This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

What is the Democratic Party? Actually, mechanically, what is it? What are its powers? Who comprises it? When you call the Democratic Party, who picks up the phone? And what could the Democratic Party be if it were reinvented for this era?

Ben Wikler was the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. He turned that party into a fund-raising, door-knocking powerhouse. In Wisconsin, that might have made the difference. The 2024 election was a bit of a mixed bag there, to say the least. Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by a single percentage point, but Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic Senate candidate, won the state.

Wikler then launched a run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, which he lost to Ken Martin. A lot of Democrats, seeing the difficulties the D.N.C. has had since in fund-raising, organization and internal unity, very much wish Wikler had won that race.

Now Wikler is back. He’s the author of “This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.”

So I wanted to ask him not just about his plan but about the Democratic Party — this flawed but necessary vehicle that is needed to carry his plan out. What has happened to it? What could be done to renew it?

Ezra Klein: Ben Wikler, welcome to the show.

Ben Wikler: It’s great to be with you, Ezra.

We last spoke on the show in July 2024.

Vividly remember it.

Joe Biden had just dropped out. Kamala Harris had consolidated the Democratic Party. We talked right after Harris had done one of her first rallies in Wisconsin.

We had a very optimistic conversation. I believe I ended up titling the episode, “This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin.”

At the presidential level, they did not win in Wisconsin. What went wrong?

So Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin by less than a percentage point. It was the fifth of the last seven presidential races that came down to less than one percentage point.

And on election night, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that nothing we’d done — we’d tried everything, we’d done everything that we thought could make a difference — maybe none of it had had any impact. What was I doing with my life?

The last thing I saw before I let myself fall asleep that night was that Tammy Baldwin had won, and I thought: Ah — and I collapsed.

The next day, I did a little spreadsheet therapy for myself. My way of relieving electoral stress is to dig into data. And in Wisconsin, Harris had done better than she had in any other battleground state in terms of how she did versus how Biden did.

It wound up being the closest state in the country. A lot of Donald Trump voters didn’t vote down the ballot. The Harris voters did. That’s been a huge part of our work — to make sure people fill out their whole ballot. So we actually gained 14 state legislative seats and won the U.S. Senate race at the same time we lost the presidential.

But for the underlying question of why Harris lost, to me, you not only have to look at the country, you have to look at the world. If you consider every election in an advanced Western democracy, this is the only year on record where the ruling party — regardless of whether it was left, right or center — lost ground. And the overwhelming issue in races all around the world, and with the voters who actually shifted their vote choice between 2020 and 2024, the No. 1 thing was inflation, prices, affordability, the economy.

The rise in prices after a long period where we didn’t see broad-based inflation, especially for people who felt like they were at the economic brink already, was devastating.

I should say when you lose by as little as Harris did, lots of things could have made the difference. But the biggest issue of all was this fundamental economic malaise that people felt, and they voted for change.

I agree that in the 2024 election, prices were the biggest issue. They were the biggest problem for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris.

But based on that analysis, I think I would have then expected, after the election, and as people got the Donald Trump presidency, as the Donald Trump presidency did not turn out the way they had hoped, to maybe see a real resurgence in how people felt about the Democratic Party.

But today we’re sitting here, and the Democratic Party is wildly unpopular as a brand. It is less popular than Donald Trump is as a brand.

So as somebody who has run a Democratic Party in a state and who, I think, was quite successful in doing so, why is that? What is it that people don’t like about the Democratic Party?

I’ll say it at two levels. One is that if you had Democrats in charge, you voted for change, and now you don’t like the Republicans in charge, that doesn’t mean that you’re like: Oh, let’s go back to the old thing. That means you want something else yet again. You want change from the situation you have, and neither party so far has delivered it for you.

The second thing is that if you look under the top lines in polls, there are Republicans who think Democrats are too liberal, there are Democrats who think Democrats are not fighting hard enough for change, and then there’s a third category of people who feel like all of politics is messed up and that they can’t trust either party. They feel like neither party has connected with them and actually solved the problems in their life that they’re struggling with.

So I would not expect Democratic Party approval ratings to bounce back until people can see tangible results: that people are fighting on their side, not only speaking to their issues, but also making concrete differences in ways that they appreciate.

To me, that’s the crisis of this moment — this profound sense that the whole country is not working for regular people, that people who would like not to have to ever think about politics suddenly are feeling politics just pounding at the windows like a horde of zombies because their lives are going off the rails. That it is so hard just to be able to afford to live, and people are being shot in the streets, and there’s this sense that lettuce might give you explosive diarrhea. All this is wrong.

Most people do not want to have to think about who controls which chamber of Congress, let alone their state legislature. For people who’d like to be left alone to lead their lives and pursue their dreams free of politics, this is a very hard moment. And for people who pay attention to politics all the time, it’s even worse.

You’d expect in that situation for people to be like: Set this whole thing on fire. And that’s what we see in poll after poll and at door after door if you go out and talk to voters.

In early 2024, I did this big article where I talked to all these state chairs and Democratic politicians about what the Democratic Party was at a time when — actually, compared to now, it seemed more settled. But there were some questions that had arisen.

And you gave, by far, the best quotes in that piece. You told me this story about how there were these big piles of coal — I think it was in Green Bay. Is that right?

In Green Bay, Wis. That’s right.

And Tony Evers, the governor, and Tammy Baldwin and others had been working, and they got money from Joe Biden to get the piles of coal gone.

