Steven Potter:
So, the state parties, they are political organizations, but they're not campaigns. What role does the state Democratic party have in elections, and specifically, what will you do in the 2024 elections?

Ben Wikler:
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin has a mission to elect Democrats up and down the ballot in order to help advance the cause of a freer, fairer, better Wisconsin that works for everybody. And so our job is to do all the organizing on the ground with volunteers knocking on doors and calling people's phones. It's voter protection to ensure that people who are eligible to vote can cast a ballot freely and fairly. It's coalitions work to make sure that whether you're a rural democrat, Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, LGBT, all the different communities that make up the Democratic Party have a voice within the party and all the campaigns are communicating with them in the ways that make the biggest difference. We wanna make sure that every voter in the state knows that Democrats want to earn their vote and that we don't take them for granted. And in a state that comes down to tiny, tiny margins like Wisconsin, the only way to win is to be everywhere all the time.

Steven Potter:
So what are your priorities with the 2024 elections?

Ben Wikler:
We have the BBB plan, so it's Biden, Baldwin, and Blue Down Ballot wins. That's the banner headline. That means this spring in local elections, we wanna make sure that MAGA election deniers don't take over offices that will allow them to mess with the 2024 elections in November. That means this fall will fight in the state legislature, we'll fight in county offices, we'll work to defeat Republicans in the U.S. House. People like Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil, and we'll work to reelect Tammy Baldwin and President Biden. Wisconsin could determine the House majority, the U.S. Senate majority, and the electoral college. We could be the deciding factor for control of the entire federal government, and we wanna make sure that every voter knows which party's candidates stand for freedom, stand for the idea of democracy, for the idea of shared prosperity where every working family has the opportunity to thrive, and which party stands for extremism, bans on books and bans on abortion and threats to democracy itself.

Steven Potter:
In July, Milwaukee will host the Republican National Convention. How will that impact your work?

Ben Wikler:
The Republican National Convention will make vividly clear what today's Trumpified MAGA Republican party stands for. And what we've seen over and over is that the more voters see from Donald Trump and the Trump-like MAGA candidates, the less they want anything to do with that extreme wing of the Republican Party. This is not the Republican Party of Tommy Thompson. This is a Republican Party that tried to overturn the 2020 elections, that put extreme Supreme Court justices on that ripped away Roe versus Wade and has tried to criminalize abortion and now is talking about going after contraception. Things like birth control pills and IUDs. Those are policies so out of step with what most Wisconsinites want that we think republicans having a stage in our state will make vividly clear the contrast, the choice people have between a Biden-Harris administration that stands up for common sense and a MAGA GOP that is pushing way far out to the far, far right. So during the Republican National Convention, we wanna make sure that we have local messengers helping not only puncture the lies, but also speak the truth about what's happening in our state and what each party stands for. Our goal will be to make sure that people see the choice, the choice between the far right MAGA GOP and a common sense Democratic Party that has a big tent where everyone can find a home and be heard and make sure that we build a state where everyone feels welcome and has the opportunity to get ahead.

Steven Potter:
The Republican National Convention does have the opportunity to motivate voters in Milwaukee and southeast Wisconsin. Do you think it will matter to the rest of the state?

Ben Wikler:
I think that the Republican National Convention is a great economic stimulus and we hope the Republicans, the wealthy Republicans visiting Wisconsin spend as much as possible in Wisconsin businesses while they're here. And we wanna make sure that when people hear the fear and the demonization and the smears and the divisive messages and conspiracy theories from the far right, they also hear from Democrats in their own communities, people they went to church or Little League with, that they hear from Democrats about how Democrats have delivered for their communities, how we are building roads, how we're making sure folks have access to clean, affordable energy, how we're replacing lead pipes with clean water pipes, all these things that President Biden has delivered with help from Senator Baldwin and Democrats down ballot. That is such a vivid contrast between Trump, who talked constantly about things like infrastructure, but all he actually did was hand out massive tax breaks to the ultra wealthy and set the stage for banning abortion. That is a choice that we know that Wisconsinites will look at and conclude that it's time for another Biden-Harris term.

Steven Potter:
What are you hearing from voters about the most important issues in this election cycle?

