Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ben Wikler:

The question of why should I get involved in the system that feels so broken to me, part of our answer to that is that even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. And if you have a medical emergency while you’re pregnant and you need care, it doesn’t matter whether you voted or not and that kind of argument reaches out of politics and into people’s real lives and can actually move people.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ben Wikler. He’s the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, one of the seven battleground states in this extremely competitive presidential election. Ben isn’t just any chair, he’s been called the best state chair in the country and a winning machine for Democrats in the state. Before his election to the chair position in 2019, Ben served as Washington DC director and senior advisor for MoveOn where he successfully fought to save the Affordable Care Act. I spoke to Ben this week in a live taping of the podcast about the state of the presidential race. Hundreds of you joined us and asked great questions at the end of the episode. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

After Ben Wikler was elected chair of the Wisconsin Democrats in 2019, he turned the party into a winning machine. Ben, welcome to the show. We’re thrilled to have you.

Ben Wikler:

Great. It’s great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

I will admit, I wanted to start with, “Live from New York, it’s Stay Tuned,” but I think there’s a copyright on that or something. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to use that.

Ben Wikler:

Well, I think I can say, “Live from Wisconsin.” That is not copyrighted anywhere.

Preet Bharara:

That’s true. That is actually perfectly acceptable to say. So I will say since we can see each other and the audience can, you look terrific, how can that be since I’m guessing you’ve gotten no sleep?

Ben Wikler:

I’m currently fueled by caffeine, adrenaline and anxiety, so that is my magic recipe and I’m not sure I recommend it to everybody, but I will say the greatest thing in politics is when you’re in a giant, colossal fight and you actually have things that you can do that can make a difference. And everyone who’s volunteering with us and everyone on our team has the luck and blessing of being in that situation right now.

Preet Bharara:

So before we get to the serious stuff and we have a lot to talk about with respect to not just Wisconsin, where you are and where you’re so active and important, but also some of the other battleground states, before we get to that, I want to tell folks that you have a background as a comedy writer. You have big smile on your face. How do you think about comedy this year in politics? And given the stakes, do you let yourself laugh and watch comedy? How do you think about humor at a very serious time like this?

Ben Wikler:

Well, I’m Jewish and my people have a very long history of dealing with incredibly stressful situations through humor, so this is maybe somewhere in my DNA, but I think it’s critical to find ways to be able to laugh. And I’m watching the show the English Teacher, which is hilarious and fantastic. One episode comes out a week, so it’s like my little 30 minutes of total escape from everything. And I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, writing… well, in middle school and high school I was obsessed with The Onion, which was the then local coupon vehicle-

Preet Bharara:

It still exists.

Ben Wikler:

It still exists. It is now back in print. I’m a print subscriber and now my kids are reading the new print edition. But my friends and I started underground student newspapers in middle school and high school sort of modeled on The Onion in our schools. And then we sent every issue to The Onion and then finally in my senior year of high school, they wrote back and said, “This is pretty funny. You can come in,” so my friend and I got to go in and start writing headlines and stories for them. The first headline that got in print that I can remember was, “I’m no proctologist, but I’ll take a look,” and it was not bad. And so I got to do that while being involved in politics and activism. I volunteered in high school on a bunch of campaigns including Tammy Baldwin’s first run for Congress. And I think part of the human condition is finding your way to things that you find really meaningful and also be able to find joy and laughter in the midst of all that and it is hard to do one without the other.

Preet Bharara:

You helped Al Franken, the former senator, write a book that I have on my bookshelf from years ago. It’s kind of quaint when you think about the title, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. That’s years before Trump, the super heavyweight champion of lying. How do you think you or Al Franken would update that book today?

Ben Wikler:

It’s funny because Al has always had this incredibly deep aversion to lies. It just infuriates him when people say things that they know are not true and Trump is actually takes it to another level, which is indifference to the truth. There’s this book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit and the idea of bullshit is that you don’t care whether something is true. It’s not defined by its relationship to truth, you’re just saying whatever will get you through that moment-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not the lie, it’s the calling to question truth altogether.

Ben Wikler:

Exactly. It’s an affront of the idea of truth. And so in a way, you’re right, it is kind of quaint to remember a time when the right was merely lying. I wish we could go back to the time because lying honors the truth in the breach. In this moment, the truth is totally out of the window and we have an election that’s about to take place where half of the election is being conducted on totally false grounds. We have dropping crime rates that’s being conducted on the right on the basis of an imaginary crime wave that’s unleashed across the country.

There’s all these different dimensions of just complete divorce from reality that are the central Republican message at this moment. And it’s a different thing, you can’t debunk that. It is something that you have to approach differently. You have to mobilize people who share the reality you’re in and then you have to find hooks that are based on shared values as opposed to shared facts and find ways to connect with people even if they believe a whole bunch of things that you know or believe you know to your core are just completely untrue.

Preet Bharara:

So humor, as you mentioned, is an important antidote in serious times, but what about humor as used and wielded in political rhetoric? Is Kamala Harris doing a good job of properly making fun, poking fun at her opponents? Is Tim Walz doing the same? How about Trump? A lot of Trump supporters think he’s hilarious.

Ben Wikler:

Yeah. And I will say that there are moments when he says things that are funny. Sometimes they’re funny because it’s him saying them. He had this line about the Fed, being the Federal Reserve chair, is the greatest job in government because all you do is go in, flip a coin once a month and then everyone treats you like God. It’s a funny thing for a presidential candidate to say.

Preet Bharara:

Right. And you concede that. Some people will be upset that you’re saying that because they don’t concede anything to him.

Ben Wikler:

Look, I mean, I think that there are few people who are funny to everybody and it’s very clear that a ton of Trump supporters find him very funny and I think occasionally he is. I think he’s also incredibly cruel and vicious and hateful and intentionally divisive and so many of the world’s worst qualities. I think that the capacity to be funny is not a sign of some kind of innate virtue and I think that the best humor lifts people up, but there’s also can be really cutting humor. And I think that Harris and Walz do a great job of not taking themselves too seriously at the same time as they take the stakes in the election very seriously. So there, I laugh when I see them give their speeches, they can land a joke, they can also laugh at themselves and laugh at the world and I think that’s great. I think one of the things that they’ve done that’s really a gift in our politics is they’re treating Trump as both the menace that he is and also the clown that he is and so Harris has this great-

Preet Bharara:

And that’s inherent, right. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people say, maybe your thought on this, that a way to treat people who are belligerent, who are bullies, who are demagogues, even ones who have some sense of humor sometimes as you suggest Trump does, is to belittle them and mock them, not always to point the finger in a sort centurion way and lecture them, but to bring them down with humor. Do you believe that works?