And you said to me: “Democrats are the party that gets rid of the giant piles of coal.”

Then we’re talking some years later, and you’re like: Postscript. The piles of coal are still there.

I looked into it. There were lawsuits, environmental lawsuits.

It got me thinking. Obviously, this is a little bit related to my “Abundance” work, but there are many different ways this plays out, where the Democratic Party wants to think of itself as the party that makes government work for people.

And I think if people believed the Democratic Party did that, they would support it. But they believe, typically, one of two things that gets in the way.

One is they don’t believe the Democrats make government work for people. They believe it makes government work for their own set of interests, whether it’s funders or environmentalists or unions or whoever it may be that people are upset about.

Or the others, who just don’t believe government works.

So the party that says: Hey, I’m here to make government work for you — it’s not credible because people don’t want government doing jobs they’re not certain the government can do.

I guess the question is: Do you believe that’s who Democrats are? That they’re the people in politics to make government work for people? And if that’s true, what do they need to do to prove it?

I think the Democrats are the party that wants to make government work for people. Sometimes Democrats can trip over their shoelaces. Over and over, we have a government that gets blocked or seized apart because it actually can’t respond to the public’s goals.

Our government, in so many ways, is set up to meet a million different goals other than delivering great public services, solving public problems, doing great work for people — despite millions of wonderful civil servants who do absolutely critical work all the time.

Right now, we’re pulling out Jenga blocks — like the decision to stop monitoring for cyclospora — and we can see how that leads to disasters across the public.

So this is not to say government doesn’t work or can’t work, but there’s a ton that gets in the way of having a government that’s capable of being responsive and effective at the level that this moment calls for — especially a moment where a host of new threats and risks and concentrations of power unleashed by artificial intelligence are right on the horizon. In some ways, it has never been more urgent to have a government that is both responsive and effective.

So I do think that Democrats can rebuild the trust in government and in themselves by being excellent and actually delivering. And I think you can see that in some state and local governments across the country.

You can see in Zohran Mamdani’s New York with public services that people are celebrating, delivering on campaign promises, communicating the delivery of those promises.

But there is work to do to change how the system itself works.

When people think about the Democratic Party, when they hear those words, when a pollster calls them and says: What do you think of the Democratic Party? — what do you think those words activate in their mind?

What do people think the Democratic Party is? And then as somebody who ran one branch, what is the Democratic Party?

It means whichever thing is most salient to people.

The first, and the most common, is the amorphous blob of every elected official, every pundit, every annoying person they see online, all the things that are associated with this vast, interconnected web of all things Democrat related.

That is not one thing. There’s no person who controls that. In a sense, if you have a Democratic president, that person is the head of the amorphous blob. Donald Trump is very much the head of the blob on the Republican side.

There’s also the formal Democratic Party, which is the literal institutions. I was chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. There’s the D.N.C., the Democratic National Committee. There’s the Democratic county party system, so we have a Democratic Party of Iowa County, Wis. There’s also a Democratic Party of Iowa County, Iowa.

Very often, people are mad at the blob, but they’re blaming the formal institution without — and why would they? — without a lot of recognition of exactly what it is that is in the control of the formal Democratic Party.

The opportunity that the formal Democratic Party organizations have, most of all, is to create a home for people who want to fight for change, to do the kind of grass-roots community neighbor-to-neighbor organizing that can turn “the Democrats” — this headline phrase — from being some distant thing that is defined by Fox News every day into my neighbor who asked me if I wanted to put up a yard sign for a City Council candidate who actually cares about building more housing where I live so that my kids can live near me, and I can see my grandkids.

That shift, to me, is what it means to build from the ground up and to try to rebuild civic life in this country through institutions that once actually had that role in community after community, where people would associate the Democratic Party with that big dinner that I go to once a year or with somebody who checks in with me about who all the local candidates are.

To me, the work of building the party is thinking from the ground up about how we actually reconnect with people so that we are human beings rather than slogans on TV.

I want to hear you talk about that a little bit more — what parties maybe once were in American social life and political life and what they are today.

I know you and I have both been interested in this “hollow parties” idea that has been in political science from Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman. But as somebody who is interested in party machinery, what relationship might I have once had with a party? And then what does it become now?

There were times in American life when parties were a huge part of your daily and monthly and weekly existence. When you became a naturalized citizen of the country, the local Democratic Party — and sometimes the Republican Party, but more often the Democratic Party — was there to greet you and ask you to register for the party at that moment. There was a block captain who was going to check in with you from time to time.

I quote in my book a letter that Abraham Lincoln sent to the Whig Party, and his advice then is the same as my advice now. He said: Keep a constant eye on the most doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence.

First of all, that is great advice about organizing. Second, it presupposes that members of the party have a sense of which voters are doubtful, and actually, that those doubtful voters who might or might not vote, who might switch parties, that they have confidence in someone who’s associated with the party.

The idea that you’d have a personal relationship with somebody who might check in on you and ask what you’re thinking about, that is so alien from the world where most people’s experience of the political parties is incredibly annoying text messages and emails that you’re constantly trying to find ways to filter. Or nightmare headlines that are screaming at you from your phone.

What’s it like to be the name on the other side of those emails? [Laughs.]

I sometimes meet people who are like: You text me all the time.

And I’m like: You never write back.

It is a strange aspect of life. You have your public simulacrum of yourself — you know this as a journalist — and then you have your actual human being self.

