The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 24 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We just learned that Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, believes that Trump will rule as a dictator if elected president. Kelly also says the fascist label applies well to Trump, and that Trump has declared that he wants his generals to function as Hitler’s generals did. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris jumped on this news, citing it as the latest evidence that another Trump term poses a serious, perhaps existential, danger to America, which raises a question: Is there a way for Harris to translate this bombshell news and news like it into a strong closing message that can win where it counts in the swing states that will decide this election? If so, what does that look like? Today, we’re fortunate to be discussing all this with Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. He’s going to help us understand what to expect in his state, in the Rust Belt, or broadly in the race’s closing days. Thanks so much for coming on, Ben.
Ben Wikler: Great to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: John Kelly is now speaking out. He said Trump prefers the dictatorial form of government and that the term fascism applies to the former president. Kelly described fascism as a far-right authoritarian worldview that relies on forcible suppression of opposition, and said this fits Trump. Kelly also said that Trump has expressed the desire for generals like Hitler had. Here’s what Kamala Harris had to say about all this.
Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable. In a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there, and no longer be there to rein him in. So the bottom line is this: We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question, in 13 days, will be: What do the American people want?
Sargent: Ben, I’m guessing that a lot of Democrats in Wisconsin are really glad Harris just did that. Is that right? And if so, why is that, from the perspective of an operative on the ground?
Wikler: This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.
Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.
Sargent: Right now, the 538 polling averages have Harris up 0.4 points in the state. [It] couldn’t be closer. You often say that this is Wisconsin being Wisconsin. It’s a 50-50 state. So who are these undecided voters? A small subset are Republican-leaning, maybe Republican. Characterize the whole pool for us if you could.
Wikler: One way of thinking about who these voters are is a deep dive that Craig Gilbert at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did, where he looked at the undecided voters across a whole bunch of polls connected by the Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin. He found that, of the undecided voters in Wisconsin, half were people who had voted Republican mostly in the past. Ten percent, one-fifth the number, had voted Democratic mostly in the past. And then four in 10 had been swing voters who’d voted sometimes Democratic, sometimes Republican. So there are many, many more Republican-leaning voters and true swing voters that there are Democrats thinking about defecting over to Trump. The question is, How do you close the sale to those voters in the final stretch?
The two pieces of that are: make clear that Harris will be a president for all Americans—she is someone who sees and respects everyone and is someone who’s basically can be accepted even by people who disagree with her about a number of policy issues—and then, on the other side of that equation, make clear that Trump is a manifested threat to the American system of government, to the idea of democracy, the life and livelihood of millions of people across the country. You have to remove Trump from the equation of acceptability, and make sure that Harris is in the big We of people who disagree on some things, but all believe in the idea of the flag and this being a free country. That’s why Harris was here with Liz Cheney. That’s why so much communication is around these basic questions of whether we should have freedom in America, which used to not be a question that was really in doubt. And that’s why this revelation is such a game changer.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about demographically who these undecided voters are. President Biden beat Trump in 2020 in Wisconsin in no small part by really running up better numbers than usual for Democrats in the suburbs around Milwaukee and Madison. We’re talking about Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties outside Milwaukee, Dane County outside Madison. Governor Tony Evers won in 2022 by getting more in those suburbs than Biden did. Where exactly is Harris right now in those areas? Where do you think Harris is right now—is she at Biden 2020 levels or Evers 2022 levels? How important is this, to your thinking, about winning?
Wikler: Waukesha County is the third-biggest county in the state. It is the biggest source of Republican votes, and it’s the third-biggest source of Democratic votes after Milwaukee and Madison. And Waukesha County has been moving toward Democrats ever since Trump came on the scene in 2016. We’ve had bigger shares in election after election. Right now, what we can see is high turnout from Waukesha County in the early vote and the absentee vote. The question that we don’t know—we have guesses, but we don’t know—is whether that early vote represents a surge in Republicans voting early or it represents a surge of people who are against Trump, who have maybe moved in the Democrats’ direction, who are voting early now to make sure Trump doesn’t win.
