Q&A: Ben Wikler running for DNC chair

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NewsNation) — Democrats, still reeling from losing the presidency, their Senate majority and remaining in the House minority, are looking to make changes within their party. 

The current chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, is not running for reelection. The race to replace him and elect a leader who will set the agenda and lead the party forward is underway.

NewsNation has interviewed all four of the candidates up for the job. Below is a Q&A conducted with Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, who is vying for the role. Read Q&As with the other candidates here.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

NewsNation: What went into your decision to run for DNC chair?

Wikler: Well, I thought about it a lot after this election. I wanted to see the data about what happened and what worked. What I saw was that Wisconsin was one of the very few states that added votes relative to what we saw for Harris, relative to what we turned out for Biden in 2020. We overperformed.

The swing [towards the GOP] was less across Wisconsin than you saw in similar counties across the country. We won our U.S. Senate race. We flipped 14 state legislative seats thanks in part to maps that we fought and fought for and finally won a Supreme Court majority that actually read our Constitution, struck down the gerrymander and ensured that Wisconsin has become a democracy.

And the impact of that work, that year-round, permanent campaign, organizing, fighting and communicating everywhere, we can see it in the election results. We're going to see it in people's lives, and I want to see it on the national stage.

If I become the DNC chair, the goal will be to unite the party around these battles. To fight them across every state, to have a battle plan for every state, for all the down-ballot and up-ballot work that we need to do, and then to win more elections at every level that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

NewsNation: What is your message as a candidate for DNC chair?

Wikler: In the DNC election I think we have a choice about whether to go as big as we can, to meet the challenges of fights up and down the ballot. Whether we're going to unite as a national party around the work that we need to do in every state across the United States, to gear up for ‘25, ‘26, ‘27, and ‘28.

And what I bring to the table is the experience of working in one of the most hotly contested states in the country, where we've seen everything that the right-wing machine can throw at us, and we've built a permanent campaign that works at races at every one of these levels.

My message to DNC members is that I am excited to work with you to supercharge our national party in the way that we've done in Wisconsin successfully. And there's an opportunity to do that nationwide, and so that's why I'm asking for the support of DNC members so that we can work together in partnership and with all of our partners and allies and candidates to build the kind of dynamo that this country urgently needs in a time of national political crisis.

NewsNation: What are your top three priorities if elected DNC chair?

Wikler: The first is to unite the party. So that means working to ensure that across race and ethnicity, gender, geography, rural areas, suburbs, cities, small towns, big towns alike, that across the country, we're united by our core values.

The fight for working people, the fight to ensure that everyone has freedom, dignity, opportunity in this world, the respect every person deserves. And that we're fighting back against a Trump administration that we know is going to try to use its power amidst a frenzy of corruption, to try to hand out trillions of dollars to billionaires next year. That is their plan. That is going to be the fight in Congress.

The platform is unite, fight and win. And when we talk about how we fight, a key piece of this is to think not just about what we want to say, but what voters will actually hear.

So, as Democrats, we need to go on places that are not oriented toward Democratic audiences. We need to build a bigger progressive, independent media ecosystem. We need to make sure we're communicating effectively in the traditional press, and we need to go where folks are not thinking about politics.

The second piece is to fight through our year-round permanent campaign through organizing and communicating in every state, including to people who are not paying attention to politics right now.

And the third is to win more races at every level of the ballot. So that means taking seriously fights like State Supreme Court races, state legislative races, the non-federal races for Governor and Attorney General and Secretary of State and Congress and the Senate and the presidency. Often, the DNC is so focused on the presidential elections that it is not as deep a partner as it could be in some of these other kinds of races.

NewsNation: All of the candidates are talking about a 50-state strategy or 57-territory-and-state strategy. What does your version of that strategy look like?

Wikler: There's two elements of it. One is all 50 states and also the territories and Puerto Rico, DC. And the other is strategy. 

And what I mean by that is we should work with state parties to get all the folks in the room. The Democratic Governors Association, the senatorial and congressional campaign committees, the folks working on state legislative races, on local races, like mayor's races, and map out what are all the fights that are coming up in 2026 and 2028. And then what are the shared resources we need to build to be able to help us win all those fights?

So that means year-round organizing capacity. In many places, it's critical to have year-round voter protection. How do we support state chairs to be able to do the kind of fundraising and communication that's going to help all the candidates win? And we build the plan kind of backwards from winning those key races to figure out what kind of resources we need to bring to bear, the kind of team we need to assemble.

And then I work, as national chair, with all of our partners and state parties and these different candidate committees to find those resources and get them to the people who know how to use them best.

NewsNation: Are there any specific tactics that you’ll use in your role as chair to win?

Wikler: In Wisconsin, our tactics span the spectrum, and we're constantly evolving them because the goal is to do things that actually work, not just the things that we've done before or things that might feel good.

So that means door-knocking, on-the-ground organizing and calling people's phones and sending some text messages. It also means figuring out through people's social networks how to ensure that people are reaching out to their friends. Because we've seen a much bigger impact when you hear from someone that you know than when you hear from a stranger.

It means strengthening our communications capacity. One is by training more people to go out and use effective messaging and effective techniques to make their voices heard.

And I think we can have a communicator training operation at the national level and support one at the state level all across the country to help get people ready to go on camera, on podcasts, on new media platforms, on social media, and then to help deploy them, to help book them, to help support state-level efforts to make sure that Democrat’s voices are being heard when the major issues of the day and the political battles are being discussed.

The second piece is having a national strategy that starts with where people are actually getting their information because we know that attention is now wildly fragmented. [Wikler mentioned TV, mail, blogging, and various social media platforms as examples.]

We have to start with the voter and then have a kind of everything everywhere, all at once strategy to make sure we're showing up in those places. That doesn't mean everyone has to be everywhere. That means we have to have someone who is the right fit for that medium and that audience everywhere. And that work requires institution building.

NewsNation: How do you plan on appealing to men of color, particularly Latino men who shifted quite dramatically, as well as Black men who shifted a little bit?

Wikler: Democrats only win with a big tent approach, and that means organizing across lines of race and ethnicity and gender and geography. Rural areas, suburbs, cities, small towns alike. It means working across generations and speaking to voters who may be progressive, maybe moderate, maybe they're conservative. But what Trump is going to do in these next four years is sticking in their craw.

And that means big uniting messages and a ton of different messengers who can help to carry the message and communicate in a way that lands the right way the first time. Now, there's a lot of work to do to make sure we have a ton of great messengers, and we are lucky that this party is full of leaders. We have so many folks in elected office. We're going to have vice chairs at the DNC. We're going to have all these state party chairs.

We have this extraordinary diversity and strength that comes from having a ton of wonderful people in the party. And I see the job of the DNC chair to help lift up a ton of different voices and help us to find a path to being able to sing in harmony, to communicate to voters in a way that moves the needle.

That has been my life's work. That's been my work at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, working across all these different identities and lines of difference to find our common ground and be able to fight and win elections in a way that celebrates the full diversity of our party and the unity of our purpose. And that's the work that I want to do as the DNC chair.