This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin
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What a month this week has been. I don't think I've ever lived through a period in American politics that felt like as much changed as fast. On Sunday, we got the news that Joe Biden was dropping out. I was on a plane that night. I feverishly wrote the audio essay that I then recorded Monday that came out Tuesday. And by Tuesday, I felt like we were in a fully different world than when I was writing. And I was like,

You know, over the last kind of year that I've been working on some of these issues, the most common and dominant worry the Democrats had if something happened to Joe Biden or if Joe Biden decided or was convinced to step aside is that they had so little confidence in Kamala Harris. I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris. There was reporting of Nancy Pelosi wanting an open primary or an open convention, but

And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall out of the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time.

And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is going to feel until it actually happens. At the same time, when things shift this much, it is reasonable to ask, is anything being missed? Are things that people were legitimately worried about being suppressed? Kamala Harris is a liberal Black Democrat from San Francisco, California.

For many in the party, that is not the profile they would imagine or prefer for Wisconsin, for Michigan, for Pennsylvania, for Arizona, for Georgia, for all these states. Now, Harris, as I've argued in other shows, has other profiles.

political identities, right? That sort of list of attributes doesn't actually reveal that she was a moderate, tough-on-crime Democrat in California. But I think it's worth taking the concerns the party had about her not very long ago seriously. And one way to do that is to look at Wisconsin. Losing Wisconsin in 2016 was a trauma for Democrats.

It's no accident that Harris's first major campaign rally, first campaign rally at all, in fact, since Joe Biden stepped aside, was in Wisconsin, the same state where Republicans held their convention this year. Wisconsin is a must-win state for everybody this year. But when Harris stepped out on that stage in Wisconsin, The next president of the United States. the feel of it,

was, I think, really different than the people who'd been worrying about how she might play in Wisconsin would have expected. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Wisconsin! How do Democrats win Wisconsin?

Well, since 2016, they've been figuring that out. The Democratic Party there, the state party, is run by Ben Wickler, a veteran of different organizing groups like MoveOn and absolutely one of the most effective state chairs in the country. And they've been on a fair winning streak since. In 2020, Joe Biden won the state. In 2022, Governor Tony Evers was reelected.

There was a feeling Wisconsin might go red, and they really kept that from happening. It has gotten bluer since 2016. But that is not to say Democrats have been on an unbroken winning streak. And in particular, the lost sits in the Democratic psyche is Ron Johnson versus Mandela Barnes in the Senate campaign in 2022.

2022 was a good year for Democrats. Ron Johnson was one of their prime targets. They really don't like that guy, and they thought he was really vulnerable. Barnes, the lieutenant governor, he'd been elected statewide. He's a young Black Democrat, a charismatic guy. And he lost. And he lost in a race run by Chris LaCivita, who is now running Donald Trump's campaign. So what can be learned from that race? What can be learned from both Democratic wins and losses in Wisconsin?

And how is the Republican Party positioned there now, now that Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance for his vice president? The person you would, of course, want to talk about this with is that Democratic State Party chair, Ben Wickler, and he was kind enough to join me today. As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com. Ben Wickler, welcome to the show. Great to be with you, Ezra.

So Kamala Harris's first campaign rally happened yesterday, Tuesday the 23rd in Wisconsin. You were there. You helped introduce her. What was the vibe like? It was electric. Let me paint the scene for you. We had a previously scheduled Kamala Harris visit to Wisconsin on Tuesday on the books. So our team was preparing for that. And then the world changed on Sunday.

And then the world changed again with a kind of whoosh. It was like the country was making a decision. The Democratic Party coalesced. Our delegates started pledging en masse for Kamala Harris. We endorsed her with a unanimous vote of our state party's governing body on Monday. And meanwhile, the RSVPs were rolling in and the whole team planning the logistics of the event had to scramble to find a bigger and bigger place.

They found West Alice Central High School with a huge gymnasium and more than 3,000 people got in to the event. And when you walked in, the room would just explode.

And when I walked out, people jumped to their feet, not because of me, because of this feeling that they were there for history. They were there for a kind of end to a period in American politics that people want to move past and the beginning of something so much better. And all the way through, through multiple speakers, through music breaks, through

There was this just sense of joy and hope and optimism that felt so unlike the sense of dread that people have had in the pit of their stomach since 2015, really. It felt like something new. And I feel so lucky that I was in the room when all that happened. And it feels like what we're about to see unfold across the country. Man, I'm pumped hearing that. I want to pick up on two things you said there, Ben. One is the whoosh and the other is the joy. But let's do the whoosh first.

I feel like my head is spinning. I've never felt political sentiment change faster than in the past couple of days. This candidate who people were actually afraid of, right? I think it's important to be honest about this, like inside the Democratic Party.

they are thrilled about. And there's something very organic about it. I mean, suddenly the internet is full of Kamala's brat memes and memes of her laugh and her dancing, right? There's this deep set of intangibles that have connected around her that feels a lot to me like Obama in 2008. But instead of being this build, right? I mean, that was a multi-year build to what he was in 08. It all happened in like 48 hours. How do you account for it?

I feel like as a country we've been holding our breath.

And it's like we can finally exhale and then we can start singing with joy. It is a head spinning moment. It really is a head spinning moment. And I say this as someone who believes deeply that Joe Biden was an extraordinarily effective, still is our extraordinarily effective president. And he made this really extraordinary decision born out of, I think, a really deep patriotism and a sense of something bigger than himself.