This feels more like 2020 in terms of the margin than 2022. And the reason that’s significant is that in 2022, Governor Evers run by 3.4 percentage points, which is more than five times the margin that Biden won in Wisconsin in 2020, which is 0.6 percentage points. This is, from what we can tell right now, looks more like a nail-biter. But the reality is if voters have decided that they cannot vote for Trump again, but we know that they voted in multiple elections recently and we think that they’ve been Republican, they will show up as increased Republican turnout in everyone’s models until the ballots are actually counted. Obviously it’s a secret ballot, we don’t know who’s voting how, but we can see the precinct level. If a precinct is moving blue, even in a very red county like Waukesha, that’s an indication that January 6, the affront and attacks on our democracy, and Dobbs, the attack on the freedom to make your own decisions about your own body—those two issues are the big new factors in our politics that can potentially spell doom for Trump’s presidency that have happened since the 2020 election.
What we can tell right now, it’s not like the bottom has fallen out anywhere of turnout. You can read these numbers as it’s going to be really close and both sides are going to have super high turnout or that there’s some crossover voting, which is part of how Evers won.
And I’ll say one last thing. It’s not just the suburbs that were very red. It’s also that Biden over-performed relative to what you’d expect from demographics and expect from 2016 in rural Wisconsin. Most Wisconsinites live in small towns or rural areas. Half the state lives in communities of 15,000 people or less. It’s not like Arizona where more than half the population lives in the Phoenix metropolitan area. This is a state where it is spread out all over Wisconsin and most people can see a water tower from their house. It’s not a state where most people live in skyscraping apartment buildings. Being able to find a few more Democrats in every 500-person town across the state can mean a statewide margin of victory. That’s what our organizing strategy focuses on doing. It’s turning out voters everywhere. And it’s part of what this communication can do. This kind of news can help people to perk up and say, This is different from other elections, it’s time to rally around the flag.
Sargent: I want to get to that stuff about rural Wisconsin in a second, but can you just finish telling us a little bit more about these suburban counties outside Milwaukee and Madison? Where are they right now? The other ones, not Waukesha.
Wikler: Yes. Waukesha as the biggest. Washington ... Well, I’ll go to Ozaukee. Ozaukee County used to be the reddest county in the state of Wisconsin. And that has changed. Ozaukee actually had the biggest swing from its reddest days to the present, and from 2012 to 2020 in the presidential race. Ozaukee County is now the home of the most expensive state Senate race in Wisconsin history, which is the 8th state Senate district. Jodi Habush Sinykin, who is a suburban attorney and mom and small business owner, is running against Duey Stroebel, who’s a very MAGA-, MAGA-, MAGA-candidate, the kind of guy who would get elected in a walk in old Ozaukee County. And he’s now facing the fight of his political life. That race could be a bellwether for what happens in suburban Wisconsin across the board and in the state across the board. And I would rather be us than them in this moment in that race.
Sargent: Really?
Wikler: Yes.
Sargent: That seems like a good sign. Am I wrong?
Wikler: I think you’re right. I would not trade places with the Trump campaign at all. It is tied, but there’s all these indicators on the ground that make me feel like we can pull this off. And it might be another four-in-the-morning final absentee ballot is counted decision for Wisconsin. But the things that I’d be worried about—some of the things we felt in 2016—just aren’t here right now. And the things that you look for—a surge of volunteer energy; massive crowds that are showing up for things; responses on doors where you’re hearing more about people who said they voted Republican in the past and now are voting Democratic than the reverse—are happening.
The fingertip senses that there’s a path here. And that, I find really energizing. I’m trying to not get my hopes up and burrow as deeply into every indicator as possible. There’s a lot of headwinds; the Republican Party has a massive propaganda apparatus, and they have finally gotten smart about asking people to vote early. No one should think that this is a reason to stand down. It’s do-everything-you-can time. But in a state where elections are statistically within the margin of error, we call them within the margin of effort. If you do everything in your power, you can pull off a victory.
Sargent: Washington and Dane counties. Tell us about those, would you?
Wikler: If you look at the WOW counties, it’s Waukesha County, the biggest, Ozaukee used to be the reddest and now is the one that’s moving blue the fastest, and then Washington County. Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington. Washington County is the most rural of the three WOW counties. It’s smaller than the other two WOW counties, but it has stayed really red. It is as red as can be. And yet, when you visit Washington County right now, the Democratic Party there has exploded in size. The amount of organizing energy and intensity there has gone up and up and up.
