Ben Wickler
Appearances
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So the night of the election, I felt like a punch in the gut because I had felt the energy all over Wisconsin. I thought we were going to win in Wisconsin, which was my obsession. And then we lost. And I remember that night feeling like maybe none of this has had any impact. Maybe this is all for nothing. And then the next day, I got up and started digging through the numbers.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And what I saw was that while Democratic turnout had gone down in most states, including all our neighboring states like Minnesota, over the course of the election, it went up in Wisconsin. We actually had the highest turnout in the country. And because of that, Tammy Baldwin won reelection, we flipped 14 state legislative seats,
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
you know trump republican turnout went up even more and that's why that's why we lost but the work had made a giant difference and wisconsin actually was to the left of the national popular vote for the first time in a long time and i that led me to start thinking like what if we could do this everywhere like how big the stakes are for people
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
For working people across race and ethnicity all over the country who are about to get punched in the face by this administration, if we can build the kind of strength of a party that we built in Wisconsin across the country, then we can both contain the damage and also make this the beginning of something much better where we actually make this country work for everyone.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that sense of the impact that it can have is why I'm running for DNC chair.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So my godmother is a woman named Ida Deer. And when I was 11, she ran for Congress and became the first Native American woman to win a congressional primary. So that was, volunteering on her race was my first experience in politics, like stuffing envelopes and putting up yard signs. And she had led the fight to restore her tribe's recognition by the federal government.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It was terminated in the 50s and had passed a federal law to restore recognition and just was this kind of force of nature, incredible person.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So learning from her and from my parents, who are both, like, literally believe deeply in change, and then getting involved first as an organizer in, like, to fight for public school funding in Wisconsin and volunteering for Tammy Baldwin when I was in high school when she first ran for Congress.
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Biden’s Final Warning
an interning for Russ Feingold, seeing these people who were heroes to me, who got involved and actually won fights, it made me more idealistic the more I got involved as opposed to less, which is often how it happens in politics for people. And I got hooked. So I've always had three big things. One is actual electoral politics. The second is new media.
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Biden’s Final Warning
So I wrote for The Onion when I was in high school and college, which started in Madison where I grew up. And I worked at Air America Radio after college trying to build a, this might sound familiar, a progressive media ecosystem to combat the dominance of the right and shaping political narratives.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And then the other is advocacy, which is what I was doing at MoveOn, which is both trying to win elections, but also actually fighting on the issues that affect people's lives. And what led me to run for chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and to move home to Wisconsin in 2018, I always wanted to raise my kid there, but it was the experience at MoveOn of Trump coming in
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And winning Wisconsin in 2016 in my state that had been rigged by the GOP for total control after Scott Walker came in with voter suppression, with gerrymandered rigged legislative maps, with union busting as a centerpiece of their strategy to shut down the voices of working people. The
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Seeing how that then played out in putting Trump in the White House and shredding the public education system in my state that I had grown up fighting for, I wanted to move home and try to change the direction of all that. And I... The only way to protect the fundamental things people rely on, like being able to get to a doctor when they get sick, is to win power in states across the country.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
That's where political power actually resides. And that's what led me to run for chair in my state, because all of these fights are interconnected, and we need a party strong enough to fight at all these levels. So I used to come on your show right when you launched as we were fighting back against ACA repeal.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And the whole thing was like mobilizing people in their congressional districts and pushing U.S. senators and telling their stories and getting into the press and all this stuff. It's state by state by state.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And I want to I want to build I'm running now for DNC chair because I want a national party that can build that kind of strength, both to limit the damage and also to build the trust from from folks who want to see someone fighting for them to build a party that earns that trust and helps elect Democrats at every level.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So this is the first election of my lifetime in the last half century where Republican vote share went up in every state and D.C. The whole country moved a little bit towards the Republicans. That involved a combination of more people voting who hadn't voted before and voting for Trump.
