What is the Democratic Party? What Could It Be?

The Ezra Klein Show

Ben Wickler discusses the Democratic Party's identity, challenges, and potential for renewal after 2024 election results. He reflects on Wisconsin’s close race, voter disillusionment, and the need for grassroots rebuildi

Key takeaways

• Democrats must prove government works for people

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) What is the Democratic Party? What is the Democratic Party? Actually, mechanically. What is it? What are its powers? Who comprises it when you call the Democratic Party? Who picks up the phone? And then what could the Democratic Party, the official party, actually be if it was reinvented for this era? Ben Wickler was a chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025. He turned that party into a fundraising, door-knocking powerhouse. In Wisconsin, where the state is very, very, very close, that might have made the difference. The 2024 election was a bit of a mixed bag there, to say the least. Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by a single percentage point, but Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate, won the state. Wickler then launched a run for DNC chair, which he lost to Ken Martin. A lot of Democrats seeing the difficulties the DNC has had since in fundraising and organization and internal unity, very much wish Wickler had won that race. And now Wickler is back. He's the author of, this is the plan, how to end America's meltdown and save democracy. So I wanted to ask him not just about his plan, but about the Democratic Party, about this flawed but necessary vehicle that is needed to carry his plan out. What's happened to it? What could be done to renew it? As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYUTimes.com. Ben Wickler, welcome to the show. It's great to be with you, as well. So we last spoke, I wonder if you remember this, at least on the show. Vividly remember. It was July of 2024. Biden had just dropped out. Kamala Harris had consolidated the Democratic Party. We talked right after Harris had done one of her first rallies in Wisconsin. We had a very optimistic conversation. I ended up titling it, I believe. This is how Democrats win in Wisconsin. At the presidential level, they did not win in Wisconsin. What went wrong? So Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by less than a percentage point. It was the fifth of the last seven presidential races that came down to less than one percentage point. And on election night, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that nothing we'd done. We tried everything. We'd done everything that we thought could make a difference. Maybe none of it had had any impact. What was I doing with my life? The last thing I saw before I let myself fall asleep that night was that Tammy Baldwin had one. And I thought, oh, and I collapsed. The next day, I did a little spreadsheet therapy for myself, which is my way of relieving electoral stress is to dig into data. And in Wisconsin, Harris had done better than she had in any other battleground state in terms of how she did versus how Biden did. It wound up being the closest state in the country. A lot of Trump voters didn't vote down ballot. The Harris voters did. That's been a huge part of our work is to make sure people fill out their whole ballot. And so we actually gained 14 state legislative seats and won the U.S. Senate race at the same time as we lost the presidential. But the underlying question of why Harris lost, to me, you not only have to look at the country, you have to look at the world, that if you consider every election in an advanced Western democracy, this is the only year on record where the ruling party, regardless of whether it was left, right, or center, lost ground. And the overwhelming issue in races all around the world and with the voters who actually shifted their vote choice between 2020 and 2024, the number one thing was inflation prices, affordability, the economy. The rise in prices after a long period where we didn't see broad-based inflation, especially for people who felt like they were at the economic brink already, was devastating. And I should say there are many reasons when you lose by as little as Harris did. Lots of things could have made the difference. But the biggest issue of all was this fundamental economic malaise that people felt and they voted for change. So I agree that in the election, in the 2024 election, prices were the biggest issue. They were the biggest problem for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris. But I think I would have, off of that analysis, expected then after the election, as people got the Donald Trump presidency, as a Donald Trump presidency, did not turn out the way they had hoped, to see a real resurgence in how people may be felt about the Democratic Party. But today, we're sitting here. Democratic Party is wildly unpopular as a brand. It is less popular than Donald Trump is as a brand. So as somebody who has run a Democratic Party in a state and I think was quite successful in doing so, why is it that? What is it that people don't like about the Democratic Party? So I'll say at two levels. One is that if you had Democrats in charge, you voted for change and now you don't like the Republicans in charge, that doesn't mean that you're like, oh, let's go back to the old thing. That means you want something else yet again. You want change from the situation you have, and neither party so far has delivered it for you. The second thing is that if you look under the top lines in polls, there are Republicans who think Democrats are too liberal. There are Democrats who think Democrats are not fighting hard enough for change. And then there's a third category of people who feel like all the politics is messed up, that they can't trust either party. They feel like neither party has connected with them and actually solve the problems in their life that they're struggling. with. So I would not expect for Democratic Party approval ratings to bounce back until people can see tangible results that people are fighting on their side, not only speaking to their issues, but also making concrete differences in ways that they appreciate. And to me, that's the crisis of this moment is this profound sense that the whole country is not working for regular people, that people who would like not to ever have to think about politics suddenly are feeling politics just pounding at the windows like a horde of zombies. Because their lives are going off the rails. It is so hard to just be able to afford to live and people are being shot in the streets. And there's this sense that the, you know, lettuce might give you explosive diarrhea. All of this is wrong. Like most people do not want to have to think about who controls which chamber of Congress, let alone their state legislature. And for people who'd like to be left alone and able to lead their lives and pursue their dreams, free of politics, this is a very hard moment. And for people who pay attention to politics, all the time, it's even worse. So it's, you'd expect in that situation for people to be like, set this whole thing on fire. And that's what we see in poll after poll and at door after door if you go out and talk to voters. So I'd have remembered this in very early 2024. I did this big article where I talked to all these state shares and Democratic politicians about what was the Democratic Party at a time when actually compared to now, it seemed more settled, but, you know, there are some questions that had risen. And you gave by far the best quotes. in that piece. And he told me the story about how there were these big piles of coal. I think it was in Green Bay. In Green Bay, Wisconsin. That's right. And, you know, that Tony