I’m not saying it’s going to be a purplish pink color on Election Day, but I am saying that Biden got 30.3 percent there. If we get 32, 33, that is a pathway to getting a statewide margin of victory that could potentially exceed the 1 percent mark, which, in Wisconsin, we call a landslide. More importantly, [that] is the point at which there’s no recount. There’s no opportunity for Trump to pull legal shenanigans and try to throw out legally valid ballots on the basis of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Sargent: Well, that would be nice, Ben. What about Dane?
Wikler: Dane can make a gigantic difference to the whole state. And we saw an explosion of early voting there yesterday. Milwaukee led the state with 12,000 early votes cast. Dane County had 11,419 early votes. And Waukesha County came in third with 11,229. Those were the three biggest counties on an early vote. Overall, we tripled the early vote number from 2022. And we went 20,000-something votes passed the early vote number from 2020, which is a very weird year.
It’s hard to benchmark against any of these because sometimes we’ve had a pandemic, sometimes it’s been a midterm, sometimes—we used to have before the 2020 election—there were six weeks of early voting so you didn’t have the same one-day explosion because different municipalities set up different amounts of time. But I think it’s clear that there’s high energy. People are tuned in. People are organizing. People are doing the work. It’s good news for democracy in any event that people are getting involved in the system, and it could be very good news for Democrats if we can pull this off.
Sargent: Let’s go to what you brought up earlier, which is rural Wisconsin. For Harris to win, she has to hold down Trump’s gains among noncollege whites—obviously a huge demographic in Wisconsin, maybe a larger percentage of vote in Wisconsin than either of the two other Rust Belt states that we’re talking about here, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But she’s also got to hold down Trump’s numbers among nonwhite working-class voters, where he’s making gains too, and then make up for whatever gains he makes in those areas by putting up big numbers in the WOW counties and Dane among suburban educated whites, particularly women, the voters we’ve been talking about. What levels do you need to hold Trump at among noncollege whites and nonwhites in order to win this thing? And how’s that looking?
Wikler: This is the key. In some ways, the difference between Wisconsin and some of the other battleground states is that we have a bigger share of non-college-educated white voters in Wisconsin than we do in any of the other battlegrounds. One TargetSmart measure in 2020 was that in Wisconsin, 62 percent of the electorate were white voters without a college degree, 58 percent in Michigan, 55 percent in Pennsylvania. Trump, nationally with these voters, had a 35-point margin. In Wisconsin in 2020, 16 points. So we way over-performed with these voters in Wisconsin, and we would have lost the state easily if we’d slipped a couple of points, because, again, more than half of the voters in Wisconsin are part of this demographic.
Now, white voters, without college or with college, are not a monolith. There’s a lot of different communities of a lot of different ethnic heritage, a lot of different cultures, religious beliefs. Urban density is a huge predictor of how people vote, but one thing I want to stress is there are lot of 3000-person towns where we got half the voter, we won by a percentage point, surrounded by even more genuinely rural areas where we wound up losing. There’s a fractal to population density. The more you zoom in, wherever there are more pockets of people, social trust is higher and Democrats do better. That’s very true across the state of Wisconsin. If we can hold that 16-point margin, or even close it a little bit, then that’s probably the ballgame for the state of Wisconsin.
And it’s very highly variable across polls. If you look at the cross tabs, generally speaking, it looks like we’re roughly holding. And if we were doing a little bit better than before, if you trust the polls—and I’m not sure I trust the polls on this—there’s significant losses among especially African American men and Latino men, and that’s being made up for by gains among white voters. The question is, Are all these things actually true or will they prove to be statistical artifacts? Are these the results of nonresponse bias? Are these results of poor weighting and samples and so forth? We’re operating in such small wobbles of statistical error at this point that really the only thing you can do is just determine to do everything you can to try to make a difference and move the needle. That includes amplifying things that affect what voters sees in the stakes.
Sargent: Absolutely. The Quinnipiac poll that you mentioned earlier has Harris at 39 percent among noncollege whites in Wisconsin. I’ve seen other polls that are around there. I got to think, if she can get to 30 ... if she’s really at 39 ... She wins if she can get to around 38, 39, 40 percent among those voters, right?
Wikler: I’d rather do a little bit better.
