SecretName101 (CC BY 4.0)
Campaign signs for Susan Crawford in Madison, Wisconsin, April 2025.
If you believe, as Ben Wikler does, that democracy in this country is in a death spiral, you should read his newly released book, This Is the Plan. And the sooner the better, because a lot needs to happen by the midterm elections in November.
This Is the Plan is exactly what its title suggests: a roadmap for Democrats inspired by Wikler’s experience as the former chairman of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, where he led the party to a number of electoral successes, especially with regard to the state’s supreme court. Wikler’s roadmap extends through 2032, and much of it hinges on the 2026 midterms.
Across the country, Wikler argues, Democrats must achieve majority control of governors’ offices and state legislative chambers in battleground states. At the state level, he foresees that Democrats can create a massive “pro-democracy trifecta” that would set the stage for a victorious 2028 presidential race. Mix in some electoral college reforms, Wikler says, and the United States will have gone from “American meltdown to glorious glow-up” over the course of six years.
Part pep rally and part political field guide, the unrelentingly optimistic This Is the Plan is also a love letter to Wikler’s home state of Wisconsin, which has played an outsized role in recent presidential elections. Wikler, a longtime political organizer, wears his local pride on his sleeve as he recounts lessons learned during his highly successful tenure as WisDems chair from 2019 to 2025. He presents the Badger State as a model that other states can adopt to reverse the red wave.
W.W. Norton & Company
W.W. Norton & Company, 322 pages. Publication date: July 21, 2026.
The book opens with Wikler’s analysis of a March 2025 political rally in Green Bay headed by Elon Musk, who donned a polyurethane foam Cheesehead for the occasion. Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Wisconsin’s state supreme court election in a bid to tip the recently claimed liberal majority back to the conservatives.
But Musk’s money didn’t talk—liberal justice Susan Crawford won her election handily, becoming the second Democrat-backed justice elected to the state supreme court in just two years following Janet Protasiewicz’s election in 2023. Her election then enabled the court to dismantle state voter district maps gerrymandered in the early 2010s by a Republican supermajority that had previously led to an era of busted unions and disenfranchised voters.
Wikler traces that era of Republican control in Wisconsin to 2010, when Scott Walker was elected governor—a moment that Wikler says “flicked the first spark” of what became the MAGA movement.
Walker survived a 2012 recall election and won re-election in 2014, but Wisconsin voters ousted him in 2018. It was a squeaker—the second-closest governor’s race in the country that year—won by Democrat Tony Evers, a former teacher who ran on a plainspoken promise to “fix the damn roads.” Evers was reelected in 2022, but has announced he will not run again in 2026, so November’s midterms will be crucial in protecting the state’s recent progress.
The key to Wisconsin’s recent political victories, Wikler says, was WisDems’ adoption of a year-round long-game organizing approach launched by Martha Laning, his predecessor as state party chair. Wikler also helped the Democrats raise an impressive $200 million over his five years as chair, allowing them to reclaim liberal control of the state supreme court and set the stage for future successes.
But This Is the Plan focuses on people-to-people relationship building, not fundraising. In a fascinating section in the first chapter, Wikler mentions apps and other tools that can help identify “doubtful voters” among one’s circle of friends, while focusing on the tightest races. This may be especially productive in low-profile and local elections, in which the party’s advocates can often “safely leave ideology at the door and focus on getting things done for people,” as he puts it.
“I’m not saying organizing movement building and infrastructure building are a shortcut, a panacea, or a silver bullet,” Wikler writes. “I’m saying it’s the thing that all of us can do . . . . And that to win an election in which you need one more vote than the other side . . . [and] to win, the most fundamental task is to make the numbers grow.”
For the upcoming midterms, Wikler’s plan calls for getting or keeping Democrats into top office in the most purple states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, which were battleground states in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections.
Wikler also talks up direct campaigns via citizen ballot initiatives, which are not available to voters in Wisconsin and twenty-two other states, but have been particularly successful in Michigan. He doesn’t have much to say, though, about more direct actions, such as the round-the-clock protests in Wisconsin’s Capitol Rotunda in Madison in the Scott Walker recall era. I would like to know, for example, where Wikler places the No Kings-type marches in his plan for reform.
A couple of minor nits: It’s hard to knock a guy for his sense of humor, but I might have toned down the cheesy remarks, even just a tad. On a practical level, I also would have liked a page or two providing in one place the nuts-and-bolts information for pro-democracy organizations and tools he names throughout the text. An index might have helped, too.
Maybe Wikler can put those in the paperback or e-book editions that he promises will come. Given the stakes and considering that he acknowledges defeat as part of the process, I’d welcome an update to his game plan as well.