Today, Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman, announced he was entering the race to lead the Democratic National Committee.
This is important. The person who runs the DNC is the key organizer for the Democratic Party between now, the 2026 midterms, and the 2028 presidential election (assuming we have one). That person will be a critical voice in opposition to Trump’s authoritarian fascism.
Speaking on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” Wikler said, “I’m running for chair of the Democratic National Committee because we need to unite, we need to fight, and we need to win to stop the GOP from ripping this country apart and ripping off working people to enrich mega billionaires.”
Wikler is the right man for the job.
I got to know Ben when he proved to be a thoughtful and effective top official at MoveOn. He’s chaired the Wisconsin Democrats since 2019, presiding over the successful rebuilding of a party that had been seriously weakened by many years of Republican control of the state government.
Wikler organized and mobilized voters in a state that Republicans had rigged to ensure total dominance and control. Ben unrigged that system. He turned Wisconsin into a year-round organizing and fundraising powerhouse, winning seven of the last 10 statewide elections since he took over.
Democrats just picked up four congressional seats in Wisconsin. They held on to their Senate seat. They also broke the GOP supermajority in the state Senate, picked up 10 seats in the state Assembly, and are on track to flip both chambers in 2026 and potentially get a trifecta if they win the governor’s race that year too.
This was made possible in part because Democrats flipped Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court in April 2023. That court then struck down the gerrymandered GOP-drawn state legislative map. Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed into law a new competitive state legislative map.
Wikler’s activism is all over Wisconsin. Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin prevailed with a few thousand more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris, and both Harris and Baldwin got more votes than anyone in the history of the state other than Barack Obama in 2008, when he won by 14 points (and Trump).
In an interview with The New York Times, Wikler said he aimed to do for the national party what he did in Wisconsin. “The Democratic Party is best served by leadership that’s been fighting on the front lines in one of the most contested states in the country and has demonstrated an ability to build an operation that has shattered expectations for what was possible.”
This is what Democrats must do nationally.
Wikler is right when he says, “Democrats win when voters know that we’re the ones fighting for them against those who will seek to rip them off to add an extra billion dollars to their bank account.” And he correctly calls for an approach “grounded in where people actually get their information, not just where we want to speak or what we want to say.”
Ben was one of the first to attack Project 2025 and link it to Trump. “These ideas aren’t just bad. They’re dangerous for our country,” he said during the Republican National Convention. “Donald Trump and JD Vance want to ransack the public treasury to hand out massive tax cuts to billionaires and stick working Americans with the bill.”
Just 43 years old, Wikler started in politics as a research assistant for Al Franken and hasn’t looked back.
Can he win? The DNC election is slated for February 1. The current chair is South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison, who is not running again. There are 448 voting members of the Democratic National Committee.
Why is this important? Because for years, the Democratic National Committee has been little more than a fundraising machine, which means it’s been tilted toward sources of big money: billionaires, big corporations, and Wall Street.
That’s precisely the problem. That’s why the DNC cut Bernie Sanders off at the knees when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s why starting in the 1980s the party began turning its back on the working class.
There’s no way the party can speak for the majority of working people in America when it’s reluctant to bite the hands that feed it.
Wikler is a progressive who knows how to win elections with a Democratic Party that’s on the side of the little guy.