Sargent: Where do you want it?
Wikler: Sixteen-point difference means getting 42, 42 to 58. So I’d be a lot happier if I were in the 40-42 region than being in the 38-40 region.
Sargent: Where do you think it is right now from your experience?
Wikler: It’s probably just shy of where we were in 2020. [But] Harris’s advantage, among voters with college degrees, is slightly larger than it was in 2020. There’s going to be very high turnout, including of young people. There’s a lot of disputes about what’s going to happen with youth margins. But what I’ve seen in Wisconsin is young women especially voting in very high numbers with very large democratic margins across race and ethnicity and geography. That’s in part because Wisconsin had an abortion ban for 451 days. People experienced it and they do not want to go back to it.
What we’ve seen is that the issue of abortion and the question of reproductive freedom, it moves everybody, especially women, everywhere in our state. We saw this most vividly in the state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin in 2023. Janet Protasiewicz, who campaigned saying, I’m not going to prejudge any cases, but you should know, I think that this should be your decision, and Dan Kelly, the Trump-endorsed MAGA right-winger who was endorsed by far-right anti-abortion groups, were head-to-head, and Janet Protasiewicz won by an 11-point actual landslide, not just a Wisconsin landslide. And in polling after the election where we asked people what issue was most important to you, abortion was the number one issue; and Protasiewicz won 90 percent of the votes from people who said that abortion was their issue number one. It was a massive mobilizer and it didn’t generate a backlash countermobilization by foes of reproductive freedom.
It’s interesting because it goes against what had been conventional wisdom, which is that you win over some voters, but you wind up mobilizing some people on the other side. This question of whether the government should get involved in your most personal decisions is intensely personal and incendiary for a ton of people who do not want politicians putting their lives at risk if they have a pregnancy gone wrong or if they need to obtain an abortion and aren’t able to get one. And it doesn’t actually have the same mobilizing effect for the people who have been fighting to end Roe v. Wade for so long. They’re already going to vote. It’s already clear. They’re already Republican. But the people who thought that Roe v. Wade would never be overturned or an abortion amendment never come into place are Republicans who are now willing to switch parties or people who are nonvoters who are now willing to get involved in politics just to get their freedom back.
Those kinds of issues that are not already well-sorted into the partisan buckets, they’re few and far between in American politics. But in this moment, we see it in our testing and polling and state legislative races too, it’s the biggest persuasive issue. I can understand why. This is something that I think Republicans wish would go away, that they could hand-wave out of existence, but it’s not going anywhere until freedom is restored.
Sargent: It sounds like that and Trump’s authoritarian threats really are two of the biggest reasons you feel cautiously optimistic about this thing, right? Do you expect Harris to close out by really getting these Trump comments—the Hitler stuff, the fascism stuff, the ruling as a dictator—to everyone on their phone, in ads? How do you achieve saturation on this?
Wikler: I’d say that the three things are freedom, democracy, and opportunity. Harris has removed the huge anchor that is the economic argument [that] had been around Democrats’ neck in this election cycle. She’s now more trusted than Trump on economic issues by a lot of voters. The freedom argument really cuts against the Republicans. And then this question of democracy—Trump goes around saying Democrats are a threat to democracy, but having his own staff say that he’s literally a fascist and was admiring, saying that he wants his generals like Hitler’s ... For anyone who has even a crack open in their openness to new information about Trump and the stakes in the election, it is an overwhelming argument.
Our job now is to communicate that through every screen that glows, through every door knock, through every phone call that we can place, every text message we can send. We’re going to work with our volunteers to go back to people that they’ve contacted before, whose doors they knocked on, to do follow-up conversations in the final stretch. We’re going to do a ton of on-the-ground, person-to-person, face-to-face, and friend-to-friend organizing, and a huge air war where there’s ads everywhere, mail in people’s mailboxes. We want it to be omnipresent. For people that don’t like politics, find it stressful, don’t want to think about it, but do feel that it’s their obligation or their opportunity or responsibility to vote, we want to make sure that, as they walk into the polling place, they understand the stakes, that they have clear in their minds what it means if Trump gets back in, and what it can mean to restore their own freedom and open up economic opportunity and protect their vote and democracy if Harris wins.
If those things are in voters’ minds on Election Day, then the final set of undecided voters will break our way.
