U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the East Room of the White House July 16, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Saul Loeb/Pool via Getty Images) How will we defeat Trump and the Republicans and take control of Congress in the midterms? How are we going to win the White House in two years? Ben Wikler has a plan: he published a book called This is the plan. Ben served as Chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party for six years, until 2025, where he shaped what became the most powerful and effective state political party in the country.
More: John Nichols on the Senate candidates in Maine and Nebraska, and the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin. John is of course editor-in-chief of The nation.
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Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, here is Start Making Sense. My name is Jon Wiener. Later in the show: John Nichols on progressive Senate candidates to challenge Republicans in Maine and Nebraska. One is a Democrat – and the other is not. But first: how are we going to win the midterm elections? Ben Wikler will explain – in a minute.
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Everyone in politics wants to know: what’s the plan? How are we going to defeat Trump and the Republicans? How will we take control of Congress in the midterms? How are we going to win the White House in two years? What’s the plan? Well, Ben Wikler just published a book called This is the Plan. Ben served as Chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party for six years, until 2025, where he shaped what became the most powerful and effective state political party in the country. Ben Wikler, welcome to the program.
Ben Wikler: Nice to be with you, Jon. Nice to be with you, dear listeners.
JW: You open your book with the first major election of Trump’s second term, in April 2025, the first test of whether Trump and MAGA would continue to dominate all of American politics, or whether ordinary citizens could, would fight back. It was in Wisconsin. It was for the state Supreme Court, and it featured Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, on one side, and a little-known Dane County Circuit Court judge, Susan Crawford, on the other side. When you say that now, it all seems highly improbable. But in reality, the winner of this first test of Trump and MAGA power was not the richest man in the world. He was the little-known Dane County Circuit Court judge. Tell us how that happened.
BW: It was a struggle, and I love starting here because I think it illustrates both how dark this moment is, how big the crisis is, and how realistic there is hope if we roll up our sleeves. And as Nancy Pelosi likes to quote Flo Kennedy to say: “Don’t worry, get organized.” So here is Elon Musk. He has had his own lawsuits in Wisconsin courts regarding Tesla dealerships. So he wanted to buy the court for his own interests, but he also wanted to demonstrate his power and seize mega control of the state supreme court in the closest state in the country. He put more money into this race than anyone has ever given to any judicial race in American history. And what Susan Crawford did statewide, she said, I never dreamed as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that I would come face to face with the richest man in the world for democracy. But she energized this movement that had been continually building an ongoing campaign on the ground, in every small town, in every suburb, in every city across the state for years. This machine of organization, participation and communication allowed voters to understand that this was a referendum, not only on Brad Schimel, Elon Musk’s preferred candidate, and Susan Crawford, but on whether Wisconsin could be bought, or whether it would remain a state governed by the people.
The state party working on the campaign launched a campaign called “The People Against Musk.” This is a judicial election, and Elon Musk was on trial, and we kicked his ass. He lost ten percentage points. His money ended up boomeranging and turning against him. In this election, more people supported Susan Crawford over Elon Musk than ever voted for a Republican candidate for governor in a November election.
Normally, Supreme Court elections have much lower turnout than one would see in a gubernatorial election in a midterm election. What we saw was both a beautiful campaign and the culmination of years of work. And my argument in this book is that there are elections like this, that don’t get as much attention, but like this one, that have huge consequences for the entire country, that happen all the time, and that are what we need to do as a movement.
This is a book addressed to the person who is listening to this podcast right now, to the concerned American who may have been to a protest against the Kings or attended Act Blue once or twice, but is trying to figure out “what am I doing in this nightmare?”
If enough of us come together and get into races that no one is paying attention to, but that actually determine who runs the American electoral system, then we will have a chance to capture power in the states in 2026, which will allow us to have free and fair elections in 2028, which can then allow us to enact fundamental reforms to change this country and make it a democracy that works for everyone in 2029. And that is the plan.