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely right. That’s absolutely right because the whole thing is there’s a part of, for many people, the human psyche that is drawn to power. And when Trump is agreed by both sides to be just incredibly powerful, the main character, this towering menace, a lot of people want to be on the side of the winner, whoever that might be. And the reality is this is someone who’s lost election after election, who can’t handle when he doesn’t win an Emmy and thinks that every election that he doesn’t win is somehow rigged because he can’t stomach the idea that he lives in a reality and making fun of him for that helps to reduce this kind of mythic predatory force that a lot of people have granted him. I don’t think we should cede that to him. I like how Harris says, “He’s an unserious man, even though the threat that he poses very serious,” and that is worth keeping in mind.

Preet Bharara:

Although some people will say, many people have said, that maybe the reason we have Donald Trump in our politics in the first place is back during that very faithful White House Correspondents’ dinner, Barack Obama used humor and jokes to make fun of then private citizen Donald Trump that, as the saga and the tale goes, was so offended and so angered about that, being made fun of and humiliated in that way, that that’s when he decided, “I’m eventually going to run for president and show everyone up.” Do you buy that?

Ben Wikler:

I mean, it is a beautiful kind of encounter-

Preet Bharara:

A beautiful tale.

Ben Wikler:

… that can inform our national narrative, but also he’s been talking about running for president his whole life. This is someone who’s always been obsessed with the spotlight and with power. This is someone who was really, really into the racist birther conspiracy ideas about Obama and was pushing that left and right. I think this is someone who’s always going to be looking for an excuse to go on the attack and to try to amass power for himself. So maybe it is literally when he made up his decision, but the question of would we have had a rendezvous with this outcome through some other path, I think probably the answer is yes. It seems like he is like a Gollum with the ring. He wants the power and he’s going to scrabble his way after it no matter what comes his way.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a nice image, Trump is Gollum. Okay, so let’s talk about Wisconsin. You’re talking to us live from Madison, Wisconsin, am I right?

Ben Wikler:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

Remind folks how important Wisconsin was in 2016, 2020, how close it was and what that means for how important Wisconsin is to the overall election that’s happening in three weeks?

Ben Wikler:

So 2016, if you looked at fivethirtyeight.com, if you asked national pollsters, if you’re asked the campaign, it looked like a blue state. And in fact Wisconsin had been blue in every presidential election going back to 1988, whether Republicans won or lost the election.

Preet Bharara:

Seven in a row, right, went blue?

Ben Wikler:

Seven in a row. So there was this idea that Hillary Clinton was going to be fine and if you talk to people on the ground and I came home and knocked on doors that year, I was with MoveOn in Washington D.C., but I came home and knocked on doors and it didn’t feel fun. But I would knock on doors of people who were supposed to be Democrats who I was turning out and they would tell me how many people the Clinton family had gotten killed. They were totally in the tank of these conspiracy theories-

Preet Bharara:

How many did they say?

Ben Wikler:

They would ask me if I knew the number and I believed that the number was zero and they would just shake their heads at how naive I was. So I didn’t feel-

Preet Bharara:

So that’s not polling, that’s your anecdotal feel.

Ben Wikler:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

And how much weight should be put on that kind of a feel, maybe for you a lot because you’re an expert?

Ben Wikler:

Well, I think that the most important thing is to find a whole bunch of different ways to listen. So polls are one way to listen and there’s a bunch of different polling methodologies that you can use. Focus groups is another one. What happens when you knock on doors based on your expectations and then the reality, especially if you have a large sample size, that is a meaningful source of data, what your model says is going to happen, then what really happens. Yard signs tell you something. They don’t tell you everything. Crowd sizes tell you something, they don’t tell you everything. What you want is actual voting behavior, what’s happening with registrations, what’s happening with the early vote and absentee vote. You want to try to build a picture out of as many data points as possible.

And in 2020, all the data points that involved the actual people on the ground were pointing in the wrong way and all the kind of algorithmic weighted data points said that everything was fine. And the team on the ground that was at the state party, I came to learn, was screaming bloody murder that there was a serious problem and it was kind of waved off. And then the polls closed and the votes were tallied and the state that was supposed to be safely in the Clinton column wound up going to Trump by 22,748 votes, so that’s three votes per precinct across the state. And in that moment, people stepped back and realized Wisconsin was blue in 2000 and 2004, but it was the second-closest state in the country in 2000. It was the closest state in the country in 2004. It was incredibly hard fought. Barack Obama’s landslide victories were the exception. And that meant Wisconsin should never be taken for granted no matter what the polls say.

So I was elected chair in 2019. We ran this massive operation, all virtual because of COVID. The turnout shot up on both sides. There were more Trump voters in every county in Wisconsin in 2020 than in 2016, but there were also more Democratic voters in every single county in 2020. And we wound up winning in a much higher turnout election by 20,682. And those microscopic margins, again, this is three votes per precinct, are what we are expecting again this time, it is what we are building in order to win the final handful of votes and if you look at the polls right now, it is tied in Wisconsin again. So that is where we are and we might tip the whole country.

Preet Bharara:

That’s where we’re going to be, right. So what are the issues that will turn people on or off and that they will vote upon in Wisconsin? And then follow-up question which I’ll ask in advance, are those the same issues that we see in other swing states or is it different?

Ben Wikler:

So the biggest one that helps us, which is true I think in all the battleground states but it’s true in a particular way in Wisconsin, is the issue of abortion and reproductive freedom. And I say that not because it’s the first thing people name when you ask them what the biggest issue is, it’s that it’s the biggest issue that moves Republicans and swing and ticket-splitting voters to vote for Democrats. And it’s the biggest issue that moves nonvoters who might be totally cynical about the political system in both parties, it gives them a reason to leave home and go cast a ballot even if they hate politics and don’t like either candidate. For those folks, they don’t want politicians telling them what they can do with their own bodies.

Preet Bharara:

Is that unique to Wisconsin or is that true in the other battleground states or is that true all over the country?

Ben Wikler:

So I think it’s true across the country, but in Wisconsin we had a near total abortion ban for 451 days after the Dobbs decision. And that is not true in a lot of the other battleground states. In states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, you didn’t have the same experience of every abortion provider shutting down their access to abortion care after the Dobbs decision came through. We were a state where we had a law in the books from 1849, before the Civil War, using premodern medical language. But it meant that when the Dobbs decision came through, Roe v. Wade was shredded, suddenly every hospital didn’t know whether their doctors would be thrown in jail for providing miscarriage care that technically could be termed an abortion.