I used to work at an organization that used email to organize people, and one of the best maxims for sending mass emails is to imagine that you’re talking to the most important person in the world. You have five seconds to give them a reason to listen to you at all, anymore, so you need to be completely clear.

And it’s fine if they don’t want to listen to you at that moment. You have to equip them with what it takes to make a decision about whether they want to listen to you by explaining what your message is about and what the stakes are.

That’s very different from the messages that promise a 400 percent match with a zero replaced by an O so it can bypass the spam filter and all this kind of stuff that just makes me want to tear my hair out.

But the reality is that right now, parties don’t have, in general, the capacity, and they also are pursuing this kind of algorithmic optimization. So they just are not in the business of earning trust with people for the long term.

Well, there’s also another interesting difference from the past, which is that parties used to have a lot of control over the product. The people they ran for all kinds of seats, up to and including president, came out of conventions. They didn’t come out of primaries.

So the role of being a party is stranger now. You are organizing for a candidate who might have taken over the party, who might have been an insurgent against the party or just might not have anything to do with the way the party regulars saw it.

But you’re not, as the official Democratic Party, deciding who will be the next gubernatorial candidate for the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.

Not only is the Democratic Party of Wisconsin not choosing the next candidate, in Wisconsin’s case — and I say this for a reason that I’ll get to — it’s in the state party’s constitution that it is neutral in primaries.

Now that’s different from state to state. But Wisconsin, my state, is both a place with a deep progressive tradition, and it’s also part of that tradition to have the public get to call the shots.

Wisconsin was the state that created open primaries. This was a reform against party bosses and against the control of the smoke-filled rooms. And in 1948, there was this watershed moment. Joe McCarthy had just become the Republican senator in Wisconsin, and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which had been kind of a backwater at that moment, reformed with progressive Republicans, with people who had been in the Progressive Party in the state and with the more liberal Democrats.

It had a new charter, it had a new constitution and bylaws, and it said: We’re going to be neutral in primaries unless there’s extremely unusual circumstances, and then we’re going to fight like hell in the general elections.

I think one of the strengths of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin — and I’m very proud to have worked alongside thousands of people who built up over the six years I was chair, and I still am an adviser and support the work of the party — is to create a civic fabric of people who are ready to go to bat for the nominee that comes out the other side, but actually have a small-D democratic process to figure out who the nominee should be.

You might not like who people decide in a primary process, but there’s something important about the legitimacy that comes from being chosen by actual voters in a process as the standard-bearer that I think is valuable for the country.

One of the reasons I bring this up is that we’re in this moment where primaries in the Democratic Party broadly are getting very heated and very contested.

Across the country, obviously here in New York, there are a bunch of very high-profile primaries where Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates knocked off either incumbents or establishment-backed candidates.

But in Wisconsin, you’re having a gubernatorial primary where Francesca Hong, a D.S.A. member, is leading in most polls against Mandela Barnes, a former lieutenant governor.

Barnes is a pretty progressive person himself, so I’m not sure these are unfathomably, dramatically different directions for the party. But we are in a moment where there is a hot contest over both what the Democratic Party should be and who should represent it, but also what the public wants. One job of these primaries is also to try to figure out who can win in a half-and-half state like Wisconsin.

So how are you understanding that primary and the choices being offered?

First, I should say, as an adviser to the state party, I’m bound and embrace my own neutrality in the process.

I’m sure you do at this moment. [Laughs.]

My most important goal will be to help ensure that whoever wins the nomination that the party can come together around that person and fight to win.

But the second thing that I’d say is that if you imagine a counterfactual world where there is some smoke-filled room that overrides the wishes of voters, it’s harder to be able to rally those voters to come together and support whatever comes out of the process. So whatever comes out of the primary, I’m going to be there to fight for it.

But I think if instead we had a party that said: This is the person, and everyone can suck it up if they don’t like it — that actually would not serve well the work of building and advancing a ——

I take your point on that. And I recognize that you’re constrained on this. I’m not going to get more out of you than I’m going to get.

But I think one thing that I struggled with while reading the book — the book is very much about organizing, and you’re an organizer going way back. But organizing is about the apparatus of organizing, the strategy of organizing, and it’s also about the product. More important than how you sell it is what you’re selling.

And one of the things I think is a really up-for-grabs question right now is how the Democratic Party reimagines itself if it has to reimagine itself for a new moment.

I remember talking to you for stories going way back, while you were chair in your space — a neutral chair. A point you would make to me is: There’s a lot of ferment online about what the Democratic Party should be.

But if you look at the Democrats who are winning in the swing states — Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, Tony Evers, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro — you see them very focused on fixing the roads, making government work well, staying out of big culture-war fights. There’s a kind of Midwestern stolid nature to all of them.

And now there’s a heat coming from some of these same states. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Francesca Hong in Wisconsin.

I do think there is this question of: What happens when the party is not able to articulate a view on what it thinks the public wants or what it thinks or what it can say has worked?

So I’m going to challenge your premise on two fronts.

Please.

The first front is if you look at candidates from D.S.A. all the way to centrist Democrats, there is essentially a unified message this election cycle around affordability. There are differences on foreign policy, there are differences on what kind of health care system we should have.

The central theme is connecting with voters about the lived experience of a country that feels like they cannot afford it — and delivering ideas about how they can change that. They can both change the economic reality and change who the government works for, because there’s an accurate sense that, right now, our federal government works for a cabal of far-right billionaires and not for working people.