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Biden’s Final Warning
There were people who crossed over in both directions, but there were more people who switched over to vote for Trump. And there were people who stayed home, who otherwise probably would have voted for Democrats. And there's a lot of different pieces of why that is, and we need a lot more data to get the full story. But one thing that jumps out really clearly
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
is that the people who were hit hardest by prices going up and, and no one talks about this, by the pandemic era support falling away because Republicans shut down things like the childcare tax credit the Democrats were fighting for, those programs really made a difference in the lives of the middle class and of the poor, of working families across this country.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
like incomes went up for a while, child poverty was cut in half and then the support went away. And so people, you know, if you're getting a thousand dollars a month because you have two kids and you make $40,000 a year, that's a huge, huge deal for your family. And when that goes away, the
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
suddenly the floor is falling out at the same time as the price of keeping a roof over your head and filling your prescriptions and getting the food you need is going up. So that's why the economy sucked for a ton of people because they had, they had helped that disappeared and the cost of getting through the day rose.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And those voters who had a lot of other things on their mind were the least likely to pay attention to political news. They were least likely to be, you know, tuning into this show or to, or to the MSNBCs of the world or reading a newspaper and, And they didn't – they felt like things were getting worse when a certain party was in charge and they didn't show up to keep that party in power.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
We saw the same thing happening everywhere in the world. The incumbent parties lost ground for the first time in more than a century in every wealthy democracy on planet Earth. Right. In the United States, it's particularly infuriating because Democrats actually were fighting for the exact things that folks needed, and Republicans stopped them. They blocked them and took them away.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
If we'd had a couple more Democratic votes in the Senate, we could have provided long-term support for folks. And what is really clear to me is that we were not communicating to people to talk the talk, to show up and show that we're fighting for working people in their lives in places and ways that they actually heard and saw and felt.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that is an indictment on us for how we communicate and also shows the power of the right wing community. you know, propaganda and organizing machine that they've been able to dominate this conversation and tell people your life sucks because of some, some them that Democrats are on the side of against you.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And it's, it is both, you know, Republicans trying to divide people based on their identities, but it's also a message about saying Democrats don't actually care about you, whoever you might be. And the way we beat that is not by abandoning parts of our coalition.
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Biden’s Final Warning
by people that deserve the same freedom and respect everyone gets, the way we defeat that is by showing that we are fighting for people and Republicans are the ones trying to rip them off and divide and distract them in order to pick their pockets.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Unless you argue that that's actually part of what Trump is doing. And he was trying to reverse that and tell a story where Democrats are the party of the rich. That's true.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So it's everything, but I will put one particular circle around something, which is you have to actually have a fight. That means there have to be two sides of the fight, that attention follows conflict. To me, 2018 was an election about healthcare and about Republicans trying to rip away people's healthcare in order to give tax cuts to the ultra-rich and big insurance companies.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that was the voices in the forefront of that fight were people whose healthcare was gonna be ripped away by what Republicans were doing. It was electrifying.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And we organized across the country as it move on, we helped to organize 23,000 protests with grassroots groups, with people with disabilities in the front of that fight whose lives were on the line, who put their bodies on the line in that fight. And Democrats made absolutely clear that there were four people being able to get healthcare when they needed it, and Republicans were against.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Republicans started trying to copy our message. People could see who was fighting for them and who was trying to screw them over, and we won. And in 2006, same thing, Social Security privatization. Republicans had this big plan that they were going to move Social Security into the stock market right before the financial crisis. Great idea, Republicans.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And Democrats said absolutely not and went to bat. And the voices of people who were going to be directly affected were front and center of the race in the battle. And that was a huge part of how we won in 2006. Also, the fight against Republican corruption, which was endemic.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And we know there will be fights like that at this moment, but there actually has to be a big battle for people to be able to see it, especially to reach outside of the bubble. Just having a bill that has a bunch of great provisions that you talk about, it doesn't do it because Republicans never publicly message that they're against good ideas that Democrats have.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
They kill our good proposals in private, and then they duke it out on the cultural fights that they want to bring attention to in the most public way possible. And then, by the way, you know, They don't believe half the stuff that they're saying. They know it's all BS. But the attacks that Republicans do are centrally to try to provoke fights that bring attention to their issues.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And we need to fight on our issues to fight, for example, not just to protect Social Security but to expand Social Security and to – to tax a higher income so we can expand the support that everybody gets in ways that put Republicans on defense. If we can do that kind of fight, it takes building a war room. It takes, it takes communicating clearly.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
