Everybody's got a hot take on how American democracy is dying. Almost nobody has an actual plan to save it. This week, Rick Wilson sits down with Ben Wikler — the former Wisconsin Democratic Party chair who turned a purple-state battleground into a national model, and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy — to skip the hand-wringing and get straight to the blueprint. Because the authoritarian playbook Trump is running isn't magic. It's a system. And systems can be beaten by people who understand how they actually work.

Rick and Ben get into the real fight: the systemic threats hollowing out the guardrails, why Supreme Court reform has to be on the table, and the unglamorous grassroots work — local elections, state parties, showing up between the presidential years — that actually moves power. They map the road to a federal trifecta in 2028 and what it would take to finally rip out the rot that's rigged the whole system. It's not a doomscroll and it's not a fairy tale. It's a strategy — and a reminder that the people who built this mess are counting on you believing it can't be fixed. This is the conversation that proves them wrong.
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Ben Wikler is the former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Find his work at https://www.benwikler.com/, and follow him @benwikler.

Rick Wilson is on X @TheRickWilson, Bluesky @TheRickWilson.bsky.social, and Substack at therickwilson.substack.com.
More from LP at www.lincolnproject.us and on X @ProjectLincoln.

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How Democrats Actually Win It All Back by 2028

The Lincoln Project

How Democrats Actually Win It All Back by 2028