Ben Wikler:
What we find over and over is that Wisconsinites believe in freedom. We believe that people should make their own decisions about what they do with their own bodies. We believe that we should have the freedom to love the people we love, marry who we want to marry, read the books that we wanna read, and the freedom to know that when we cast a ballot, that decides the outcome of an election. And what we've seen from the GOP is opposition to that very basic idea of American freedom. They want politicians to go into doctor's offices, essentially, and dictate what people can do. They've supported book bans, they've supported attacks on these really guarantees that everyone should be able to live with. And that is anathema. It just doesn't resonate with Wisconsin values. What we find is that over and over, whether people agree or disagree about this or that tax policy, these fundamental questions of whether we all have the freedom to live the kinds of lives that we wanna lead, that is something that leads voters across the political spectrum to vote against MAGA Republicans and for Democrats. We saw that in the Supreme Court race this spring. We saw that in 2022. We're gonna see that again in 2024.

Steven Potter:
Wisconsin, as you mentioned, has been rising nationally in political importance, has been the tipping point in the past recent elections. How did that happen?

Ben Wikler:
Well, when you have a state that has a margin under one percentage point in four of the last six presidential elections, people start paying a lot of attention to what happens there. We had this again, Democrats lost the Senate race with our great candidate against Ron Johnson in 2022. And Mandela Barnes came closer to defeating an incumbent Republican than any other Democrat running for Senate in the country. And in the governor's race, it was 3.4 points. That's a Wisconsin landslide, but for the rest of the country's perspective, that's a pretty close election. The Governor Evers ran a fantastic campaign. Go back throughout this decade, we've had a dozen elections that came down to 30,000 votes or less. And all of that means that if you line up every state by the margin of victory for whoever won the presidential race and you look at where it is that the winning candidate got across the finish line to become the president of the United States, that's called the tipping point state. Wisconsin was the tipping point in 2016 and 2020. Whoever wins Wisconsin in 2024 becomes president, and that puts a lot of power in the hands of Wisconsin voters.

Steven Potter:
Former President Donald Trump, front runner Republicans right now is under indictment. How much will that impact voters? Is that something that might turn them off that he is under criminal indictment?

Ben Wikler:
Yeah, we have an independent justice system in this country and the the process of the courts making the decisions that they do, all that will be happening. It's unprecedented. We really don't have any historical pattern to show us what could happen with that. But what we do know is that Trump is talking about using the powers of the presidency to go after his enemies and pardon the January 6th rioters who attacked and brutally savagely beat police officers at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, at his urging essentially, after he sent them to do that attack. We know that Donald Trump is talking about pushing the judiciary even further to the right, the same judiciary that just ripped up Roe versus Wade. He wants to push them even further to the far right extreme. He's essentially talking about an authoritarian government and the rule of law applies to everyone in this country. We're supposed to have equal justice under the law. If he gets power again, he's talking about ripping that principle to shreds in a way that really would threaten the idea of America. So all of these issues really tie back to this really stark contrast between President Biden and Vice President Harris, whose fight, as it has been since they launched the campaign, is for the soul of America. The idea of a free and fair America where everyone can thrive and where everyone can have the freedoms that come with being born as a U.S. citizen, or becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. It's a contrast between the idea of America and the idea of really a kind of authoritarian state under the thumb of an extremist that Donald Trump wants to inflict on the rest of us.

Steven Potter:
Why should Wisconsin residents feel confident in the state's electoral process in the 2024 elections?

Ben Wikler:
If you look at the big studies of the performance of election systems, MIT has something called the Election Performance Index. Wisconsin has some of the best elections in the country. We've been in the top five. The 2020 election administration in Wisconsin was award-winning. And it was scrutinized over and over and over. People looked for every possible indicator that something went wrong. In fact, the the performance of the local clerks, who are chosen by their own city councils or elected in townships and municipalities across the state, their work has been outstanding. These are public servants who are motivated by serving their communities. Probably most people in Wisconsin have met someone who's a clerk in their town or their county at some point in their lives. And these are folks who feel accountable to making sure that their neighbors are heard when it comes to elections. So the reason why I'm confident about the 2024 election, why everyone should have that confidence is that our election system here has been scrutinized six ways to Sunday and it has come out with flying colors. And that is why we've had elections where Democrats win and Republicans win, and where it's close and where it's not you. If we had a system where one side was winning every single time and people were digging up all kinds of irregularities, you might have a serious problem. But think about 2020, think about 2022. Both sides had victories and both sides had defeats, and voters everywhere had their say. That's how democracy is supposed to work. And that's why I'm very confident that if someone casts a ballot in 2024, that will shape the future of our state and our country.