So women were left to bleed for days. People had to flee the state to try to get the care they needed to stay alive. Doctors would pull in lawyers, try to get multiple doctors to sign off when women were going into sepsis. Some of this stuff is in public record, there’s a lot of word of mouth networks. A ton of people, including me, are one or two or three degrees of separation from people who are directly affected by the abortion ban. And we know what it is like. It just happened here and we know that we’re one bad election away from that coming back. So that is a reason why it’s a bigger deal here in some ways than it is in a state like New York where 2022 was a red wave year. In ’22 in Wisconsin, this was a row, row, row your vote year. We reelected our Democratic governor, which had not happened in a year with a Democratic president since 1962. In ’23 we won the majority in our state supreme court, very much on the [inaudible] issue.

Preet Bharara:

Talk about that for a moment because that was a big deal. Usually you don’t hear about court elections making national news. What happened there? How much of that is a result of what you talked about with respect to Dobbs and abortion and what does it mean for 2024?

Ben Wikler:

So I think there were three big things that went into our state supreme court victory in ’23. The first is this abortion ban. And a candidate who was very clear without prejudging any case was very clear that her personal values were that it should be the decision of the person who’s pregnant and not a politician. The second is the effective democracy in this race. And in Wisconsin, we were the state became closest to overturning the 2020 presidential election. It came down to one vote on our state supreme court. And Dan Kelly, the guy who was running for supreme court in 2020 in the spring and in 2022… excuse me, ‘3, he had been an advisor to the fake elector scheme for the Republican Party of Wisconsin. I mean he was part of parcel of this whole conspiracy movement, he was a MAGA guy. And that issue has real meaningful impact on giving people a sense of the stakes in these fights.

But the third piece is that we have a year-round state party with this year-round organizing program and an infrastructure, allied groups, there’s a whole bunch of different organizations that are deeply involved in politics, there are thousands of people who make it their business year-round to knock on doors and mobilize their neighbors and communicate and amplify things online. And we had a candidate campaign that just did a fantastic job of working with all the parts of the infrastructure within the lines of the law to maximize how efficiently we’re able to use resources and how big we’re able to make the fight. So we had hundreds of thousands of people who’d never voted in a spring election vote in 2023 and the polling said it was going to be close and we won in a landslide. And the best-

Preet Bharara:

Unexpectedly, right?

Ben Wikler:

Unexpectedly, yeah. No, the week before the election, I had a poll that said that [inaudible] was only two points up. And it turned out that that’s because the polls were all based on a model of who’s likely to show up in a spring supreme court election and they missed huge numbers of people who were now mobilized because of Dobbs. The thing that makes me most hopeful in this election is that it won’t be the same magnitude of polling miss in our direction, but it’s possible that a whole bunch of people who’ve been infuriated by the Dobbs decision and the tax on democracy are going to turn out and make the polls look too pessimistic. And I don’t want to bank on that possibility, but if it turns out to be a great night, I think that is most likely to be the thing that happened in retrospect.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Ben Wikler.

So I’m not in Wisconsin, I don’t know what’s going on in the airwaves or on the billboards. Is Kamala Harris spending a gazillion dollars talking about Dobbs, Dobbs, Dobbs, Dobbs all the time in Wisconsin, based… it sounds like she should be based on what you’re saying. Is that what it feels like?

Ben Wikler:

So there are other issues too and typically it’s been kind of Dobbs plus has been the… so you want to absolutely draw a clear line in the sand on that and then you want to also make arguments to folks that aren’t voting on that. And I think she’s doing a good mix of the different pieces. There’s a lot about abortion and Dobbs and then there’s also pieces around her economic vision and there’s also stuff defending against the Republican attacks, but we are facing a wall of Republican money. And part of the reason why it’s so tight in Wisconsin and I think other states is that if you look in aggregate across the different races, the Republican super PAC operation and Republican candidates are outspending and out-communicating Democrats. There’s been a lot of publicity lately about the $23 million in independent expenditures in the Senate race. Miriam Adelson just gave $100 million to her super PAC, there’s a $49 million from Dick Uihlein to his super PAC, there’s-

Preet Bharara:

But what’s interesting about that is, I’m sorry to interrupt, all I hear on television is how much money, the Harris-Walz campaign has raised a billion dollars in just a couple of months. You’re painting a different picture. How do you square those two things?

Ben Wikler:

I think that when you look just at the candidates’ own campaign fundraising but you don’t look at the dark money groups, then you miss a huge amount of the spending that happens in American politics. And so Harris has definitely run a more effective fundraising operation than Trump, but she doesn’t have Elon Musk, she doesn’t have people that are writing nine-figure checks and there’s not just one on the Republican side at this point. I mean, we’re seeing it on TV. If you turn on Hulu, my kids can recite things they’ve seen in Republican attack ads, there’s just an assault on the air happening right now.

Harris and all the different allied groups on the Democratic side are fighting back and what they don’t have, and I don’t think there’s any path to, is total dominance on the airwaves in the way that in 2020, actually Biden had against Trump because Trump did not have the kind of well-organized armada on the air that he did. Ironically, in 2020, the Republicans had a better ground game than they do now. They’ve just fallen apart in terms of their ability to organize on the ground. It’s mostly been outsourced to Elon Musk super PAC now. And on the Democratic side [inaudible].

Preet Bharara:

Is that good enough? Is that just as good? Does it matter if it’s outsourced or not?

Ben Wikler:

I mean, I will say that normally in a close election like this in Wisconsin, our volunteers see Republican volunteers crossing them on the same block and you walk along and you can see which door has got the Democratic literature tucked behind the door knob and which one has got the Republican and which one has got both and it’s not happening that way right now. From all the things that we can see-

Preet Bharara:

So I’m confused. As a matter of strategy for the Republicans, if they have all this money and the ground game is important as most experts will say, what am I missing? Are they just dropping the ball? Which is good, I’m glad they’re dropping the ball, but are they dropping the ball?

Ben Wikler:

Yes, I want them to spend it inefficiently, target badly, communicate the wrong things-

Preet Bharara:

But they’re not dumb, Trump’s people are not dumb.

Ben Wikler:

So this is the thing, I think the people running Trump’s campaign, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, they’re experts in the air war and I think that they’re recognizing that they can’t control Trump and they’re letting Trump assert his will on the things that he cares a lot about. And he cares a lot about hiring election integrity staff as he calls them, the kind of voter suppression team, but he doesn’t care about field organizing. He’s never knocked a door in his life. And they can run their very disciplined and aggressive ad campaign, which they’re doing and Trump doesn’t really get in the way of it and then he goes off and rambles for hours on these rally stages. And I’m sure they’d like it if he could actually deliver a message, but they know they can’t control him.

So it’s really like a multi-headed hydra. You have Trump totally undisciplined, you have an RNC operation that’s been hollowed out and it’s focused on voter suppression instead of persuasion and turnout. And then into that, steps a group of arguably grifting Republican kind of MAGA donor types, you have the Turning Point USA team that helped engineer the ouster, the Republican National Committee chair and then took over field operations. Turned out they couldn’t actually stand up the kind of operation that was needed. Then Elon Musk has come in who believes he can do anything and he’s promising the sun, moon and the stars and he’s apparently cycled through several vendors of paid field canvassing operations and it’s just a little bit of a mess.

