Hello and welcome to the Dr. Kristen Lyrely show.
I'm Dr. Kristen Lyrely and oh my gosh, I have Ben Wickler here with me today.
Ben and I go way back.
We have tailgated at a Packer game.
We have stumped for candidates big and small.
We've worked side by side when I ran for Congress back in the day.
And he is, he has a new book and it is so much fun and so exciting.
There it is.
This is the plan.
Welcome, Ben Wickler.
It is so great to be with you here now in this moment as we've been side by side in so many different fights and different adventures.
And with your audience today, this is both a scary moment in this country.
I also, as I write about in the book, I think it's a moment with enormous hope coming up from below.
And I think there's a path from a time that's pretty scary to a time when things are much better for many, many people.
So that's the plan.
That's why I'm excited to be with you today.
This is what you do.
You create hope.
You inspire people.
You get people really excited.
And we're going to get way into that.
But first I wanted to say thank you for going on The Daily Show and warming up for this giant blockbuster.
So yes, you got John Stuart so animated.
He's like moving his arms and the way that he reacted to the story you were telling about Wisconsin from our progressive roots, but also our very conservative roots to what we've been through.
over the past 15 years to where we're headed, Ben, you encapsulate that so beautifully.
Walk us through that briefly if you can.
So, you know, I think what John Stuart was reacting to and what moves me is the recognition that the state of Wisconsin has really, we've had a miniature version of what the whole country is going through right now.
And there are people who disagree deeply in Wisconsin about all kinds of different things in politics, and the pendulum of politics moves from side to side.
But in 2010, in our state, we saw a group of Republicans take power that tried to break democracy so that even when people said, you know what, I don't like this, I want something else, they couldn't do anything about it.
And it almost worked.
They almost snapped the connection between
what the people of Wisconsin want, what they vote for, and who holds power and writes the rules.
So they smashed unions, they gerrymandered our maps, they suppressed the vote, they took over the state Supreme Court, and then they just ruled and ruled against regular folks, against working people, and in favor of far-right billionaires who wrote the rules.
I wrote in the book, they changed the rules around what constitutes a conflict of interest on the Supreme Court, so that even when
you know, far-right billionaires poured huge amounts of money into their campaigns.
They didn't have to recuse themselves from cases, any of that.
And this could have led Wisconsinites to say, you know what, I guess we're not in charge anymore.
I guess we'll just have to take whatever they decide to give us, the crumbs that fall off the table.
I guess we're going to let the streets get riddled with potholes.
We're going to let our schools fall apart.
But instead,
Wisconsinites rolled up our sleeves.
As we are
known to do.
This is a state of people who work really hard in so many parts of their life, and politics is no exception.
And that means that in Wisconsin we saw this resurgence, this movement of people both in the Democratic Party but also Republicans who thought this was totally out of control, independents who don't like either party but think the system should be fair so that everyone has a fair say and a fair shot.
Unions that had been smashed, people still got together in union halls across the state and organized and organized and organized.
And step by step, we've been able to win back.
First, the most important thing, it turned out,
was winning a state Supreme Court majority for people who believed in democracy, but also defeating Scott Walker, electing Governor Evers, fighting for state legislative races, contesting races even when it was tough for congressional seats, which you have poured yourself into, and that voters that you inspired helped flip state legislative seats that have allowed Wisconsin now
to be on the brink of having majorities, a full reversal from the Walker years, a majority in the state assembly and a majority in the state senate.
And the beauty of democracy is that if you have a system that works, then when
people in one party win, they can pass laws, and if people like them, they can reelect them, and if they don't, they can fire them.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
That is totally fine.
That's all we're asking for, and we're doing it in our state.
So my argument, and this is the plan, is that if we can do this in Wisconsin, the state that was so rigged against democracy, then we have a path to being able to do this on a national basis and get out of the mess that we find ourselves in right now.
I want to just take you back to something you said very early on.
This was the blueprint.
What happened in Wisconsin was the blueprint for what's happening across the country right now.
We are the pre-project 2025 playbook.
But we are fixing it and we are actually on the brink of coming out of it because of the work that you've done here in Wisconsin and so many other people have done.
How have you done it?
that work to celebrate the people, the grassroots heroes across our state who've poured themselves into the fight at every level of government.
But what you say is exactly right.
I say that Project 2025 has reheated Project 2011.