And so I was in my feelings when that announcement came through. My head spun the first time when I saw President Biden's tweet. Yeah, when I saw that tweet, I actually had to sit down. Yeah. Like, I felt like everything went quiet around me. Like, you could feel history happening right there. I think that's right. I was sitting down, thank goodness. I was sitting down with my laptop perched next to me. If I'd been standing, I think I would have dropped my computer and smashed it. So on that front, I was well prepared. Only on that front, in a sense.

there was this kind of yawning moment of no one knows what's going to happen now when that word went out. And then President Biden shortly thereafter endorsed Vice President Harris. And then the work that the vice president has been doing

I think started to bear fruit in a very rapid way. She has been building relationships across the country. She's been working closely with Democratic and progressive leaders and activists, union leaders, elected officials all over the country. She's been on this nationwide tour since the Dobbs decision, meeting with people involved on the front lines of the fight for reproductive freedom, people directly affected and providers and advocacy groups and organizers. You know, she was in my office at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin earlier this year and

met the whole team, people filing through and meeting her individually. She's been doing this work in a way that I think the country hadn't quite realized in a way that made her the totally clear choice as our nominee. And this is something that I think in a funny way is starting from the party and moving out because the people who've been closest to the campaign, the people who've been seeing her in her stops across America, those are the people who are actually delegates.

She's gone through the process that kind of, you know, many primary that people have talked about have wanted, which is for people to actually see her in action on the campaign trail. But she's not been the locus of the national conversation. The national conversation was about Biden and Trump, then briefly about J.D. Vance, which decision that will live in infamy by Donald Trump. But for Kamala Harris, she has been doing this. She's very visibly been a just a powerhouse spokesperson in these in these last few weeks, and

And it is so natural now for her to step into this role as the nominee. She tipped the balance and got the presumptive nomination on Monday night. So she's now the presumptive nominee of the party. And the general election has begun.

The last couple of days, she has raised more than $100 million, breaking all fundraising records. We're hearing a lot about money beyond that, right? Money from big donors going into super PACs, money going down ballot in Wisconsin, in the Democratic Party there, in the down ballot races there. What are you seeing in fundraising since Harris got Joe Biden's endorsement?

I can say that in the last 48 hours at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, we've had a flood. We've had more than $250,000 just flooded.

Float in. The people have been logging on and clicking, I'll say, at wisdom.org, our website. The people who I've left messages for for the last year have now been sending me texts back that they just contributed 500 bucks, 5,000 bucks. People making bigger contributions than they thought. And anecdotally, talking to state legislative candidates already, it is a new day for them, too. There's a general sense, I think, of...

of yes, like we can actually do this. We can not only win, but we can win up and down the ballot. The goal now is a democratic trifecta. They can actually pass Roe into law, the Women's Health Protection Act, led by my Senator Tammy Baldwin, I'm proud to say. We can pass the PRO Act for union organizing. We can expand social security and Medicare, not watch them get eviscerated by the Vance Trumpites. You can kind of feel the future on your fingertips.

And that is going to fuel energy in state legislative races. It's going to fuel energy for people running for county offices across the country. It gets volunteers jazzed.

For weeks, it's been, you know, every time I would go to a campus kickoff, someone is asking, you know, what's going to happen with the ticket? They're watching the news. They're listening to your podcast. They're wondering what should happen next, what is going to happen next. Now there's clarity. And from that clarity comes unity. And from that unity comes energy. And I think that that's what everyone involved in democratic politics is feeling at this moment.

So I am personally thrilled to see Democrats have some joy in this election. I think they, as you put it well, I don't think they quite realized how much dread they were carrying. I mean, it's like this mass collective effervescence. It's really fun to watch and to see.

And I'm going to be counter vibes for a minute, which is not going to be the most popular place to be right now and inhabit some of the concerns I was hearing a few weeks ago, even through the weekend, right, that have now been pushed to the side. And one of the reasons I wanted you on today is that Wisconsin is a good place to focus on these concerns. There's a tendency, as Democrats have been very focused on this Midwestern blue wall in recent years, right?

To just kind of say like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, it's like sort of moderate-ish Midwestern states, you know, tight elections could go either way. Obviously, they're different states. What is the political culture of Wisconsin that people should take into account when they're thinking about it?

People see Wisconsin as the state where it's always a nail biter, not every time, but over and over. The governor's race here was 1.1 percentage point in 2018 during the blue wave, the presidential elections that come down to fractions of a point. And they think that means that kind of everyone's clustered in the middle of the political spectrum. And the reality is,

Like swing voters themselves, people have conflicted, idiosyncratic, interesting views that are deeply rooted in the history of this place. And just to spell that out, Wisconsin was the state where the Republican Party was founded as a radical anti-slavery party in the 19th century.

It became the birthplace of the progressive movement as a kind of popular, you know, farmer labor, like in Minnesota movement against the big trusts and corporate power. Fighting Bob La Follette is this iconic figure whose bust is in the state Capitol. He was this founder of the progressive party and this forefather of the progressive movement here.

Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment so women could vote. It was the first state to have a statewide equal rights law for women. Wisconsinites wrote the Social Security Act. They created workers' compensation, unemployment insurance here. People fought and died in battles for labor rights. There's this deep, rich, progressive streak, the founding of Earth Day. All these things that happen here that people learn about in school. It's also the state where Joe McCarthy rose to power.

It's also a state where the John Birch Society had a huge role in Republican politics, where the Bradley Foundation, which funds the Heritage Foundation and was involved in Stop the Steal-y stuff and Project 2025-y stuff. All that happened in Wisconsin. And we got this red wave in 2010 with Scott Walker, the Republicans in the state legislature, who we finally have the chance to kick off. It's a state where...