Evers, the governor and Tammy Baldwin and others have been working and they got money from Joe Biden and to get the piles of coal gone. And you said to me, it was by far the best part of the piece. He said, you know, that's who the Democratic Party is. They're the people who get rid of the piles of coal. They were talking some years later. And you're like, post-script. The piles of coal are still there. Yeah. I looked into it. There were lawsuits for environmental lawsuits. And it got me thinking, I mean, obviously this is a little bit related to abundance work, but there are many different ways this plays out where the Democratic Party wants to think of itself as a party that makes government work for people. And I think if people believed the Democratic Party did that, they would support it. But they believe typically one of two things it gets in the way. One is they don't believe the Democrats make government work for people. They believe it makes government work for their own set. of interest, whether it's funders or, you know, environmentalists or unions or whoever it may be that people are upset about. Or the others who just don't believe government works. And so the party that says, hey, I'm here to make government work for you is not credible because people don't want government doing jobs. They're not certain government can do. Yeah. So I guess the question is this. Do you believe that's who Democrats are, that they're the people in politics to make government work for people? And if that's true, what do they need to do to prove it? So I think that Democrats are the party that wants to make government work for people. Sometimes Democrats can trip over the shoelaces. Over and over, we have a government that gets blocked or seized apart because it actually can't respond to the public schools. Our government in so many ways is set up to meet a million different goals other than delivering great public services, solving public problems, doing great work for people, despite millions of wonderful civil servants who do absolutely critical work all the time. Right now, you know, we're pulling out jingo blocks like the, you know, monitoring for cyclospora, and we can see how that leads to disasters across the public. So this is not to say government doesn't work or can't work, but there's a ton that gets in the way right now of having a government that's capable of being responsive and effective at the level that this moment calls for, especially a moment where a host of new threats and risks and concentrations of power unleashed by artificial intelligence are right on the horizon. In some ways, it's never been more urgent to have a government that is both responsive and effective. And so I do think that Democrats can rebuild trust in government and in themselves by being excellent and actually delivering. And I think you can see that in some state and local governments across the country. You can see that in Mamdani's, New York, with public services that people are celebrating, delivering on campaign promises, communicating the delivery of those promises. But there is work to do to change how the system itself works. I guess a question that that raises is, when people think about the Democratic Party, when they hear those words, when a pollster calls them and says, what do you think the Democratic Party? What do you think those words activate in their mind? What do people think the Democratic Party is? And then as somebody who ran one branch, what is the Democratic Party? So it means whichever thing is most salient to people. The first and the most common is the amorphous blob of every elected official, every pundit, every annoying person they see online, all the things that are associated with this kind of vast interconnected web of all things Democrat related. That is not one thing. There's no person who controls that. There's, in a sense, if you have a Democratic president, that person's the head of the amorphous blob. Donald Trump very much is head of the blob on the Republican side. There's also the formal Democratic Party, which is the literal institutions. I was chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. There's the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. There's the Democratic Democratic county party system. So we have a Democratic Party of Iowa County, Wisconsin. There's also a Democratic Party of Iowa County, Iowa. Very often people are mad at the blob, but they're blaming the formal institution without, you know, and why would they, without a lot of recognition of exactly what it is that is in the control of the formal Democratic Party. The opportunity that the formal Democratic Party organizations have, most of all, is to create a home for people who want to fight for change, to do the kind of grassroots community neighbor to neighbor organizing that can turn the Democrats, this kind of headline phrase from some distant thing that is being defined by Fox News Channel every day into my neighbor who asked me if I wanted to put up a yard sign for a city council candidate who actually cares about building more housing where I live so that my kids can live near me and I can see my grandkids. That shift to me is what it means to build from the ground up and to try to rebuild civic life in this country through institutions that once actually had that kind of role in community after community, where people would associate the Democratic Party with that big dinner that I go to once a year or with somebody who checks in with me about who all the local candidates are. To me, the work of building the party is thinking from the ground up about how we actually reconnect with people so that we are human beings rather than slogans on TV. I want to hear you talk about that a little bit more, what parties maybe once were in American social life and political life. life and what they are today. I know you and I have both been interested in this hollow party's idea that has been in political science from Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlossmann. But, I mean, as somebody who I think is interested in party machinery, what relationship might I have once had with a party? And then what does it become now? There were times in American life when parties were a huge part of your daily and monthly and weekly existence. When you became a naturalized citizen of the country, the local Democratic Party, and sometimes the Republican Party, more often the Democratic Party, was there to greet you and ask you to register for the party at that moment when there was a block captain who was going to check in with you from time to time. I quote in my book a letter that Abraham Lincoln sent to the Whig Party, and his advice then is the same as my advice now. He said, keep a constant eye on the most doubtful voters and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence. which, first of all, is great advice about organizing. And secondly, presupposes that members of the party have a sense of which voters are doubtful, and actually that those doubtful voters who might or might not vote, who might switch parties, they have confidence in someone who's associated with the party. And the idea that you'd have a personal relationship with somebody who might check in on you and ask what you're thinking about, that is so alien from the world where most people's experience of the political parties is incredibly annoying text messages and emails that you're constantly trying to find ways to filter or nightmare headlines that are screaming at you from your phone. What's it like to be the name on the other side of those emails? I sometimes meet people who are like, you text me all the time. And I'm like, you never write back. Yeah. It is a strange aspect of life. You have your public simulacrum of yourself.