What
Scott Walker did when he came into power with his allies, with some of the biggest right-wing donors in the country, was to try to systematically rig the system against regular people.
And now Trump is doing the same thing.
Trump is the biggest union buster in American history.
He went after the union organizing rights
million federal employees.
He has driven this wave of gerrymandering, starting in the Texas House.
Not normally you draw maps every decade.
Trump is trying to redraw the maps everywhere to lock in Republican control.
The U.S.
Supreme Court has smashed the Voting Rights Act.
So now you don't have to think about whether people of different races and ethnicities have representation.
You can just draw the maps however you want to advantage one political party over the other.
Their goal is a system where Elon Musk, the world's richest man, can just buy whatever election he wants.
Now, Elon Musk tried to buy an election in Wisconsin, which folks might remember.
He waltzed into our state.
He poured...
We now know 56 million dollars into the Wisconsin State Supreme Court race and he thought that pesky Wisconsinites would just You know get out of the way Maybe we take his election bribes and go for his guy and give him a guaranteed seat on our state Supreme Court and he thought it was so important that he demonstrate his his Unassailable power that he came to Wisconsin he came to Green Bay he put on a cheesehead you were there protesting this
and He
him
and Brad Schimmel, Wisconsinites, Susan Crawford, our amazing candidate, beat them by 10 percentage points.
It was not even close.
And what that showed me and showed the world is that when people unite and organize and fight for the fundamental principle that our government should work for everyone, not just for a tiny few at the top, it is possible to move mountains
beat big money and make change.
You open the book with that story and I have to tell you of course you know I'm in Green Bay.
I remember it was the it was the Friday before the election which was on Tuesday and Amadra Vera Wagner our state rep here in Green Bay called me and said Kristen Elon Musk is coming to Wisconsin and I know he's coming to Green Bay.
We only have a few hours to organize let's go and we got a
thousand over a thousand wisconsinites to come out in the 33 degree drizzle it was miserable and we lined main street with i had a megaphone we had signs we were chanting people were so passionate i will never forget that
Because it was exactly what you said.
There was Elon puffing his chest out, putting the cheese hat on, handing out these giant publishers clearing house checks.
But it was the people who pushed back at every single individual who showed up from New Holstein to Marinette made a difference that day.
And that is what you inspire in people, Ben.
You know it.
That's your superpower.
And
the story.
It's chapter one.
That's the first chapter of the book.
And the superpower that each of us has, it's not just our vote, it's not just our voice, it's our ability to connect with other people and then take action together.
It's the power to organize.
And it is the thing that topples dictatorships around the world.
People taking action together is the key to this whole thing.
And what I write about in the book is that there's actually
great joy in building community and finding that you have something in common with people and then finding something that you can do together to make a difference.
Once you get involved in that kind of fight, you don't want to stop.
And in fact, as I say in the book, people feel great and they look great when they get involved in organizing for something bigger than themselves.
I fell in love with my wife while we were putting out posters for our protest years and years ago.
And now we have such a happy life together.
And I think that for so many people in this era of loneliness when we're addicted to our screens and the world's biggest companies profit from getting us to
to stare at glowing rectangles instead of looking into the eyes of other human beings, breaking away from that and actually getting involved in organizing sometimes at the hyper-local level, sometimes it's a protest against Elon Musk coming to town, is a way of rebuilding community in a country that deeply needs it.
And as funny as it is to say,
you know, in a partisan political contest where, you know, you're organizing for one party over another, I actually think it reduces partisanship for people to actually talk to people that disagree with them and find out that they have more in common than they could ever have realized.
It's so very true.
And another place where individuals can really make a difference, and you dig into this in the book as well, is these little elections that we think they don't make a difference.
School board who cares, city council, a lot of these positions go
unopposed.
A lot of these elections are decided by a vote or a handful of votes, but this is where it starts, isn't it?
And I want to speak to two ways in which that's true.
So the first is that if you think about the biggest cost in everybody's lives, it's finding a place to live.
The biggest household budget item for most people is their mortgage or their rent.
And we have a housing affordability crisis in this country.
We have, in so many parts of Wisconsin, people can't find a place to live.
People want to live near their grandkids.
They want to live near grandparents to help their kids be able to grow up.
They want to find a starter home.