So I think that that hurts them and I think that their flood of attack ads probably helps them and the question of how it all shakes out in the final analysis… I think the last thing I will say, our candidate is not only better, but also her message is something that actually really resonates with people. So reproductive freedom, also an economy that works for middle class people, making sure the wealthy pay their fair share and supporting unions and supporting actually building things in this country, that stuff really flies. And the way she communicates about issue after issue, from gun safety to all these things, she’s really good on. So if people just vote on how this election will affect them, Democrats will win. And the goal of the campaign in a way is to bring people’s attention to the stakes in their own lives of this election.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the issues that are positive for Kamala Harris and I agree with all of that. Do the people of Wisconsin care less about the border than in some other states?

Ben Wikler:

I mean all the battlegrounds are tied right now, so Wisconsin might be looking a tiny bit better than some of the other states. Historically, we’ve also had a larger polling error in the wrong direction. I don’t know whether we’re in a better position than other states. When I knock on doors for undecided voters, the ones that are thinking about voting for Trump tell me about things they’ve seen about… I mean there’s a whole kind of Trump narrative where the border was opened and then murderers surged through and now they’re in your community, killing people and bringing in fentanyl. And so I hear that litany from people and it is not amenable to updated statistics. It is something that people have-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a core belief now.

Ben Wikler:

Yeah. It’s become a core belief. And so for those voters, they kind of have to choose between do they want the guy who might sign the abortion ban or whose vice president would love to become president, sign the abortion ban, or do they want the guy who will put up the border wall, even though you and I know he didn’t put up the border wall. And that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Did Mexico pay for it though? The portion that was put up, did Mexico pay for that?

Ben Wikler:

We’ll never know apparently.

Preet Bharara:

So there’s been a lot of talk about who’s going to Wisconsin, right? A few weeks ago, I think Trump had gone a number of times already. I think he’s been there recently. Kamala Harris is going there I think this week. Does Trump do better the more he comes to the state or not and same question about Kamala Harris?

Ben Wikler:

Depends on what he does, but in general, I think more people-

Preet Bharara:

What if he stands for 30 minutes saying nothing-

Ben Wikler:

I think that helps us.

Preet Bharara:

… maybe listening to songs?

Ben Wikler:

I think that in general, the more he comes and the more Harris comes, the more it helps us in my view and they-

Preet Bharara:

But each way it benefits the Democrats?

Ben Wikler:

I think it does. I mean when he does his press conferences and actually is able to drive a message with his really, really dark rhetoric, I think it does fire up some of his supporters and I think there’s a marginal impact for him. When he goes totally off and the coverage winds up being about the ways that he’s misfiring and losing it and also threatening and making things really dangerous, that gives us things to work with. He came here four times in an eight-day stretch that ended about a week ago. Harris is making three visits this Thursday. Walz was here yesterday. I got to see him in Green Bay and he also went to Eau Claire. Both sides are going to be here a ton. We just announced today that Barack Obama is going to be here with Tim Walz this coming Tuesday, the first day of early vote, which is fantastic from my perspective.

The thing that when the candidate comes, first of all, it generates a ton of local news coverage. So every TV camera in town shows up, some often from across the state, it’s the lead story on the news break that happens on the hour on all the radio stations across Wisconsin. One clip from the speech gets played, so an hour and a half of rambling turns into either 20 seconds of a coherent message or 20 seconds of an incoherent mess and the war over what actually happened at the rally is almost important as the rally itself, but it does drive the earned media local news coverage. It also creates visuals that can turn into the ads that are used in paid media coverage.

And then the third thing, which is better for us, is that it puts a whole bunch of people in one place who might sign up for volunteer shifts. And I think we’re doing a better job of turning rally crowds into armies of volunteers to go talk to friends and family and neighbors than the Republicans are and that’s what’s one reason I love when we have visits from our principals here.

Preet Bharara:

So through the power of technology, which I’m not good at, we have in real time getting questions from people who are watching our podcast and they have a lot of great questions. So one of them is how much is Tim Walz as VP pick impacting Harris’ campaign in Wisconsin? What about the other swing states?

Ben Wikler:

It is so good for Wisconsin, it’s fantastic and I think it also helps in Michigan and it helps in a few ways, so the first is Tim Walz is a local, known-

Preet Bharara:

He’s basically a Wisconsinite.

Ben Wikler:

He’s basically Wisconsinite. Literally in western Wisconsin, local western Wisconsin TV stations, half their audience is in Minnesota and so they covered Tim Walz like he’s the second governor. And in western… excuse me, eastern Minnesota, their audience is often in Wisconsin, the Twin Cities and the Duluth media market. So they’ve been covering Walz because he was their governor, but the Wisconsinites see it on local TV all the time. So you start with like half million people who have a deep familiarity with him from that. And then on top of that, he’s just a kind of Wisconsin-y guy, in the sense Wisconsin is overwhelmingly white. If you look at the population demographics, half the state lives in communities of 15,000 people or less. And all over Wisconsin, everyone knows someone like him. Their favorite teacher was like him, he was their coach, he’s the kind of dad they want to be or wish they had-

Preet Bharara:

Ben, he was only an assistant coach.

Ben Wikler:

He’s their favorite assistant coach. He’s a familiar type of person. And probably the vast majority of Wisconsinites can sing the theme song to the Menards jingle << Save big money at Menards>> and he can do the same thing. And he did it on video and when Wisconsinites tell that, they’re like, “Yeah, he knows what’s up.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s why I can’t run for president and certainly won’t get vote, I can’t sing that.

Ben Wikler:

Well, you’d bring other attributes to the job. Kamala Harris lived in Wisconsin when she was four, we claim her as one of our own and Tim Walz has been living next to the door to Wisconsin and is ready to Wisconsin with the best of them and that really helps. It makes this campaign feel really local in a way that Tip O’Neill would be delighted by and that-

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting. I have as a question, I made a note to ask you about that, Tip O’Neill, all politics is local. And the reason I thought that that was a worthwhile thing to talk about is in recent years, Tip O’Neill wrote that book I think in the mid-80s if I remember correctly, and it sort of rang true in the ’80s, all politics is local, particularly for House members. Now it seems like everything is nationalized. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and some of these other people on the right are national figures and they run against national party leaders on the other side. They run against Chuck Schumer, they run against Nancy Pelosi seemingly less than they run in favor of policies that help the particular needs of their district. Overall, is all politics national or local or how do you think that’s evolved?

