Bulwark Takes - Some Democrats Want Ben Wikler to Run the DNC. Listen to His Answer.

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Sam Stein speaks with Ben Wikler, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, about why Trump is not the main character for many voters, how groceries, gas prices, roads, and local relationships shape elections, and his plan for rebuilding Democratic power from the ground up.Buy Ben's book, "This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy" - https://www.amazon.com/This-Plan-Americas-Meltdown-Democracy/dp/1324131438

All right, hey, everybody. This is Sam Stein, managing under the bulwark. And I am pleased to be joined by Ben Wickler, who was formerly chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, former DNC chair candidate. And now a book author. I don't know which one was the tougher job. But you have the, it's right there behind you just so people can buy it on Amazon.com. It's called This Is the Plan, How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Ben and I were talking off camera a little bit about the tortuous process that I believe bookwriting is, but Ben seemed to enjoy it. maybe he's a sadist. Ben, thanks for doing us. Appreciate it. Sam, great to be with you. It is easier than running a political party. I'll tell you that. There are fewer people met at you at every given moment

along the process. And for me, like, I was so in the trenches for years as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for six years before that, for years as the DC director from MoveOn.org. And really, I talk in the book, my first campaign I volunteered on. I was 11 years old when my godmother, yes. So, Aida Deere, my godmother ran for Congress when I was 11. She became the first American Indian woman to win a congressional primary. She'd been the leader of the Menominee tribe. And when she won the primary, she went up and said, I've been waiting a long time to say this, me nominee. And it was like this perfect political joke that steered itself in my memory and made me think, you can have fun with politics.

This is great. Little did you know that would lead you to this place. Let's talk about why, I guess, why you felt like, now in this era of, you know, influencers and everything's online and people don't read past the headline and you watch 10 seconds of video and then you move on to the next thing because you're scrolling. Why a book? The book argues essentially for a non-doomscrolling approach to politics. And so maybe the people who are taking the time to read books or listen to audiobooks. I've read the audiobook myself, I should say, which is a delight to be able to do, that if you have the

patience to actually listen to a book or read a book that maybe you can find the energy to roll up your sleeves and get involved in essentially the slow food version of politics, which is what I argue for in this book, that there is no one election, there's no one magic message, there's no one secret trick that can allow us to unrig the political system. But what there is is the work of actually building a group of people to get involved on a regular basis for years that, like, slowly but surely can unravel a system of anti-democratic control of, you know, domination of how public life works in this country by a handful of super wealthy, powerful people. We've done this in Wisconsin, and it took years to be able to do, and there were no shortcuts.

But if you think about all the steps in the chain, the like series of dominoes you have to push over, you can actually get out of this mess. And that's the reason I wrote this and the reason why I think it takes a book to convey the whole thing is that it is, it's going to take a whole bunch of different steps to be able to get out of it, but so many people are carrying around the sense of fatalism and hopelessness, and it's going to be like this forever. And my argument is that, in fact, if enough of us roll up our sleeves, there is a path to a vastly better, more small, the democratic future,

a country that works for everybody. And we've made huge strides in the past and we can do it now. And this is a, this, I trace out the roadmap exactly what we need to do to get there. You know, it's funny that you mention it because I do want to start with, 2010, the elections there, but actually you should go back a little further to 2008, because I think what you're getting at is something that a lot of Democrats need to grapple with, which was 2008. Obama's elected. There's this intense sugar high of being politically active and an assumption, I think, among a lot of people that things are going to change forever.

The permanent liberal majority, you know, the idea that like there's potentially 60 sentities, and in fact they got to 60 Senate seats. There's just euphoria. And it feels like a chapter has been turned on Bush. And then, frankly, it looks like in retrospect, the eye was taken off the ball or the foot off the gas, whatever cliche you want. But can you speak to that sort of time period, the kind of the rush of excitement and then how quickly people just sort of got complacent? Absolutely. And you're exactly right.

I literally was dancing in the streets on the night of 2008. I had poured my heart and soul into supporting the Obama campaign. I was at that moment working with Move On on their election campaign efforts. And I was one of millions of people who felt like this was this watershed moment that we turned a corner as a country that, you know, the things were going to go in the right direction. And then there was this titanic battle to pass the Affordable Care Act, which works. And then, you know, kids up to 26 getting into their parents' health insurance and millions of more people got health care. obviously huge amount left to do and lots of problems in the law. But the sense of forward motion brought so many people.