I think using the language people use in their real life is really critical, but this is, this is work that we've been doing year over year in Wisconsin. It takes on the ground organizing. We have the biggest on the ground organizing team. It takes communicating across a ton of different platforms. And it means going on offense on fights that actually basically,
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
people have an emotional, intense response to that they actually care about. And then they get involved in those fights as well. Because if we can message all we want, but if people aren't talking about it in their, you know, in Baron's chat in World of Warcraft, then we're probably not actually having the kind of fight that draws the country's attention and changes the conversation.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So the biggest thing is to go to places where people are talking about other stuff and talk about other stuff as well as about politics. And that means – it doesn't mean video games. It means home makeovers. Gigantic audience. People think about that all the time who are lucky enough to have homes that they can make over. Cooking. Parenting.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
sports, beauty, fashion, like the whole world of culture, the world that people actually inhabit when they're not thinking about how they're going to vote, the conversations that happen in those places are the things that are sort of, you know, cultures upstream from politics. The places where those nonpolitical conversations take place shape the landscape in which political dramas play out.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And this is something that I think Trump has a particular talent and knack for, but also people like Roger Ailes and a lot of other Republicans. They think about how to push narratives that affect the broader culture. And as Democrats, I think we need an intentional cultural strategy. And some of that can happen and should happen at the party. Some of that should happen outside the party.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
But as a Democratic Party, we should be working to help get folks – to get Democratic candidates and elected officials and communicators and storytellers into places that shape the broader conversation across the country. That means having dinners where people can meet each other. Influencers can meet elected officials and learn about the things that they're working on.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
A lot of this stuff is a total black box to people that are outside of politics. And you actually have to demystify it and put a human face on things and build relationships so people make a phone call to see if something's true before they go out and say it. And that's work that has to happen before elections so you don't get to the final 107 days and have culture already swung away from you.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
That work should start right now. And the DNC chair's election is February 1st. So I will be on day one. It's a very public commitment. We'll start an audit of every consulting contract that the Democratic Party has, and we will actually choose where to spend our money based on our values and the path to victory, not relationships or old political debts that someone incurred a long time ago.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
But the other thing that we'll start doing is building a battle plan in each state and a strategy around attention and communication that shifts where these conversations are taking place. It's just, we don't live in In the 90s or the 2000s or the 2010s, like this is now attention is fragmented into a million different places.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Half the electorate doesn't watch TV and we need to look to where attention is going and then actually build relationships that are based on common values and shared interests and make sure that Democrats are talking about why their values as a –
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
as a hunter and sports person, lead them to want to make sure that we don't destroy the natural resources across the state of Wisconsin, to take one close to home example, across all the different dimensions, because people care about a million things, but they have a common set of values that are fundamentally about the idea that everyone should have freedom and dignity and respect and be able to afford the basic things that everyone needs in life.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
That's universal stuff that touches just about everything that people do.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Well, we know that... We are losing ground with folks across race and ethnicity and across geography, across the country. And so we should be working with ad makers, with communicators, with pollsters and researchers that reflect the full diversity of our coalition that understand the communities that they're trying to work in.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
We know that there's a huge generational problem and that if Democrats – we did better with older voters and worse with younger voters, and we need to make sure we're working with younger folks and new voices and people who have familiarity across different new platforms. I also want to make sure we're actually looking at results and how we measure those results and what those results are.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
There's not a lot of budget transparency within the DNC right now. a commitment that I've made on my platform at Ben Wickler.com slash platform is that we will both upgrade that transparency and bring DNC members in to build a, like, you know, a policy around how we build those consultancies and contracts.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And then to be able to raise money when there's not a democratic president, this is, and a lot of people are skeptical. A lot of money was spent in the last election. We didn't win it. This is not horseshoes. It doesn't count if you get close. If we want to be able to earn people's trust, like they're not ATMs. People are going to invest when they know that money is going to be spent well.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And so I want to basically be spending money at the DNC we'll have to raise and spend a lot in a way that we're very clearly doing all of that coming from our values and our path to victory. And that's a battle plan in each state across all the different kinds of fights that we need to fight. That's understanding how different races at different levels are interconnected.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Wisconsin has a state Supreme Court election April 1st. If Republicans win that, they re-gerrymander the state. If they re-gerrymander the state, they could rig our electoral system for the long term. Like North Carolina, we're in a fight to retain an election against a rogue Supreme Court because Republicans took it over in 2022. There's so many of these fights that are all part of this fight.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