And the question of whether they can find a place that they can afford is shaped enormously by local offices, by city council offices, by mayors, and by elections that do come down to a few dozen votes.
When you elect people who are dedicated to ensuring that everyone can find a place to live, to have good schools and safe streets, all those different things, you make sure that people are going to live there.
You make it affordable and possible and lovely.
And Wisconsin, we're so good at this.
I think we're the best place to live in the country, over and over, different cities in Wisconsin get in the top 10 in the country lists.
But we can make it even better in so many different places.
The long-term consequences of those local decisions affect where the electoral college majority comes from.
There are states like Texas and Florida that...
where there is a lot of cheap housing that have been attracting tons of people, they're going to get four more electoral college seats, which means they'll have a bigger say in choosing the president of the United States.
They'll have a bigger say in determining who has a majority in the U.S.
House.
And those states are run by Republicans who have gerrymandered the living daylights out of their maps.
So
it's
not like when a Democrat moves to Texas, they add one Democrat to the vote total that chooses those offices.
In fact, their votes are effectively erased by gerrymandering.
which means that local decisions by local elected officials wind up shaping the future of American democracy and every policy that affects every one of our lives.
So that's one way that local offices have a huge impact on the entire country.
But the other way is that by getting involved in local races, you build...
you build grassroots strength that then rolls forward to every other race for every other level of the ballot.
If you ask how we beat Elon Musk in Wisconsin, it wasn't just that he was repellent and offensive and should never have been able to touch a cheesehead and that
he was supporting the Trump
It's also
that we've been building year over year in fights for local offices, going back at this point, you know, a decade plus, and building on the work of decades of people who've been part of these fights.
We have a civic culture in our state, a culture of participation.
We had the highest voter turnout in the country in 2024.
And that comes from getting involved.
So I think we save our own souls by getting involved in the life of our communities at the same time as we elect people who luckily serve the public instead of some special interest that doesn't have our best interest at heart.
It's so hard though because we want that instant gratification and we feel like especially right now where everything is so heavy.
We've got this giant affordability crisis that's affecting the vast majority of people.
They can't afford their housing.
They can't afford their food, their gas, certainly not their healthcare.
They just feel like there is no hope and it's hard to think about, well, we can build this, but it's going to take us 10 years to get out of it.
What do you say to those people?
And I talk about it all throughout.
But one of the things I quote, I think in the introduction, is this moment in The Princess Bride where, if you haven't seen the movie, this won't make sense, Miracle Max, this kind of wizard guy, says to the heroes of the movie,
Have fun storming the castle.
And
in a
these
The goal is to actually have fun doing this.
what I find and people find over and over is that, in fact,
It is really joyful to be part of some of these fights.
And I write a lot about the specific things you can do that have the biggest impact.
But guess what?
All of them involve interacting with other people.
You're going to find people that you like, that you love, that maybe you fall in love with, maybe they become your best friends that you know for decades and then tell stories about your political battles in your old age as you reminisce about how you saved democracy together.
But politics is not a spectator sport.
It's actually a life sport, I argue.
It's like pickleball.
Which is to say you know something that you can play at any age and have fun doing and The the the path out of the mess that we're in as a country There's no single office.
You know we we I think Donald Trump is both a symptom and cause of the problems that we're having as a nation We beat him before that did not solve the problem
Just like beating Scott Walker, absolutely essential in the state of Wisconsin, but it's not like the nightmare of far-right control ended at that point.
Immediately after Governor Evers and Attorney General call one, the Republican state legislature convened and started stripping powers away from them in order to prevent them from doing the things voters had elected them to do.
So you have to think about all these different parts of the government at once.
work step by step through them, but as you do that, build a community that gives you joy, that gives you energy, that you can't wait to see at the next meeting or the next time everyone gets together for a drink to talk about strategy, because that's how we're going to sustain the work that we need to do.
This can actually, I think, be a positive part of our lives.
Talk to people at the last chapter of their lives.
What made the biggest difference?
It's always relationships.
It's
always the
Let's go back to The Princess Bride for a minute because this is your favorite movie and when you were running the Wisconsin Dems and it was COVID, I was running for assembly at that time, it was incredibly hard to campaign because we couldn't go out and knock doors.
We couldn't have that face-to-face contact.
So you pulled that cast together to do a fundraiser that was a read through and it was
Brilliant, you found different ways to help us connect when we couldn't connect with each other and reasons to want to come in and be together.
