On with Kara Swisher - Ben Wikler Has a Plan to Save Democracy

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Ben Wikler, political organizer and former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, joins Kara to discuss his new book, “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.” Drawing on the grassroots strategies that helped Democrats restore a competitive democracy  in Wisconsin, he lays out a national plan to defeat Trumpism and halt America’s slide toward authoritarianism. That starts, he argues, with building a year-round organizing operation capable of competing in races at every level of government. They also discuss the Democratic Party’s internal divisions, the future of the filibuster and structural reforms including a national popular vote, a national ban on partisan gerrymandering and Supreme Court term limits. Plus: how election officials should prepare for President Trump’s attempts to interfere with the midterms. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is maybe a scary bet to take. I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE Act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of voters, Republican voters as well as Democratic. Yeah, that's a technical term. Piece of shit legislation. Yes. That's the term of art. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Ben Wickler, political organizer and author of the New Yorker. book, This is the Plan, How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Ben has worked in progressive political organizing for over two decades, including as the former Washington director of Move On and later as chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. During his time as chair, Democrats won 10 out of 13 statewide races. Ben is credited with leading a political comeback for his state party and turning the Wisconsin Democrats into what the New York times called a fundraising colossus. Ben ran for the chair of the Democratic National Committee in

2025 and lost to Ken Martin. Later that year, he stepped down from his role as chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. He's now applying the grassroots organizing strategies that worked in Wisconsin to a national plan, which he argues could defeat Trumpism and end America's slide into authoritarianism. I think it's really important to talk to all these various political organizers as the Democrats try to figure out their way out of the wilderness and actually to winning back the American populace. It's a really important time to think about various ways to do that. And this is yet another. And Ben is one of the smartest thinkers in the country about this.

Our expert question today comes from Ested Herndon, veteran political journalist, and host of the Vox Media podcast, America, actually. So stick around. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business takes everything you've got, and a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other, and that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there's O-D-O-D-O-O-O-D-O-O-D-O-O-D-O-com that actually might help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try O-D-D-4 for free at O-D-O-D-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-O-com. Right, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer?

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Upbrent payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180-month plan required, $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. Initial term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Ben, thank you for coming on on. It's a delight to be with you today. I want to sort of set the table. You talk about the need to unrigged America and build a quote government that works for people instead of plutocrats.

It's a recurring theme in U.S. politics forever. When Teddy Roosevelt campaigned for the Progressive Party in 1912, he reeled against the unholy alliance between corrupt businesses and corrupt politics. Obviously, I talk about it a lot ever since the inauguration and the sort of rightward shift of the text. Moguls, who are the ones we're talking about here. Talk about how it's the same or different today. Are we always sort of doomed to this rigging of whatever particular business group is in on top at any one time in the United States? Go back across the history of the country. There are waves of power that accumulate in a tiny number of hands and people trying to lock in their power and control. And then there are waves of the public rising up and then changing the

rules to be able to protect the idea of democracy and expand the circle of freedom. That's a cycle we've always had. In this moment, there's a more rapid and bigger accumulation of wealth and power than we've ever seen. And Elon Musk is at the top of it. He's the world's first trillionaire. There could be more trillionaires. Well, he's not, Ben, he's not a trillion. Not anymore. He was briefly the world's first trillionaire. That's right. There's a real possibility that with artificial intelligence that even more wealth and power will accumulate in an even smaller number of hands. In the United States, we've had these waves of very rapid enormous wealth accumulation and then attempts to kind of ossify and control the system. And there are so many levels of government

that occupy so many different parts of the power structure that you have the local robber baron who then buys and sells the state legislatures. I think that right now, if you think about the way that Google sort of sucked all the advertising money out of the world and it meant that all these institutions supported through advertising fell over and, you know, a couple of companies became worth multi-trillions of dollars met it did the same thing. Artificial intelligence has the possibility of doing the same thing for all kinds of work, right? It's suddenly there's one place that you can go to do this one thing more efficiently.

And that threatens a more rapid and total wealth accumulation and could turn into a power accumulation than anything else that we've ever seen. So I do think there's something different about that time in this sense. but we have also seen versions of this movie before, exactly as you say, in the first progressive era, we saw the American economy totally transformed mass dislocation of most people's jobs. People moved from like 90% agrarian to moving into cities to work in these factories. And it took the labor movement and it took the progressive movement. It took trust busting. It took creating workers' health and safety administration, all these different things to be able to get to a point where the explosion of growth actually led to an improvement and

living standards for regular people. And that took the reassertion of Democratic control of how the rules of the American political and economic gamer set. Well, we're going to get to how to do that in a second, but let's look at what you did in Wisconsin, where you led the state Democrats for six years. You open your book with the 2025 Wisconsin State Supreme Court election, which was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. The Republican-backed candidate was backed by Elon Musk, lost to the Democratic-backed candidate, Susan Crawford. The Wisconsin Elections Commission now says Musk, likely broke election bribery laws by offering voters a million dollars, those idiotic checks he put up. It would surprise you most about the election and what he did there, aside from the cheese hat,

which when he did that, I thought it's over. He also didn't have a lot of power without Trump next to him in an interesting way. So money wasn't the only thing that mattered. So talk a little bit about this race and why it was important. So the first thing to move yourself mentally back to the spring of 2025 is to remember that not. not only had Musk been the biggest donor for Donald Trump, and not only was he effectively running the federal government and dismembering it from the inside, including defunding aid programs that keep millions of people alive, he was also threatening to fund primary challenges against anyone who got in his or Donald Trump's way. And so people in both parties