There's both the greatest traditions of expanding freedom and making the government work for regular folks, and also a state where there's a far-right streak that has scarred our politics, I think, for so long. It's led to some of the biggest racial disparities in the country. All of those stories have played out here. And in every election, it's kind of a choice of which Wisconsin is going to show up. Which Wisconsin are we going to be? So 2022, surprisingly good year for Democrats in the Senate. They beat a bunch of MAGA Republicans.

But not in Wisconsin, where Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes loses in a pretty tough race to Ron Johnson, who had become very MAGA over those years. Mandela Barnes is a liberal Black Democrat. Johnson's race is run by Chris LaCivita, who is now running Donald Trump's campaign campaign.

And I want to play you one of the ads from that race. What happens when criminals are released because bail is set dangerously low? Tragedy in Waukesha. An SUV plows through the city's Christmas parade. Six people were killed and dozens more injured. Brooks was freed from jail on $1,000 bailed. Mandela Barnes wants to end cash bail completely. He wrote the bill. Barnes still wants to end cash bail today.

Mandela Barnes, not just a Democrat, a dangerous Democrat. LaCivita's attack line on Barnes was different, dangerous. These were very Willie Horton like ads, very racially coded. They darkened his skin with the filters they were using in the ads. Republicans have already started using dangerously liberal, which is quite similar as their line on Harris.

So this was the kind of race that people were afraid of and that many of the Democratic Party wondered how Harris would fare in. So I think it's good to focus in on it. Talk me through from your perspective, the Barnes-Johnson race and its lessons for Democrats now. First of all, that ad makes me want to punch through a wall hearing it again, just as I felt at that time.

Just to be clear, Mandela Barnes's position was that rather than how much money you have, the question should be whether you're a danger to the community if you're held in pretrial detention, which actually is a pro-community safety point of view. But

Putting that aside, I think that race actually illustrates the path to victory for Kamala Harris in the following way. Mandela Barnes came out of that primary ahead against Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson had pretty high negatives, but about a third of Wisconsin did not yet have a view about Mandela Barnes.

And then Chris LaCivita and Super PACs, Allied Super PACs, which put in $29 million to smear Mandela Barnes. They came in and they were outspending the pro-Mandela, anti-Johnson side in some media markets in some weeks by like four to one. People were seeing attack after attack after attack. And of course, they're going to use, I mean, we see this all the time in Wisconsin, Republican ads using inflammatory racist rhetoric.

often racially coded, sometimes not even fig leaf, dog whistle racism or bullhorn, of course we're going to see those ads. And just to pull the lens back here, Wisconsin, we've had nail biters over and over. Four of the last six presidential elections have come down to less than one percent point. But the other two out of the last six were landslides for Barack Obama.

We've elected Tammy Baldwin in huge margins in 2012 and in 2018. Wisconsin's the first state in the country to elect a Black woman to statewide executive office, Vel Phillips in 1978. In all these races, we've seen hideous Republican attacks. The question is how we punch back. And in that moment, Mandela's campaign, and I say this, you know, being close to the internal side of this whole thing, they knew that they could actually beat that hideous message and

And it took three things. One is responding to the attack head on and deflating it. The second was laying out who Mandela Barnes is and what he wants to do, what he's for. And the third is being on offense. The campaign didn't have the resources to do all that. This was a campaign that had just finished a primary. Groups had not yet kind of clicked into gear to provide outside support.

And so there was this massive imbalance and people were hearing surround sound with the most vicious attacks without hearing the combination of defense, self-definition, and offense. And what we know from a million other races, when you do all those things, it works. And we know that from that race too, because by the final stretch in that race, the kind of cavalry arrived, the whole progressive movement was in formation fighting and supporting Mandela Boren's.

And he started gaining. He went from a significant deficit in the polls and seeing the internal polls, I can vouch for this, to being right on the cusp. He was gaining about a point a week and he ran out of weeks. He wound up losing by one point. When you say the Calvary came in, do you mean they came in with money or there was a change in feeling towards him? Like, was this a resources gap that closed? Fundamentally, this was resources.

When you have to choose, you only have enough money to have one ad on the air in every part of the state. You have to choose which of those messages you want to communicate or try to cram three messages into 30 seconds, which is really hard to do. There were a whole bunch of groups on the air by the end. There were groups going after Ron Johnson for his support for January 6th protesters who beat up law enforcement officers and with gunfire.

U.S. veterans talking about how Ron Johnson attacked everything that they fought for. There were ads about Mandela Barnes and his story. And there were his ads, you know, making clear that he's always supported community safety. He's supported funding first responders, that the ads that Republicans were running were total BS.

But critically, if all you're doing is defending, you're going to lose. You have to be on offense at the same time. And to do that, you need to have the resources. We do not have to be terrified of a red wave in 2024. That was the narrative in 2022 when Democrats went on defense. And, you know, I get that. I want to ask everyone to bring their minds to the fact that when we are on offense, when we are proud and fighting for who we are, what we want for a country that works for everyone, we win these elections and we're going to win this year.

I think it's important to talk about this bluntly because I will say this was a big whisper campaign against Harris over many months, which is this idea that I'd say a liberal black Democrat from California, a woman, is not going to be able to win in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan. You need someone from there. You need somebody like Scranton Joe, although it doesn't just have to be Scranton Joe, but

And at the same time, if you look at Wisconsin's record, Barack Obama wins in Wisconsin twice. Wisconsin has a very progressive record. And the Mandela-Barnes-Johnson race, I don't think I had realized in retrospect even how close it was. It was a 27,000 vote win for Johnson. I mean, it was nothing. And both Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Trump,

And Joe Biden and Trump, these were 20,000 vote margins. So, I mean, these were all I mean, it's all been teetering. But what do you say to Democrats who have this view that these Midwest states will not vote for someone with Harris's both geographic and racial and ideological background?

