that the best way to think about these battles, aside from passionate engagement on the particular side on which one finds oneself, is with curiosity about how it all actually plays out with voters.

DK: These 2026 primaries are kind of child's play compared to what's going to happen in the 2028 presidential primary.

Is there anything that Democrats need to do now to avoid a civil war in the presidential primary that could potentially cost them the election?

Wikler: I think the thing that every person has the power to do right now is to build a group of friends—maybe part of a national grassroots network, maybe just a local club, maybe part of your state party—but a group of people that gets engaged in talking to voters, in doing relational organizing and volunteering in election after election, that builds the muscle and builds the relationships of trust with voters that are on the fence.

They can allow the general election campaign for 2028 to be built in advance of the primary's conclusion.

That's been the strategy in Wisconsin going back to the spring of 2017, when my predecessor chair [Martha Laning] launched the neighbor-to-neighbor organizing program that is still our state party's hallmark.

And I think building that kind of neighborhood-by-neighborhood, friend-by-friend group, group-chat-by-group-chat strength is going to be of enormous importance—especially if there's a deeply contested primary in 2028.

So doing the work now to be ready for the moment after the nominee is chosen is work that people will never regret and be very glad that they undertook.

I think that the passion and energy that people bring to primaries can often obscure the fact that the work of winning a general election should not start the day after the primary.

It should start the day before yesterday.

And if you can't go back in time, then the best day to start it is now.

DK: Building off the Michigan results, it seemed like pollsters really whiffed there.

I think the consensus before the election was that El-Sayed was ahead by maybe 10 or 11 points, and it ended up being pretty close.

Do you think polls are similarly overestimating gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong in Wisconsin?

What's your take on that primary?

Wikler: The Wisconsin primary for governor has had so many twists and turns and ups and downs that I think the best attitude is to assume that nobody knows anything.

This will be decided when the final votes are counted on Aug. 11, and the last public poll that I know of had a different field of candidates than the race has right now.

The takeaway is that this is the time to get involved and commit to joining the fight on Aug. 12—whichever direction it goes.

I think that the primary electorates are notoriously difficult to model, and also we've seen response and non-response bias in polls ranging from presidential races to state legislative races in both directions for as long as I've been involved in politics, and well before that.

So I do think that, yeah, the future is very much uncertain.

The one thing that's certain is talking to voters that are on the fence and making the case that they should go your way.

DK: Speaking of Francesca Hong, I feel like Republicans are trying to nationalize candidates like her to try to paint Democrats as a whole as too extreme.

How do you think Democrats should combat that narrative?

And do you think it's one that's going to hurt the party's image?

Wikler: I think, for every candidate, relentless focus on the things that voters care the most about is a wise way to communicate that their priorities are your priorities.

And I think that that approach is generally the heart of those successful Democratic campaigns of all ideological stripes.

I also think Republicans overestimate the extent to which voters who are on the fence about whether to cast a ballot, or which party to vote for, live in the Fox News cinematic universe.

So often, Republican attempts to nationalize particular local candidates sound like dispatches from another planet to voters whose main concern is whether the pothole outside their house is going to get fixed.

DK: On the subject of political organizing, it seems like the Democratic National Committee is having some issues right now.

What do you think the ramifications of the DNC's problems are going to be, and how do we fix them before 2028?

Wikler: Nationally, it's pretty clear that there's a chance to have the resources to both support party-building at the state level across the country—which is important work—and also to infuse money into the emergencies that inevitably come up in a national political system that is as enormous and varied as ours.

And I think the U.S.

Supreme Court ruling that allows national party committees to spend unlimited amounts to support individual candidates expands the number of urgent gaps that are going to arise and need to be filled.

So I think that the work of DNC members and donors and leadership to paint a vision for how they're going to meet those urgent crises, while also doing the patient work of building party infrastructure and inspire folks to chip in and be a part of that solution is going to play a big role in shaping the long-term prospects of the party.

My hope is that, collectively, the whole Democratic and progressive movements keep the full picture in mind and invest in some of the less flashy but more significant battles, including state legislative races in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that could potentially deliver a trifecta in 2026.

DK: Do you have any plans to try to get involved in the DNC again, or are you staying out?

Wikler: My biggest focus is on making sure that Wisconsin carries the path forward to ensure that we win the trifecta in 2026.

My hope is that “This Is the Plan” helps inspire people across the country to get involved, including in the Democratic Party itself, and also many state, local, and national fights.

But I'm not seeking another leadership role at the DNC.

My focus is on my state and on mapping out the plan for everyone to get involved.

DK: Speaking of your state, I saw a news report that said you're maybe considering a bid for the Senate in Wisconsin in two years.

Are those reports true?

Are you going to run?

Wikler: I think I'm quoted in that piece as saying in an interview that I'll decide about the future in the future, and that is my intention.

I think the biggest question right now is whether democracy survives the midterms in 2026, and I'm going to keep my focus there.

DK: If you want to give one piece of advice to Daily Kos readers on how to go about engaging in this upcoming midterm, what would it be?

Wikler: If there's one tactic that I'd love to spread more around the world—at least the pro-democracy movement, the Democratic Party, and all the folks to the left of the Trump administration—the tactic is one with a terrible, impossible-to-pronounce acronym, which is PPVT, which stands for “polling place vote tripling.”

This is a volunteer technique that was started by a group that became known as Vote Rev that does in-depth behavioral science research on how to improve voting rates and voting behavior.

What they found is that, if you go to a place where most of the voters are Democratic, and you stand outside the polling place—outside the legal perimeter for electioneering—and you check in with people who just cast a ballot during the early vote period, and you ask them if they would be up for texting three friends right then and there to tell them that they just voted and ask their friends to vote too, you can get tons of people to send a ton of messages that have a huge impact on whether those people then go on to cast a ballot.

There's a lot of research that I write about in my book about relational organizing and how when people hear from someone they trust, it has a much bigger impact than hearing from a stranger.

But PPVT creates a way that you can talk to a lot of strangers and ask them to contact people they trust and multiply the impact of your time per hour.

So if I could wave a magic wand and get a whole bunch of people to do one single thing, that's what it would be.

But I have a list of many other things that can be done at different parts of the campaign cycle that similarly have a huge grounding in the voter turnout research.

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Ben Wikler dishes on the secret to grassroots success ^⁠22%

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Ben Wikler

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Ben Wikler dishes on the secret to grassroots success ⁠22%

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Ben Wikler

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Ben Wikler dishes on the secret to grassroots success ^⁠22%