were falling over themselves to find ways to not get the eye of sar on upon them. There was this real sense that if he had figured out how to turn money into power, into votes and win whatever elections he wanted. There was no stopping him and Trump from carrying out every one of their plans. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, I think, was supposed to be the ultimate demonstration of that. This wasn't the presidential race. This had been until that point, a fairly sleepy local election in one state. And here he came with an amount of money that nobody had ever seen spent in this kind of context. With tactics no one ever seen, he was flying in people to knock on doors. He was offering these bribes. He was funding massive TV ad campaigns. The ads he was

funding were actually all about how Trump was endorsing Brad Schimel and how you needed to support Brad Schimel to support Trump right after Trump had won in the state. So the strategy was very much to say, we have the power, we're in charge, do not get between us and what we want. And what we saw with Susan Crawford, our amazing candidate, she started going around the state and saying, I never dreamed as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. I'd be up against the world's richest man in a fight for democracy. And we also saw this, grassroots army, basically, these thousands of people who had been organizing continuously, often in races exactly like this, in multiple state Supreme Court races, in local races across the

state, going neighbor to neighbor and talking to people that they had long relationships with about how this was a race you had to vote, you had to show that Wisconsin could not be bought. But there was this even deeper principle about whether democracy in our state would be for sale, whether Wisconsin could be auctioned off based on these giant checks. In a lot of ways, he was kind of a perfect villain for you in that regard and the kind of extensive efforts he took, including putting himself at the center of it, you know, looking like a lunatic. So that helped you, correct? I do think that having the perfect villain allowed a message to really ring through very clearly that the people who were ravaging and terrorizing the country wanted to do the same thing to Wisconsin and you could fight back by getting involved in the state Supreme Court race. Having a really clear electrifying message like that. that really mattered. But also having the courage to get up and go out and keep showing up in a race where it seemed like the odds were overwhelming, a lot of people were shocked that Elon Musk lost that race after everything that he poured in. A lot of people thought we were totally cooked. I remember vividly this question of whether it made sense to go after Elon Musk because it could provoke him to do even more. And I think the fear that if you punch the bully is going to crush you like a bug can make a lot of people want to shrink back. And to Susan Crawford's enormous credit, she did the exact. opposite, and it worked. So when you think about what he was doing there, which I suspect he's

going to be doing in the next race, possibly, the upcoming midterm elections, he's already put $90 million across the country. What did he do right and what did he do wrong? So it's funny. I feel like he approached politics the way he approached Doge, which is to have a big theory and then apply it without paying any attention to whether it was actually working. And one part of his theory was very smart, which is that there's a whole bunch of research. I dig into this in the book, because a lot of my goal in the book is to equip individual readers with what is the most powerful thing they can do to get us out of this mess. And I write about the same research that I'm pretty sure whoever was advising him or he himself had looked at, which is that the most powerful

thing to shape someone's vote is to hear from someone that they trust. It is to hear from someone they have a relationship with. I quote Abraham Lincoln who says in 1841, he wrote, keep a constant eye on the most doubtful voters and from time to time have them talk to by those in whom they have the most confidence. So Elon Musk strategy was to bribe people, pay people, possibly break the law, to sign a petition saying they opposed activist judges and then to pay people for referring other people to sign the petition. He was going around trying to manufacture relational organizing where people talk to other people that they know and giving this financial incentive to do it. And he's not wrong that if you're here,

hearing from someone that you know to get involved in something, it has a really big effect. And a lot, like the huge share of Republican campaign finance at this point, this is the turning point USA strategy, it's the Faith and Family Coalition strategy, it's Elon Musk strategy, he has an America PAC that was doing this in a big way. That is a smart tactic. And on the Democratic side, I think there's a lot more to be done. There's some groups like Empowers one that are doing relational organizing. I think there's a ton more that is absolutely worth doing there.

Like a lot of states, Republican wave in 2010, going back further shape with the politics of Wisconsin, so much so that one journalist called it a democracy desert in 2020. But you've shifted that. We'll get into some of the details. But as we go high level, what did you do and how does it apply to national politics? So Wisconsin experienced a mini version of what's happening to the whole country now. I argue that Project 2025 is reheated Project 2011 from the states. Right, right.

And as we learned in Wisconsin, just as we learned nationally, while it's great and important to beat the guy in charge, we beat Trump in 2020, we beat Scott Walker in 2018, it is not enough. You actually have to fight for all the other levels of government, too, because they all make the rules for all the other parts. So in Wisconsin, we've seen the same drama we've seen everywhere in the nation that the far right has reached down into local races,

has tried to elect mayors who will block the absentee ballot drop boxes. They try to elect judges who will restrict their right to vote. They elect state legislators who are committed to gerrymandering, House and state legislative districts. And you have to look at how the different parts of the power system interlock and figure out how to trace the path to being able to unrig the whole thing from the inside. In Wisconsin, we thought, we tried a whole bunch of strategies to try to unrig our state legislative maps. There were federal court cases. There was having a governor who could veto Republicans' maps. None of that wound up working until we flipped the majority in the state Supreme

