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
And as we learned in Wisconsin, just as we learned nationally...
while it's great and important to beat the guy in charge, we beat Trump in 2020, we beat Scott Walker in 2018, it is not enough.
You actually have to fight for all the other levels of government too, because they all make the rules for all the other parts.
So in Wisconsin, we've seen the same drama we've seen everywhere in the nation, that the far right has reached down into local races, has tried to elect mayors who will block the absentee ballot drop boxes.
They try to elect judges who will restrict their right to vote.
They
like state legislators who are committed to gerrymandering house and state legislative districts.
And you have to look at how the different parts of the power system interlock and figure out how to trace the path to being able to unrig the whole thing from the inside.
In Wisconsin, we tried a whole bunch of strategies to try to unrig our state legislative maps.
There were federal court cases.
There was having a governor who could veto Republicans' maps.
None of that wound up working until we flipped the majority in the state Supreme Court.
That wound up being the skeleton key to unlock the whole system in the state of Wisconsin.
And that meant building a permanent campaign where a ton of people in small towns and cities and suburbs everywhere got involved over and over, not about one candidate, often about people that they only were learning about a few months before the election, not about one race or one office, but about this much bigger, deeper idea about being a democracy that works for everyone.
That kind of permanent campaign to me is what we need at a national level now.
A permanent campaign.
And by that, I don't mean ads on TV in every ad break in every state every second of the day.
What I mean is actually building, organizing at the local level, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood organizations.
all over the country so that in all these races at all levels of government, we're able to drive up participation to encourage and persuade people to get involved in these races that otherwise go unnoticed.
I talk in the book about race after race that comes down to a few hundred votes that winds up starting a row of dominoes that winds up giving Republicans control of the US House years later.
Showing 81–100 of 485 · page 5 of 25
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