Ben Wikler:

So it’s interesting because I think Republican politics is national and Democratic politics is much more often local and the reason for that is that where people get their information has changed enormously. We do post-election polls to see where voters got their information in the election and Republicans are much, much, much more likely than Democrats to get their news from cable news. There’s a lot of Democrats who watch MSNBC a lot, but many, many more who do not. And if you look at Fox News audiences, they’re massively bigger, it’s the central kind of place for GOP information. Right-wing talk radio, there’s a lot of national hosts that really define what is going on for tons of Republican voters. There’s these kind of national viral content mills that are a huge source of information for huge numbers of Republican voters as well online.

And it means that a ton of Republican voters are not getting their news from local news sources, they’re not getting it from the state’s public radio network, they’re not getting it from a newspaper. If you read a newspaper, you’re like 70% likely to be voting Democratic at this point. And it means the things that happen in your own community often don’t affect what you think is happening. So that’s how you get this huge gap on crime statistics because in every community, just about, crime has been going down, down, down. It’s like at historic lows in a lot of places, but Republicans still have a narrative.

Preet Bharara:

There’s no truth.

Ben Wikler:

Well, this is how that works, right-

Preet Bharara:

Because people stand up and they say-

Ben Wikler:

… how do you live in a world that does not display truth?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. They say crime is up and that’s what people believe.

Ben Wikler:

Yes. And it’s because so many people live in an information ecosystem that’s defined by national propagandists. On the Democratic side, there’s not a monolith. There’s a huge number of different flavors of Democrats who get information from different places. So some people are watching local news, network national news, they read the newspaper, they’re on social media, there’s a greater variety of news sources. And they’re also often reading a variety ideologically and so they might hear this from right-wing media and this from progressive media and this from local media and they have to make the sense of it all. But it means that Republicans have more one-stop shopping, the politicians do, to reach their voters. It means that world events are less likely to move the Republican base. And it means that Republicans are more often kind of voting against a caricature of Democrats that they’re getting from national propagandists rather than the actual flesh and blood humans that are running where they are.

But basically Republicans need all the conservatives and then a handful of moderates to win. Democrats need more than half of the moderates and all the progressives and liberals to win. And so Democrats have a local job that’s really different from the sort of national-centric job that Republicans have to do to be able to win these elections. And Tip O’Neill’s advice, he was a Democrat, it’s still true for Democrats, you got to glue yourself to understanding what is happening in your communities and local stuff. If you’re Ron Johnson, a Republican, you can run based on the national fearmongering topic of the week and have a chance to win, even by a single percentage point as we saw in 2022. But he basically camped that on [inaudible 00:33:53] radio and Fox News and that worked for him in a way that it would never work for a Democrat.

Preet Bharara:

So you’ve been fairly modest about your own achievements and the progress you’ve made in Wisconsin for Democrats. Among the things you’ve done is engage in creative fundraising, the raising of money. And one of those are things by the way, so it’s a particular treat to meet you, is because I participated in it, you had a live reading of the script of The Princess Bride, what was that now, I guess three and a half years ago or something?

Ben Wikler:

Four years and a month.

Preet Bharara:

One of the greatest movies of all time, screenplayed by William Goldman, one of my heroes and someone who I respect a lot, the late William Goldman. How’d you come up with that idea and tell people how much money you raised? And what are the lessons for other state parties who have to compete with all sorts of other organizations, PACs and everything else, to raise money for their state?

Ben Wikler:

This is a dream come true experience for me because it’s my favorite movie in the world-

Preet Bharara:

Number one.

Ben Wikler:

… I also love the book. Number one movie and I grew up watching it over and over, I inflict it on my kids, I’ve memorized the whole thing. It is a-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, do you have a favorite line? Do you have a favorite line?

Ben Wikler:

The line that my kids and I repeat the most is the moment on the boat where it goes, “Fezzik, are there rocks ahead?” “If there are, we all be dead.” “No more rhyming now, I mean it.” “Anybody want a peanut?” “Ah.” That’s because I go back and forth with that a lot. Do you have a favorite line?

Preet Bharara:

I have many and I have favorite terms. If I were a politician, I would campaign against rodents of unusual size.

Ben Wikler:

I don’t think they exist.

Preet Bharara:

Mawage is a good one.

Ben Wikler:

That was my toast at my sister’s wedding.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a lot of great stuff. So that came together. So from that one event, online event, how much money did the Democratic Party of Wisconsin raise?

Ben Wikler:

That raised $4.25 million. It was our most successful fundraising event of all time.

Preet Bharara:

That’s kind of crazy.

Ben Wikler:

It was wild. And this happened, so we’d had an event with Bradley Whitford who’s from Madison, Wisconsin, and he was on the West Wing. And there’s a podcast called West Wing Weekly and they had a kind of virtual event during the DNC, which was virtual itself, and it raised $160,000. And we thought, “Wow, this is great. I wonder if we can do this with any other kind of cultural thing.” So our team started brainstorming and a member of our team had grown up with someone who was friends with Cary Elwes, who was the Man in Black and so they got in touch. Cary Elwes apparently had reached out to his friend, Sarah, and said, “Sarah, you’re from Wisconsin. Is there anything I can do to help Wisconsin? It seems really close there.” And boom, suddenly he was on board to try to help.

He contacts Rob Reiner. Rob Reiner who owns the rights, started calling the other cast members. Everybody signed on. This thing came together, there were Wallace Shawn and Mandy Patinkin and all these amazing actors and actresses got together. And then Ted Cruz, when he saw the announcement about it, he loves The Princess Bride and he tweeted something where he was trying to throw shame on The Princess Bride for getting involved in politics. And immediately Mandy Patinkin started responding and it blew up online. And CNN covered it and it became a national story before it happened and it was like the best free publicity in the world. So Ted Cruz, I hope you lose your election this year, but I do thank you for helping us to win Wisconsin in 2020. That is your gift to us.

Preet Bharara:

You know my reaction to that? Inconceivable.

Ben Wikler:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Preet Bharara:

You killed my father. We could do this all night long. No, but it’s interesting that Ben Wikler and Ted Cruz can love the same movie. What does that say about how we can bring the country together? It’s not a facetious question actually.

Ben Wikler:

So I think in a way, stories that convey universal values are a path to bring the country together. I mean, maybe not Ted Cruz specifically, but for so many people, they’re looking for a story of the country that they can see themselves be a part of and that speaks to the things that motivate them and to bring them joy and make them laugh. And I think one of the great gifts that politics can give is to tell a story of the moment that includes everyone, where they feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And I think that that is something that Princess Bride does so wonderfully. And kids like my older sister love The Princess Bride and I love The Princess Bride-

Preet Bharara:

All my kids can quote-

Ben Wikler:

… and we probably related to different characters.