JW: Well, you and I, and most of our listeners, are politicians. We think about politics every day, but it’s actually quite unusual in America. Most people don’t have the same relationship with politics as we do. In the last presidential election, approximately 75 million people voted for each candidate. 90 million people didn’t vote at all. And even among those who voted for most of them, politics is not a part of daily life. It’s a bit like the Olympic Games. This happens once every four years. You watch it on TV for a few days, cheer on your team, then come back to real life. And real life for most people is paying the rent, paying the grocery bill, putting gas in your car. This is not about saving democracy by defeating Trump. Now you can say, “That’s bad. That’s wrong.” But this is the political world we live in. I think you know that. And I think you had to deal with that in Wisconsin.
BW: Absolutely. If you ask the average voter or someone who may or may not vote what they think about Trump’s threat to federalize election administration, it doesn’t tell you anything. Most people don’t think about the fact that elections are held at the state level and not the federal level. Trump’s attacks on democracy are so far removed from the concerns of people who might vote, I don’t know if you’re really concerned about democracy, your job is to talk to voters who are on the fence, not about what freaks you out, but what freaks them out. And the only way to do that is to ask them what’s bothering them and listen to them. And that is my fundamental political advice to anyone who wants to make a difference. It’s following the advice of Abraham Lincoln. In the 1840s he wrote a letter to the Whig Party in which he said, “keep a constant eye on the more doubtful voters and ask them from time to time to talk to those they trust most” – that is, talk to the people who trust you, listen to them, if they are not already with you, they are the most important group of people to talk to about what concerns them, and then meet them where they are to voice their concerns. And a lot of the kind of political coverage is like what this person said in a speech: What’s this going to do in the election? Hesitant voters did not hear this speech so far removed from their daily concerns.
You have to bring news, information and politics into the lives of people who don’t think about it. In Wisconsin we constantly have elections that come down to less than a percentage point, five of the last seven presidential elections have done so. And to win a race like this, you have to talk to people who don’t want to think about what happens in the next presidential election, because everyone who’s already thinking about the election already knows who they’re voting for. So that means finding the people who aren’t thinking about it, being patient, being curious, meeting with them on the issues that concern them, that they don’t even necessarily see as issues, and then helping them see how the values and concerns that they have in common with you can lead them to vote for the person that you support. I show how to do this, groups that can help train you and support you to be able to do this, how you can do it even if you live in a red or blue state to support work in places where elections are closest. It’s all in the book. I call it your super power. Another word for this is organize. And in a democracy, that’s the one thing we can do to save the country.
JW: We want to know what the plan is to defeat Trump and MAGA? But the first eight chapters of your book, the vast majority of your book, are not about the battle for the presidency. Why not?
BW: The reality is that the presidency is the final boss of a video game in which you have to fight through all the levels. If you’ve ever played Super Mario Brothers, you know that you get to Bowser at the end, not the beginning. Every element of the American political system is built like a pyramid. It’s stacked on top of other parts. Elections often take place at the municipal level. Local municipal governments set up the polling stations. Maybe the county does the ballot design. This varies from state to state. They do this within laws set by the state government. Constitutionally, state governments oversee elections and work with local governments to administer them. These are governed by federal laws. But the reality is that Trump is currently in the White House because of a whole series of decisions made by state governments over the past few decades. And in Wisconsin, we see it very clearly because the Trumpian moment, this moment of crisis and nightmare really began in 2010 with the Tea Party Wave and Citizens United and the takeover of state governments in the battlegrounds and across much of the country, and then the systematic breakdown of democracy at the local level, not the national level, that created the conditions that allowed Trump to get into the White House. And as we learned in 2020, we beat the biggest bad guy, and he came right back because all those other conditions remained unchanged. There is so much more to do. So the good news is that a lot of these smaller levels of government are have actually more appreciative of the work, of the donations that you and I can make, of the volunteer hours that you and I can do because so few people pay attention to it.