And what did not happen is that all of these neighborhood action teams that had formed to help elect President Obama through the Obama campaign in 2008, they did not become neighborhood action teams focused on politics in their neighborhood that then would work on city council races and mayoral races and then the state legislative races in 2010. In fact, the right started pouring huge amounts of money into state legislative races in a moment when Democrats were kind of ignoring them on a national level, aside from a few brave souls. And so 2010 became this backlash. There's almost always a backlash against the party of the president in a midterm election. But Democrats fell over like a House of Cards, and Republicans took control of state governments across the country and then used their power in those states, very much including my home state of Wisconsin, to change the rules.

to essentially wish for more wishes with political power to rig maps. There was a huge wave of intentional gerrymandering. This is the Red Map Projects that I say in the book, Red Map is a little illustration of gerrymandering because red stands for redistricting, M.A. for majority and P for projects. So they, like, packed some of the letters into one word and spread the others out in other way so they could fit stuff in. So they rate the maps. They suppress the votes.

They smashed unions. They passed anti-union legislation in Wisconsin. They did all these things to prevent the public from being able to have a say in government. And then they defunded public services and started steering policy massively to the right, including huge attacks on school funding, infrastructure, and road building in my state of Wisconsin, lots of other states. In 2012, the pendulum swung as it always does, but it didn't work outside of the presidential election. In 2012, Democrats won a majority of votes for the U.S. House, but they still lost the majority

in the House of Representatives. They won a majority of the votes for state legislature, in states including Wisconsin. Republicans expanded their majority in the state legislature. Republicans had essentially broken off a core aspect of how democracy is supposed to work through their power in those midterm elections. And there was not a kind of permanent campaign infrastructure on the Democratic side to be able to contest and fight back against this. And so it just carried over year over year over year. In many ways, we're still living in the country that was built by the GOP after the 2010 midterm election.

And you can say the argument in my book is we might have another chance to get this right. If we win in 26, we win in 2028, we have to use that chance both to build a permanent campaign infrastructure and to unrig a political system so that the question of whether we have a democracy is not on the ballot with every election. Let's take your homestead as sort of an example, a case study of how to move things back in the right direction. It's 16 years since 2010, and I would just argue Wisconsin. sort of clawed back to maybe the status quo that existed prior to 2010. Obviously, the redistricting is going to be, it looks like it's going to be undone. But like it took a lot of effort.

And it took someone like you atop the state party to sort of make sure that the attention was placed on the right races. But more than that, that they got national coverage and that people understood the importance of, for instance, state Supreme Court races, which in Wisconsin do generate a lot of interest. That's not true of every other state. Talk about how arduous the process is because it's, I think people just assume one election cycle could undo some of the damage. But in your case, it was a profoundly difficult, time-consuming labor-intensive process. So it's a huge volume of work. And I want to like underscore it. I write in the book, it's the work of thousands of people, including the chairs before me of our state party.

We went from having like three staff and debt after the 2008 presidential election. The next chair built it up to eight staff and some, you know, a positive bank balance. The next chair started the program of year-round organizing. I came in and built on that. So it goes to well before me and many, many people across the state who refused to give up. So the first thing is this idea that actually comes from the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign had this insight. They were, Obama was trying to run when he didn't have the support of the form.

Party. Most people who'd been involved in the Democratic Party were supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary. But he came up with an organizing strategy that basically said to anyone who wanted to help get a group of friends together, meet in your living room, meet in a coffee shop, go start talking to your neighbors, throw host parties, find people like a snowflake, you know, with the branches of the snowflake coming out from the center, not like a liberal melting snowflake, but like a lattice of connection between lots of people. It's called the Snowflake Organizing Model. And by doing that, they were able to win the primary across the country.

Engaged tons of people, had millions of volunteers in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race in Wisconsin, my predecessor chair, Martha Lennon, went back and rediscovered this model, the snowflake model, and decided to try to raise money to build a year-round snowflake-style organizing program that would literally be a neighborhood by neighborhood across the state and would work on every race, not just on, you know, a presidential campaign, not just one thing. But the core insight was that that kind of organizing gets stronger with every fight, whether you win or lose.

And so if you do it on a year-round basis, if people keep on building, and this happens on the right, the faith and freedom coalition on the right does this, the, you know, things like Turning Point are always on, they always exist, and they just keep on growing from fight to fight. if you do that, then especially in the least salient, the kind of like obscure elections no one's paying attention to, you can blow it out of the water. And in the really big elections where there's hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, maybe you can add a percentage point. But in Wisconsin, that is enough. In Wisconsin, five of the last seven presidential elections have come down to less than one percentage point. So this started, I fell in love with it.