That kind of message unity — Democrats love to self-flagellate around this idea that Democrats can’t agree on a message and can’t all say the same thing. But they are speaking with one voice about this biggest central issue. Even with all the huge fights between Democrats, there’s a huge contrast between that kind of unity of message and what we see on the G.O.P. side right now, which is just constant fealty to Donald Trump.

The Republicans in Wisconsin in the governor’s race had a contested primary, and then it evaporated when Donald Trump tapped his favorite candidate, who had tried to help him overturn the 2020 elections.

So on one level, I think the question is: What is the party fundamentally about at this moment? When I ran for D.N.C. chair, I talked to the whole range of D.N.C. members. All of them were like: We need to be the party that is fighting for the economic lives of working people.

Usually, the factions blame the other factions for pulling the party’s eye off that ball. But right now, I think you actually do hear that from candidates.

The answer you just gave there is pretty optimistic about the level of unity in the Democratic Party. I’ve heard people being a lot less optimistic than that.

Former D.N.C. chair Jaime Harrison said: “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination.” He added: “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”

James Carville and Rahm Emanuel have been arguing that there are people who are running for Democratic nominations who should not be in the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party should set limits on who is part of it.

This is an old debate in parties: How big of a tent should you be? Where do you come down on it?

I think it should be a very big tent. It is possible to get so far beyond the pale that party members themselves will vote to do something. I’ve seen Republicans running as Democrats in order to become spoilers. We saw Republican super PACs funding valid antisemites in Texas. We saw these things happen.

But there should be a big tent, and there should be big contests of ideas, and there should be different candidates who represent very different things in different places.

I hear the argument, and I’m sympathetic to the argument that Republicans will wield whoever has the most extreme view anywhere in the country as a weapon against candidates in the purplest places or the reddest places in the country. And that does happen.

But it’s also the case that the voters who are most on the fence about who to support are not tracking the contested House primaries in New York.

You have to have a deep immersion in the Fox News cinematic universe for a lot of these names to mean anything to you. Swing voters just don’t look at the world that way — nor should they.

What do you think about the way that foreign policy is becoming more of a litmus test in some of these primaries?

The way you framed the party there was that there’s a tremendous amount of agreement on affordability. You have everyone from Zohran Mamdani running on making New York cheaper to Roy Cooper in North Carolina, whose slogan is “Make stuff cost less.”

I agree that there’s actually a lot of unity directionally on that, even if the different factions in the party have different ways of approaching how you make things cheaper.

Israel and Gaza are not that way, and I think it’s one reason those fights have been proving much more combative — and, at times, much uglier. They’ve become more a question of a moral litmus test.

That’s the kind of thing that is more dangerous for a party when the issues reflect not a disagreement on how to achieve a shared goal but a fundamental disagreement on what the goal is — and who is moral and who is immoral in it.

So as you’re watching it play out, as you’re counseling people how to navigate it, how do you see it?

I think the fundamental thing is that there is a change. There’s been change over years and decades and much more change recently in the realities on the ground that people are seeing play out — the horrors and the human suffering.

There could be a big change in Israeli politics that could torque and potentially change this yet again. But it’s healthy to have debates when those kinds of changes play out.

The Democratic Party has had huge changes in foreign policy approach. We’ve had much bigger, deeper divisions over the Vietnam War, for example, a generation or two ago. And having a party that actually has a conversation about this — there are times when the conversation can be so vicious and extreme, or even violent, and those things I do not like.

I think we should all fully oppose any kind of violence in political disagreements. The point of democracy is to be able to settle conflicts nonviolently.

But there are both issues of identity and issues of morality and basic deep fundamental divides that are being hashed out. That’s part of why I think it’s actually good to have a democratic process where those things can happen, where people can have those debates, and they can decide how central that’s going to be to their vote. They can figure out how to draw a circle that includes enough people to be able to both win and feel comfortable living inside that circle.

There will be another side of it, a new circle that’s drawn that has the vast majority of Democrats and finds a path forward. My deep hope is that that’s a future that allows thriving and life and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

This is a moment where people have watched unimaginable horrors being inflicted on people who manifestly do not deserve it. And different people have seen different horrors on their screens based on which algorithmic bubble they’re in. But the question of how the United States should conduct its foreign policy in the wake of that is absolutely a legitimate thing for a democracy to think through.

For better or worse, right now, there are two major viable parties in the country, and it is healthy for contests of different ideas to happen within the party, within primaries — and then to have a chance to elect very different types of Democrats in different places.

This is a giant, incredibly diverse country. People are going to disagree about a whole bunch of different things. And for me, I think the Democratic Party is better if the tent is wide.

To come at this from a different angle, rather than get you to weigh in on primaries you’re not going to weigh in on ——

I appreciate it.

What is your theory of the median voter? Do you believe in a median voter? Do you believe in the median voter theorem? How do you think about the people you were trying to win over in Wisconsin?

I start with the fact that maybe 90 percent of voters already know who they’re going to support, even before they know who the candidates are.

So then you ask: Who are the remaining 10 percent? In a state like Wisconsin, there’s a huge amount of polling that suggests that there is roughly 10 percent in play.

The counterintuitive thing is that the people who might vote for either party have a lot in common with the people who are on the fence about whether to vote at all. What sometimes voters and swing voters have in common is that they don’t think about politics all the time. Politics feels very distant. It feels like something that happens over there, and they live over here. They live in their real life, and all these explosive squabbles between the two parties are just noise.