BW: The vast majority of Americans don’t know who their state representative is, which means that if you tell someone who that person is and tell them they’re a crook, or tell them they’re a champion, you can have a much bigger effect on their opinion of that person than on their opinion of Donald Trump, where everyone already has an opinion and may be ready to yell at you.
So the work that we need to do is basically drawing the lines of power through state and local governments, through state judicial elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. But these kinds of races allow a group of friends to have an outsized impact by pushing a domino that sets off a chain of dominoes that can truly change the entire direction of the country. And that’s the path that we took in Wisconsin, which is to figure out exactly what set of races we needed to win by doing everything we could to win those races and systematically dismantle the system of control and domination that Scott Walker or the former Republican governor put in place. We are close to making Wisconsin an all-blue state after years of work. I think of the same kind of strategy of picking our fights, picking our battles, and then putting everything we have into it in a way that changes the system itself. This is what we must do as a nation.
JW: Well, let’s talk about the Democratic Party right now. People feel much better about the Democratic Party than they did two years ago. After all, think about the alternative. But there are a lot of problems within the Democratic Party that our friends are able to explain quite clearly. You say we should all work hard on the project of making the Democratic Party strong and good, and that’s part of the plan.
BW: If you ask the average person what they think of the Democratic Party, they’ll tell you a bunch of things you can’t say on a family podcast. And that’s true for Democrats. This is true for Republicans. It’s true for independents, it’s true for people who are not interested in politics. And part of that comes from feeling like the party should be doing a million things, that it actually has no power to do it. The party, the official legal organization of the Democratic Party, is not delivering the message. He does not choose the candidates. It does not show advertisements. The party is much more limited in scope than that. People often use the term Democratic Party to mean the amorphous collection of everything associated with any Democrat anywhere, but the Democratic Party itself has that possibility that we, I think, have demonstrated through the work that I and thousands of people have invested in in my home state of Wisconsin. And you can see it in other places, but not enough, that is, it can be a home for local neighbor-to-neighbor, friend-to-friend year-round organization that is woven into the fabric of communities. So that when people think “who are the Democrats”, they don’t think that it’s distant “them” who “disagree with me, who I don’t like”, or who fail to fight or seize the moment, whatever they think instead. “Oh, it was my neighbor that I talked to, you know, yesterday at our block party, who asked me to help elect a city council member who will do something about that pothole at the intersection.” And when you build from the bottom up, then you can create the kind of trust that allows you to get many more people to get involved. Wisconsin was the highest turnout state in 2024. And we were also the most divided state, the closest state in 2024. There are so many elections where Wisconsin has been to the right of the national popular vote. This time we were on the right track and heading towards the left of the country. It’s not because Republican turnout has declined. That’s because Democratic turnout has increased and. The work builds on itself. So when you’re in every neighborhood and every community, that means that in elections, like in the Supreme Court race, when Elon Musk comes along and tries to buy everyone off, there’s a whole bunch of people who are grounded in what’s happening, where they live, who are willing to stand up and say no and fight back.
My point is that whatever you think of the Democrats and the Democratic Party, you actually have the power to join your local party, gather a few friends, and make it the party you want. The door is wide open. It is. It’s a lot easier than people think to be able to build and organize within the Democratic Party itself. And the great thing about the Democratic Party as a vehicle to do this work is that it’s everywhere. This is legally enforceable in every state. There, it is possible to create a local chapter without having to pass a number of litmus tests to be able to join the party. Everyone can join and get involved. And that means if you think we should have more fight in us, if you think we should organize more intensively, more locally, in more places, you can do that right now.
JW: Well, let’s talk about Trump. Trump’s first victory in November 2016 was of course a terrible shock. But if you tried, you could kind of understand why a lot of people might vote to give him a chance and see if he could actually improve their lives. And of course, he didn’t win that election. He lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. But in 2024, everyone knew what Trump was, and he got more votes than last time. Lots more votes. He received more votes than his Democratic opponent. So, 2024 was actually much worse for what it said about our fellow Americans, and of course, much more disastrous for the future of democracy. And yet you say there’s a different way to think about Trump winning in 2024, one that offers some hope. Please. What is this?
