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'Moment of national emergency': Wisconsin insider details game plan for fighting Trump

Wisconsin, along with Pennsylvania and Michigan, was once considered part of the Democratic Party's "Blue Wall" in presidential elections. But Donald Trump, in 2016, became the first Republican to carry Wisconsin in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and he won Wisconsin again in 2024 after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.

Wisconsin — which has a GOP senator (Ron Johnson) and a Democratic senator (Tammy Baldwin) — is, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, neither reliably Democratic nor reliably Republican. Democrats celebrated when liberal Justice-elect Susan Crawford defeated the Elon Musk-backed Brad Schimel in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race by roughly 10 percent on April 1, but during the race, they took nothing for granted.

Ben Wikler, chosen in 2019, is retiring from his position as leader of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. And he discussed his work during a Q&A interview with New York Magazine's Daniel Strauss published on April 21.

Wikler told Strauss, "I think the Democrats have two big jobs. One is to contest elections and do the normal work of driving down the Republican popularity by showing how they're hurting people, and presenting an ultimate credible vision and building a winning coalition. That's all with one hand. And with the other hand, to be fighting every day, each second to try to contain the blitzkrieg of damage to our democracy itself. And I actually think it's both possible and necessary to do both."

Wikler was vehemently critical of Trump's second presidency during the interview, characterizing it as an attack on democracy and the rule of law.

"We're in a moment of national emergency with an attempted eternal coup by the (Trump) Administration," Wikler told Strauss. "And there's a huge amount of work to do to fight back, to just try to contain damage and to set the stage to be able to swing back power for people who actually believe in democracy. And at the same time, there's an enormous political backlash that's already afoot and is only going to be visible when elections take place or when people pour into the streets for protests…. Voters are furious. If the election were today I believe to my core that Democrats would turn out in record numbers, Trump would lose, and Republican candidates would lose up and down the ballot."

Wikler added, "At the same time, the (Trump) Administration has issued executive orders to try to dismantle voting protections across the country — and Republicans are trying to move legislation that would disenfranchise millions of people. The Administration is disappearing people from the streets. They're causing profound economic chaos in a way that could give them the power to selectively remove that chaos as a form of political patronage on steroids."

Read New York Magazine's full interview with Ben Wikler at this link.