The Big Q&A With WisDems Chair Ben Wikler
As Chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler has overseen a remarkable string of pro-democracy wins in the state.
Wisconsin is a famously purple state, having gone for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Yet Republicans have maintained a gerrymandered majority in the state legislature that has allowed them to hold onto power despite Democratic candidates winning more votes. Well, thanks to the efforts of Ben Wikler and the Wisconsin Democrats, that undemocratic grasp on power is coming to an end.
Wikler, who has been chair of the WisDems since 2019, has overseen a series of pro-democratic (and pro-Democratic) wins over the past 5 years, and so we were thrilled to be able to ask him how they did it. What organizing tips can he pass on to other states so that we might be able to replicate their success around the country and undo corrupt Republican minority rule once and for all. — Jay and Team
Activists around the country are impressed at the great gains that Wisconsin has made in democracy since the low point back in 2011, when the egregious GOP gerrymandering began. The state went from having the worst, most unfair legislative district maps in the country, to some of the fairest with the new maps just signed into law. Was there a plan and a strategy to all of this, something that Democrats in other state parties might look to as a model for how to re-democratize their own states? Or did it happen more organically, in ways that the state party could respond to ad hoc?
Wisconsin’s gerrymandering crisis began in 2011, when Republican lawmakers—bound in secrecy by nondisclosure agreements as they worked with operatives at a lobbying firm—drew legislative lines that guaranteed that even landslide election losses statewide wouldn’t cost them their majorities. The result was one of the most egregious, extreme partisan gerrymanders in American political history.
In 2012, and again in 2018, Democratic candidates received a majority of votes in the State Legislature—but Republicans won huge majorities of the seats. In 2020 and 2022, Democrats won major statewide victories, but Republicans won near-supermajorities that would have given them the power to overturn Governor Evers’ vetoes—the Democratic governor who was reelected in a Wisconsin landslide by 3 points in 2022.
Ending the gerrymander has been an existential top priority ever since it was originally put in place, and Democrats—and a broader coalition of people who believe in democracy—have been working relentlessly to pursue multiple strategies for more than a decade. A federal lawsuit, Gil v Whitford, was ultimately resolved for the worse in Rucho v. Common Cause. Then Governor Evers was elected, who vetoed the GOP’s gerrymandered maps proposal in 2021—but the right-wing state Supreme Court, with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, chose the vetoed maps anyway. But then, at last, a third strategy clicked into place: progressive victories in state Supreme Court races in 2018, 2020, and 2023 built a new majority on the state Supreme Court. Even then, the GOP came close to impeaching our newly-elected Supreme Court justice in order to thwart a legal challenge to the maps, but a massive civic uprising shut down that threat. So, at last, the Court struck down the old maps as unconstitutional this past December.
At every step, Democrats, grassroots activists, attorneys, and many other allies kept tracing out paths to ending the gerrymander and doing everything in their power to pursue that result. The core strategy is clarity and relentlessness. Identify what dominoes have to fall to reach the goal, and keep working on all of them until one works.
The flip of the majority on the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin made national headlines, in part because Justice Protasciewicz won by such a large margin. We’re used to seeing statewide elections decided by less than a percentage point. What accounts for this blowout, and can we bottle that energy somehow?
In one word, freedom. Especially the freedom to access a safe and legal abortion. That was the top issue for most voters in the election, and voters who cast ballots on that issue voted overwhelmingly for Janet Protasiewicz. Stepping back, Justice Protasciewicz’s landslide win was the result both of her own values-centric campaign and also of many years of tireless organizing by many, work that came together at a critical moment for our state and our country. The values Justice Protasciewicz brought to her campaign were the values that mattered for Wisconsinites across the political spectrum—starting with freedom, democracy, fairness, and the rule of law. Meanwhile, on the other side we had an extreme, far-right candidate in Dan Kelly who promised the exact opposite: a future with less freedom, not more, and where the law is bent to enrich the very few at the expense of everyone else. So you had this enormous contrast between the candidates, and then you add in a massive, massive campaigning and mobilizing effort by the campaign, the state party, and allied groups. The message sank in for voters, the choice was very clear—and ultimately, so was the result.
Gerrymandering is a big problem, but it’s also a hard problem to explain to voters, especially when Democrats are also accused of doing it in some states. How did the Wisconsin Democratic Party explain the issue clearly to voters, and do you think the message got through?
Grassroots activists and leaders across the state worked tirelessly for more than a decade to educate and organize around fair maps and ending the gerrymander. This included a campaign to convince more than 50 county boards to back resolutions supporting fair maps. At WisDems, communicating the realities of our gerrymander with voters was a constant focus for us. Once Gov. Evers was elected in 2018, our focus shifted in a major way towards protecting his veto authority—in other words, making sure we defended the handful of seats that stood between Republicans and a veto-proof supermajority in our state legislature. Along the way, we reminded folks constantly of what Republicans were up to—how they were hiding behind gerrymandered lines, passing policies that set us backward and enriched the very few and the expense of everyone else. When we finally had a chance to flip the Supreme Court away from the far-right, voters were ready: they understood intimately how Wisconsin’s gerrymander was hurting our state, and they were prepared to chart a new course. One key lesson at every turn was to explain the impact that the gerrymander had on people’s lives—not just the fact that it was unfair, but also the policy consequences on issues like worker’s rights, public school funding, giveaways to the ultra-wealthy and big corporations, and the abortion ban.
We’ve seen court challenges to maps succeed in other states, like Ohio, only to have the GOP run out the clock on fixes. How did Wisconsin manage to get this all fixed in time for the 2024 statewide legislative elections, rather than have it bounce back and forth forever between the courts and the legislature?