BW: I want to say up front that one-tenth of 1% of all votes cast in this election determined the winner. It was fewer than 115,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If these voters had voted for Harris instead of Trump, then Harris would be president right now.
JW: And that’s because of the Electoral College.
BW: It’s an atrocity, a disaster. And I lay out a plan to defuse the electoral college, which is a whole other conversation we could have. But this is much closer to happening than people think. But the big question of how this person, who was obviously a disaster as president, came back to the White House is actually, in my opinion, impossible to understand unless you step back that far and look at the entire planet, because something happened in 2024 that has never happened before in the modern history of democracies. In every country in the world that has a wealthy or middle-class democracy, the ruling party in that country lost ground in 2024. It happened in Japan. This happened all over Europe. Right-wing governments have lost ground. Left-wing governments have lost ground, both men and women in power around the world. Whoever was in charge took it on the chin. And again, this has never happened before. And if you ask why, by and large voters were hit by inflation, which was a global phenomenon. Rising prices have made everyone distracted. And that’s also why people are furious about the economy right now, I might add. But if you look to 2024 and ask who has moved the most? Who voted for Biden, who then voted for Trump? Who voted for Biden? Who didn’t vote next, who didn’t vote in 2020, and then voted for Trump in 2024. The main indicators were whether you said that inflation had caused you great distress, that prices had affected you, and secondly, that you didn’t watch the news, that politics was far from the center of your life, that you said you never looked for political news. If you read a newspaper, you had a 70% chance of supporting Biden in the spring of 2024. If you said you never paid attention to political news, you were much more likely to support Trump. And what’s so striking in the United States, where Harris campaigned the most and Trump campaigned the most, Harris did better. In places where none of them ever showed up, it was the people who experienced something in their own lives and voted for change, without paying much attention to who exactly was on the ballot and what that person was promising to do, who made the difference for Donald Trump.
And the reason that that creates hope, in my opinion, is that, first of all, it doesn’t mean that people have embraced MAGA wholesale or even supported Trump’s policies. If someone remembered which policies each candidate supported, they were much more likely to support Harris. Second, the country isn’t working for most people right now. And so, the large portion of the electorate that is basically saying, do I like the way things are going? Otherwise, vote for change. This part of the American electorate says they want change now. And that’s something that Democrats and, in some states, independent candidates or even non-MAGA Republicans were willing to join with Democrats and independents to build a pro-democracy, pro-worker coalition. This means that everyone who promises and fights for change currently has the upper hand.
Our coalition cannot aim to restore a status quo that people already saw as broken. It has to be about making changes to actually improve things for most people. And that means taking the keys out of the hands of the megabillionaires who are ruining everything. There is not a pendulum movement that has remained stuck on the right. Instead, there is this chance encounter between the business cycle that Trump was lucky to waltz into post-Covid, after supply chains became knotted and mangled and prices rose everywhere. And the fact that Trump, who doesn’t believe in democracy and thinks we should basically belong to the billionaire who pays him the most money, and often he himself pays. Those two things intersected with Trump and this period of high inflation. And Trump returned to power. But this is not a permanent condition. And in fact, it makes inflation worse. Everyone who panics about democracy is now against him. And everyone who panics about the economy is now against him. And it’s a winning coalition that could allow us to create the change people are demanding.
JW: And you say there’s still a big secret. You call this the biggest secret in politics. It’s about what happens to you if you make fighting for a better country a long-term part of your life.
