Talk to Democrats across the country about who they think is doing things right within their party, and one name comes up repeatedly: Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
The praise comes from all levels of the party, ranging from grassroots Democratic leaders within Wisconsin and as high up as their presidential ticket.
“When I turn on my TV, there’s nobody I want to see more than Ben Wikler,” vice presidential candidate Tim Walz said at a breakfast for Wisconsin’s Democratic National Convention delegates this month.
Wikler has established a national reputation for himself as the architect of effective state party infrastructure. But this year, Democrats across the country are looking to him to deliver crucial wins in his own backyard. Wisconsin is part of the blue wall that Kamala Harris virtually must win to have a feasible path to the White House, and it has a key Senate race that could factor heavily into which party controls the chamber next year.
The 2024 election is the ultimate test for a state party chair who has preached to his party the importance of doing heavy, year-round outreach to keep engagement high for when they need it most.
“We’re really in a moment where we could win up and down the ballot in a way that changes the future of Wisconsin,” said Wikler in an interview with NOTUS this May about the potential of his operation this year. “It’s the result of all these pieces coming together over years and years of work.”
The apparatus Wikler is working with has been years in the making, before his time as state party chair. He pointed to other state party leaders who made structural changes that have directly affected his approach to the job.
That includes the decision by a prior chair to develop a “Neighborhood Action Team” model, which works by hiring staff to build active year-round teams that focus on having community conversations, meeting with local leaders and recruiting volunteers.
It was through volunteering with these teams that Wikler said he “just fell in love with” the party’s organizing model. When Wikler was elected chair of the party, his focus became to grow the party’s ability to reach voters even more.
“[The party] did not have a lot of capacity in terms of communications, digital, didn’t have the same fundraising capacity to support this type of thing,” Wikler said. “I made it my mission to supercharge all those different pieces of how we operate.”
He’s taken other steps to innovate the party. He hired a “world-class attorney” as his party’s voter-protection director, with help from a Stacey Abrams-led group in Georgia. Wikler built out the state party’s digital team to handle fundraising and organizing, “which became incredibly handy when the COVID pandemic hit because suddenly, everything had to be done online,” Wikler said.
For years prior to Wikler’s tenure, Democrats had worked to beat a Republican trifecta at the state level. Right before Wikler took on his role, Democrats had finally flipped the governorship and sent Sen. Tammy Baldwin back to the Senate with over a 10-point win margin.
In the five years before Wikler was chair, they won 9 out of 15 statewide races, largely thanks to a boost from 2018, a boon year for Democrats during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Just a few years later, it’s clear Wikler has helped add to those results. Since he has been at the helm, Democrats (or candidates they backed in nonpartisan races, like Supreme Court seats) have won 80% of their statewide runs in one of the purplest states in the country. State Democrats also played a key role in delivering the White House for Joe Biden.
His party’s wins aren’t limited to statewide offices: In mid-August, Democrats beat two GOP-authored ballot measures that would’ve expanded oversight of the governor by the legislature — the sitting Gov. Tony Evers is a Democrat, and the state’s legislature is controlled by Republicans.
He’s led the party even on other battles that hit home for its base. When state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz ran as a candidate who supported abortion rights in 2023, state Democrats hammered the point that the court would ultimately decide on abortion rights, gerrymandered maps and election administration later on in the nation’s tipping point state. Protasiewicz won by double digits.
Wikler’s also raked in cash, year after year. Since he took over as chair, he’s helped raise more than $180 million for his state party. The state Democratic Party outraised state Republicans more than 10 to 1 in the first six months this year.
Part of Wikler’s pitch is simple: “If you want to make sure that Trump doesn’t get back into the White House, you have to win Wisconsin.”
But winning Wisconsin is hard. Despite the massive difference in party fundraising, many elections are still razor-thin, and the presidential race this fall is a toss-up. While Democrats have won statewide races, they lost both rising star Katie Rosenberg’s mayor race in Wausau and two campaign-finance-related ballot initiatives this past spring. Wikler’s national profile nor Democrats’ big bucks is a guarantee of a blue Wisconsin for Harris.
Still, the financial floodgates that Wikler opened for the party have given the party the ability to hire staff that is willing to stick around for more than just a cycle.
“[Wikler] has helped the party raise enough money to keep a fantastic set of staff working on-years and off-years and all the years in between in Wisconsin,” a Democratic strategist in the state not authorized to speak on the record told NOTUS. “You just get better and better and better at doing these races because you’re [keeping] competent people who stay a long time because Wikler has enough money to pay them decently, and give them health care, and be like, ‘Hey, man, this can be a career, not just a temporary job where you leave totally exhausted.’”
Years of building up grassroots and fundraising combined with Wikler’s push into the digital age have, they hope, set them up for their toughest battle yet: keeping the White House blue, helping Democrats keep the Senate and trying to support other Democratic candidates down ballot. He knows how critical that is for his party.
“Wisconsin specifically will tilt the entire country,” he said in an interview this summer.
And he is also thinking beyond his tenure.
Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said if state chairs “build it the right way, it doesn’t matter if Ben’s around or not.” Martin continued, “Our job is to build the organization to last. And Ben is doing that exceptionally well.”
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.