How, where does this come from, this genius of Ben Wickler?
In this case, it was a team of my, you know, Wisconsinite on our team.
one of whom had a friend who grew up in Wisconsin and then moved to Los Angeles and became friends with the man in black himself, Kerry Elvis, the star of The Prince's Bride.
So we were... Really?
Yeah, my team was having a brainstorm.
What could we do?
And someone was like, wait a minute, I know someone who knows Kerry Elvis.
Let's contact him.
Contacted him.
Turns out he'd been talking to this former Wisconsinite about what he could do to help with the election.
He'd wanted to do something.
Boom.
Then he contacts the producers of The Princess Bride.
Then they start contacting all the different actors who are in the movie.
And everyone says, yes, people wanted to be part of it.
People wanted to be part of something that could actually make a difference in a place that really counted.
And so all of a sudden, like, miracle of miracles.
Miracle Max couldn't pull off a miracle like this.
We have all my heroes, these amazing actors, getting together, doing an original
original cast reading of the script with a bunch of guest stars who joined for the occasion and 160,000 people tuned in to this virtual event.
We raised like four and a half million dollars after a replay where we raised a few hundred thousand extras.
And that helped power the victory.
That Princess Bride helped to defeat Donald Trump in a state that tipped the Electoral College in 2020 and introduced so many people to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, thousands of people who became volunteers for years to come after that.
And that to me is like...
distilled, having fun storming the castle.
We actually did it in our state in Zoom during COVID and we're still having fun too.
I got to meet Kerry Elwes in person because he goes on tours sometimes and does screenings of The Princess Bride.
He's going to be in Madison this October.
So I'm going to see if I can make sure he
gets
So watch for that.
And there are other Princess Bride things sneaked throughout the book.
So if any of your viewers, listeners, or fans
of the movie the same way that I am, you're gonna find little treats and Easter eggs hidden throughout.
It really is, I think a movie that exemplifies the joy that can come from big fights that are ultimately grounded in true love, as they say.
And I think if we can make politics a little more like The Princess Bride, I think we'll all be better off.
Agree because it's about the people it's about the joy and I'm so glad you mentioned the governor's race because I want your take on this So things were very boring for a long time.
We had seven candidates.
We were all saying something has to break What's gonna happen and then boom total chaos?
What's happening Ben Wickler?
What's your take?
Here's a candidate.
Oh, no longer a candidate.
Here's someone who wasn't a candidate, who wasn't back in.
It is moving a million miles a minute.
There's a famous saying from a former British prime minister, a week is a long time in politics.
And the last week feels like a very long time in politics.
The exciting thing to me is people are now tuning in.
and they're not just tuning into the different candidates who are running in the Democratic primary for governor, they're also starting to tune in to Tom Tiffany himself.
Tom
Tiffany is
Now, on the Democratic side, there's something called democracy taking place, where you have different people making their case, different people, you know, indoors, people are starting to run their ads, they have their stump speeches.
On the Republican side, you had something a little different because there were multiple candidates, and then a guy who wants to be king chose...
his night.
Donald Trump put his political sword on the shoulders of Tom Tiffany, anointed him the Republican nominee.
Lo and behold, his opponent drops out Tom Tiffany, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election.
Tom Tiffany, a Republican congressman who voted to cut a trillion dollars from healthcare to fund tax cuts for the super rich and people losing their health insurance in Wisconsin right now have Tom Tiffany to blame for it.
Tom Tiffany wants to be our governor.
And the thing that the
just jumps out to me about this moment, is that whoever you support in the Democratic primary, there's an opportunity to come together afterwards and support the nominee to ensure that someone who believes the state should work for regular people wins the governorship and Tom Tiffany loses.
And I think with any of the nominees, there's a path for us to be able to come together and do that.
So that is my message to everyone.
Absolutely.
Fight it out.
Make your case.
Support who you want in the primary.
But then we've got to unite the day after and win this race.
It is wild to me that here we are in Wisconsin and we've got this talented, diverse, incredible group of candidates.
I just, it feels so rich.
I mean, this is democracy.
at its best involves contests and debates and ideas and all kinds of different people making their case.
And voters choosing.
Voters will decide who the Democratic nominee is, unlike in the Republican primary, where Donald Trump decided.