Preet Bharara:

… can quote chapter and verse on The Princess Bride too and have been able to for years.

Ben Wikler:

That’s a sign of a good parent. I’m glad to hear that.

Preet Bharara:

But my question is, we don’t know because I’ve never read anything about this, Ted Cruz may like or be very fond of The Princess Bride, do you think Donald Trump would’ve any affinity for The Princess Bride? I think not.

Ben Wikler:

I don’t think he would. And I have to tell you, there was this amazing moment where a journalist found Mandy Patinkin at the Democratic National Convention that just happened and asked him, “Do you think that The Princess Bride… he actually asked him what I’d said because he’d asked me whether The Princess Bride is a political movie. And I said, “It absolutely is.” And he said, “Mandy Patinkin, do you think it’s a political movie?” And he said, “Yes,” and he said, “I’ll tell you why.” He said, “I have this line in the movie when I’m in Inigo Montoya. After I’ve killed the six-fingered man, Count Rugen, I say, ‘You know, I’ve been in the revenge business so long, I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.'”

And Patinkin said that when he said that line, he didn’t know what it meant particularly, but now with the benefit of the full life, he realized that’s the heart of the movie, which is revenge does not bring his father back. He said, “I want my father, you son of a bitch,” that was the climactic line, but he doesn’t get his father. Killing the six-fingered man doesn’t give him the thing he sought. It’s been the cause of his life, revenge, and what does it do? It doesn’t actually bring him any absolution. And that is this big lesson that is the ultimate lesson Trump has never learned and will never learn, he’s consumed by vengeance, revenge, domination against his enemies and it will never fill the void in his soul.

And in a way, the liberation from that void is like the great moment for Inigo Montoya, but true love is actually the thing that is the happy ending for Westley and Buttercup. And I think in a way, that’s the big thing for us as a country, is to get out of the cycle of violence and revenge and killing and to become more about how we build a country that’s based on love. So yes, I think it’s a political movie and I think Manny Patinkin’s exactly right.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t want to dwell too much on The Princess Bride, but there are the greatest insults of all time that still get used sometimes among friends and colleagues of mine. Should Kamala Harris refer to Donald Trump as a miserable vomitous mass? Would that have some staying power? I don’t know.

Ben Wikler:

That was probably in the bag for the next debate, but unfortunately, Trump has… probably fearful of the scourge of a fight to the pain, so to speak, I think he’s avoided it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. He’s only mostly dead.

I’ll be right back with Ben Wikler after this.

So I do have a concern that I feel is being covered a little bit, maybe more than a little bit, but I’m very worried about it and that’s third-party candidates, in particular Jill Stein. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Jill Stein got more votes in 2016 than Hillary Clinton lost by in Wisconsin. And I think in many, if not all, of the battleground states and so we may sort of roll our eyes about Jill Stein and say it’s not serious, there’s an argument that she swayed the election the other direction. What’s going on with Jill Stein this year in Wisconsin and elsewhere and how do you think that’s going to play out?

Ben Wikler:

So first, she didn’t just get more votes, she got almost 50% more votes than the margin of victory. She got 31,072 votes in Wisconsin and Trump won by 22,748. And she’s on the ballot now and she knows full well that she could swing-

Preet Bharara:

But would all of those votes have gone to the Democrat?

Ben Wikler:

I mean, I think for some people they never would’ve voted for a Democrat and so they maybe would not have voted at all or maybe written someone in, but this time they voted Stein, but I think a lot of them would. And I think at this point, my message to people thinking about voting for Jill Stein right now is that you have a chance to stop Trump from getting back into office. And if Kamala Harris becomes the next president, you can protest, you can try to change her policies on things, you can make your case, you’ll be in a democracy where you actually have a voice. And if Trump becomes president, he’s talking about using US troops to put down protests in this country. There is every risk that our freedom to be able to protest and cast protest votes and everything else is going to be massively threatened by a Trump presidency.

So this is a moment to ensure that the right to continue advocating for change, even if you think the two-party system is a total flaming disaster, the way to prevent a collapse into a one-party system and a threat to the very foundational idea that people can have a voice is to make sure Trump doesn’t win and the only way to do that is to elect Harris. And I think it’s really important to be able to communicate clearly. And I know that voters have many different motivations and for some people, they view voting as expressive as opposed to as a strategy to affect the world. But I think there are a lot of voters who might be surprised to realize how much Republican support has backed Stein’s ability to be on the ballot and about what version of a campaign she has. David Duke just endorsed Jill Stein, so there’s that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a great endorsement.

Ben Wikler:

You have to wonder a little bit about what you’re up to when your candidate gets David Duke’s endorsement. This is something we take really seriously. And right now, the DNC is preparing a big effort, is buying ads, is going to be communicating a bunch of different ways to try to reach Stein voters about the stakes about what might happen-

Preet Bharara:

When they try to reach Jill Stein voters, are they mentioning her and talking about her by name and is there a risk that increases her prominence and her name recognition? Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about it. Maybe we should cut this out.

Ben Wikler:

I think the goal is you want to communicate, you want to take people seriously and I do take people seriously and people that I honor and respect are thinking about whether to vote third party or not to vote and my message to them is that-

Preet Bharara:

Do you take Tulsi Gabbard seriously, sir?

Ben Wikler:

I’m not talking about Tulsi Gabbard, but I think that the core of democracy is trying find a way to extend the respect of actually taking seriously what motivates people. And I really think there are so many reasons why it’s really important to vote for Harris against Trump this time, even for people that disagree with Harris on a lot of policies even very passionately and I hope that we can get that message out. Now, I also think that RFK is on the ballot in Wisconsin.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So what’s going to happen there?

Ben Wikler:

It’s interesting because a lot of the voters who can’t quite bring themselves to vote for Trump but also can’t bring themselves to vote for Harris, they might vote for RFK. And in a way, I hope that they will vote for Harris instead. If it’s a choice between Trump and RFK, RFK is not going to win, we can all be clear about that, but you can send a protest message by voting for RFK in that way. If your goal is to make sure that Trump doesn’t win, the best thing to do is vote for Harris and the worst thing to do is vote for Trump. And voting for a third party is basically equivalent to not voting and so you really have to ask yourself what to do.

Preet Bharara:

So is RFK on the ballot in Wisconsin a negative or positive for Harris? It was not clear to me.

Ben Wikler:

The polling suggested it’s a positive for Harris, which is one reason why after RFK got on the ballot in Wisconsin, which is basically an irrevocable act, and then endorsed Trump, he then tried to pull himself off the ballot. But the [inaudible 00:45:43].

Preet Bharara:

Right. So that tells you a lot.

Ben Wikler:

… clear of that. I think he wants to be put in power in the Trump administration and I think Trump tends not to be very good with-

Preet Bharara:

So who do we get, the head of the CDC?