Court. That wound up being the skeleton key to unlock the whole system in the state of Wisconsin. And that meant building a permanent campaign where a ton of people in small towns and cities and suburbs everywhere got involved over and over not about one candidate, often about people that they only were learning about a few months before the election, not about one race or one office, but about this much bigger, deeper idea about being a democracy that works for everyone. That kind of permanent campaign to me is what we need at a national level now. Right, a permanent campaign. A permanent campaign. And by that, I don't mean ads on TV in every ad break in every state, every second of the day. What I mean is actually building, organizing at the local level, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood all over the country so that in all these races at all levels of government,

we're able to drive up participation to encourage and persuade people to get involved in these races, that otherwise go unnoticed. I talk in the book about race after race that comes down to a few hundred votes that winds up It's like starting a row of dominoes that winds up giving Republicans control of the U.S. House years later. And those races are happening all the time right now. There was a Georgia state Supreme Court race just in this May where the Democratic candidate lost by 2.2 percentage points.

And the reason she lost is that a whole bunch of Democrats voted in the governor's race but didn't know about the state Supreme Court race. So they didn't know which candidate to vote for. If we can zero in on those kinds of races on top of the critical work in the House and Senate, but if we build that kind of muscle to be able to go after the whole ballot, that gives us the power to pick apart this knot that's been tied that stops the public for ruling. What are some of the most consequential local races we need to pay attention to right now? I would say that the most critical ones in 2026 are the governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and state legislative races, especially in the battleground states. And the reason why I say that is this gift we have in the Constitution that elections are run at the state level, not the federal.

level. So Donald Trump keeps trying to take over the election system in the country, and he keeps getting slapped down in court. And the reason is it's literally right there in the Constitution. That means that in 2008, when he attempts his next coup, if there are governor, secretaries of state election administrators, and if their laws passed at the state level to protect the sanctity of the electoral system, he will not be able to steal the next election. We came so close to Trump stealing the 2020 race. In Wisconsin, it came down to a single vote on the state Supreme Court, a four three decision. I write about the moment in the book when I was an elector in the electoral college that moment when we found out the decision came through. He knows exactly where the vulnerabilities

are, and he's going after them. The reason why he's flipping out and calling for these voter suppression laws and trying to nationalize the election system now before the midterms, it's not because he cares about what happens in the midterms. It's because he knows that his ability to run a successful coup in 2028 depends on winning control in the state and state legislative races in 2026. So I map in the book, and I'm happy to say, here, state by state, but basically which states are likely to tip the 28 presidential race, those are the states where you have to win power at the state level now to make sure that the system is not vulnerable to sabotage. Which are? Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, all those states

could become Democratic trifectives. Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms could win the governor's race and prevent Republicans from gerrymandering and passing anti-democracy legislation before 28 if we're able to pull that off. North Carolina was one of the closest battleground states in 24. There not only can we stop Republicans from getting supermajorities in the state legislature, there's a state Supreme Court race. That if Anita Earle wins re-election, there's a path to a pro-democracy Democratic majority in the state Supreme Court by 2028. Those are the closest battleground states. The closest state that Harris won, New Hampshire, currently a red trifecta, has incredibly restrictive voting laws. That could flip to a blue governor and both chambers of the state legislature

this cycle. And winning there would give another margin of protection for democracy. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from NetSuite. There's a lot of talk about how much you need AI in your business, and that can definitely feel overwhelming. Because the truth is there's still a lot about AI that business owners don't exactly understand, but it still feels like your competitors are pulling away from you.

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Talk about the tensions with, and I was at a dinner last night here in Michigan, where that was you could feel it, like with the centrist versus the left, etc. What do you make of the tensions, including the popularity of the Democratic brand and how does it impact the ability to organize and build a cohesive opposition? The first thing is when a party loses power, that is the time to look in the mirror and most critically look at the voters and try to figure out what is not working here. So it is healthy to have big debates right now. It's healthy for people to make different arguments about strategy, tactics, message, where we need to go. If you look at when parties lose power and then regain it, in a durable way, it tends to be when they actually have this kind of hard conversation with themselves and try out different approaches. So I think we should welcome some conflicts, some debate, some life within the party. The second thing is the second thing. The second thing is, I'd say is that so many people, they, A, they want real change. They feel like the country's not working for them in their lives. They can't afford anything, the basic needs that everybody has. And secondly, they know that in order to get that change, they need to win. And so a lot of the

frustration that Democrats have with the Democratic Party is the sense that it is not good enough at winning right now, that we've lost to the worst guy in the world, Donald Trump, how the hell is he in the White House. So all those things, I think, create an energy that you can see playing out in primaries right now, and the critical question is, after each primary is over, does everyone come together and say, we're going to spend even more energy to win the general election in November? I'm from the state of Wisconsin, big, very fluid, highly energized Democratic primary happening right there. That's on August 11th. My hope and my expectation is that everyone who was involved in the primary and a ton more people will say, all right, it is time to go.

The Republican candidate in Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany, tried to overturn the 2020 election and the governors in charge of certification of presidential elections in the state of Wisconsin. So lots of people have lots of disagreements with lots of different candidates in lots of different directions, and that's fine. The critical question is, do you then say, you know what, we beat each other up before, but now we're on the same big team that believes this country should actually work for everyone and not a tiny group of people at the very top? And do you see that happening in state like Wisconsin, for example? Absolutely. I do. I see it happening in Wisconsin. I see that happening in Maine. I see that happening in Michigan.