BW: It’s something that has trans shaped my life and I’m excited to share it with your listeners. Although it’s possible that people listening to this podcast have also discovered it on their own. It’s actually a source of meaning, purpose and joy to be involved in something bigger than yourself. I fell in love with my wife while we were putting up posters for a protest together. And it is part of the social fabric of our family and our circle of friends. We are people who have discovered that when you are part of something bigger and you actually win and make a difference together, collective action helps create collective joy. Movements can be contagious. They can be durable. Political energy is a renewable resource.
And at a time when we are distanced from each other, spending time on our phones, panicked by notifications, driven by algorithms that know humans are super alert for threats, but make us terrible in body and soul. It’s actually the feeling that we can join hands, have more power and make things better. It’s something that makes everything better. The best response to political anxiety is not to take the pill. It’s about taking action and then seeing the impact of that action to make your world a better place.
Anyone who helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 probably has this memory. How awesome was that. And the thing is, when you not only do presidential campaigns, but you also get involved in local elections, when you get involved in supporting a highly contested state legislative race, half the country. But then you see that it actually worked and you won by a few dozen votes. And you know you and your friends were part of it. It’s great.
This is not a fight we will win overnight. It will take years to repair all the damage and then build something better than we ever had, which is what we need as a country. But it doesn’t have to be work. This can actually help build community in our country, reducing the partisan and polarizing climate. Because if you want to convince someone, you must first consider them as a human being. And it improves our own souls, while helping to provide political opportunities to people who do not yet identify as our allies and partners. And in doing so, we can really come closer and feel that we are part of a country that really has a common project. To me, that’s the underlying source of hope, is that the process of fixing what’s broken in our politics and in our economy can also be a process that heals our civic souls and helps us grow rather than shrink like Trump wants us to do. And for me, the opportunity that underpins political work is something deeply human.
JW: One last thing: yourself. What is your own plan for 2028, when Ron Johnson faces Wisconsin voters in a campaign for Senate? Many of our friends want you to run for the Wisconsin Senate in 2028 and be part of the Democratic majority in the Senate. When we elect a Democrat to the White House, what can you tell us about your plans for 2028?
BW: I am honored and flattered. I will tell you that my main focus right now is on the next few months. What I want is for everyone, whether you buy the book or not, to roll up your sleeves and get involved, not only in the fight for the House and Senate, but also for state and local offices. The litmus test is whether we will have free and fair elections in 2028. And that will depend on who actually runs them. And these people will be elected in 2026. These next few months will determine whether or not Trump’s next coup attempt succeeds.
A lot of people are wondering who will be the presidential nominee, who will run in each Senate race, all in 28. All of that can wait now. We must all focus on the steps we can take over the coming months to ensure that democracy survives this period of enormous peril. And if we come out the other side after 2026 with an electoral system run by people who actually believe in democracy, then there will be no limit to what we can achieve to make this country better for everyone.
JW: Ben Wikler – his book is This is the Plan. Ben, thank you for all your work, thank you for this wonderful book, and thank you for speaking with us today.
BW: Thank you very much, Jon.
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JW: For today’s political update, we turn to John Nichols. Of course, he’s the editor of The Nation. John, welcome back.
John Nichols: It’s good to be with you, my friend.
JW: Just a reminder here that Democrats need to take back the Senate – that means holding two and flipping four. We have good candidates in many places, but we have one open question: Maine. Who will run in Maine, instead of Graham Plattner?
We must defeat Susan Collins. Maine is the most Democratic state with a Republican senator up for re-election. Things became much clearer over the weekend. Several candidates have dropped out and the last one is Troy Jackson. He will be officially named at the party congress this weekend. Who is Troy Jackson?