It's what led me to run for a chair of the state party. And then I was able to help to grow it and work with all these amazing local volunteers around the state. and raise money to be able to support campaigns with ads and all the other things that go into a campaign. The core thing is that we sort of kept our motivation going in these more obscure races by connecting to this bigger picture plan about how we were going to end the gerrymander of the state that would allow us to get to our North Star, which in Wisconsin is to have a Democratic majority, Democratic majorities in the state legislature, a pro-democracy, state Supreme Court majority, and when you do all that, then you can actually pass laws that make a positive difference in people's lives

and not have them get struck down and shut down. And that has been our kind of guiding goal, and now we're just a few months away potentially from actually making it exist in Wisconsin. If we win the governor's race this fall, if we win the state legislative majorities, we'll be there. We have a five-two pro-democracy state Supreme Court majority now after just a gigantic amount of work. nationally, things are not actually as bad now as they used to be in Wisconsin. Democrats have more power in the federal government now than they did in Wisconsin in the most, in the most, you know, far right days. The gerrymandering nationally is less bad now than it was in Wisconsin just a couple of years ago.

The U.S. Supreme Court is not as right wing as the state Supreme Court was in Wisconsin just a few years ago. Like this is, you know, I look at the national scene and yeah, it's really grim, but it is not as bad as the thing we just thought of it. Let's be real about it for a second because, sure. Yes, statistically you can make the argument. I hear you and I'm all granted, but at its core, the Wisconsin voting electorate was more evenly divided than I would say the Mississippi or Alabama electorate is right. Yeah, but not more than the country.

The country. Well, sure. But if you want to, for instance, undo some of the voting, the gutting of the voting rights act in those states, right, it's going to require you to win the state legislature. legislatures in those states. Well, here's the, so this is where we get to the plan and this is the plan. Okay, this is tell me the plan. Step one is, like, let's be very clear.

The whole idea of democracy is under a, like, battering ram assault right now. And there's, Trump is doing everything through every federal agency, through state government allies, through, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in super PACs to try to take away the idea of popular, of the public deciding who holds power in this country. The most important line of defense that each of us kind of. fact is state governments, which constitutionally run elections. And the most critical state governments are those in the battleground states that will decide the 2028 presidential election. So the striking thing about this moment, the public is furious at this administration, it's furious about prices,

furious about a whole range of different things, ice agents shooting people in the streets. If that gets channeled not just into House and Senate races and things that you read about and see on TV, but also to state legislative races, to the North Carolina state Supreme Court race with Anita Earle, that's on the ballot this fall to winning trifectas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona's within reach, New Hampshire's within reach, Alaska is a possibility. Amazingly, there's also the chance of breaking Republican state-level trifectas in Iowa, excuse, yeah, Iowa, in Georgia, in a bunch of different states. If that happens, then come 2028, it will be vastly harder for Trump to invent votes that don't exist, to seize ballots. You saw in Minnesota,

you had a democratic state leadership that refused to turn over the voter rolls, even though there were ice agents, you know, marauding through community after community. And the Trump administration said, you know, give me your voting rules. We'll take the ice agents out. And they said no. And the organized and dealt with both problems. So that's the central job for the future of democracy now is actually the state level fight, as well as House and Senate. Yeah, by all means, go for them. Yeah. Well, let me pick on that for a second. Let me pick on that for a second. Because Trump, Trump presents an interesting sort of dynamic here. And I'm. curious how much you've, I'm certain you've thought about it, but I'm curious your experience dealing with it. What was the name?

Donald Trump. Yes, he's the president. You write it down. Yeah, you write it down. It's D-O-N-A-L. Anyways, to a degree, obviously he's galvanizing. Certainly we can see it right now. There's a huge intense backlash against what he's doing.

And yet, as someone who operates on this, who has operated on the state level and understands the importance of these state races, I do wonder to the degree to which you were constantly fighting the temptation for Democratic activists and donors to simply just focus on Trump and the federal races and holding him accountable vis-a-vis the House and the Senate to the neglect of statewide offices like the ones you describe as so critical. So what's so striking, I argue in the book that the voters who wind up making the difference in most elections, especially in, let's say race for governor or state like Wisconsin, There are voters who often think of politics the way that you and I might think of curling,

which is to say it's on to you for a little while every four years. It's like not something that is part of our lives. And if you follow curling, then you probably have a strong feeling about the Broomgate controversy about whether directional pads on the sweepers are, you know, legal for, should be legal in competition play. That's how most political like uproars sound to a lot of these voters. And some of these are people who would definitely vote for Democrats if they voted, but they're not sure, you know, if it makes sense to vote. Some of them are swing voters who might vote for either side.