As Wisconsinites would say, that cheese curd don't squeak. It's just not the case. And you can see that in our electoral record. I would also say in 2022, the national incumbent advantage was 2.2 points. So Mandela Barnes was running against an incumbent U.S. senator, and he lost by one point. If he had been the incumbent, he probably would have won that election. No incumbent from either party lost a Senate race in 2022. And so, you know,

So this was within the margin of what a fully funded and resourced and supported campaign can do. And I will never not be mad that we didn't find a way to find all the resources needed to be able to cross the finish line. But that election illustrates exactly why this is a winnable race in this moment.

First thing I'll say is, unlike Donald Trump and like Tammy Baldwin, Kamala Harris lived in Wisconsin when she was four. She was a kid who grew up in part in the Midwest. She visited her house in Madison, her childhood home, when she was in Madison on a recent campaign visit. She understands the state. She's been here every year during her vice presidency, in not just Milwaukee, but in western Wisconsin and in Waukesha County, the heart of Republican Wisconsin. That's where she kicked off her Fight for Reproductive Freedom tour.

She is 100% credible as someone who will restore women's freedom over their own bodies. No one can ever hear her speak or even see her and think, oh, this is not someone who would actually carry that forward. So, you know, campaigns are about narrative, about momentum. They're about deep, visceral sense of, you know, whose team is this person on? And Kamala Harris is.

is evidently, clearly on the team of people who want a country that's characterized by freedom and opportunity and hope and the future. Donald Trump is manifestly the opposite. And that's a contrast that works out for Team Future. People do not want to go back to the sense of constant conflict and dread and fear and menace that Trump represents. ♪♪

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I want to note before I play this that I think Republicans are scrambling and confused right now. So I'm not sure where they are at this moment is where they're going to land in their attacks. But I want to play one of the early ads Republicans have released on Harris.

Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe's obvious mental decline. Our president is in good shape, in good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work that we have done. But Kamala knew Joe couldn't do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done. A border invasion, runaway inflation, the American dream dead. They created this mess. They know Kamala owns this failed record.

The way some of the early ads I've seen from them are working is on two things. One is saying she was a border czar. And, you know, the Trump campaign is very built around this idea of a migrant invasion. And the other is tying her to Biden's record. And Democrats are very proud of Biden's record. I think there's a lot for Democrats to be proud of in Biden's record. But Biden's record has not been popular. People are mad about inflation. How do you think about that? How do you respond to that?

That feels like an ad crafted for a Fox News audience that's been following the narratives in the mega cinematic universe. And this is the next plot twist. I don't think that moves normie voters. I think for people that don't live, sleep, eat and breathe this stuff.

It's very clear that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are two separate people. It's also a moment that is fundamentally different in terms of what is moving people day to day. We have seen a drop in border crossings. We've seen an enormous rapid drop in inflation. People are still frustrated about higher prices, but Trump is running on a increased prices platform. And that may have been a tough message for people to kind of hear from Joe Biden. I think that Kamala Harris can make it really powerfully.

And if people are frustrated with the way things have been going and they want change, Kamala Harris is a change candidate. And this is, I think, speaks to this kind of deeper underlying structure of politics recently.

There have been a series of change elections, a series of elections where people were frustrated. 2008 was a change election and voters voted for Barack Obama once. And then a second time, this was like, let's finish the job. We can't go back in 2012. 2016, there were a lot of reasons that 2016 happened, but for some voters, it was a kind of burn the house down, sick of this, let's change everything kind of vote for Donald Trump. 2020,

Those same voters, the ones who bounce back, so many of them were like, oh, you know, we voted for Trump and look what we got. This is terrible. They want change again. One thing I've heard from a lot of political strategists is that Harris's vice presidential pick is going to be meaningful. It is the first huge decision voters will see her make, and it will help define her to them. What would you advise her to look for in terms of a candidate who would actually help in a place like Wisconsin?

My core advice would be to make the decision on the grounds of a governing partner that you can work with to build a better future for the country. I think the more political, in a sense, a stunt pick is,

would actually not send the clear message that this is someone who's planning for how to make everyone's lives better. That said, I don't think any of the names that are being thrown around are stunt picks. These are all people who are credible partners in governance. I think fundamentally what people are going to be responding to in this race is a choice between two different futures. And every brushstroke that helps to paint that future can help make that choice vivid.

J.D. Vance actually reinforces that aspect of the menace that Trump poses to people and that MAGA poses to people. I think for Kamala Harris, her partner is an opportunity to help paint a vision of change and moving forward in a way that I think will be really exciting to folks. I'm glad you brought up Vance. I don't normally think vice presidential picks are very significant. It happens occasionally. Sarah Palin was one. But Vance feels significant. I mean,

One dimension is the amount of blood Democrats smell in the water around J.D. Vance is like nothing I've ever seen. Just watching every vice presidential possibility line up on Morning Joe and cable news to show how they would take Vance apart in a debate. And I want to play you what Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the line he was trying out here.

Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And they're running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something. That's what they go at. That's not what people are interested in. And there is angst because robber barons like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump gutted the Midwest, told us we didn't do that. They talk about private schools. Where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of 400? Those are public schools. Those are great teachers that are out there making a difference and gave us an opportunity to succeed.

That angst that J.D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, none of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale and none of them went on to be venture capitalists or whatever. It's not who people really are.