My sense is that people are going to be ready to roll up their sleeves and go to bat in the day after the primary, the same way that they're scrapping it out in the primaries right now. Even Michigan. Even Michigan. You know, any individual legislator doesn't have the power to change every policy. People have different positions on things. But the Democratic Party is a big ten that is a coalition party, and the laws that pass are the sum of what can attract all the votes, basically,

they've crossed the whole thing. It becomes very clear when you step back from any particular battle that the fun. fundamental difference between the GOP, which right now is a cult of one person who's so corrupt and so bent on enriching and glorifying himself and his friends at the expense of everybody else, and a Democratic Party that the throughlines are the idea that the economy should work for everybody, that everyone's rights and freedom should be protected, and that we should be a democracy. And those three principles, very, very popular. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

Hey, Ben, it's a guest, host of Vox's America Actually Podcast. And as you know, a fellow lover of Wisconsin. My question is about the fixes for state parties that are distinct from national parties. So much of the anger about Democrats' 2024 choices was about process and about how the public was or wasn't included in the conversation. I guess that's my question to you. What are the answers for the Democratic Party that are not ideology? How can they help make voters feel like they're included in decision making, particularly on the state and local level? and the way this distinct than the conversation we're having nationally.

Such a great question from Instead. The thing that I love that happens in Wisconsin and a few other states, a growing number of states, and I map out step by step how to build this in my book, is that the Wisconsin State Party has neighborhood-by-neighborhood teams. These are groups of volunteers who sometimes meet in their living rooms. They map out who's going to go where. And they go to community events,

and they go door to the same voters off in Europe. over year. And when we're not right before an election, we ask people questions. We call it bridge building. You go and you say, what's most important to you right now? And we actually try to listen at scale. And the sense of like, nobody consulted me changes when someone consults you. And there's a huge power to actually going out and talking to people and finding out what's on their mind. Politically, I think of it like bumper bowling. If you put the bumpers and the sides, then the ball just doesn't go in the gutter. And if you're actually talking to the voters that you're trying to connect with and taking their opinion seriously. First of all, it pulls you out of your own head. I think Democrats

often will, you know, want to go scream about the latest thing they saw in MS now to a voter who's not paying attention to politics, and that doesn't resonate at all. This is why often talking about democracy is actually the worst message if you want to save democracy. You should focus on what it is that people want to change in their own lives, how the government can be on their side. And I think the same thing is true as a party, having actual connections to communities on the ground and not just being something that lives online or something that lives in fundraisers, but actually talking to people who don't put politics

to the center of their lives and asking what is bothering them and how can we change that? So often the answers are actually from local government. There are things about the pothole on my street. And if you can hear those things and you can do something about those things, then you can build the trust that you need

to ask someone to take a risk on a candidate. I think there's a lot of talk about attention. And attention is this very important currency. It's absolutely a powerful force. But I think trust is actually the thing that is most precious and rare at this moment. People are so fed up, they don't believe anyone. A lot of the people who either don't vote or swing between the two parties, they think both parties are messed up and corrupt and unresponsive. And the only way to change that is to actually earn trust from people by hearing them out, saying how you're going to do something and then actually doing it and then going back to them to talk about how it went.

That's something that is built over years. And it's something that each individual candidate cannot build by themselves. That to me is what local and state parties, and any viewer of your show or reader of this book, they can get involved in doing, and the effects of doing that can echo for years to come. So what you're saying is that like doing something on the level where they see you answering, whatever. First of all, listening and actually listening, not just fake listening. And the second part is actually doing something. I had an interesting argument with someone last night.

They're fixated on Mom Donnie. And I said, well, he put the – he opened the soccer field. it was kind of interesting. And they're like, who cares? I'm like, those people who play soccer. That is exactly it. I was like, they work all day. They can't play soccer now.

They can play soccer. It was like, it was a tangible thing. I was like, but it was so much more than that. I was like, do you understand? Like, they didn't want to talk about Trump. They wanted to play soccer. Anyway, it was a really interesting discussion. It happens all over the country, but I thought that's exactly what people want.

They want to be listened to in some fashion rather than be told that, you know, democracy is dead, which, of course, they realize on some level. But at the same time, when it comes to election outcomes, you write that we're, unquote, an era of field margins. Now, that makes it kind of impossible to govern if we have these small margins at nearly every level of government. This is the paradox of this moment. The vast majority of elections, you already know the outcome of the vast majority of congressional districts of states for statewide elections and the electoral college. They're totally safe. And that's a problem in and of itself, which I want speak to. But then the elections that wind up tipping the balance that tip the House majority,

Republicans have a House majority because of 7,309 votes across three congressional districts. That's a number of votes that the people listening to this right now could flip in the next election if they focus on the right places. The same thing is true in state legislative chamber after state legislative chamber in the presidential race. It was 0.1% of all the votes cast across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that determine the outcome. So there are these tiny margins. the country's almost perfectly cleaved in half in this way. Wisconsin is a microcosm of this national picture. And because it's so agonizingly, evenly balanced,

the country keeps toppling from one side to the other. We've had more changeovers in who holds power in the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the last 26 years this century than any other time in American history. And I make the case in the book that if we want to get out of this, this period of instability where people keep voting for change,

not getting it, or not liking the change that they have, and then voting to throw the bumps out and get a different bunch of people who they immediately get disillusioned with too. We need to change the systems that block things from actually happening. And the first and biggest one of those is the Senate filibuster. We're in a period right now where no party is likely to get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. And where both parties have a political incentive to stop the other side from doing big things, which means that voters screaming out for change, voting for change, do not get it from our political system on the biggest

most intensive issues of each individual moment. And that will continue to be the case as long as the Senate says that you need a supermajority in order to pass legislation. The filibuster is the exact opposite of what the founders intended. They considered the idea of requiring a supermajority, and they rejected it. It was not part of the Constitution. It was actually created by accident when they changed the rules of the Senate when Aaron Burr suggested revising that the Senate rulebook.