Some might vote for Republicans. But the thing they all have in common is that politics is so far from the center of their lives. And generally, they think the whole political system is corrupt. All the politicians are crooked. They probably believe both sides attack ads if they pay attention to them at all. And meeting them where they are about the things that they're frustrated about in that moment is the essential thing. And usually they're not actually thinking about Donald Trump. Trump looms large over people who are involved in Democratic politics and Republican politics.

He's not the main character in the lives of people who never want to think about politics in the same way. And I think for national donors and for, you know, blue and red state activists who might think about making, you know, joining a phone bank for a battleground state, they're often very motivated in thinking about Trump. But when you're, like, knocking on doors with a state legislative candidate and you talk to someone about, you know, what's the biggest issue for you? very often it is it's grocery prices and gas prices right now like those things come up all the time and people are not thinking about the war in Iran or the war powers resolution they're just thinking about the fact that it costs $70 to fill up their you know their minivan or whatever and talking to them credibly about things that are like local relevant direct becoming a human being in their lives as opposed to being an avatar for some distant political party or you know

group of billionaire donors or whatever, like showing up as an actual person in their community, especially if you find some link between like you went to elementary school together or, you know, like something that grounds you outside of the political sphere. That's what makes the biggest difference to voters who hate politics, but who might vote. And that, the sort of practice of doing that is in a sense what I'm arguing for for people to do. If they have the ability to show up, do what's called relational organizing, we have a relationship with a voter that you're talking to. Statistically, it's the highest impact. you can do. It's something that can, you know, a lot of local elections literally come down to a

single vote. If you find, yeah, the person cutting your hair and convince them to show up, that can, that can flip a city council race. I tell the story of a local candidate who lost his city council race because his barber didn't vote in that election. No. Yes. I know. Can't go back to that barber? Can I tell you a story I want because you, you spot, you spurred a memory of mine. So post-citizens United for folks who don't recall, since it's United basically opened the floodgates for unlimited giving to allied packs. And so it was like a whole new world of campaign finance. And I was kind of curious if like what candidates who were underfunded would do in this world.

And one of the things that I was that I decided to do to find out like how you should go about doing it if you were a penny pincher and you needed to get every cent going as far as possible was I called the guys who were behind Moneyball, which is the baseball idea of like making good with a frugal budget. And so I called the Bill James. I don't know if you know who Bill James is. Yeah, yeah, I read the Bermetrics. Father Stametrics.

Bill James was a Kansas resident, and he had written the book on statistical analysis of baseball that was the inspiration for moneyball. And I got him on the phone somehow, and I said, well, you know, like, Bill, let's say you were running a campaign these days, like, and you had to do the Moneyball philosophy. What would you do? And he had this insane answer that actually was kind of stuck with me.

He said, I would focus on all the, deer, all the cars running into dears in trying to pass policies to stop deer overpopulation on how they're affecting the roads. He's like, it's a huge issue here in Kansas. And no one's talking about, and I was like, what the hell is he time? I looked it up in some statistical, some government record database. And it was like insane how many car fatalities were happening in Kansas because of deer population. And so he was just thinking sort of differently about how to come around these issues and get motorists motivated. That's perfect. It's a perfect example. And that dear are an issue in Wisconsin as well. And that, I mean, I have this,

I have this mentor in the 2022 midterms. If you want to save democracy, talk about roads. Because the voters who are like most on the fence about whether to vote at all or who to vote for, they're by definition, they're not thinking about democracy all day. But they think about roads every time they drive. Going to the thing that is in people's minds when they're not thinking, what is a political issue, but they're just thinking like, what is pissing me off today? that's that's the magic of messaging and doing it well requires actually going and talking to voters and listening to them interacting with it. But there's like tension here, right? Because your book is about salvaging democracy. It literally has the words save democracy in the title. And it's like to save democracy don't necessarily talk about democracy. I want democracy to not be an issue that we have to think about or vote on.