If you knock on the doors of those voters, what you find is people who have a bunch of opinions that don’t neatly align with either political party. That is not how they define their identities. They define their identities based on their role in their family or their role in their job or the team that they love or the hobby that they throw themselves passionately into. They have deeply held values and deeply held views, but politics is just not their jam.

If you want to persuade that voter to side with you, you have to show them that you care about them, that you like them, that you have common sense, you get how the world works, and you get what they care about. You don’t have some blinkered wild opinion that they think disqualifies you, but also your priorities are the things that they care about in their day-to-day life.

And if you can do that, if you can enter that circle of trust, then you can make the case for this or that solution.

If they think: This person doesn’t get me, is not on my side, wants something from me — then they’re just not going to listen to your message at all.

How much do you understand the way voters like that — or nonvoters like that, for that matter — assess politics as being: They have their set of issue positions in their head, as well as what they do and don’t like — and maybe that’s more jumbled together than the parties would like to have it? You can have somebody who believes in full-on marijuana legalization and believes in universal health care but is also pro-life.

Absolutely. And you get that all the time.

There are a lot of voters who just don’t fit the way the parties have grouped what goes with what.

When those voters are assembling the picture of the world that is in their heads and when they are hearing about candidates, how do you understand what they are basing decisions on?

Last time I was on the show, to pull a deep cut, I talked about a book called “The Reasoning Voter,” which marshaled a lot of persuasive evidence that has not been shaken by the last few years: that for voters who are paying attention to other things, the things that they learn about a particular candidate are like stars in the sky.

If they see a few stars, they draw a line around those stars and draw a constellation, and that’s their picture of who that candidate is. Once a star is in the sky, you cannot get someone to unsee that star. The most that a campaign can hope to do is to add a couple of stars that allow you to draw a different constellation.

That’s a very abstract way of saying that most of the issues that a candidate talks about and has positions on are not going to play any role in the election. It’s going to be the one or two things that crystallize what it seems like this person is about.

I remember vividly in 2004 that George W. Bush decided that John Kerry was a flip-flopper, and he drove home that message over and over and over. Once you’re a flip-flopper, it doesn’t matter what you say or what your positions on the issues are, because you can’t trust that person to hold that position the next day. That was message discipline that allowed people not to trust the Democratic nominee.

And the Obama campaign in 2012 was a master class in defining Mitt Romney — who many Democrats now pine for as a Republican opponent — as someone who is ripping off working people and was on the side of the wealthy, against the middle class. That was the central issue. So many, many other issues were not relevant.

As we think about each election cycle, there are a few issues that become the central things that determine whether someone is trusted, whether someone is a threat, whether someone is on your side — and it’s not as simple as left or right.

At this moment, it’s often top versus bottom or trusting institutions people feel have failed versus recognizing and speaking to the truth that they do need to fundamentally change.

The G.O.P. has announced they’re going to run a campaign of hate. Axios had this report that they’re going to run a campaign trying to make this about Democrats holding disqualifyingly left-wing views.

The question is: Will that be more salient for voters — that Republican message — than this fundamental question of whether you’re supporting an administration that is both ripping off people and terrorizing them across the country?

That giant arm wrestling match between which of those stars burns more brightly in the sky will ultimately determine the outcome of the midterms.

Why does Ron Johnson keep winning elections in Wisconsin?

So that’s very painful.

[Klein and Wikler laugh.]

He’s our U.S. senator. I think part of the magic of Ron Johnson is that he’s had the very good luck of being on the ballot once in 2010 when there was a historic G.O.P. wave and once in 2016 when Donald Trump swept in. Johnson had both MAGA voters and traditional Republican voters at a time when the Republican Party was riven in the state of Wisconsin.

And then the last time was 2022, which had a Democratic president. He won by one percentage point. But he did well enough that he was able to pull it off. So at one level, it’s that.

I also think that Ron Johnson holds tele-town halls all the time. He speaks to the concerns of people who feel that they’re marginalized from the political system. I don’t like this at all — he’s a huge vaccine skeptic and Covid-vaccine skeptic. I totally disagree with him about those issues. But there are a lot of people who see him speaking to concerns that they have that they feel they’ve been made fun of for or excluded from public life for, and he’s a champion on their side.

I think noticing when people feel unheard and sticking up for them is smart politics, even if he’s propagating views that I think have led to the loss of life in my state.

So there are aspects of how Ron Johnson comports himself politically that I think are smart politics, and I think that one thing that he’s good at — that Tammy Baldwin is very good at — is a lot of listening.

That’s part of how you win in a state like Wisconsin that has almost perfectly evenly divided voters across the two parties, and any pocket of 20,000 or 30,000 votes could actually tilt a statewide election one way or the other.

The Republican Party mostly listens to Donald Trump right now. As Democrats, I think our job — and for anyone who believes in democracy — is to listen to voters and connect with the things that matter most to them.

One question that people have is what it would mean for the Democratic Party to listen to voters. That was sort of heartbreaking for Wisconsin Democrats, and for national Democrats in the Senate race in 2022.

Heartbreaking for Wisconsinites.

Mandela Barnes loses to Ron Johnson. The campaign against Barnes is, I would say, borderline racist.

That’s an understatement at best. They darkened his skin tone in their mailers.

Yes. And he goes very hard on painting Barnes as soft on crime. That’s a major attack Johnson uses, and I think to some real effect.