JN: Troy Jackson is a really interesting candidate. He is a former lumberjack from northern Maine, near the Canadian border. And he got his start in politics not as a candidate, but as a logger who was blocking the border during a dispute over how much loggers were paid and what was being paid for lumber and things like that – this might get a little technical for some people on the podcast. But ultimately he was engaged in a very political struggle. And the sitting governor at the time said, “Well, why don’t you people who are blocking the border come to Augusta, to the Capitol, and meet with me?” And basically the lumberjack said, “No, come meet us.” »
And that’s where his backstory kind of lets you understand where this guy is coming from. He entered politics already very unhappy with the status quo. And then he eventually became a state senator and a very powerful, very effective state senator. The Maine Legislature, which has often been divided over the years, is experiencing divisions within the Democratic Party. But he rose to a pretty high position, and then he ran for governor this year in a multi-candidate primary where three progressives were running: Hannah Pingree, who ultimately won the nomination, as well as Shenna Bellows, who is Maine’s secretary of state.
And what’s interesting is that Graham Platner approved all three of them. because they ranked ranked choice voting in Maine. But Jackson was quite close politically to Platner. I mean, there’s an ideological parallel on a lot of issues, pretty strongly pro-Medicare for All, in favor of taxing the rich, very aggressively in favor of taxing the rich. So when Platner’s campaign collapsed or when Platner left the race, there was a real sense that people weren’t sure where this thing was going to take us. The vibe was Maine, where they were speaking to someone who is more of a traditional politician, where they were speaking to someone. It’s a kind of centrism, something like that.
You got a real signal during the county caucuses that took place last weekend, and Jackson swept them away. He won everywhere. And one of the reasons for this, of course, is not just ideological. It’s a long-term presence in politics. This is a guy who’s been in Maine politics for decades and he’s very well identified.
He was the leader of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in the state. He was someone who was always very outspoken, particularly on issues of work and the economy. But ultimately, after starting out as a relatively conservative guy, he became a strong advocate for many social and racial justice issues. And so ultimately, I think there were a lot of people who came to really love him and know him.
He will be the candidate and he will be operational. He just spent the first half of the year campaigning statewide for governor. He’s now turning his attention to a Senate run, but he’s been to every city. You know, he knocked on doors. He talked to people. And so he doesn’t really start out as someone who’s just building, trying to get a campaign going.
The funny thing is, on his signs it said “Troy Jackson for Governor” and then in the corner it said “Endorsed by Bernie Sanders.” The signs still say “Troy Jackson” and “Endorsed by Bernie Sanders,” but they had fun putting a white stripe on it that says “for Senate.”
JW: Let’s talk about Susan Collins for a minute. In 2020, the last time she ran for office, every major poll showed her behind. Some showed him behind by ten points or more. And in the end, she ended up winning by nine points. Huge victory, especially since Joe Biden carried the State by nine points.
The latest polls, taken just after Platner’s withdrawal, show that the candidates are currently practically tied. Will it be difficult for Troy Jackson to beat Susan Collins?
JN: Hard! Maine is a state that has had a very right-wing Republican governor over the past decade. There was a Republican senator. The other senator is independent. Maine is a battleground state. It is a party which tends towards democracy. And in recent years, Democrats have done quite well in this area. Perhaps this trend is being confirmed. And perhaps that would suggest that in the six years since Susan Collins last ran for office, there really has been a change in mood. If so, it will be easier.
But I think we have to recognize that this is a real race. Main also knows Susan Collins well, even if they don’t like her. They know her very well. She has done a lot of service for voters. She shows up at parades. She is an energetic and committed candidate. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is going to be an easy thing. There is a nationalization of this election. So ultimately what Susan Collins will try to do is localize, get people to not pay attention on a national level. I think what Troy Jackson is going to do is also localize to some extent, because he’s very much from the state. But he will, I think, deliver a very strong message: if you want to fight Trump and Trumpism, and frankly, if you want to get the Democratic Party to stand for something other than platitudes, he might be the right choice.
JW: Okay, Maine is the best opportunity. Surprisingly, further down the reverse opportunity list is Nebraska. Nebraska, a deep red state Trump carried Nebraska 60-40 in 2024. 20 point margin. And the incumbent Republican is running for reelection to the Senate: Pete Ricketts.