The reason that connected, I mean, I've seen that all over, is it gets at something true, which is that there's something weird about Vance. I mean, I'm sorry, there is. Like, watching the guy's own ideological evolution, I'm very willing to take people's conversions as sincere. But going from Trump might be Hitler to as slavish as Vance is towards him now, the way Vance just talks about other people, kind of the way he's on the stump, like,

Like, it just, like, feels like a guy who has spent too much time in, like, a MAGA comment section, like, late at night on YouTube for the last four years. And it feels like it has crystallized something about Trump. Like, it has created a different kind of attack surface around him that he'd almost become this sort of

I don't know, he was treated with nostalgia. Like, people got used to him. And Vance made him and them weird again. I think a lot of people are about to find out what groper means. Do you want to say what groper means? They got to find out somehow, Ben. I think people should Google groper. G-R-O-Y-P-E-R. You know, bordering on alt-right, online, provocateur universe, right?

And, you know, there's a very, very extreme edge of this that includes all the kind of most terrifying Charlottesville-y type of people. But this is the part of Trump that is the most repellent to voters, but who's been on display ever since he lost the election in 2020, most of all. This is a kind of the Stephen Miller wing of Trumpism, but it's the same Trump who had a meal with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, you know, far-right political commentator who's kind of the king of the groper's.

Often you'll see Trump post these things on Truth Social that come from the far, far right, ultra mega extremist fever swamps. And some of the things that Vance talks about and the ideas that he puts forward, they kind of come from that same fringe. I remember when I was working at MoveOn during the Trump presidency, I was

There's one big kind of showdown around immigration. And there was this rumor, this possibility that Trump was going to support the DREAM Act. And then at the last second, he completely ripped away from that and endorsed, you know, the worst, most far-right positions, the stuff that we saw with the family separation policy.

And over and over, what we would find is that Trump would dip into the well of the alt-right, ultra-extremist, fringe conservative movement. And that feels like the swamp from which J.D. Vance emerged. That version of Trump can never win a majority in this country, cannot win a majority in Wisconsin. The Trump and the J.D. Vance that comes and talks about trade and talks about factories closing, that has a certain populist resonance. But this kind of seething hatred and fury that

That does not appeal to people. I have a theory on this and I'm happy to share it, but I'm curious for your theory on why he chose Vance. Trump, I think, in a lot of ways, has pretty sensitive political instincts when it counts. He's been running away from Project 2025.

He came out with a more moderate state's choice position on abortion and has really pushed that in the Republican Party platform, recognizing what a vulnerability that is for him. He picked Mike Pence in 2016. And he had these other candidates he was thinking of. I mean, the moment Doug Burgum was on his shortlist—

My first thought was, oh, shit. Like, that's the kind of move from Trump that would actually be quite dangerous, right? I would have never in a million years thought Doug Burgum, the completely normal Republican governor of North Dakota, would end up on his shortlist. Rubio is also a pretty interesting figure from that perspective. Rubio's a very talented politician. He's, you know, moved more MAGA-y over time, but he's able to really do it with a smile. He knows how to run in a very big, diverse state. And

Vance is inexperienced. He's not great on TV. He comes across as pretty mean. What's your theory of how he ended up on the ticket? It feels like the Trump who thought he could not lose. Maybe it's the part of Trump that thinks that he can't lose unless there's cheating and he wants the person who's willing to use their muscle to overturn election results he doesn't like. But fundamentally, it felt like an act of supreme overconfidence of choosing the person who he just really actually liked their vibe as opposed to the person who he thought voters would really like.

It feels to me like he was on a boat and he thought that he was so certain to win the race that he picked up his anchor and started spinning it in a circle and then hurled it through the floor of the boat.

It's like an act that you only do when you think that there's no way that you can possibly lose. And yet here he is in a totally different race. You know, there's rumored or there's reported angst within the Republican world already that he picked the wrong guy. I think that's just going to get worse. And I think that's going to get worse as more comes out about J.D. Vance and what he's written and what he says and whose ideas he's most interested in. He does not represent somebody you'd want a heartbeat away from the presidency. Right.

He represents menace. And the decision to go with that might be one of the biggest political mistakes we've ever seen from Donald Trump. I think that political parties, political coalitions...

They have virtues and vices that are associated with them, that are sort of their light side and the dark side. I think for Democrats, all this is particularly true under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. You know, I think their sort of light side is, you know, they're thoughtful, they're curious, they're open-minded, they think through things really hard, they take serious things very seriously. And the dark side is smugness, is condescension, is a kind of faculty club elitism mindset.

It came out sort of in Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment. Right. I think that one of the things the Democrats have had to really work on inside their coalition and their presentation in this period is not semen smug. Right. Not treating the people voting for Donald Trump like this sort of dying spasm of white rage. Right. Which was a real tendency in the party on the Republican side. I think, you know, they've got some virtues, patriotism and sort of a love of country and a love of tradition there.

And the vice is a sort of rage and contempt. Everyone is against us. The people against us are un-American. And those aesthetics really matter. And to me, the difficulty that Vance and also oftentimes Trump, which I think is actually coming out in him more and more as he feels a little bit cornered by Harris now, is that rage and that contempt. And I want to play this clip from Vance because I remember being stunned by it at the time. And I think it really shows this sort of politics.

We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?

Kamala Harris, I should say, has two stepchildren who they call her Mamala. It's a very important part of her life and identity. Pete Buttigieg was in the process of adopting while J.D. Vance was saying that. But even putting all that aside, like, how does that vibe play in your view in Wisconsin? To hell with that guy. Yeah.

You know, wherever you go in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is small towns, is factory towns or water tower towns is their call that has bigger cities, no huge cities. You know, Milwaukee is well under a million people. It has a ton of rural areas. But wherever you go in our state, there's all kinds of families. That is part of the American story now.

There are families with stepkids. There are single people. There are people who've divorced and remarried and blended their families together. There's all kinds of different family structures. And everyone knows people who have different ways that their lives are proceeding. That is just a universal experience in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania. It's the human condition now that not everyone follows the same script.