Democrats won Senate races that year, and Johnson was able to survive in that category. It was not a year that was such an incredible year for Republican Senate candidates.

Now in the Democratic primary race for the governor of Wisconsin — and you’re seeing versions of this play out in other parts of the country — you have Barnes running again. You have, in Francesca Hong, a candidate well to Barnes’s left, who has made more expansive statements that you could paint as soft on crime.

This is something I’ve been trying to get at a bit. There was an old Democratic Party that might look at the situation and say at its nominating convention: Look, we tried Barnes a couple years ago — it didn’t work. This is what we think the Wisconsin voter needs.

Primaries work very differently. Primaries in the algorithmic attention age work very differently. But I think one of the things the Democratic Party is going to have to wrestle with is whether or not primaries are leading to electorally optimal candidates.

So this is what I’m trying to get at with this question: What does the voter want? But given what you’ve seen and given your point about the reasoning voter, I guess it’s a question of: Even if the Democratic Party wants to listen to the voter, can it?

There are five candidates in the Democratic primary race for governor in Wisconsin right now, and they represent a big part of the range of the Democratic spectrum.

They’re vying for support from voters. They’re vying to get donors to chip in so they can put their ads on air. That process will play out for another couple of weeks, and then we’ll have this blitz sprint through November to define what the election is fundamentally about.

However someone might feel about the choices of the voters in the primary, I do want to underline for people that even when you can’t imagine that an election is going to be close in Wisconsin, it’s often incredibly close. It often comes down to the final ballots that are counted through the Milwaukee Central Count system. It comes down to the margins in red rural counties that have voted 70 percent for the G.O.P., but this time they vote 68 percent, and you’re able to win.

There are voters all across our state who are furious about the way things are right now, who have not yet been reached by any message from either candidate, and I genuinely think there’s a path to victory in whichever configuration we come out of the Democratic primary.

But I will also say that the risk in an autocracy is not just the lack of freedom that people have when one person gets to make the decisions. It’s also that throughout history, throughout the history of political parties, throughout the history of the world, when one or a tiny group of people gets to call the shots, they can get things terribly wrong, and people have no recourse.

For all the messiness and all the challenges and all the disagreements that people have in a democracy, I think there’s something incredibly sacred about protecting that fundamental principle.

As you can see, I’m not participating in the debate about who should win the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, but I’m fiercely protecting the principle that this should actually be up to the voters.

I hope we win every election. I hope that people who believe in democracy win every possible election in 2026. But part of the lessons that will be drawn from ’26 will inform an open primary process in 2028 for who the next Democratic presidential candidate could be, and that’s an important and valuable process, as well.

This is an iterated process where each time you learn lessons from the last, you learn lessons from where things stand now and then pay it forward to the next one. I think there’s a healthy debate both about how the Democratic Party should operate and which kind of Democrats voters should support in these primaries.

But I think we should preserve the advance that we made in political technology of actually having a process where the public gets to weigh in. I think, partly because we’re in this moment of collapsed public trust, having systems that are manifestly and clearly and genuinely accountable to the public is vital to being able to preserve enough legitimacy to be able to move forward.

This is a moment when our democracy is under threat, writ large. And I think this is a moment where people pouring themselves into the project of winning a contest in a democracy and ensuring that people who want the rules to give everyone a voice win those elections is absolutely vital.

You ran for national D.N.C. chair after the 2024 election. What was your pitch to the D.N.C. delegates?

It’s a funny experience to run for D.N.C. chair.

I bet, actually.

I compare it to a cross between a student council election and a papal conclave. You’re running a national campaign, you’re crisscrossing the country, and you’re talking to around 400 voters.

When I ran, I found that there was actually the basis for a common message and a common vision around year-round organizing that took place everywhere to fight for every level of the ballot, and a message that was centrally focused on this overriding economic concern that people feel across race and ethnicity across the country — in red areas and blue areas and purple areas alike.

That gave me a lot of hope for where we could go as a party. I also found that the D.N.C.’s voters were a lot like voters in maybe any context — which is that familiarity and trust were huge factors in how people made their decision.

To his credit in that election, Ken Martin had been building trust and building relationships with D.N.C. members for years. He led the Association of State Democratic Chairs. I’d been focused on Wisconsin. I missed a lot of the state party chair association meetings because I was in the middle of Supreme Court races in my state.

So I was the guy parachuting in two months before the election and saying: I’ve got a great idea — come with me. And people were like: Yeah, that idea sounds great. And who are you again?

As you note, the D.N.C. chose Ken Martin. I think it is fair to say that the broad view is it has not been a successful tenure as D.N.C. chair. I think he’s had a very difficult time — internal insurgencies, a debacle around the autopsy from the 2024 election.

I think it actually speaks to a little bit of what you’re saying. Martin did win that election because he was more institutionally connected as a candidate.

To something we were talking about earlier, I think we’re in a strange moment for institutions, in that many of them are beginning — or have been for some time — failing, and that tends to make them defensive. An institution that is under stress is often not risk-taking and creative. It is scared, and it retrenches.

I’ve got my criticisms of Martin. But I also think it’s a tough time to be D.N.C. chair.

Rather than ask you to criticize him, which I don’t think you’ll do, what do you think the D.N.C. could be if it moved into a position where it’s — I mean, it is currently at a terrible fund-raising disadvantage. It is a flailing organization.