vast maze about how you win the power to make change in people's lives. And we need to be working from a battle plan, not just cutting checks to states to say, good luck, here you go, but actually funding program that leads to winning so that we can make a change in people's lives, which is the entire point of this work. And that's the set of principles that I want to use to inform how we spend.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Politics, people have relationships, and I'm and I honor that, but it's not about who knows who. It should not be about who knows who and who owes someone a favor or who scratched someone's back.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
It should be about how we actually build a party strong enough to fight for the things that people need across this country that are going to be attacked by the Trump administration, how we communicate, how we show up, how we organize year-round on the ground everywhere in the country, as we've done in Wisconsin. as we need to do across the nation. That is the point of this work.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And if we do it right, then we could win enormous amounts of elections and really make change over the next four years and beyond.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Well, I want to honor that when there's a Democratic presidency, some decisions aren't made by the DNC chair. A lot of decisions come out of folks at the White House. And I think... I think President Biden has done, has passed a lot of really critical legislation. I also think that the DNC has not engaged in this kind of fight up and down the ballot in the way that we have the opportunity to do.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And I also think that the work to build the kind of communications strategy to do the nonpolitical work, the building up progressive media ecosystem and training and deploying communicators on conservative media, there's a lot of work to do there as well. And you can see that in in what happened in the election.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And you can also see that in the way that if you talk to folks across the country, there's a ton of races where as a national party, we haven't leaned into the fight. And that's the thing I think we have the opportunity to change. I have great respect for Chair Harrison. And I think there's a...
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
There's a lot of battles that simply have not been a core priority for the Democratic National Committee that we're going to be living with the consequences of that for a long time to come. And this is no shade on the people on the ground or the people who worked in the building.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
This is about having a strategy to be able to fight and win at all the different levels of the ballot, recognizing they're interconnected.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that the DNC is a part of an ecosystem with unions and the labor movement, with grassroots partners and allies, that we need to build a plan together to be able to fight and win in a way that's happened more on the governing side than has happened in the political and communication and organizing and campaign side.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So the core of that question is, do you think that the Democratic Party's agenda should be controlled by corporate PACs and lobbyists? And my answer to that is absolutely not. We should be fighting for working folks, and we should be fighting to win at every level of the ballot. I also know that if you look across the country,
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
the core thing that we need to do is fight in a way that brings friends to our side, and that will lead to various companies, I'm sure, investing in supporting Republicans, as they're doing right now in a big way, and that there are states, there are different fights, there are places where the right has gone so far that the only way that
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
The business community winds up siding with moderates and Democrats against far-right Republicans. So I actually think that the way corporate money affects our politics is less affected by the DNC's ban or not ban. It's affected by the kinds of fights that we lead and the way that we fight back against people trying to rig the country.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Being in Wisconsin where Republicans rigged our campaign finance law to – officially to shut out corporate money but it's actually to shut out union money and then raise money from billionaire owners of giant corporations to fund their campaigns through dark money and on the independent side.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
I think that a DNC ban is actually not an effective tool to winning the kinds of fights we need to win to be able to change our campaign finance laws nationally. Yeah.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So it's one part not wanting to unilaterally disarm, but the amount of money that corporations give to the Democratic Party is actually not meaningful. And you could accept zero and it wouldn't change the total amount. The big picture is actually lots of the state-level races across the country and local races across the country where –
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
If you go down to state legislative races in red states, a lot of times it's only the business community members that think that the attacks on different communities are totally unacceptable and finally move to defense that actually are the only way that Democrats have to be able to do this work. So the DNC's policy, it's symbolic.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And I think when Democrats running for office say, I'm going to take no corporate PAC contributions, that often is a really powerful way to state their values and be able to fight. As an institution, it's something that winds up making it difficult in particular circumstances. I think that the other big picture thing is
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
that we should be very clear about is that Democrats should be fighting against big corporate interests that try to build monopolies and rip people off. and in favor of bringing down costs for people and making our economy sustainable and supporting unions in a way that is crystal clear.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And so, for example, I have said we will not accept any money from a company that's actively engaged in union busting. And being able to return a contribution from a company that is involved in union busting is a way to make a powerful statement in that moment in a way that not having the overall policy makes possible.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