Over the weekend, Democratic Party candidate Cindy Burbank withdrew from the race, leaving the field open to an independent t: Dan Osborne. Dan Osborne is one of our favorites. Remind us who Dan Osborne is and can he defeat an incumbent Republican in a 60% Trump state?
JN: Dan Osborne is a fascinating man. When he became old enough to vote, he registered as an independent, but did not particularly like either party. And he rose to prominence in Nebraska as the leader of a strike at a Kellogg’s factory in Omaha. And it was a bitter strike. This garnered a lot of national attention. He held on, you know, pretty hard and got a lot of attention as a result. He became a relatively important figure. And what’s interesting is, you know, he’s a machinist, I think a technician who was very good at talking about car repair, tractor repair, things of that nature.
And so obviously people convinced him to run, and he ran two years ago and kind of shocked everyone because his campaign took off. It was a very Nebraska-centric campaign, truly independent, very critical of the Democratic Party, very critical of the Republican Party, pretty populist economics, pretty close to Bernie Sanders on a lot of issues. In the same way, he was not, I would say, good on immigration or other issues. And ultimately, I think people had to figure out, you know, what do we think? Where, where do you lean on this guy? And in a strange way, he managed to retain the Democratic base. And in Omaha, the Democratic base is actually quite progressive. And in Lincoln, in other places, but also beyond that base, I’m not thinking of Republicans per se, but a lot of independents. And in fact, polls really seem to like it a lot among independents.
And what’s interesting about this race against Ricketts is that he’s going up against a super rich guy, you know, the son of a billionaire family who has sort of forged his own path with dollars. And I think the message of the stagehand versus the billionaire had a lot of resonance this year.
Osborne has been very, very clear: he is not running for Senate as a Democrat. You know, as many independents as they show up, then they align with the Democrats. It’s going to be a lot harder. This is not an arrangement likely to happen. What he’s saying is he’d like to get into the Senate and take the lead. You know, call it what it is. RIGHT. And he always says he’ll do what’s best for Nebraska.
But I think in some ways he will be a bit of a thorn in the Democrats’ side. A much bigger thorn in President Trump’s side, because he’s a guy who’s really in favor of taxing the rich, who’s really in favor of regulating businesses, and who’s passionately pro-union. And, and, you know, I think on a lot of economics, if you start looking at things, he’s someone who would come closer to the Democrats on a lot of economic issues, who might not always be with them on other issues, but who, overall, I think on things like government shutdowns, these places where we have these clashes, I think you would tend to do the right thing.
JW: And I have a question about Wisconsin, your home state. The New York Times fears that the Democratic primary for governor, intended to replace the incumbent Democratic candidate, Tony Evers, could be won by a socialist. The candidate they are worried about is Francesca Hong. They describe her as a Madison chef. Is this correct? Could a socialist leader from Madison be Wisconsin’s next governor?
JN: Well, between the time she was working as a chef – and she is a chef, she has the skills. But she ran a ramen noodle shop. So, and, and she’s a very hard-working person who was a good cook, a good restaurateur. Covid hit and it really disrupted his operation. And that’s how she ran in the legislative elections. And to everyone’s surprise, because she had never been in politics, she was riding a bike with a mask, she was wearing a mask and riding a bike during Covid and had a sign on her back and stuff like that. And they elected her.
So she has been serving in the state Senate, legislature or assembly for several years now. The shortcut makes things more simplistic. This is someone who was elected in tough primaries, re-elected and re-elected, and who has carved out a place in the Legislature as a high-profile progressive, someone who is to the left on a host of issues.
She is now running for governor. When she began her run for governor, she was virtually written off. She’s a democratic socialist running in a state whose largest city, Milwaukee, by the way, has had democratic socialist mayors for much of the last century. And where there is a democratic socialist legislative caucus, it is not something that is totally foreign to the State. It also has a great progressive tradition, etc. But it’s a swing state. It’s a divided state. She gained her popularity during the Democratic primary by getting in the car and going everywhere. She was literally in every small town, in every cafe. She got to know the people very well. She goes out and cooks with people, she goes into the kitchen, and she has a ironic, tough way of talking about a lot of things that are affected.