I want democracy to put the seed into the background. And the way to do that is that people who believe in democracy. win enough power. This goes back to this plan. Step one, protect 28 by winning in 26 in the state. Step two, win federal trifecta, House, Senate, and White House in 2028. Also keep winning at the state level. And then step three is in 2029, you need to pass, I think, a suite of major democracy reforms, like things that have passed in many times in the history of the country, but we have to do a whole bunch at once. Otherwise, we'll revert to exactly where we were in 2010 by 2030. But they didn't pass it. They didn't do it. Yes, I know. Why would it get done in 2029?

Because if they hope, then 2030 will repeat 2010. We'll be right back where we started, and maps will get rigged at every level. We will not have meaningfully competitive elections until 2042. If we don't get this right by 2030. So this is like there's a, you know, even beyond the immediate crisis, there's enormous stakes for the next whole generation of people of whether we're going to have competitive elections for House and for state legislatures across the country, whether or rather everything will be frozen.

the U.S. Supreme Court, I think, has gone completely rogue. And I would argue, like, we either got to expand it or create term limits, which is a proposal that several people have looked at so that to ideally turn down the level of partisanship so that it's not being used as a partisan club by one side and then the other. Like, and to do all this requires ending or, you know, maybe radically restructuring the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. There's a bunch of things you have to do. All those things are a precursor to then having, you know, a democracy where both sides can make their case about what kind of economic policy we need or, you know, how to how to think about different social issues. But there's these structural things that basically are built to support,

you know, far right domination of the country and hyper-polarization in a way they think, I think is bad for everybody right now. And to take that kind of gun off the table in the, and the grand drama of American politics, it means winning in 26 and winning in 28 and then doing a whole bunch with power in 2029 to unrig the American political system. So that's, that's the big plan that everyone's their neighborhood teams talking to their neighbors feeds into is how do we how do we defuse this kind of political time bomb that we're all living through when you were going through all your old memories and the stories to write this book and you're charting it down was there one or two moments where you felt like there's kind of like a butterfly effect or you just

like that really set us on a bad path and I wish we could have done that over yeah I mean in both directions. So the most positive kind of fights, there are really two of them that I think about. The first is the opening anecdote of the book. It's 2025, the spring of 25. Elon Musk is dismembering the federal government. He's just fed the U.S. Agency for International Development into the woodchipper and consigned hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people to their deaths by ripping away the basic food and medicine that they need. He's defunding. federal agencies that do food inspections, so we have explosive diarrhea raging across the country now. Obviously, we didn't know that in 2025.

He's also threatening to fund primary challenges for anyone in politics who gets in his way. And Democrats and Republicans are trying to figure out everything they can do to avoid being caught in his crosshairs. And he decides as a demonstration of his power and a way to ensure that the U.S. House stays rigged and to help his own lawsuit in Wisconsin potentially to try to buy the U.S. to try to buy the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin. and he pours $56 million into the state Supreme Court race more than anyone's ever spent on any judicial election in American history. He comes to Wisconsin. He puts a cheesehead on his head at a staging Green Bay. He hands out giant novelty checks written out for a million dollars to people who pledged, who signed his petition.

He says it's not a bribe for an election. It's a payment for people who become spokespeople for my petition. This ridiculous thing that's being criminally investigated. And for all the world, it looks like he. about to succeed and demonstrate that even down to state judicial elections to cross Elon Musk is to sign your own political descends. If he had won, we'd be in a much darker place right now. And instead, there's a backlash led by our candidate Susan Crawford, who says, growing up as a little girl in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I never thought I'd be up against the richest man in the world.

And she wins by 10 percentage point. And he is pushed out of the White House within, well, Trump said the next day that his time at the White House was drawing to a close. He goes out on his ass. He then tweets about how Trump is in the Epstein files and helps to kick off this entire push for the Epstein files because you've driven a wedge between the kind of two worst people in American politics, maybe among the worst in the world. And the voter uprising that made that possible was both this kind of overnight story of a response to his obscenity in that moment, but also the fruit of years and years of patient organizing by people on the ground in the state. And it meant that Wisconsin's state Supreme Court majority,

stayed pro-democracy, and it meant that I think collectively as a country, we saw that we could actually fight back, even at a moment when it seemed like everything had fallen apart. So I think of that, and I think of the 2020 state Supreme Court race that happened during COVID. It was the first statewide contested election during the COVID pandemic. And it only took place because Republicans in the state legislature sued and got the state Supreme Court to override the governor's executive order to delay that election. And everyone went to the polls. And in that election, then, too, it felt like Republicans had figured out a way to kind of short-circuit things. And on election day, I had this pit in my stomach. I felt like they were going to win.