The fundamental thing, I think, in our politics at this moment is what fights we choose. And that goes to my theory of attention. It also goes to my theory of how we rally a coalition that represents our values. And ultimately, you're going to piss people off who will invest on the other side and come at you. And that's fine. You have to be ready to incur those kinds of fights.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
But the fights are actually at the center of this work. Am I right? My campaign slogan is Unite, Fight, Win, which reflects that idea that you unite around big fights that demonstrate your values, that you're for working people across race and ethnicity and in rural areas and suburbs and cities, the big we in this country against the people who are trying to rig the system to rip everybody off.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And if you can do that, you can actually build trust and build a grassroots fundraising infrastructure like we built in Wisconsin that can sustain the work.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So our visions and what we're talking about at Campaign Trail, there's not a huge amount of daylight. I think the big difference is in our record. And I have been working for the last six years in –
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
one of maybe the most hotly contested state in the country where Republicans throw a wall of money every dirty trick they can, a massive owned media infrastructure to propagandize people, just the most blistering and incendiary dark money attacks against our candidates. And it's also a state that's been rigged by the GOP for permanent control. And in order to unrig our state, in order to over time
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
to beat a 60-year curse where Democrats always lose the governor's race when there's a Democratic president.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Governor Evers not only beat that and won re-election, he also expanded his vote share, unlike in all of our neighboring states, in order to defeat the Republican attempt to get super majorities in our state legislature and then flip our state Supreme Court majority and then defeat an impeachment attempt and then finally get fair maps and flip 14 state legislative seats.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Well, in Minnesota, we lost the state legislative seat in this cycle, and now the legislature is in chaos. In order to do all that, we've had to build something that is just bigger and stronger and deeper, both in organizing and communication, powered by more fundraising than we've had in any state party in the country. And... Our size of our staff is sometimes similar to that of the DNC.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
We've had more than 400 staff in the final stretch in both 2020 and 2024, which the DNC in those moments is a lot bigger. But I've been leading organizations that have deep, multilayered departments doing a huge array of work in partnership with unions and our allies and the front lines of the fight. And Minnesota's... Republicans fight there, but it's more of a blue state.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It's the only state that's been blue since the 1970s in the country. And Democrats have won every statewide election there going back to 2006, before my fellow candidate was chair. And it's a different kind of fight that I think in Wisconsin we've built something that is a bigger, a closer model, an approximation of what I think we need to build across the country.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And I appreciate Ken Martin has been leading the State Chairs Association and he's fought within the DNC for state chairs relative to other parts of the DNC, but hasn't made the case to the public for why we need to go and build a party apparatus that has this kind of strength.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And so there hasn't been more public support and fundraising and volunteering and energy for building the idea of what the Democratic Party should be about. And I feel like I've been able to do that even from my one state, in a way that I think we need to do for the national party going forward.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And the last piece on the record is that when I was at MoveOn, I was working in partnership with Democrats in Congress, in the House and the Senate, with allies in grassroots groups all across the country,
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Biden’s Final Warning
On progressive media and going on conservative media and nonpolitical media to change the conversation about a major national crisis where Trump was trying to rip away protections that everyone in this country relied on. And we won. And we're going to have fights like that going forward.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And I think having a DNC chair who has the both experience and track record and just orientation around that kind of giant battle is going to be something that we could benefit from as a national party. And I think I bring that uniquely in this race. That's my contrast is that kind of fight.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
In Wisconsin, we've been skating along the edge of a cliff, and sometimes we've been pushed off that cliff and grabbed a branch as we fell by our hands and pulled ourselves up by our fingernails to avoid becoming permanently rigged, permanently red, even though most people do not want what Republicans are trying to do. And we're facing that exact crisis as a country right now.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
There's a real risk that Trump will smash to pieces things that families and families you know, working people and the poor and people across this country urgently need and rely on, that they did not vote to get smashed, that they voted for change, they voted out of frustration, they voted for all kinds of reasons. But what they didn't do is vote to have the rug pulled out from underneath them.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And they didn't vote to end democracy and to have a country that gets rigged by the people at the very top for their benefit at the expense of everyone else. And when you're in that kind of darkness,
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Tracing the path out of it, being able to see the glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel and knowing that if you do everything you can, everything in your power to take step after step after step, that there's a way out, to me is the essential thing that you have to do. You have to have a North Star to be able to continue that fight. And my...
