In January, about 650 days before the 2022 Senate contest, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin spent more than $100,000 on the first TV ad of the new election cycle, a blistering attack ad that linked Republican Senator Ron Johnson to the storming of the Capitol building by far-right agitators and called on him to resign. “Ron Johnson: unfit to serve” was the tagline.
An ad that comes that early—before Johnson has even officially declared he’s running for reelection—is unlikely to change that many voters’ minds. But it serves as a marker for how Wisconsin Democrats are thinking about the upcoming cycle.
“There’s often a period of regrouping after elections,” said Ben Wikler, the 40-year-old chair of the Wisconsin Democrats. But they can’t afford to do that in the state. “It takes both feet on the gas in order to overcome the barriers to the functioning of democracy that Republicans have erected.”
“Both feet on the gas,” as the 2022 election slowly approaches, means fundraising as aggressively as possible. It means recruiting volunteers to persuade their neighbors and communities to stay involved in politics and eventually cast ballots against Johnson. And it means not resting for a second—Democrats are at such a disadvantage in Wisconsin politics that they have to work overtime just to avoid getting swamped. But at least they have Wikler, a rising star in Democratic politics whose two-year tenure as chair has been markedly successful. Defeating Johnson, a climate change denier who has helped push dubious theories about COVID, will likely be the most difficult challenge Wikler has faced, however.
Wisconsin goes Hollywood
Wikler’s most prominent innovation is probably the Zoom celebrity reunion, where cast members of beloved TV shows or movies got together to throw fundraisers. The first one, a “West Wing” reunion spearheaded by Wisconsin native Bradley Whitford, raised more than $165,000, Wikler told the Hollywood Reporter, and became a model for how to do mid-pandemic fundraising. The biggest one, a “Princess Bride” reunion, raised a whopping $4.25 million for Wisconsin Democrats, who also helped other state parties organize their own star-studded events.
Wikler has more experience in showbiz than your average state party chair. He wrote for The Onion (which was started in Madison by University of Wisconsin students), and one of his early jobs in politics was working for Al Franken, then a comedian working on books like “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”
“His adage is that if you’re working with entertainers and cultural figures instead of asking them to opine about politics, ask them to do the thing that they’re best at,” Wikler told Blue Tent.
This proved to be a remarkably effective way to deploy left-leaning celebrities. These Zoom events helped Wisconsin Democrats raise nearly $47.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than the state party ever had before and more than any state party other than Florida raised in the 2020 cycle.
Going back to neighbor-to-neighbor organizing
That money fueled a steady stream of mailers and ads that supplemented a major TV blitz from the Biden campaign; it also helped the state party establish phone and text banks. It was a massive effort that was still barely enough—Joe Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes, and Republicans came up just short of securing a veto-proof legislative supermajority. (The governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat.) The state party put $1.8 million into six key legislative districts as part its defensive strategy, and this paid off.
But money bombs don’t build sustained infrastructure. In his interview with Blue Tent, Wikler emphasized that the party is now using anti-Johnson sentiment to fundraise with an eye toward a more relational organizing model. This includes a “Captains Program,” which will train volunteers to do effective outreach to their friends, their neighbors, and in the case of college and high school students, their classmates. It’s a strategy that helped Barack Obama win Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012; some critics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign say that it failed to make use of relational organizing tools and instead relied too much on paid canvassers.
“The core insight is that you build power as an organizer by giving it away, by teaching local organizers and volunteers how to build voter-contact teams in their own communities rather than helicoptering in a field operation that disappears the day after the election,” Wikler said. “The most powerful outreach to voters is always from someone that you already have a relationship with.”
In 2019, Democrats were already door-knocking with these ideas in mind, but the pandemic forced them to rely instead on phone calls and texts rather than in-person contacts. (Republicans in the state relaunched door-knocking operations even as Democrats held back for public health reasons.) Now the project is to keep voters they’ve reached mobilized and interested in politics—the goal, Wikler says, is to turn them into “super voters” who don’t tune out in off-year elections. There’s an election for the superintendent of public instruction coming up on April 6, the first statewide election in any state since the Georgia Senate runoffs, after which the party will begin to pivot to a focus on 2022.
“We want to make sure that even though we won’t have a Democratic nominee for Senate until August of 2022,” Wikler said, “that person is clicking into gear with a fully-fledged, statewide campaign that has already helped educate voters about Johnson’s terrible record, and already has relationships and an operation in every corner of our state.”
OK, now give me the bad news
The biggest challenge facing Democrats in Wisconsin isn’t that they have to repeatedly win close statewide elections. It’s that Wisconsin has maybe the most unfairly gerrymandered state legislative maps in the country. “Regardless of the number of votes Democrats win, Republicans always hold the majority in both chambers of the state legislature,” Wikler said.
The GOP has used its legislative dominance to create a restrictive voter ID regime that further disadvantages Democrats in elections. (State Republicans want to make it even harder to vote after Trump’s narrow loss.) Breaking a stranglehold on Republican power in the statehouse and senate means getting new legislative maps drawn in the coming year. In Wisconsin, these maps are drawn by the legislature, but Governor Evers has the ability to veto them; if the two sides can’t compromise on the issue, it will eventually go to the courts, which would likely be something of a victory for Democrats. “Even if the judges who wind up deciding on the maps aren’t fully on board with creating maps that are fair for all, they’ll still be much, much better than the kind of micro-targeted, computer-model-determined, ultra-Republican maps that the GOP demonstrated it wants to put into place.”
That dominance goes back to the 2010 midterms, a disaster for Democrats in Wisconsin and many other states that allowed state Republicans essentially to control Wisconsin for a decade. That this defeat happened just two years after Obama’s historic victory speaks to the danger of complacency.
“The lesson is clear to all of us that we can’t repeat what happened in 2009, and ’10, when the Democratic Party stepped back a little bit from the level of engagement we need to overcome the usual curse of the midterms,” Wikler said. He’s doing his best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