And voters showed up and won that one by 10 percentage points also. That's because of that state Supreme Court victory, the state Supreme Court rejected Trump's attempt to overturn Wisconsin's presidential election in 2020 by a single vote. So that state Supreme Court fight, when people contracted COVID by going to the polls on election day. The COVID rates jumped in places with higher rates of in-person voting. They put their bodies on the line to defend democracy, and that's why Wisconsin's election wasn't overturned. And both of those races were the kinds of races that normally get no attention at all. And just now, there was a state Supreme Court loss in Georgia by 2.2 percentage points. For people who voted Democratic on other parts of the ballot,

they didn't know who the state Supreme Court candidate was. I'm grateful to the state party there for doing a ton of great work with great candidates. But like nationally, if we'd all been a little bit more obsessed with the Georgia Supreme Court election, they would have had a path to a Democratic majority by 2028. North Carolina has a Supreme Court election this fall. If you go back to 2020, their Supreme Court Justice, Chief Justice candidate, lost by 401 votes. That led to the gerrymandering of the state that granted Republicans enough U.S. House seats to give them a U.S. House majority right now. Mike Johnson would not be Speaker. Hakeem Jeffries would be speaker if it wasn't for North Carolina having 401 votes that went in a certain direction

in 2020. It's mind-bought. Like, once you realize how these little things have this giant ripple effect, it makes you want to like scream from the rooftops. This book is my attempt to do that. It's to say like, fight here, fight here, fight here. Here's what you can do. If we do all these things, then we can get out of this mess.

And that's the goal of this is the plan. I got to ask you before I let you go. You did run for DNC chair. You did not get it. The person who did, Ken Martin, has had a rocky run at it. The stuff you're talking about in this book is stuff you could have implemented as chair of the DNC. Do you think about that ever? I sometimes think about Ken Martin has said that he's been home four times since he got to like the DNC chair.

I have three small kids. When I got home after losing that race, my kids were like, Daddy, we're so excited that you lost. You know, at a personal level, I'm grateful. And it gave me time to step back and actually map all this out. Like, I think being able to write this book, I want to do everything I can to support folks who want to be part of this fight now. I also really recognize that this kind of energy has to come from below. This has to come from people neighborhood by neighborhood.

I write in the book, in Wisconsin, we don't try to think about the margin of effort in the poll. In Wisconsin, we don't think about the margin of error in the polls. we try to win by the margin of effort, which is like are enough people showing up day after day to be able to win by the skin of our teeth. And I think it's just going to take a whole lot of people getting involved in the Democratic Party and other grassroots groups and starting new organizations that might not have a name or a legal designation, but that are going to make sure that their neighborhood jumps up 5% and turn out this

fall and might tip a statewide election. And that's going to take all of us. I don't think there's any one role or any one position that has the power to make that change. But I hope that millions more people get involved. And that like me, when they do that, they find people that they love. I fell in love with my wife putting up posters for a protest. The kind of, you know, the collapse of American community, one path to trying to address it is for people to actually get involved in real life, not just on their phones, meeting people and getting involved in building a better democracy. You're saying political organizing is really a way to meet your significant other.

I got you. Your kids are several years older now, more mature, probably ready to go out on their own. Would you reconsider doing a stint at the D&C? I'm good. It's a very, very tough job, and I've got other things I'm up to these days. I know a lot of people would like you to reconsider. Let's put it that way. How about that?

Sermin-esque will not serve as nominated. Okay, that's Sherman-esque. Not in the cards. All right. And thank you so much, man. Good luck with a book. We're going to hawk it for you, so don't worry. It's right there on the wall.

This is the plan. Right there on his hand. And paper right here. And I read the audiobook. So if you enjoy it. You keep mentioning that. It seems like you have a very high opinion of your own voice. Well, I specifically, you know, maybe it's my broken brain.

I find it so much easier to consume audiobooks that I do books. And some people might be listening to this podcast who like listening to things. So it just seems to me like it's a perfect marriage of, you know, medium message and a messenger here. All right, you heard here first. If you like Ben's voice and you just want him to, like, talk you to sleep while he reads his book, you can download it as well as buying it. Do both.

Download it and buy it. Ben, Wickler, thank you. Ben, thank you so much, man. Take care. Appreciate it.