No one noticed that they could filibuster for years after that. Then there were 80 years where it was only used to block civil rights legislation. And then much more recently, Mr. McConnell discovered that he could use it to try to torpedo anything Barack Obama wanted. So we got the Affordable Care Act. We got a few really important bills. But so much of the agenda that Obama ran on died in the Senate after passing the House. And then we've seen the same thing with President Biden, some major really important legislation,

a ton that died in the Senate, including protections for voting rights and democracy itself, but also things on health care, on childcare, and all these affordability issues that people are right now panicked about that Democrats lost over. It's good that it's there because of Trump and the SAVE Act, for example. It can be abused. It is true that if both parties have the chance to pass laws, then a party you don't like might pass laws that you don't like. That is absolutely the case. But you have to ask yourself, do you want to live in a democracy that's in a straight jacket? And you also have to ask, why haven't Republicans gotten rid of the filibuster?

Is it because they're so concerned about the genteel norms of the Senate? Or is it because they're actual top priorities, tax cuts for rich people and confirming judges, those can be passed with 50 votes. They're not subject to the filibuster. And when you start thinking that way, you realize that all of Project 2025 was about taking action through the executive branch and then ensuring that the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn't strike down those actions. So we have a system right now that is tailor-made for people who basically want a king as president, who want Congress to be on its knees doing whatever the executive wants and want a Supreme Court

that will rubber stamp anything that benefits the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. All the other laws that could change those things, those are blocked by the filibuster. And that creates a ratchet effect where things keep lurching towards the Elon Musk of the world and away from the general public. So removing the filibuster would be your top priority, removing it. It's the plug that if you pull that out and suddenly the water can flow. And it means we'll have more democracy and it means Republicans. Republicans will be accountable for their policies if they actually pass them. This is maybe a scary bet to take.

I don't think Republicans have 50 votes in the Senate for the SAVE Act. And a lot of that is because the SAVE Act, it is a piece of shit legislation that would be disastrous for tons of voting, Republican voters as well as Democratic. Yeah, that's a technical term. Piece of shit legislation. Yes, that's the term of art. It's kind of a stunt bill that most Republican senators are thrilled that they don't actually have to cast a vote on. We saw with the Affordable Character Appeal in 2017, There was a giant public uprising against that terrible bill, and a lot of Republican senators privately breed the sigh of relief after John McCain turned his thumb down because they knew it was they knew it was going to destroy them in the next election, as it was the response to Republicans trying to take away people's health care was the biggest issue in 2018, the same way the huge cuts to health care that Republicans passed this time are going to absolutely blow back on them now, millions of people losing access to health insurance and that there'll be people who die because of that.

The GOP's policies, they just don't actually work out well in practice. And that's why the far-right con and the con of plutocrats over and over is to with one hand, try to shred public services and that the other hand, try to block democracy so there's not accountability for it. So they don't have to pay for their choices. So you ran for Dancy Chair last year and lost to Ken Martin, former chair of Minnesota's Democratic Party. He's come under fire for failing to broaden the committee's fundraising operations and its overall financial troubles. The latest filing shows the DNC is nearly $15 million on hand, but is $18 million in debt. Republicans have enormous amounts of money. You describe the DNC as the top of the pyramid resting on the strength of county and state Democrats,

but it is essential to fundraising. So what needs to change within the DNC itself in order for your plan to work? Well, I will say for every person, there's a million things that you can do to start building the party at the local level. I think for the national party, the thing that draw, people to want to chip in is seeing how their money can affect the outcome of the election. And, you know, there's often this sense, and you do see it in politics, and you see it all the time with the Trump administration that donors want specific policies to pass. And that's why they want to give money because they want to have certain policies. Sure. Those are called transactional

donors. And they exist. Parties are actually not the place that transactional donors focus, because what they want is they want to have a relationship with a politician who could actually pass a policy. What parties do is that they can say, we can win this election. And so the thing that I think is going to energize voters for the donors for the DNC is the thing you see at state parties that are having success with fundraising is mapping out this is the strategy. This is the tactic that we're going to be able to use. The U.S. Supreme Court just changed the rules for parties to allow federal party committees like the DNC to be able to fund candidates campaigns to an unlimited degree. And that could open the door to a strategy to say, like, we're going to zero in on the races where an extra push could make the biggest difference. We're going to be really rigorous about finding the messages that really resonate with these voters.

And then we're going to fund those programs. And that could be a way to be able to raise a lot more funds. That's a huge part of what we did in Wisconsin. I write in the book about the Scott Walker loophole, which is essentially the state-level version of what the U.S. Supreme Court just did nationally. Just like nationally, the Republicans created it to benefit themselves, betting that Democrats wouldn't find the money to use that law to fight back. And in Wisconsin, part of how we beat Elon Musk was raising money into the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and then using that to support the state Supreme Court candidate. The local candidates.