And part of living in our society is honoring everyone making their own decisions about their own personal lives. Like that is the essence of freedom, right? Is the idea that each of us should be able to make the most important decisions in our lives for ourselves. And I think that Vance clip kind of illustrates the core of this. Abortion is a big deal. It is a part of that freedom of making your own decisions about your own body. Vance wants to control people. He wants to shame people for being different.

and he wants to create a system of control so that people follow the script that he wants them to live. That doesn't actually sell. So many inconsistent voters and swing voters

What they really don't want is politicians getting so interested in their lives that they want to make their big decisions for them. That is voter repellent, more powerful than bug repellent is to bugs. And it is not something that wins you an election. And we are going to make sure that voters know that if they want to be controlled and dominated by people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, they should vote for Trump and Vance. If they want the freedom to live their own lives, then they should vote for Kamala Harris. That is a crystal clear message that results, I think,

in a victory that will end the MAGA era in American politics. I want to read something you said to me for an article I wrote back in February about the Democratic Party. You said, quote,

And it tends to be on things that people know the government already does. That's how you wind up with Whitmer and Evers running on fixing the damn roads in 2018. Then they did fix the damn roads. And then they got reelected. Tell me about that theory of winning over swing voters.

So it starts, there's a book, which I preview, we'll recommend later, by a political scientist named Samuel Popkin. And it's called The Reasoning Voter. And his argument is essentially, you know, a lot of people in politics and political science and pollsters talk about low information voters, but he argues for low information rationality, which is to say people who don't want to think about politics much, the way that I don't think about Olympic sports when it's not the every four year Olympics very much, those voters are

They often do vote. They don't have a ton of information, but they connect the dots based on the information that they do have. They have ideas in their mind about what the government does and what it doesn't do, and they don't get mad at politicians for things that they don't think are affected by those politicians. But things that they do identify as the work of government, as the domain of public policy, they do look at what they see and then hold politicians accountable for it.

So Governors and Roads is a great example. And it was the case for a while that people felt like abortion probably was not going to be determined by presidents. It just didn't seem real. But then Dobbs happened. And for 451 days in Wisconsin, after the Dobbs decision came down, every abortion provider in Wisconsin stopped providing abortion care because of a 19th century law.

voters experienced in their own lives, in the lives of people that they knew, crises usually happening in private where people got pregnant, they needed emergency care. In some cases, they had ectopic pregnancies. There were doctors who were terrified of providing that care because they thought they might be sent to jail. Those stories spread. Going back to the quote that you just read me,

The question of whether women or politicians make decisions about abortion, whether it's the person who gets pregnant or the politician who passes law, that is clearly in the domain of politics now.

One of the arguments that is in this book and in political science broadly is that people make inferential shortcuts from the things that they can see, the information that they have close to hand, and what people's positions are likely to be. The more a campaign puts a highly charged issue front and center, the more voters distinguish between the different candidates and what their positions are.

But now we have a very handy, easy shortcut on who is going to defend your reproductive freedom and who isn't. Trump has been trying to take abortion off the table. Chris Lecevita did that with Ron Johnson as well. They tried to dodge the issue completely. But it's clearly there. J.D. Vance makes clear it's there. Project 2025 makes clear it's there. And Kamala Harris makes clear that it's there. And this is the most important.

potent issue in American politics right now. Not the first issue people name, but the issue that moves swing voters and even some Republicans to vote for Democrats and the issue that gets people off the couch and into the ballot box. And it is now unignorable in 2024.

I'm glad you went there with it, because the question I was going to ask you is, what is the equivalent of roads for federal politicians? So abortion is one. I actually think that's a very sharp point, that it has moved out of this realm of things you don't really think the president is going to do anything about either way to things that you do. Are there other things like that for you? Roads and Roe are two pretty big ones. So I'm glad that we're noting those.

There's another kind of broader one, which is, are you on the side of the people or special interests? And Kamala Harris, as a prosecutor, she went after the big banks. She got $18 billion for consumers in California. She embodies this sense of protecting and standing up to bullies and to kind of predatory wrongdoers like Donald Trump.

Her life of public service as a prosecutor, as attorney general, as a senator, I worked with her very closely in the fight against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act when she was in the US Senate and I was at move on in my previous job.

And she's very credible as a messenger of someone who will take on special interests and corporate criminals on behalf of the people. And Trump is pretty obviously a guy who loves being friends with billionaires. He had that meeting with oil company executives and told them that he'd give them whatever they wanted if they funneled a billion dollars to his campaign.

And so there's a set of things that all touch on the same kind of emotional core of whether you're for the wealthy or whether you're for the people, whether you're for big, powerful special interests who are gouging regular folks or whether you're someone who will stand up for regular folks. And Kamala is a very strong messenger on that. There's also another thing that is more complicated in terms of how it plays out, which is this idea of democracy. And

The weird thing about it is that for people that are highly motivated, high information voters, democracy is often the most important thing. The sacred idea that the people should decide rather than politicians overturning election results that they don't like.

The reason why it's a little complicated is that if you're a cynical voter, you might already think the system's rigged. You might already think that your vote isn't powerful. The idea that you're going to vote for someone because they'll save democracy if you think democracy is already broken is not super credible. And yet it is a really potent and really important and really powerful issue because it's a

It motivates people that do the work and become messengers. It's the people who think that it's worthwhile to go out and knock on doors. Those people believing to their core that democracy is under threat, which it manifestly is from Donald Trump, that is a powerful motivator and motivator.

For a slice of high-information Republican voters, it's actually a deal-breaker for Trump. There's a slice of people who voted for Trump twice who are going to vote for Kamala Harris this fall because of January 6th and because of Trump's continued insistence that the last election was stolen, the next one will be stolen, he won't accept election results. There's a meaningful number of those voters. And Wisconsin went for Trump by 22,748 votes in 2016. It went for Biden by 20,682 votes.