Ben Wikler:

I think he’s talking about HHS, he’s talking about serious positions of responsibility, but Trump is not good at keeping his promises. Trump uses people and breaks people, so if you want to see RFK empowered, I’m not sure that Trump is the guy you want to-

Preet Bharara:

I have some experience with that.

Ben Wikler:

… put your faith in. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, exactly. Can you explain something? I ask this of a lot of guests and I hear people talking about it. In sort of the history of American politics, there has never been, I don’t think, at least one candidate like Trump who is as well-known and who provokes incredibly strong reaction, either positive or negative. There are people who I think have a cult-like, overly forgiving admiration and obsession with him. And on the other side of the coin, there are people who feel nothing other than contempt for him and despise him and think he’d be the ruin of America. Who are the people who are undecided? How many of them are in Wisconsin? And can you just explain this sort of political science, psychological fact that defies explanation as far as I’m concerned?

Ben Wikler:

So 4 to 6% of Wisconsinites are undecided right now and there was an effort by a pollster to do a deep dive into who these folks are. And it found that roughly half of them have typically voted Republican in the past, only 10% have typically voted for Democrats and then 40% have actually gone either way. And what I think is interesting about that is that for the Republicans, a lot of them are people who’ve identified with Republican policies and the Republican Party is part of their identity to be Republican, but they cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump again. And so for them, they’re undecided like, because it’s like, “Ah, how do I as a Republican not vote for the Republican candidate and yet, can I really vote for Trump again?” Now, the other thing that a lot of undecided voters have in common is that they think about politics as much as you probably think about the Olympic curling competition that happens during the Winter Olympics, which is to say for-

Preet Bharara:

You’re making a lot of assumptions about me, sir.

Ben Wikler:

Now, I was a curler in high school a little bit, wasn’t very good at it, someone I had a crush on was a curler, but most Americans don’t think a lot about curling. And they maybe notice it’s happening for a little while every four years when it’s on the Olympics, maybe they learn about one of the champion curlers, but it’s just not a big part of their lives. And for people who are in the curling world, they know that there’s world championships every year, it seems crazy to the rest of us.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I don’t mean to be disparaging about such people, but one of the reasons I don’t think about curling a lot is, A, I don’t really understand the sport, but more importantly, it doesn’t affect my life and my freedom-

Ben Wikler:

Yeah. Well, that’s right. Well, that’s what you think.

Preet Bharara:

… whereas this other thing does.

Ben Wikler:

So this is the thing, is that if you are an undecided voter right now, the odds are that you think that politics is totally corrupt and crooked, every politician is full of it, the ads are all lies-

Preet Bharara:

They’re all the same.

Ben Wikler:

… nothing ever really changes, it’s just a revolving door of people moving in and out of power, competing for themselves and to get you to vote or to change sides, you have to have some reason to think that something so bad could happen if you don’t get involved that you have to do it or that someone actually offers the promise of something changing, even in a system that feels totally still and broken and stuck. And that is part of how Trump appealed to a lot of those voters in 2016 because he was going to shake things up. He was like a different kind of candidate. Barack Obama appealed to a lot of those voters in 2008 because he so clearly represented a change. And right now, Trump is running basically as an incumbent and Harris is the current vice president.

And the question of why should I get involved in the system that feels so broken to me, part of our answer to that is that even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. And if you have a medical emergency while you’re pregnant and you need care, it doesn’t matter whether you voted or not, it really is going to matter whether we have a national abortion ban in place or we have national protection so we don’t have state level abortion bans. And that kind of argument reaches out of politics and into people’s real lives and can actually move people. And Trump is trying to create the same thing with these terrifying visions of a crime wave where he said in a rally in Wisconsin, this is just like the most vicious, disgusting libel he was talking about. He said that the people are going to come into your kitchen and slit your throat. That was his literal quote. And he’s trying to reach out of politics and into people’s lives to give them a reason to vote.

Now he’s doing it based on hideous, slanderous, vilifying, demonizing, divisive fear and we’re doing it based on actual policy affecting a third of American women right now. But in both cases, the mission is the same, is to reach people who normally would rather not think about politics at all and give them an argument for why this a moment where they should tune in. Now I think that our argument is actually true and it’s a reason why everyone should vote, but Trump is trying to execute the same play and that’s why he’s going to such extreme language because he hopes that it can get picked up and reach outside the realm of political conversations.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So to the miracle of technology, we have a couple of video questions, both aimed for you.

Ben Wikler:

All right, I’ll take them.

Preet Bharara:

The team will queue up the first question.

Listener 1:

As someone who lives in a battleground state, I live in North Carolina, I’m a pretty informed consumer of news, I listen to a lot of different outlets. And I’m concerned after re-listening to Ben Wikler’s interview with Ezra Klein where he pointed out three things that had to happen to win the 2022 Senate race that was lost in Wisconsin, where he said the candidate needed to respond to attacks head-on, laying out who the candidate was, what they wanted to accomplish, what they stood for and being on offense. And I think Kamala Harris has done a good job of being on offense, but I’m concerned really about that second one, about laying out who she is and what she wants to do, what she stands for. Other than reproductive rights, I’m not sure if she’s really defined what she stands for, considering how many undecided voters feel like they still don’t understand or know her. What does Ben Wikler think would help in changing that narrative and making people feel like they know what she stands for in Wisconsin?

Preet Bharara:

Ben?

Ben Wikler:

It’s such a good question and I think that she’s executing on each of these three fronts in ways that I’ll describe. So first of all, when she tells her story about growing up in middle-class family, when she tells her story about working at McDonald’s, when she talks about being a prosecutor who prosecuted international gangs and sex traffickers and human trafficking and then went after price gouging big companies and won, what is it, $18 billion for consumers in California and then her work as vice president on the world stage and signing investments that have restored jobs and communities across America and her work on the Inflation Reduction Act, those things all convey her story, who she is, what she’s about.

And then the forward-facing, the plan she lays out about bringing down taxes and costs for middle-class families, taking out special interests to negotiate, taking out price gouging pharmaceutical companies and anyone who wants to price gouge for food, all of that and then reproductive freedom and being a strong advocate for bipartisan tough border safety bill, that stuff conveys what she wants to do. And she’s won the argument around the economy in a massive way. She’s had double-digit percentage gains in trust on the economy relative to Trump that I think is based on laying out some of those pieces. Now, there’s more to cement those in voters’ brains so they know exactly what they get if they vote for her. That’s what the campaign is working on. But I think that is the key future-facing element. The second thing is being on the attack, which there’s a lot of that. We’ve talked about some of that today.