Sargent: Ben, it’s very persuasive. What exactly has to happen between now and Election Day in the most granular demographic terms possible for you to win? And one of the three biggest things that could go wrong that you worry about most, that keep you awake at night?
Wikler: I’ll start with the thing that could go wrong, which is: the Trump campaign has been saying everywhere that they know about hundreds of thousands of people who basically are MAGA, but they don’t vote. Their goal with their field programs, such as it is, is to get those folks to turn out. Republicans engage in voter suppression and mobilization for their side. We get involved in mobilization of our side and persuasion of the other side. Different strategies. And I would seek to persuade those voters that in fact they should vote for Harris this time and they certainly shouldn’t vote for Trump.
What we saw in 2016 and 2020 was a ton of people who were Republican-supporting voters, who hadn’t voted before or hadn’t voted much before, turn out [to] same-day register or cast ballots for Trump. People who were not in polls, not in the models. And Trump over-performed his predicted vote share and vote total by a dramatic margin, bigger in Wisconsin than anywhere else. The RealClearPolitics polling average was seven points off in Wisconsin both of those two years. And if that happens again, then this is not a close election unless Democrats are able to also over-perform and find tons of people to come out of the woodwork and cast ballots. So the question of, Is there a polling error? Is there a big block of people that are hidden Trump and or Harris voters?, is unknowable in a certain sense. We do everything we can to look for them, but it’s something that we don’t have a window onto. The only thing we can do is try to overshoot the mark. You take a 48-48 race—we’ve got to swing big, try to get a lot more voters than that to be ready for a situation where there’s an overwhelming surge of Trump voters who come out of the woodwork and cast ballots at the last second.
Now, if the polls are actually like 2012 and they’re underestimating Harris’s support, then I think we would also be glad that we swung for the fences because, in that scenario, we can win a majority in the state assembly with some seats to spare. We can win a slew of state Senate seats. We can win multiple U.S. House seats in Wisconsin, and Tammy Baldwin goes back to the U.S. Senate. And if this is happening across the country, then maybe we’re going back with a Democratic trifecta. So try to capture the upside as well as prepare for the downside.
What this means for us is we have to sweat the small stuff in every community across the state: in small towns and big towns and the countryside across Wisconsin, with white voters who did or didn’t go to college, with Hmong voters, with Native American voters, with Latino voters, with South Asian and voters from the Middle East, with African American voters. Every group ... with Ukrainian Wisconsinites, we want to make sure that they know the stakes for the country of their origin; and Polish Wisconsinites, which is a huge number of people, hundreds of thousands of folks, it means, with young people, understand[ing] what it means for their future, for older folks, recognize[ing] what Trump wants to do to Social Security and what he proposed in every single budget that he had.
For everyone who’s thinking about starting a family or loves someone who might be starting a family one day, understand what it would mean if your reproductive freedom is taken away by the federal government, and for everyone to understand what it means if our democracy collapses because a would-be dictator comes into office, empowered by the Supreme Court to break the law, with a vice president willing to violate his constitutional oath who appoints only pre-vetted Project 2025 people willing to carry out unconstitutional orders to establish a Trumpian dictatorship. Making all that vivid to those who are open to hearing about it, and making the case about straightforward pocketbook issues and reproductive freedom issues to folks who find it hard to believe the reality that Trump poses, this fascistic threat—all of those things at once might be just enough to win by a fraction of a percentage point.
That’s how we have to treat this election: that if we do everything, then we’ll win by a hair. And then the day after the election, we’ll find out if that all worked, if we overshot, or if God forbid, it didn’t work. At least we can wake up knowing we did everything in our power. The last thing we want is to wake up with any kind of regret for leaving a stone unturned. That’s the mission from here on out the last 13 days.
Sargent: Ben Wikler, it sure sounds like you’re planning to leave everything on the field, and all the people working with you do as well. Thanks so much for coming on with us today, man. What a great discussion.
Wikler: Thanks so much, Greg. Appreciate it. Let me just say, anyone who wants to help with all this, should go to wisdems.org/volunteer. You can phone bank from anywhere every day between now and the election. And then go to wisdoms.org/donate and then chip in a few bucks.
Sargent: Thank you so much, Ben.
Wikler: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.