The local candidates, exactly. But you don't think it wipes out the fundraising edge Democratic candidates have ahead of midterms. I think that that's exactly the threat is that the Republican committees now can fund candidates who've been struggling to raise money on their own. And that's a big part of why it's such a priority for the GOP. They have, I mean, as we've discussed, an extreme, like an unbelievable amount of money that they're willing to spend to protect their money and power. And I think a whole lot of people who are thinking through right now, you know, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to keep a roof over their head and buy groceries. But if you're somebody who's lucky enough to have some extra money, this is time to donate to people, organizations, party committees that you think are going to do really good work to be able to win this fall because the stakes right now are going to affect the rest of our lives for whether democracy works. And I know that sounds like a cliche, but I think it's pretty clear right now that 2024 was one of those years too. And we're still on a

nice edge for whether we're going to have free and fair elections in 2028 and beyond. That gets determined over these next four months. And this is time for folks to throw it on and do everything they can. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Bowling Branch. If there's even one thing off about your bed, it'll show up in your sleep. Maybe your sheets slip around too much or your pillows not quite right. These issues only get worse over time as materials wear down, which can wear you down alongside of them. With Bowling Branch, you can upgrade your bed and find everything you need to get better sleep. They make everything from cotton sheets to pillows to blankets and comforters. All are designed to be breathable, incredibly soft, and get better over time. Most people start with

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builder so teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Framer is a pro-site builder's teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI-generated ideas and production-ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. It lands on the canvas, stays editable, and can be published when a team is ready.

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A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that could determine control of Congress in November. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul al-Sayyayy. A progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded evil. word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking, where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum? Then in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle. The problem, though, is that that model hasn't really accurately predicted our politics for a very long time. If

Michiganders wanted moderate, why would they have elected Donald Trump twice? Dr. Abdul El-Sayyette is making the progressive case for America first, and he's trying to settle the Democrats' ideological battle in the process. This is about the many versus the money. I'm Instead Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Now you emphasize that the Democrats have to run this permanent campaign, which Republicans seem to be doing, and it worked for the Wisconsin Democrats.

A permanent year-round campaign is expensive and difficult to sustain, especially on the national level. Talk a little bit about this, because President Obama built an expansive volunteer organization during his 2008 presidential campaign. To organize this machine is expensive, and to have it live on is difficult. So it does take some money,

but the vast majority of campaign budgets is spent on what they call paid media. It's ads. It's digital ads. It's TV ads. That's where the lion's share of the money goes. It is comparatively very inexpensive to pay organizers to build teams of volunteers to do this work on a year-on basis.

That is a sliver of campaign budgets. Most campaigns don't even do that because this is money that only really works if you spend it early. A lot of campaigns will hire people to knock on doors in the final weeks. That doesn't create something that has a snowball effect over time. What you want to do is invest in real organizing, which means leadership development, finding people who are going to get involved and keep talking to voters that they have relationships with. On the right, you can see this with Ralph Reed's organization. He used to do the Christian Coalition.

Now it's the Faith and Freedom Coalition. On the Democratic side, there are groups doing versions of this kind of work. I think Swing Left is doing amazing work. Move on where I used to work. Does a ton of organizing at the grassroots indivisible. I could go on with that list. And some Democratic Party organizations do this. But if you just wait until right before an election, you cannot build that trust from scratch.

You actually have to show up long before you're asking someone for their vote and actually listen to them, as we talked about before. to me that the amazing thing about the Obama campaign was that they and they started, you know, outside the Democratic Party infrastructure, they had to figure out a different way to win. They did this hard work of actually building local teams of people who are acting on their own values and building community and they were able to win the White House. But because it was built around one candidate, it didn't wind up creating this kind of permanent infrastructure. And that to me, you know, we beat Trump in 2020. It was this incredible thing. and then in so many places that organizing infrastructure melted away. So much of the funding for this kind of work melted away. And it is now reared right back and Trump is back in power.

So this next time when we win, first we got to win. But when we win, we have to keep going. And if we don't keep going, then 2030, the midterm elections after the next Democratic president is elected will take us right back to 2010. There'll be a backlash. Republicans will rig all the state houses. Then they'll rig the congressional maps. and they will have tilted the playing field for the next decade. So back and forth for the next.

Back and forth. For the next thing. So let's finish by talking about what happens to the Democrats actually win a governing trifecta in 2028. People are very skeptical. The party can pull that off. But let's say it does. You write a lot needs to happen in a short period of time to get to real structural reform, which I think is at the heart of what you're saying, including abolishing the filibusters.

You just mentioned, reforming the Supreme Court, which you haven't mentioned yet, passing a national ban on partisan gerrymandering, D.C. statehood, safeguards for union organizing. It's an ambitious list. If there was ever a Democratic trifecta, there's going to be debate within the party about the details of these major structural reforms. The filibester alone continues to divide Democrats. What is the most important from your perspective, or all of them at the same time? I mean, Pete Buttigieg is the one that brought out reforming the Supreme Court, and that was sort of slapped down when he did. Many years ago, that was one of his first bigger ideas. Look where we are now. Yeah, exactly.

