Does It Matter if Ben Wikler is DNC Chair?

Nationally, the Democratic Party is in disaster denial mode. Soon-to-be-outgoing Vice President Harris lost millions of votes that soon-to-be-outgoing President Biden won in 2020: 6.8 million, roughly, with notably low support from black voters, Latinx voters, and young people. The Democrats lost the U.S. Senate and did not take back the House. President Trump won the popular vote, albeit by only a percentage point, taking away Dems’ regular excuse that the Electoral College is mean and bad.

This is a disaster: setting aside the clear possibility that a better candidate or a more competent campaign would have won, there is little stopping the Republican Party from destroying the last vestiges of social democracy and wholly remaking our federal government in Grover Norquist’s image. In a more functional democracy, Democratic leadership would face mass calls for change, and would maybe even remove themselves out of sheer embarrassment. 

Instead, we have Nancy Pelosi saying the Party is fine, Amy Klobuchar cornily proclaiming that it “defied gravity” in 2024, and senior advisors to the campaign doing sweaty apologia on Pod Save America. There’s no real mechanism to remove any of these people from power, either: Pelosi and Klobuchar are in incredibly safe seats and their leadership positions are internally elected. 

It’s not clear what level of personal and professional failure gets these people’s phone numbers deleted from politicians’ phones. There’s a shocking amount of overlap between Obama Administration apparatchiks and advisors for Harris’ second failed bid for the Presidency –maybe because there’s still an air of positive nostalgia around Obama, maybe, that lends these people credibility. 

One obvious area of possible change, though, is the chair of the Democratic National Committee, a position soon to be vacated by the seemingly disgruntled Jaime Harrison. Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler is one of several self-nominated candidates, along with former presidential candidate and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Wikler’s Minnesota equivalent Ken Martin, and New York state senator James Skoufis. Also, as of December 17, some guy called “Nate Snyder” who probably isn’t the director of Batman vs. Superman, we’re pretty sure?

Wikler is already being touted by some as the most progressive and competent option, someone who successfully halted the 2024 red wave in Wisconsin (kind of, Trump still won the state, and the Democrats didn’t actually win a majority in the state’s Assembly). 

This raises more, less obvious questions: does it even matter who becomes the next DNC chair? And should progressives spend time and energy pushing for Wikler?

We aren’t promising definitive answers to these questions in what we promise will be a short article. It might not even be possible to answer them, right now: for example, can we say how much Wikler is responsible for the recent results in Wisconsin, at all? Has he truly set up the party for future success –or is he just rephrasing the moderate tendency to pander to white, rural voters while taking the party’s progressive, urban base for granted?

Let’s be clear about what we mean when we say “setting the Wisconsin Democratic Party up for future success.” As Democratic Party chair, Wikler has seemingly broad executive authority over the state party: but this could mean a lot of different things, in practice. Did Wikler work to counter the despicable anti-trans, anti-immigrant hate speech at the core of Republicans’ messaging? Are we actually set to flip the legislature in 2026 –and if not, shouldn’t that be Wikler’s clear, primary focus? The underlying premise of his national chair campaign is that Dems did something meaningfully different and better in Wisconsin, at least in comparison to other swing states. But the swing in the state assembly could be almost entirely a result of our new, better but not actually fair electoral maps. And, again, Trump still won the state, albeit narrowly! 

Show your work, Chair Wikler: what did you actually do, what structure is in place to create a lasting state legislative majority in 2026, and how does that look substantively different from party and campaign structures in other swing states that VP Harris fumbled even worse? Most of the volunteers who turned out in October are back home twiddling their thumbs while the alt right media blob continues its permanent, reactionary campaign –what is the state party doing to permanently fight that? 

Let’s assume, for now, that Wikler deserves credit for recent power built by Wisconsin’s Democratic Party. He’s being treated as competent and progressive by seemingly smart politics knowers, so fair enough. At the national party level, what is it that Wikler actually hopes to change –what could he do, as national DNC chair, to build the “permanent” campaign he insists already exists in Wisconsin? 

This isn’t a scarcity question, at least when it comes to campaign resources. Democrats raised plenty of money and recruited plenty of volunteers in 2024 –but they spent those resources on a candidate that campaigned with Dick Cheney and his daughter, squandered the enormous hope and goodwill built up at Vice President Harris’ campaign launch, and now are circling the wagons around existing, failed leadership. Would DNC chair Wikler even be able to prevent this from happening again, if he wanted to? 

We need a meaningful change in party leadership, not just a different guy to facilitate the national party. You can claim there’s already meaningful separation between elected leadership and the consultant blob that unsuccessfully ran Harris’ campaign –but at this point, the onus is on anyone making that claim. And it’s not clear that a new DNC chair could create that separation –or even publicly criticize the perennial losers in his party– when the current one is unable, despite clear indications that he very much wants to.

In any case, the Democratic National Committee’s chair often makes news for interfering with the democratic process of picking candidates for President –that’s not the position’s only function, of course, but it’s certainly when chairs demonstrate the leverage and power they have, most clearly. In general, it’s likely the next DNC chair will be just another loud voice in the blob of consultants, elected officials, non-government organization EDs, fundraisers, etc who constitute the in effect leadership of the national Democratic Party. Can we trust Wikler even to speak up in those spaces, for us? For workers? For trans kids? 

So long as progressives and anticapitalists lack a clear understanding of these structures, we’re doomed to react to media narratives, to push for the seemingly most progressive option in a potentially meaningless election. Watch this CBS video on recent changes to DNC chair election rules, if you get a chance –is there a single mention of what the national DNC chair actually does? Our attention is naturally drawn to elections because they’re the last vestiges of democracy –but it’s entirely possible that most of the power and decision making authority will still rest with the people who lost the election, even if Wikler or another “progressive” is our next national DNC chair. If we’re going to sink another cost into yet another ideological proxy fight, let’s be clear about what we can possibly win.