Ben Wikler
speaker
485 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Ben Wikler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He was flying in people to knock on doors.
He was offering these bribes.
He was funding massive TV ad campaigns.
The ads he was funding were actually all about how Trump was endorsing Brad Schimel and how you needed to support Brad Schimel to support Trump right after Trump had won in the state.
So the strategy was very much to say, we have the power, we're in charge, do not get between us and what we want.
And what we saw with Susan Crawford, our amazing candidate, she started going around the state and saying, I never dreamed as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I'd be up against the world's richest man in a fight for democracy.
And we also saw this grassroots army, basically, these thousands of people who had been organizing continuously, often in races exactly like this, in multiple state Supreme Court races, in local races across the state, going neighbor to neighbor and talking to people that they had long relationships with about how this was a race you had to vote, you had to show that Wisconsin could not be bought.
But there was this even deeper principle about whether democracy in our state would be for sale, whether Wisconsin could be auctioned off based on these giant checks.
So that helped you, correct?
I do think that having the perfect villain allowed a message to really ring through very clearly that the people who were ravaging and terrorizing the country wanted to do the same thing to Wisconsin and you could fight back by getting involved in the state Supreme Court race.
Having a really clear electrifying message like that really mattered.
But also having the courage to get up and go out and keep showing up in a race where it seemed like the odds were overwhelming.
A lot of people were shocked that Elon Musk lost that race after everything that he poured in.
A lot of people thought we were totally cooked.
I remember vividly this question of whether it made sense to go after Elon Musk because it could provoke him to do even more.
And I think the fear that if you punch the bully, he's going to crush you like a bug can make a lot of people want to shrink back.
And to Susan Crawford's enormous credit, she did the exact opposite and it worked.
That's funny.
I feel like he approached politics the way he approached Doge, which is to have a big theory and then apply it without paying any attention to whether it was actually working.
And one part of his theory was very smart, which is that there's a whole bunch of research.
Showing 41–60 of 485 · page 3 of 25
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