The core difference is that in Ohio, the court’s only power was to instruct the state legislature to adopt fair maps, whereas in Wisconsin, the court can choose maps if the legislature fails. For that reason, there was a judicial backstop. And yet, just like in Ohio, the legislature decided to go to an extreme to thwart democracy—by threatening to abuse the power of impeachment. When it became clear in the August of 2023 that Republicans were gearing up to impeach Justice Protasiewicz in an attempt to block the Supreme Court from ruling on challenges to Wisconsin’s gerrymander, we rapidly mobilized to activate our volunteers across the state—knocking on doors, sending texts, making phone calls and hitting the airwaves. We made the unlawful Republican impeachment attempt a national story. It became a massive political disaster for the GOP. And Janet’s victory in the spring had been so extensive that many Republican legislators knew that she’d won even in their gerrymandered districts. They complained that their impeachment threat was driving up Democratic fundraising, and ultimately backed down. Now, at last, the will of the people would be the law of the land in Wisconsin.
In the end, Gov. Evers’ office drew up maps that he said were fair, and the GOP went along with them rather than face the possibility of the new liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court drawing the maps themselves. Democrats largely voted against the very maps that Evers wound up signing. Can you speak about the considerations here? Is the state Democratic party really okay with these new maps?
Democrats across the board in Wisconsin are thrilled that the gerrymander is over. The new maps are a day-and-night improvement over the old, rigged maps. Democrats in the legislature, who had experienced one bad-faith attack on democracy after another from the GOP, were naturally suspicious when Republican legislators suddenly about-faced and decided to pass Gov. Evers’s maps and send them for his signature, and—as they said publicly at the time—voted against the maps out of concern that the GOP was trying to run some kind of legal trap. But so far, at least, we haven’t seen a legal attack from the right since the Governor signed the maps into law. While everyone’s remaining vigilant, it does look like we’ll have the opportunity to run on these maps in November.
The maps only address the question of the unconstitutionally gerrymandered state legislative districts. But Wisconsin also has an extremely lopsided GOP over-representation in the House Congressional delegation. Are there plans to fix that, and if so, are you allowed to say what they are?
Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation is currently 6 GOP, 2 Dem—a ridiculous situation in a state that is half Democratic and half Republican. But two of the seats are only “Lean R,” and another is now an open seat. In Wisconsin’s 3rd district, you’ve got Derrick Van Orden, an extremist who crossed police lines at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and has a history of disturbing, unhinged behavior. In the 1st District, we’ll be working to defeat Paul Ryan’s protégé Brian Steil, who has used his perch on the Financial Services Committee to rake in donations from Wall Street while voting against efforts to lower prescription drug costs for folks back home. Finally, we’re also going to be very involved in the 8th District, where Republican Mike Gallagher recently announced his retirement—making it an open seat with a messy, MAGA-fueled primary.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the state legislative maps at the end of December. Following that decision, attorneys sued in January to strike down the Congressional maps—but at that point, the time frame was too compressed for full consideration of a new case, and the Court unanimously declined to reconsider its previous case. So, a lawsuit launching a new case to reconsider the maps would have to wait for the 2026 election cycle. Until then, we’ll fight on the Congressional maps we’ve got, and make the most of the new state legislative maps at the same time.
Wisconsin is a huge state when it comes to the national election. Many number crunchers say that Trump cannot win without winning Wisconsin because the electoral math doesn’t add up. What’s the general plan for helping keep Wisconsin in the blue column in November?
Wisconsin is an essential state in the path to the White House—because the margins of victories here are so agonizingly small. Four of the last six presidential elections here have come down to less than one percentage point, and Wisconsin was the Electoral College tipping point state in 2016 and again in 2020. So, yes, it’s critical that Biden win here. And that’s exactly what we’ve been preparing to ensure, starting immediately after the 2020 election.
Our secret sauce is that we organize year-round in Wisconsin. Weekend after weekend after weekend, we’ve hundreds or even thousands of volunteers knocking on doors and having face-to-face conversations with voters about the stakes in the election. We organize virtual phone banks, relational “friend banks,” team launches, office openings, listening sessions, Get Out The Vote rallies, and a dozen other things, all with the singular focus of finding and turning out voters who will cast ballots for Democrats. That means persuasion and turnout, in every community in the state. We can only win when we show up across geography, generation, gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Anyone who wants to help can donate and volunteer!
Do you believe we have seen the end of unfair partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin? Or could this problem reassert itself if there’s a change in control of the governorship, the legislature or the state’s highest court? And what’s next on your list for expanding democracy and Democratic power in the state?
As long as there are no guardrails to prevent partisan gerrymandering, the threat will always remain that elected officials could use their positions to dilute the voting power of their own constituents. Without leaders committed to protecting democracy, and without laws that defend against partisan gerrymandering, our democracy could backslide again. As it stands now, our progress is only as stable as the next election dictates. So that’s our next focus: flipping the State Legislature by electing pro-democracy candidates who will stand up to partisan gerrymandering, and pass reforms to make sure no one is able to rig the system like the GOP did in 2011 ever again.
Ben Wikler was elected chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in June of 2019. Since then, he has led the party through a string of historic victories, including Wisconsin’s defeat of Trump in 2020, Governor Evers’ reelection in 2022, and two landmark state Supreme Court wins that delivered a progressive majority to the Court for the first time in 15 years. In the process, Ben has built the WisDems to an unprecedented level of strength and national recognition as a force for progressive change.
Magnificent job by Ben Walker. I'm very happy for Wisconsin... and America. Can we clone this guy?
Gerrymandering should be outlawed. PERIOD. The Electoral College needs reform or ridding too. The popular vote need more weight- seats in the national Senate too.