The New York Times went to profile her, found a Trump voter who was voting for her, or at least had her garden registered. And the reason was that she was very opposed to data centers, saying that there should be a moratorium on these centers. So she’s pretty good at finding the issues that strike people, whether they’re left, right, center, Democrats or Republicans.
Regardless, ultimately, she got to a point where she’s leading in most polls. This freaks out a lot of national Democrats and a lot of state Democrats. They’re trying to find a way to stop her from being the nominee. But every time they try to stop her from being a candidate, I think they sometimes reinforce her argument that you need someone from the outside. You need someone different.
So we’ll see where this all shakes out. We still have a few weeks left. Lots of money going around, lots of fees, many of you know, the usual politics of a place. I can tell you that one of the leading centrist candidates dropped out because her campaign finance reports were a disaster. And then the governor came along and supported another, more centrist candidate. But it looks like the party establishment is backing someone, and that helps Hong. And I would say that for Wisconsin, the next few weeks are going to be very, very interesting. Stay tuned.
JW: Now it’s time for your Minnesota moment: news from my hometown of Saint Paul that you won’t be getting any Sean Hannity. Last September, the Trump administration sued the state of Minnesota, the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over the state’s sanctuary policy, which prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE to arrest and detain people wanted for detention and deportation. They also sued Minneapolis over a law that prohibits police from identifying undocumented people for ICE, or checking the immigration status of people they come into contact with, for ICE. The Trump Justice Department claimed that Minnesota’s sanctuary laws violated the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which says federal law must take precedence over state and local laws.
But on Monday, a U.S. District Judge, Eric Tosterud, dismissed the case, saying that forcing state and local authorities to enforce federal immigration law violates the 10th Amendment. This is the federalism amendment, according to which the federal government has only those powers reserved to it in the Constitution. Everything else is reserved for the States. And the Supreme Court has confirmed this several times. The federal government cannot force or, as they say, “commandeer” state and local governments to enforce federal laws.
One more thing here. The judge who threw out Trump’s case was appointed by Trump.
It turns out that Trump has filed a total of 27 lawsuits against states and cities over sanctuary policies. So far he has lost everyone who has appeared in court, and now he is lost in Minnesota. What do you think?
JN: Well, maybe his policies are bad. Call me crazy. And when you lose with the people that you nominated, that’s a really problematic situation for a president. I mean, that’s one of the reasons you give federal judges lifetime appointments. So they can’t take them away if they don’t do what they want them to do. And I’m sure Trump would probably prefer to do it today.
But here’s the bottom line: Donald Trump, who originally ran for president and started in 2015, has talked about immigration and made the issue central to his policies throughout his three presidential campaigns, and has made it very central in his current term. Immigration has become an issue that no longer works for him the way it once might have. This therefore not only concerns voters, but also judges. This also concerns law enforcement at the local level, because what they see is the reality of the discourse, right? Trump’s policies are breaking the rules. They overturn the laws, they don’t follow procedures. They do horrible damage. And in the case of Minneapolis and many other places across the country, we’re now seeing cases where these ICE agents are killing people.
So you find yourself in a situation where I think the mood has changed a lot. I don’t think this will resonate with Republicans in the same way it has in the past. If Democrats take control of the House of Representatives and potentially even the Senate in 2026, I think this will become a real problem. There will be real investigations, perhaps even efforts to manage DHS and ICE funding. And so this decision is just one more part of the picture that helps us understand that this issue has become something very different from the slogans that it started with when Donald Trump was a candidate in 2015.
JW: John Nichols – read it on thenation.com. John, thank you for speaking with us today.
JN: It’s a great honor to be with you, Jon. Thank you so much.
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Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is editor-in-chief of The nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: Los Angeles in the 1960s.
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