But just more broadly, I don’t think there is a model for what a party can be in the 21st century that anybody is all that excited about yet nationally. The parties are not what they once were.

You did a lot of work in Wisconsin building something that I think people actually were quite excited about. If you were advising a hypothetical D.N.C. chair on what could be done, what do you think the Democratic Party could be if it were willing to reinvent itself as machinery?

Nancy Pelosi has a three-item list for what it takes to win elections. She says it’s message, money and mobilization.

When you ask someone out in the street what they wish the Democratic Party did differently, usually the first thing they will say is messaging. It’s something about how Democrats can never say what they mean. They’re always going through a laundry list. They should get it down to a bumper sticker. They should have one clear thing that every Democrat says, and if we did that, we’d be able to win elections.

While I appreciate that, and I think at this moment affordability is, in fact, the one-word bumper sticker that Democrats are running on across the country, it’s actually not something that the party is in a position to enforce or create. Ultimately, candidates — the people who will wield power if they’re elected through their actions and their messages — they define the brand in the biggest possible way. So I don’t think that message is the thing that the Democratic Party organization can solve.

Money is actually a significant one, and it’s worth saying, and I speak frankly in the book, that part of how we’ve been able to be successful in Wisconsin at the Democratic Party is by raising a lot of money.

In the book, I talk about the Scott Walker loophole, a Wisconsin law that allows the state parties to fund state candidates to an unlimited degree. That was part of how Scott Walker won his re-election for governor. So the Democratic Party of Wisconsin can receive big donations and then make big donations to state candidates that allow them to fight back — even when Elon Musk comes to town, as you might remember him doing in our Supreme Court race.

Now the same thing is on the table for the national party and national party committees. The U.S. Supreme Court has changed federal laws to allow the national parties to play a bigger role with their money than they did before. There used to be limits for what a party organization could do for a candidate for House or Senate. Those limits have been obliterated.

And for better or worse, until there are big changes in the Supreme Court or the Constitution, we’re in an era where money does matter. The party using money effectively is one of the essential things for the party to do.

But the last and the biggest thing that any person can do — whether they’re a trillionaire or a thousandaire or have negative net worth — the thing that any person can do of any generation, no matter what geography they live in across the country, is they can help to build the Democratic Party as a home for people who want to organize to make a positive difference — and build the trust at the local level in their community. That can especially make a difference on the races that nobody’s paying attention to.

In a lot of elections, voters find out who the candidate is when they walk into the polling place. For state legislative races, most people have no idea who their state representative or state senator is. Most people have no idea who the City Council candidate is or the candidate for district attorney in their county.

This is an experience many people have. They see those names on the ballot, and they think: Who am I going to text to ask who I’m supposed to vote for in this election?

I do think that there’s a meaningful and incredibly powerful thing for a party to build a network of folks who are that trusted person who people text and ask who they should vote for.

I read about a North Carolina State Supreme Court race that the Democratic candidate lost by 401 votes. That led to the re-gerrymandering of the state and the United States Republican House majority now, because Republicans picked up enough seats there. And if you’d been in North Carolina with a group of friends, you could have produced the margin of victory in that election.

Even though it is the case that for candidates it’s a very different environment now because it’s not enough to win over the editorial board of your local newspaper, if you can effectively become the editorial board for some people in your community or support people who are going to be that editorial board in a place where elections come down to a hairline, you can have a huge impact on what happens next.

The secret sauce for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on one hand, has been using the Scott Walker loophole and these financial laws to fight back against a G.O.P. that is funded by much wealthier people, who are spending a huge amount of money in our state.

But it has also been that we’ve built hundreds of neighborhood teams across our state that actually know everyone in their community. In places with apartment buildings, they have someone who will unlock the door and let them in so they can check in with everyone in the hallway. They know who is actually going to be on their farms at different times of year. They know everyone along the main street and which businesses would be willing to put a poster in the window in small towns across the state of Wisconsin.

Building that deep, thick, year-round organizing from the bottom up is something that any person can get involved in through their local party organization and that every state party could potentially do. And although it does cost some money, it’s so much cheaper than running an ad hundreds of times on broadcast television in order to reach a tiny fraction of the voters who might be relevant in a particular race.

So I do think there’s something, in fact, for all of us to do, who think this is bigger than any one election, one office, one candidate — which is to build power at the community level.

The Democratic Party can be a vessel for that work that can be transferred and moved from election to election in service of people who believe in the idea of democracy itself.

One of the most common frustrations I hear from listeners of the show — and just politically engaged people who find my email — is: Look, we’re sitting here talking in a podcast studio in Manhattan.

Some of the people listening may live in Wisconsin or Michigan or North Carolina. A lot of them live in California or New York or New Jersey or Vermont. And they say: I don’t know how to matter here. I’m in a blue state. My state has Democrats statewide up and down. I’m worried about Donald Trump — if that’s their politics. I don’t think people are super-excited to get my letter in the mail.

What does it mean to try to be useful and engaged in this moment if you don’t live in a state that swings, if you don’t live in a place where elections are decided by a percentage point or two?

There are people in New York and California and across the country who go through training with our state party and learn how to staff the voter protection hotline.

So when a Wisconsin voter finds out that they can no longer mail in their absentee ballot and they want to know where they can drop it off, they call this number, and lo and behold, there’s someone on the other end of the line who walks them through the process. And that person just helped ensure that a voter could successfully cast a ballot in a swing state that might come down to three votes per precinct.

