Wikler for Democratic Party Chair

 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. 

Socialists Challenge the Democratic Party

PBS Newshour on this topic
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/will-socialism-ever-have-its-moment-in-u-s-elections

The Democrats abandon the working class

by William Grieder,

The blowout election of 2014 demonstrates that the Democratic Party is utterly out of touch with ordinary people and their adverse circumstances. Working people have known this for some time now, but this year, the president made the disconnection more obvious. Barack Obama kept telling folks to brighten up: the economy is coming back, he said, and prosperity is just around the corner.

A party truly connected to the people would never have dared to make such a claim. In the real world of voters, human experience trumps macroeconomics and the slowly declining official unemployment rate. An official at the AFL-CIO culled the following insights from what voters said about themselves on Election Day: 54 percent suffered a decline in household income during the past year. Sixty-three percent feel the economy is fundamentally unfair. Fifty-five percent agree strongly (and another 25 percent agree somewhat) that both political parties are too focused on helping Wall Street and not enough on helping ordinary people.

Instead of addressing this reality and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what? The president and his party have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.

Chicago Teachers' Union vs. Rahm Emanuel

 The Democrats’ Scott Walker?

September 11, 2012

Joseph Palermo

The 29,000 striking Chicago teachers are sending the message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) that their teacher bashing and privatization schemes for public education have become so onerous and destructive to the teachers’ mission and profession that they have no choice but to fight back.

In this epic struggle to save a profession that is vital to the long-term well being of the nation Mayor Emanuel finds himself in a role similar to that of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin: an anti-union corporate politician who is more than ready to play hardball with a public employees union. Unfortunately for him, his fellow Chicagoan, President Obama, for whom Emanuel served as Chief of Staff, is in the fight of his political life right now trying to win four more years. The timing of the strike couldn’t be worse for the Democrats, and therefore packs a potent punch nationally because it lays bare how toxic the relationship between teachers and Democratic Party leaders has become in recent years.

This strike is not about wages or benefits or any other matter that might concern unionized workers in more prosperous times, this is a fight for the very survival of a profession (and a highly feminized one at that) that has been under relentless attack from sharks posing as “reformers.” Emanuel and his fellow travelers appear to be more concerned about busting the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and turning over quick profits to education corporations poised to make a bundle on their privatization than they are on any common sense solution to the crisis they’ve manufactured.

This strike also shines a light on the deep and bitter conflict that’s been tearing apart the Democratic Party since Arne Duncan launched his “Race to the Top” campaign. If Mayor Emanuel comes off as being too Scott Walkeresque the repercussions of this battle, since President Obama is personally so connected to Chicago and Emanuel and Duncan, could cost him a lot votes and enthusiasm in the 2012 election.