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Democrats trying to move forward after last month's election losses will meet this week to go over the rules to elect a new chair for the Democratic National Committee. The current DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, is not running for reelection, and several other people are already campaigning for the job. Chuck Quirmbach of member station WUWM introduces us to one of the candidates.
CHUCK QUIRMBACH, BYLINE: Ben Wikler says if Democrats want to win nationally, his party needs to pay attention to downballot races.
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BEN WIKLER: And there are fights like that in every state, but they don't get the national spotlight. They don't get the kind of intensity and support that, in Wisconsin, we know is essential.
QUIRMBACH: Wikler has been Wisconsin Democratic Party chair since 2019. Last year, Wikler directed millions of dollars into an off-year election, a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that flipped control of the court to liberals. In August of this year, at a breakfast for Wisconsin delegates attending the Democratic National Convention, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised Wikler, even using a nickname for him.
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NANCY PELOSI: You know that Big Ben is recognized nationally as a preeminent state party chair,OK?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
QUIRMBACH: But last month's results in Wisconsin were mixed. Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won reelection. Democrats picked up 14 seats in the Wisconsin Legislature, partly thanks to a redistricting that the liberal state court ordered. But Republicans still have legislative majorities, and President-elect Donald Trump defeated Vice President Harris in the presidential race here. Even so, Wikler has announced he's running for Democratic National Committee chair, promising to unite the party. He emphasizes Harris lost here by less than 1%, the closest race in this year's swing states.
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WIKLER: What matters is, did we do things that generated more votes for our side, that helped to shift people over to our side, relative to the giant headwinds we faced across the country and that every incumbent government in the world has faced this year?
QUIRMBACH: In an interview with NPR, Wikler defended his efforts, even though Trump won the state, saying Harris still got 37,000 more votes in Wisconsin than President Biden did four years ago.
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WIKLER: And the answer is that what we did in Wisconsin, it did make a difference. Now, we need more. We need to reach more voters who are not hearing from Democrats. We need to bring the kind of intensity in organizing up and down the ballot forward.
QUIRMBACH: JR Ross, editor of the website wispolitics.com, says Wikler does have a lot going for him in his bid for the national post, including a track record of raising huge amounts of money for the state party. But Ross says with Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, also in the DNC race, Harris' win in Minnesota last month gives Martin some bragging rights over Wikler.
JR ROSS: A guy like the Minnesotans just going, hey, we keep winning over here in Minnesota, and we won more than they have in Wisconsin, maybe I've got something that he doesn't.
QUIRMBACH: Martin is seen as the current front-runner in a wide-open race, where other candidates could still jump in. Carroll University political scientist Lilly Goren says the Democratic Party contest may seem just for political junkies. But Goren says with Republicans about to regain control of the White House and all of Congress, the chair of the party not in power gets a higher profile.
LILLY GOREN: The party chair is essentially the one, to some degree, leading out of the wilderness.
QUIRMBACH: DNC members will vote for their party chair early next year.
For NPR News, I'm Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.
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