He was correct. They all need to happen at once, and what should be the plan? This is part of why I wrote this is the plan, because there actually is a sequence for these things to happen. One of the biggest reform is something that happens through the states. In 26, if Democrats win unified control of the battleground states that I mentioned before, they can pass something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Yeah, this is the NipVick. Nipvick, yes, thank you.

This is my way to pronounce an unpronounceable acronym. So, Nipvick would basically join a bunch of states together to say, we're going to give our electoral college votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. And if they do that, it means the end of swing states and safe states. It means that every New Yorker, Californian, Texan, Wyoming-Ite, everybody's votes count the same in choosing the president of the United States, which would be a revolution in American democracy for the better in so many ways. It would give people everywhere a reason to organize and get involved in order to affect the most powerful office in the world. And it would mean that the federal government has to be responsive to everyone on an

equal basis in a totally different way. So that can happen even without Congress. And that is one of the things you can do when you win at the States in 26. As soon as Democrats have a majority in the Senate, I think they immediately should end the filibuster. And there's different proposals for reforming it in different ways. The most critical thing to me is it has to be a majority rule institution. That has to happen before any of the other reforms can pass because all these things will take passing through both chambers of Congress and going to the president for signature. But if Democrats win in 2027, I hope that they'll abolish a filibuster right away. Let's just get that over with and put that behind us. So after that happens, then you have the chance to pass a new Loading Rights Act, to pass a

national gerrymandering ban. I argue, I explore different ideas for reforming the U.S. House. I think we're in a situation right now where almost every House district will be decided in advance by state legislators drawing the maps. And it's ridiculous. Partisan gerrymandering. One great idea is to have proportional representation in multi-member districts and expand the size of the House. That's something that there's not a majority for yet. But the more you look at how it would actually work, if a state said we're going to give our House seats based on the proportion of votes that each party wins, it means that if you're a Republican in a blue state, you have representation.

If you're a Democrat and a red state, you have representation. And it means you just get a lot more democracy and responsiveness. For the Senate, ensuring that D.C. residents, elect senators, that Puerto Ricans have a chance for a referendum to elect senators, it allows the Senate to be a much more representative body, and it ends this ridiculous situation where American citizens are governed by people who they have no voice in electing. Yes, I'm a D.C. resident. I'm not happy about it. You know exactly what this is like.

Taxation without representation, not something America is traditionally really into, or at least in theory not into. And then you need to reform the U.S. Supreme Court, as you noted, there's several ideas for this. My favorite idea is the idea of term limits where Supreme Court Justice's serve for 18 years in active status, then they take senior status where they're not voting on active cases. And it means that every president appoints a Supreme Court justice in their first and their third year. And that not only changes the membership of the Supreme Court over time, more importantly, it creates a world where every member knows that the body is going to evolve. And so they should think about how to create rulings that can endure in different

political conditions. You want to turn down the partisanship of the Supreme Court. You don't want it to ping pong or be a pendulum in this way. I want an even playing field for everyone. I don't want to rig this thing for Democrats. Rather than expansion, term limits, I agree. Exactly. Yeah. And that, that to me is the goal is, you know, parties can get things wrong, presidents can get things wrong of both parties. You want the public to have the ultimate say. You want to have a system that's not rigged for one side or the other. And that allows you to have the flexibility to adapt to a world that is being transformed by AI and by so much else. As long as the public can write the rules. And as long as when people are hurt, they have some recourse to do something about it.

I think that we can get through just about anything that the world throws at us. But in a world where all the power and the decisions are made by a tiny group of people who are interested in serving themselves, then things can go terribly for millions of people. Yeah, this is my issue with the tech people. They're like, well, they're smart. I'm like, I don't really care if they're all nice. If they were all agreeing with me, I don't want them in charge. Mark Jensen is this Nobel Prize winning economist, and he did this deep study that found that there's never been a famine. democracy. And the reason for that is that having a democracy means that if people are starving

to death, it becomes a political problem for the people in charge. You have famines in colonies, in places where someone is in charge who's not accountable to the public. And I feel like we sort of have a political famine right now because we don't have enough democracy. There's so many ways the government is not responding to basic needs that people have for childcare, for housing, to be able to afford the food they need, all this kind of stuff. This only happens because you have a government that is not ultimately accountable to the needs of the public. And it could get worse or it can get better. And this is the plan is my roadmap for how we make it better.

Last week, President Trump claimed that American elections were rife with, quote, hacking, manipulation, corruption. It's part of his whole song that he's done for a while. He had a speech that he tried to push off. It didn't get a whole lot of resonance, I would say. But he still did it. Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen also threatened local election officials in prison time if they didn't comply with the administration's efforts to change election the policies. So what concerns you most about the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize

the federal government ahead of the midterms? And how should local election officials prepare? We should have the expectation that Trump will use every one of his powers to try to stop the democratic process from working. We've seen him testing things like seizing ballots, trying to seize voting machines, prosecuting local election officials, claiming that election results were invalid. We saw him trying to have elections retroactively canceled after 2020. He's going to to pressure everyone who he has power over to manufacture ballots like he tried to do with Brad Raffinsberger in Georgia after 2020. And we can see him using the machinery of the state to do it. The good news is that the people who have been suing against these, they keep winning in court.

And so all the lawyers that are preparing, I advise a group called Democracy Defenders that's preparing legal actions to go immediately after Trump when he tries to pull this stuff, that creates some measure of protection in places where the courts are functional and on the up and up, which is not all the courts at this moment. But the most critical line of defense is actually the local officials. If you look at Minnesota, when Trump sent in ICE and people were being shot in the streets, and then the attorney general said that they would pull ICE out if Minnesota turned over private voter data, the state and local officials said no.