And if you don't think you should have a Donald Trump henchman in the governor's office, then choose someone who's ultimately elected to serve the state by the people.
That is...
What is before us?
And I'm going to be doing everything I can.
I hope all of your viewers and listeners and fans, especially folks in Wisconsin, get involved in supporting the work to ensure that we have a governor who thinks that the state should be for everyone.
Yeah, you know I'll be there.
And we
it.
And we all love that democracy is messy and sometimes it can feel really discouraging.
Your book, This Is The Plan, it's a bold title.
What is the one thing in the book that you want a burned out Democrat who is looking at the future and feeling like, I just don't know, what do you want people to take away?
is a sense of the positive energy that can come from being involved.
Because you have to do it not out of a sense of guilt or obligation or fear, ultimately the way that you can sustain work year over year, even if it's just a few hours a month, is by finding something that makes you feel good inside when you do it.
And that'll be different for different people.
Some people love knocking on the doors and talking to strangers, and I'm grateful.
I enjoy that.
I think it's an
amazing
But other people, what they'd like to do is cook some food to bring to the offices where the volunteers, you know, get things set up.
Some people like doing phone banking.
Some people like to enter the data from other people's phone banks.
There are rules for everyone, no matter how their brain works or what gives them energy or what depletes them.
But the critical thing is to find that way to plug in and then get involved, not around one candidate or one election, but get involved because that's what being part of a democracy really is.
Find a community that you can be part of and get involved in this work.
And the beautiful thing in Wisconsin is that we have teams across the state, neighborhood teams that work in their neighborhood.
We have amazing county parties.
In every county in the state, you can
walk into a meeting and you'll be greeted with a smile and you can get involved in the work to build a democracy that works for everyone.
And my hope is that people will find a passage into that fight and discover what you and I have discovered, which is how much...
fun and joy and hope and love and community you can find in the shared work of building a state that actually serves the public.
That's the best of the Wisconsin tradition.
And that's what I hope we can bring to the country.
And I hope that this is the plan helps people to find that to be part of their lives for the long term.
Yes.
And you have built this.
You've been at the center of building this in Wisconsin.
So last question, Ben, what's next for you?
Green Bay, Wausau, La Crosse, and Eau Claire this weekend.
I'll be in Boston tonight, Chicago tomorrow, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle next week, so this is a whirlwind.
Then I'll get home, try to catch my breath.
I will be doing kind of two big things.
One is through November, everything I can do to help Wisconsin reach the summit politically of what we need in terms of elected office, which is a
majority
in the state assembly, majority in the state Senate, and a Democratic governor who's ready to fight for people.
And if we can do those three things, we have a chance to have really a watershed moment to help
workers be able to organize unions to help ensure everyone has reproductive freedom in a state where it's been under assault from the right to pass, as I write in the book, I quote a state legislator, Mary Lou Muntz, to write our values into the law.
And I will be there.
cheerleading and supporting and organizing and doing communicating everything I can do to help the folks that are part of that fight to win this fall.
But my other big project is something called This Is Wisconsin, which is a project with the Civic Media Network where I'm traveling the state and just talking to folks about what they love about our state and how we can make it better for everyone together.
And that involves trying different kinds of crinkle.
It involves celebrating my favorite frozen treats in different places that make them, there's lots of delicious Wisconsin foods involved.
And so much more.
So I will be traveling all over Wisconsin, talking to folks for that.
And you can find the videos for that at thisiswisconsin.com or your favorite social media platform of choice.
And it's another way for me of kind of bringing the joy into this conversation.
Because there's so much that we can build on that is working for people, even though there's so much that we're frustrated about that needs to change.
And I want to talk about both.
You're exactly right.
I think you have time to squeeze in a Packer game, maybe?
All right, let's do it.
Ben Wickler, this is exactly the kind of energy we need right now.
Your book, This Is the Plan, is brilliant.
It is the blueprint.
It has fixed Wisconsin and we're on the precipice of getting it over the edge.
We can do this for our entire country.
Thank you for this energy, for just being who
you are.
Thank you Dr. Christopher Mairley.
Thanks so much for having me on and all the folks tuning in.
Friends, if you enjoyed today's show, please share it, leave a comment, like, subscribe, all of those things help us get the word out so that other people know what the plan is and we can rebuild our democracy together.
That's the plan.
See you next time.