This is a small margin state. Those voters, the voters who believe to their core about democracy, even if they disagree with Democrats about a lot of other things, those voters can tip the election as well.

Thank you.

You said that Wisconsin is a small margin state, and it has been in recent presidential elections. But Tammy Baldwin, Senator Baldwin, is on the ballot this year. She is leading her Republican opponent in the latest Marquette poll by five points. In 2018, she won by 11 points. And in 2018, she won by 12 points.

Wisconsin is unusual in this. It is still a state that is sending a Republican and a Democrat to the Senate. But unlike Johnson, I mean, Baldwin has been winning by pretty big numbers. I don't think she's seen in general as an easily beatable figure. So what is behind her success? What lessons are there in it?

Tammy Baldwin is a dynamite senator. She's a dynamite campaigner. I feel very lucky. I got to know her when I was in high school and she was a state representative and I volunteered on her first congressional campaign when I was a senior in high school. In the primary, she won thanks in part to the strength of a huge turnout at the University of Wisconsin campus. The newspaper headline the next day was Youthquake.

And she went to Congress. She did a great job there. When she ran for Senate, a lot of people were having this conversation. Can Tammy Baldwin become the first out lesbian woman elected to the United States Senate? Could she win a state like Wisconsin? She was up against Tommy Thompson, who was the legendarily four times elected Republican governor of the state, who then went to Washington, D.C. to work for George W. Bush.

And she housed him. She won in a big victory in 2012 and then was number one target by the Republicans going into 2018. And then she won in an 11-point landslide.

There are some key lessons to be drawn there. First of all, she does communicate all over the state and she travels all over the state and she connects with voters in rural areas, in small towns, in suburbs, in cities. She listens to people. They can tell that she likes them. She has this record. And if you listen to her stump speech, there's a lot about how she stands up to the big drug companies. She stood up to the insurance companies. She wrote the law that allows people to get on their parents' health insurance till age 26.

Her current opponent is a guy named Eric Hovde. Eric Hovde is a mega, mega millionaire, hundreds of millions of dollars, who runs a bank in California. He grew up in Wisconsin and then left, came back to run for Senate and lost to Tommy Thompson in the primary in 2012, and then left again, and then has come back to run for Senate again. And he said all these different things that convey that he doesn't actually like Wisconsinites. He has a little bit of that J.D. Vance problem of contempt for a lot of people.

And Tammy Baldwin is able to show people that she's on their side and that she's effective. And she's showing that her opponent is not on the side of regular folks. I think there's a lot to learn from that. And there's a lot to learn from the way that she derives a crystal clear message that is rooted in her story and that connects with the lives of voters all over Wisconsin.

And in some ways, the most powerful thing in politics is the messenger. Having a messenger who instantly makes clear that you're for real, that you can deliver on what you're saying, that this is what the election is about. I want to pick up on that issue of enthusiasm, going back to the early Tammy Baldwin races.

As long as I've been in politics, there's been this idea that Democrats benefit from high turnout, high enthusiasm elections, and Republicans benefit from lower turnout. And that reflected compositional differences in the parties, that Democrats were stronger among young people, stronger among Black and Hispanic voters, stronger among voters who don't turn out that often.

But the belief was that if this was a high turnout election in 2024, given the surprising strength that Trump seemed to be showing among more marginal voters, younger voters, Black voters, that that would be good for him. Now, all of a sudden, there's this huge, what at least feels like, I mean, we don't know the polling really yet, but huge shift in sentiment around Harris, right? And particularly around these very same voters. And so I guess I'm curious from your perspective, right?

If you feel the race has changed around this question of turnout and enthusiasm, if this is just all across the board, a really high energy, high turnout clash, has that shifted in the Democrats' favor? Is that something Democrats should now want? There's a lot of theories around this. There's a lot of different ways you can slice the data. Mike Podhorzer runs a sub-stack called Weekend Reading, where he maps out, in 2016, the

A lot of people voted. 2020, a lot more people voted. Biden won the people who had voted in 2016 by two points. He won the people who had not voted in 2016 but did in 2020 by 12 points. This is new voters who turned out to defeat MAGA. And a lot of those voters voted in 2018 and in the battleground states specifically, not so much in California and New York.

Those voters turned out in 2022 and helped to reelect Governor Evers and Whitmer and Shapiro and dealt this huge blow to MAGA politicians who'd wanted to create the conditions for success in the 2024 coup that they had failed to execute in 2020. And that anti-MAGA coalition, I think, now has a very clear reason to show up.

A lot of what we saw in the polls was a striking absence, especially of young voters. And this is, you know, as a lot of people have discussed, this is also true of Black and Latino voters, which I want to emphasize, a lot of Black and Latino voters are young voters. So all these things layer on top of each other.

And a lot of those folks just were not opting in to voting. The level of voter interest and enthusiasm had waned. The people who were left, the people who said that they might vote, a lot of those were more MAGA folks who were ready potentially to vote for Trump. Going back to something you were saying earlier, if you look at the polling just recently in Wisconsin, there was a public poll by YouGov that found that Tammy Baldwin had 50% support. Eric Hovde, her Republican opponent, had 43% support.

Trump had 43% support. Biden in that poll was at 38%. So it's not that Tammy was defeating her Republican opponent because her Republican opponent was less popular than Trump. Trump and Eric Hovde had exactly the same level of support in Wisconsin. It's that there were a whole bunch of people who were not sure if they would vote in the presidential election, and they were sure that they would support Tammy if they did vote.