And then the third is responding to the Republican attacks, she’s doing that partly by talking about her bio and partly by going on the attack against Trump for killing the bipartisan border bill. And that conveys these Republican attacks on immigration, actually Trump is the person who is making sure that there’s still a problem that he can run on, she actually wants to do something about it. She also has ads on right now that are like, she says, “Look, you’re seeing a lot of negative ads about me. Let me make clear who I am,” and then she talks about what she’s fought for and what she’s about. And each of those pieces is critical and the volume and intensity and clarity and omnipresence of all three of those messages is just essential.

I mean, she’s working around the clock. Right now, she’s crisscrossing battleground states on this tour, she’s been on a million interviews just now, she has a whole bunch more to come, the ad that they’re running, all that stuff and the organizing on the ground is an attempt to make sure that we’re hitting each of those three critical message priorities with all the different audiences that need to hear them. The Republicans, Trump has a different problem to solve because everyone already thinks they know who Trump is, so it’s very hard to shift perceptions of Trump. Even if a lot of people believe things that aren’t true or don’t have information that might change them, it’s very hard to get someone to internalize a new fact about Trump because he’s been, in a way, the main character in politics for so long, the person people talk about so much. So he is kind of spending his time on the attack and she has to spend her time on the attack and on defense and on kind of laying out who she is and that’s a different set of problems to solve for.

Preet Bharara:

Well said. We have one more video question.

Listener 2:

Hi, Preet and Ben. I’d love to know how the Democrats plan to deal with the Republican controlled states which refuse to certify the election. I have little doubt that they will try this since the false electors scheme won’t be available to them again. Thanks very much. I love hearing Preet and Joyce’s banter and analysis every week. Thanks for all you do. Bye-bye.

Ben Wikler:

So this is a fearful, worrisome question and the critical piece of the answer is everyone, probably a lot of people in the audience for this podcast and Preet and so many people were so intensely involved in 2022 that we were able to defeat the election deniers in election after election after election. In Wisconsin, the governor certifies the election and Governor Evers is still in office. The state supreme court hears challenges to the election and we have a progressive majority that is not going to overturn it. It’s going to respect the will of the voters. In Michigan, we have the great Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And in Wisconsin, we have Josh Kaul as our attorney general.

Minnesota… excuse me, in Michigan we have Democratic secretary of state, attorney general. There’s a Democratic [inaudible] in the state legislature. They don’t have a far-right state supreme court. Pennsylvania, Democratic governor. That’s the blue all states in the other states. In Georgia and in Nevada, there are Republican governors and these are people who are probably enthusiastic about things, they can limit voting, but they’re not the kind of MAGA Republicans just overturn election results and refuse to certify. And that’s a critical difference and it’s part of how I think that they were able to get elected, even while Democrats were winning other elections in their state.

Arizona, Democratic governor. All the statewide office is now in Democratic hands. North Carolina, Democratic governor, same kind of deal. Democratic attorney general about to be the next governor. So there are risk points, but it is not the same kind of existential risk that Republicans were trying to create for this moment. In a way, the biggest risk is with the US Supreme Court and the best way to stop it from reaching the US Supreme Court is to win by enough in enough states that you don’t have the kinds of challenges that can go all the way up. In Wisconsin, if we win by more than one percentage point, then there’s no recount, there’s no attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people like Trump tried to pull off in 2020. So goal one is to win, goal two is to win by more than one point, which we call a Wisconsin landslide.

Preet Bharara:

I just have a final question or two before you go. There’s something that I’ve been wondering about. I don’t know if there’s science or metrics to answer this question. So not everyone votes in this country who’s eligible to vote. Depending on the election, it can be as little as 5 or 6% in a local municipal election, it get up to 40, 50, even 60% in a national presidential election. How good a sample is that in the national elections of the rest of the country? So the hypothetical is do we have an understanding of what would happen if everyone voted who was eligible to vote? Would that favor liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, independents, moderates? How would that be different? Or is the percentage of people voting a very decent sample of everyone else?

Ben Wikler:

So voters differ systematically from nonvoters, most of all in their level of engagement and belief in the political system, so low social trust is a predictor of nonvoting. And essentially, the more you pay attention to politics, the more you consume political news, the more likely it is that you vote and the more likely it is that your views are kind of neatly sorted into ideological buckets and you figured out which team you’re on and which party you identify with or you’re committed as an independent who agrees with one party or the other on different things. But when you talk to nonvoters, often they are just less tethered to the news, they have a set of views that don’t really match with either party. If every single person in Wisconsin voted, if they voted on issues, you’d have really progressive outcomes. If they voted on party, then it would probably be roughly the same-

Preet Bharara:

But you’re changing the hypothetical [inaudible] voting just on curling.

Ben Wikler:

If you’re voting party, then it’s roughly the same. It is kind of a good sample in that sense, it just becomes more diffuse and people’s level of attachment to one side or the other is much lower among nonvoting, almost by definition but it’s certainly in all the survey data and research, than it is among the voting public. And Australia has mandatory voting. If everybody had to vote, campaigns would try to do a bunch of different types of things and also it’d be a different kind of conversation.

I think Wisconsin is very high turnout. We have like 70-something percent voter turnout in presidential elections often. We’re in the top three to five in the country pretty much every election. And I think that’s really good. It’s healthy for democracy, it’s good for candidates to have to appeal to people who might assume the candidate has nothing to offer them. And I think for the level of an individual person who’s involved in politics, the best thing you can do is go find people that you have personal connections to or relationships with or people in your community who don’t vote but who share value with you and then see if you can get them to vote on the basis of acting on that value. And if we all do that, then I’m very confident that Harris and Walz are going to win in Wisconsin and everywhere else.

Preet Bharara:

So here’s the most important final question, maybe I should have asked it earlier. If you’re listening or watching to this program and you want to help in Wisconsin in particular, but other swing states or elsewhere as well, either in turnout or in voter protection or any of those kinds of things, tell people in a quick fashion how they can do that?

Ben Wikler:

Go to wisdems.org/donate to donate and wisdems.org/volunteer to sign up and join a virtual phone bank and get involved. We can use your time, we can use your money, it can make a difference. Wisconsin is tied. We encourage folks to sign up for other battleground states as well, but wisdems.org/donate and wisdems.org/volunteer, we can use every iota of energy and of financial resources that you’ve got and it could come down to the wire. So really grateful for all the help that people are going to chip in, all the way. And if we all do it, this will be an as you wish election.

Preet Bharara:

And if we don’t do that, may we find ourselves unemployed in Greenland. That’s my final Princess Bride reference of the evening. Ben Wikler, it’s been a treat and a joy to have you on the show. Thanks for all the work you do. Try to get some sleep, intermittently at least, and we’ll see you soon. Thanks so much.

Ben Wikler:

Sounds good. Thanks so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ben Wikler, and thanks to all of you who joined us live this week. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me, @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.