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
The core of what I want to do at the DNC is, in every state, to draw what that path looks like, to communicate it out to our activists, to our volunteers, to our party members, to the candidates in campaigns, to have a huge shared product of getting out of this darkness and building a country that works for everyone, where we show that democracy can actually deliver on its promise to deliver a country that lifts everybody up.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
We have to see that plan. We have to be able to touch and feel it. And then everyone needs to feel the experience of being part of that fight. This can't be something where we're cheering on some politician somewhere else for giving a great speech. We all need to see ourselves in our own role.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And that collective action, that being part of something bigger than yourself, it is what sustains hope and can even allow moments of joy and relief. And even when you fall just short, if you know that there's gonna be a next step in that chapter, in that story that we build together, that is how you get through.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that's not a set of feelings people associate with the Democratic Party necessarily. But I think that it has to be in this moment. And I'm running for chair. And if you're a DNC member who's listening to this podcast right now, I'm asking for your vote for chair because I think that's what we can build together. And I think the country needs it. And I think the stakes are real.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
But I think that the path... is there even if it can be so dark that it's hard to discern and if we take these steps i think that we can make this the low point in an era that that is looked back on as the birth of a new era of progress in this country
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
Thank you, Rachel. And thanks to Susan Crawford, who never wavered in the face of the richest person in the world coming after her with things that have never been thrown at any judicial candidate anywhere ever and held firm to her belief in integrity and democracy and the rule of law and freedom in what this country is supposed to stand for.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
And voters responded at a level we've never seen in our state. I just want to share a fact that I crunched today. Susan Crawford running for Supreme Court in an April election in Wisconsin. These are normally low turnout races. Most people don't tune into it all. She got more votes than any Republican running for governor of Wisconsin has ever earned this spring.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
Well, Susan Crawford, I think, just delivered a masterclass. Because when Elon Musk started going after her, instead of shrinking back or trying to find some way to convince him to withdraw from the race or tone it down, she went straight after him.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
She started saying on the campaign trail, I never thought growing up as a little girl in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that I'd be up against the richest man in the world. And people would erupt in applause. Her fundraising... on Act Blue. It raised more money every day than it used to cost to run an entire Supreme Court race in the state of Wisconsin. So we were outspent.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
Susan Crawford and the Democratic Party, we were outspent by Elon Musk and the forces of the far right. There were other far right billionaires that got in, too. But we weren't outcommunicated or outorganized. Because literally hundreds of thousands of people wound up chipping in. And thousands of people made phone calls, knocked on doors, got involved, spread the word.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
We've tracked millions and millions of conversations that happened between volunteers and supporters of Susan Crawford and Wisconsin voters. And all of that added up not just to a hairline victory. It was a landslide. This is a state where elections routinely come down to less than one percentage point. Elon Musk came to Wisconsin and he put on a cheese head and he tried to bribe Wisconsin voters.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
And the message of fury that that ignited, the only real response is to say that Wisconsin's not for sale. And you can't just come in to Wisconsin and think that you can take the cheese head and give an affront to our voters. But this same kind of fight is possible everywhere. no matter what you put on your head, people can fight back against the oligarchy.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
There's still enough democracy left that no matter where you are, it is possible to organize, to get together, to support people who actually have conviction and values and believe in something bigger than themselves. Because what Elon Musk doesn't get is that people in politics don't have to just be out for themselves. They don't have to be trying to attempt to loot the federal government.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
Trump doesn't get this either. There's something bigger at the heart of what it means to be an American and what it means to be a patriot in this country that is about a belief in the United States of America.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
And I think in this race, we saw in Wisconsin, in this one purple state, the kind of energy that comes out when people realize that by acting together, they can overcome the richest, most powerful people in the world in service of a country that works for everyone.
The Rachel Maddow Show
Donald Trump fired the man who likely saved his life; U.S. may never fully recover from Trump's cuts
Thank you, Rachel.