And I think that changes now. So much of what was happening was people who felt frustrated that they were seeing a rematch of a choice that they'd had to make before. They're fed up with things, they want to change, and they didn't feel like they had a way to express that through their votes, and now they do.

That I think is part of the shift for a lot of those voters. I also want to say for Democrats, we've had weeks where Democrats, every time they gathered, they were talking about what should happen, what was going to happen at the top of the ticket. And now they can direct their attention to making the case for our nominee and against the Republican nominee. And that kind of clarity, it's kind of liberating. It allows people to focus on doing the things that will actually affect the election result. It's the best cure for political anxiety is taking action. So there's a ton of

One thing that feels...

constant around me is people who say to me, you know, I know my vote doesn't matter, right? Like where they are, the Democrat is going to win. But I know people live in red states who care a lot about this election. And to them, where they are, their vote isn't going to matter because Donald Trump is going to win. What is going to matter? And it almost seems like this amazing privilege is living in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Arizona, maybe, or maybe in Georgia, you know, maybe in North Carolina. Whatever side of this you're on,

If you are in a state where the person you support is going to win it overwhelmingly and you want to be useful, you want to be involved in the places where the election matters, where the election might tip by, as it has in Wisconsin, 20,000-ish votes. What is useful? As somebody who I'm sure gets a lot of this question incoming, what is valuable for you beyond just money from people who don't live in your state?

I have a list of five things that people who live outside of a battleground state should do. They are: 1. Donate 2. Recruit other people to donate 3. Volunteer 4. Recruit other people to volunteer 5. Move to a swing state And I say this in all seriousness, especially the first four,

Money does matter. And you can see that in some of the races that we've talked about here. There's a certain point at which it stops mattering. But my general philosophy is we should use better messages to out-communicate the other side in every time period and every medium all the way through. And posting wasn't on your list, just being on X or Threads or TikTok all the time? That wasn't one of the five? No.

I will say that it actually doesn't hurt to post. It used to be that there was a kind of stigma that Republican voters talked about for announcing that you supported Trump. More recently, it's felt a little weird for some people to say loud and proud that they supported Joe Biden. And for Trump world, there's just this level of enthusiasm where people have started to overestimate Republican support. So I think that does help. But one thing I will strongly say,

is that if you amplify the other side's messages when you're trying to respond to them, that is counterproductive. There's now a lot of research about how lies spread.

And if you repeat the lie before you debunk it, people remember the lie more strongly. But I do think that posting is helpful. It's not the case that arguing with Republicans on X is going to win this election. But reaching out to people who are not thinking about politics much, who you know in your life, who are in your timeline, that can help. And that adds up. I mean, this might be a blowout election. I want it to be a blowout election. It might be another razor thin election. And just in case it is, don't

act like this is a spectator sport for the next 100, 200, three days. Put yourself in the game and get involved so that the day after the election, you wake up either feeling like you were part of the victory or knowing that you did everything you possibly could. Then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first book is one that I mentioned that I cannot recommend strongly enough, The Reasoning Voter. And I think what's so helpful about it is that

It is so cheap and easy and cynical to think that nothing matters, to think that voters go off vibes in a way that is meaningless. In fact, people do think about this stuff, but a lot of them don't pay attention much to politics. And the reasoning voter goes through a huge amount of evidence and data and kind of a theoretical way to think about people who don't think about politics much, which no listeners to this podcast are members of that club. No one who reads The Reasoning Voter is a member of that club. But it helps to put your mind into the place of someone who's

who is picking up little bits here and there and then earnestly trying to figure out who's on their side and who will make their lives better. So The Reasoning Voter by Samuel Popkin.

The second book that I recommend is a Wisconsin book that when I read it, it made me want to pump my fist in the air. It's a book called Finding Freedom, The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Freedom Seeker. It's by Ruby West Jackson and Walter McDonald. Ruby West Jackson is an amazing Wisconsin original woman, an African-American woman from Beloit who became a kind of historian of slavery and of the Underground Railroad and of African-American history in Wisconsin.

And it tells the story of a man who escaped slavery in Missouri, came to Wisconsin on the Underground Railroad, and then was tracked down. They put him in detention in Milwaukee. And then an uprising, a kind of a riot broke out, broke him out of jail, helped him get on a boat and escape to Canada. The people involved in that protest were

were tried and their case went to the state Supreme court in Wisconsin, which unanimously decided before any other court had ever reached this conclusion that the fugitive slave act was unconstitutional. It helped lead to the civil war and the secession of the Southern states. And it's a story about people organizing, fighting for justice. It has these speeches by black abolitionists in Racine that will make you just jump out of your seat and want to run through a wall in the, in the fight for a better world. And it is rooted in the state that I love. So that's my second book.

The third book is a book that led to a movie that is a key part of my life. I grew up watching The Princess Bride over and over. I memorized the movie. I quoted it in my toast at my sister's wedding, the part about mawage. The high point of my time as a Democratic state party chair in terms of fun was an original cast reading of The Princess Bride script as a fundraiser during the pandemic.

I now watch The Princess Bride regularly with my kids, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I read the book. The Princess Bride is by William Goldman. It is hilarious. It's a kind of a book that pretends to be an abridged version of a different book. It started with William Goldman telling stories to his own daughters when they were kids.

And in a moment when there's so many things that make your head spin, it is, I think, an important part of finding joy to go back to that theme in this conversation, to read things that just make you laugh and make you glad that we live in the world that we live in. We're so lucky to be alive in this moment when we have the power to change the future, where we have the power to vote for our highest aspirations. And it's a world that has freedom. It's a world where we can laugh.

Ben Booker, thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me on, Ezra.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair, mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Iskwith, Christian Lin, and Amin Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simulowski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.