There are ways to volunteer like that. There’s another thing called giving circles, where you get a group of friends together, and everyone puts in 50 bucks. Not everyone has 50 bucks, but if you and your friends do, you can help sponsor a state legislative candidate in a state where the state legislature is on the brink of winning a majority.

The States Project organizes these giving circles around the country. There’s another group called Movement Voter Project that does the same thing that could have a gigantic effect on whether you fortify election laws and protections before the 2028 election.

Essentially, you have to plug in to effectively run an organizing effort.

I want to hold you on this for a minute because there are some people who email me this question all the time. They get a million very loud emails, as we were talking about earlier, about where to donate, and they don’t know what is a grift, what is maybe well-meaning but ineffective and what is effective.

On the Republican side, I am sad to say that the Republican State Leadership Committee has been devilishly effective for a lot longer than a lot of the groups on the Democratic side.

A group that is relatively low profile that does amazing work that I would recommend is the State and Local Election Alliance, SLEA, which is pronounced “sleigh.” I love having an acronym that you can actually pronounce. Not enough Democrat-aligned groups do that.

They zero in on the democracy critical state and local races, and then they do very smart and strategic things to support the people who are working on those fights. SLEA has made a difference in Wisconsin and a whole bunch of other states.

The States Project does amazing work. I think the Democratic Attorneys General Association is also dynamite. Attorneys general are suing Trump over and over, often working with outside groups.

Democracy Defenders Fund is a group that I’m an adviser for that does amazing work in court. There’s Protect Democracy and Democracy Forward. You might find a common thread in the word “democracy” in each of those. These are organizations that are working alongside elected officials. I think they’ve been one of the most successful lines of resistance to the Trump administration.

But this is a big, complicated picture. I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood. American political power is like that. You’d never expect the state representative from Onalaska, Wis., to be one of the most important elected officials in the country. But his ability to win when Republicans had drawn hyper-gerrymandered maps prevented Republicans from getting a supermajority in the Wisconsin State Legislature.

If they had won that supermajority, they could have destroyed the Wisconsin Elections Commission and guaranteed future victories for themselves. But he won in a district that went for Trump. Because of him and Lori Palmeri, in Oshkosh, Wis., Governor Evers was able to veto the Republican attack laws trying to threaten democracy, and Wisconsin had a free and fair election in 2024.

All these different parts add up to the system of who gets to write the rules of our democracy, which then dictates in whose interests our democracy actually works.

The idea of an economy that works for everyone, that everyone’s rights and freedoms are protected and that we have a democracy — those are the three core unifying ideas behind the Democratic Party. And I hope people who believe in those things will throw themselves into the work of building something bigger than any one race.

I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

The first book I want to recommend is “Master of the Senate” by Robert A. Caro. I talk in my book about the fight in Wisconsin and the way that we unrigged our state, which wound up requiring the flipping of the state Supreme Court.

At a national level, if we want to reform and expand the U.S. Supreme Court, if we want to pass a new Voting Rights Act, if we want to ban partisan gerrymandering, the only way to do it is by abolishing the filibuster and changing the way the U.S. Senate works.

Robert Caro’s book talks about the U.S. Senate at a time when it was totally moribund. Nothing was passing, and then a senator came along who helped to make the whole thing actually function and started passing laws that people thought could never have been passed.

I think there’s something to learn from that about how to reinvigorate this institution that is currently where policy goes to die. Not all policies — but many policies that we need.

The second book that I want to recommend is called “Seeing Like a State.” This is a book by someone who used to be a University of Wisconsin professor — James C. Scott. It’s about the ways that utopian projects often fall apart and totally backfire.

He talks a lot about how governments sometimes look at this high-level view, the synoptic view, the view from above, and come up with a game plan. Then when it actually happens, it plays out disastrously. I think Elon Musk and DOGE is a perfect example of that that’s now costing ——

Yeah, just give me the passwords. I can see the whole thing through the passwords and the data transmissions.

Yeah, exactly.

And millions of people are probably going to die. Hundreds of thousands have already died as a result.

I think for people who want big positive change, as I do, there’s something incredibly important about having a level of humility and a capacity to listen and learn about what is actually going on.

But also the thing that defines the worst catastrophes is always this combination of a plan imposed from above and a lack of democracy that means that the people who are affected have no ability to demand recourse.

Famously, Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote about this. The only famines have been in places that are not democracies. If the people who are starving to death have a voice and a vote, then they can create enough noise that they ultimately get the food that keeps them alive.

“Seeing Like a State” was very helpful for me in thinking about what it takes to have the suppleness and the accountability to be able to create positive change by looking at the examples of when things have gone disastrously wrong.

And then the third book I want to recommend is probably my favorite book these days to read to my kids, which is a book called “Sal and Gabi Break the Universe.” What I love about this book — it’s set in the near future, there are A.I.s that are triply involved in the kids’ lives — but it’s a future that is actually positive and hopeful. As opposed to the Elon Musk-controlled, totalitarian techno-state that his rise seems to portend.

It’s a deeply inclusive vision of the future. It’s something that is full of art and culture, and it is a delight. My kids love listening to it and laughing to it, and I love it, too.

So if you want something that paints a picture about how things could actually be better than they are now — which is in such disastrously short supply — “Sal and Gabi Break the Universe” is a great place to start.

Ben Wikler, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me on.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Steph Khoury, Arpita Aneja and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman.

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