And that is why people's social security numbers and private driver's licenses, all this kind of stuff, didn't flow to the federal government. They were trying to get their hands on it. And right now, local officials should be running scenario plans. And I know a lot of them are doing this. They should be looking at all the different vulnerabilities and sort of lines of attack. They should be building plans with their emergency operation centers in the public. People should be doing the kind of local organizing, making sure that everyone has someone that they can check in with for if the shit hits the fan in the fall.

Everyone should have a plan to be able to vote. People should figure out who they're going to go voting with. and we've all got to be ready for what could be a moment that I hope and pray doesn't come, but I think we should have the expectation. I assume the worse. That they're going to try to pull something off that prevents power from actually changing hands. The more we prepare, the less likely the emergency becomes. The more we win in court along the way, the fewer tools they have at their disposal to mess with the elections.

The more poll watchers sign out observers, poll workers in the local communities, the more people vote early. The fewer people, the shorter the lines on election day itself. There's all these things that people can do. But we've got four short months to do this kind of organizing and get ready. I'm grateful to everyone who's been preparing along the way. And now it's a sprint. If we win this fall, especially for these state and local offices, then we have people who can

continue to say no to Trump's attempts to overturn the elections in the future. And that's the first acid test for whether this big movement to make the government actually work for the public rather than for Elon Musk and friends is the first test for whether we can pull this off. Let's look ahead 10 years. What does our electoral system look like if just 50% of your plan is implemented? 50% would be a giant improvement. This is an ambitious, bold plan.

I'll be realistic about that. If we have a national popular vote for the presidency, but we, let's say, haven't been able to reform the way the United States House works, the national popular vote in itself would be such a change. You know, right now, presidential candidates spend all their time in like seven states, maybe five, maybe four states. most people are essentially ignored. Most people feel like there's spectators in our democracy.

There's no stakes for them. The level of turnout in many states is below 50%. In my state, it's like three quarters of people cast a ballot because everyone can see that their vote might be the thing that determines the outcome. And building a civic culture in this country of this is not a spectator sport, this is something where everyone actually has power, has a voice, what you do matters. That can affect government at all levels. So much of what everyone's frustrated about is not about which party controls government. And it's about whether government itself has accountability to the public and has to move and deliver to be able to make life better for people. And there's so much the people in red and blue areas can do even though their elections aren't close.

But it's hard for that to feel real when it feels like your vote doesn't count because you already know in advance who's going to win. And so I think there's multiple paths. I think the same thing is true in house races. If we have competitive house races across the country, if gerrymandering bans are enacted and especially if we get to something like proportional representation, then many more people will have a meaningful say in who represents them in a chamber of Congress. Congress. If we can reform the U.S. Supreme Court, then maybe we can actually do something about money in politics, which right now the Supreme Court is on the- The money side. They're on the money side. They're on the money side. But imagine if that can change. So last question, if you were made head of the DNC right now and could do anything you want it,

what would that be? Well, I first don't want to really get the DNC chairs race. I don't want to be the end of the DNC now leading a different life. But let's say I am the head of the DNC now. I think the first thing that I do is start working with states to write a plan in each state to unrig the political system in that place and make those public. In Wisconsin, we had a plan that was years out. This is actually something that I learned from Ken Martin, who was the chair in Minnesota next door. After I was elected, he brought me to Minnesota and he said, when I was elected chair, we made a 10-year plan mapped out all the races that we needed to win. And Minnesota traveled this path, won a Democratic trifecta, and passed things that made the lives of everyone in that state. better. In Wisconsin, we mapped that a long-term plan and we've been moving through that plan

step by step. It culminates this fall. We could win a Democratic trifecta this November. Governor, both chambers of the legislature, we have a pro-democracy Supreme Court. I know the DNC has folks that are talking to different states about this. I want to see those plans in each place. I want to sing them from the rooftops. I want people to see how their work adds up to something bigger. Because when it feels like every election is the most important one we've ever had and then suddenly there's another one, it is exhausting. You need to see a path from what you do to actually delivering change in people's lives, and that has to be built from the bottom up everywhere in the country. I think that's a thing that the party can facilitate and support,

and I think it's something that people can do, you know, whether or not the party where they are is doing it, and they can get involved and build a kind of party that they want. But to me, all these things are connected to each other, and until you understand the connection between what a state legislature does and how the house maps are drawn, and then who controls Congress and what laws pass, if you're not fighting on all those playing fields, once you're losing. The right has been fighting on those. Elon Musk came. to Wisconsin for exactly that reason, but we can fight back and win if we look at the whole picture. All right, Ben, thank you so much. It's a terrific book. It really is very smart. There's a lot of

these books out, but I like this one. I appreciate it. Thank you. Really grateful for having me on. Today's show was produced by Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Bernie, Madeline LaPlante Duby, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishot Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff, Julia Sharp Levine, Bradley Sylvester, and Dave Shaw. Our engineers, are Fernando Arruda and Rick Juan, and our theme music is by Tracademics. If you're already following the show, you've staved off authoritarianism for another day. If not, good luck wandering the democracy desert for the next 40 years. Go wherever you listen to podcast, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Caras Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media

Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.