Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
I’ve focused a lot on primaries this year, but from now until Election Day, I’m going to do my best to run interviews with candidates running in critical races up and down the ballot. We’ll raise money for candidates, too, in those races where we can have the biggest impact. Tonight, we turn to Wisconsin.
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If Democrats are going to flip and create sustainable majorities in purple states like Wisconsin, it’s going to be thanks to candidates like Ben Gruber.
Running for state Assembly in a rural district in the southernmost part of the state, Gruber is locked in an expensive, neck-and-neck race with six-term GOP incumbent, Assemblyman Todd Novak. Millions have been spent on the race already, speaks to the general national outrage with the political status quo, as well of Gruber’s uniqueness as a candidate.
In a populist moment filled with pseudo-populist politicians manufactured by consultants, Gruber has the intangibles that are impossible to fake. He’s a longtime first responder, game warden, and union leader, and has a withering yet plainspoken way of cutting through the bullshit of right-wing grievance politics. There’s none of the calculated caution or culture war virtue signaling endemic to so many swing Democrats, just a laser-like focus on the public interest.
I came away very impressed with Ben when we spoke on a live stream in May, and with less than a month until Election Day, I decided to check back in to see how the campaign was unfolding in a place where Democrats have struggled for years to attract voters. It was an incredibly candid conversation, packed with what could be instructional mantras for Democrats running in more rural regions.
The conversation below has lightly edited and condensed.
Progress Report: You won the primary uncontested in August. Where do you see the race now?
Ben Gruber: There’s been well over $2 million spent on this race alone, which is a lot for a state assembly race, and over $1.5 million of has come from the other side. They just have three billionaire donors that have funded the entire Republican Party in this state, and this is one of the seats where they have somebody that’s over-performed in the past, and they’re going to do everything they can to try and protect that. So people are just getting inundated with mailers and TV and digital and radio. So there’s just no opportunity to take your foot off the gas.
What are they spamming people with? Are they just calling you communist?
Yeah, it’s the Republican greatest hits. Despite the fact that I’ve been a law enforcement officer for a decade, including several recognitions for performance, they run “Ben Gruber is anti-law enforcement” ads, just untethered to truth and reality. They’ve run their favorite hit: transgender issues, transgender prisoner surgeries. Their hits against me are all “Ben Gruber is funding extremism,” because I donated $25 to the Kamala Harris campaign.
Their entire playbook right now is to just say it over and over again and inundate people with deceit and discrepancy, and hope that it’s enough to motivate their base and try to convince people yet again that it’s the fault of three trans kids that they’re closing schools and police departments and people can’t afford groceries and gas, and hope that people will ignore the fact that incumbent Republicans have been stealing from our communities and giving to billionaires for decades.
What are the things you’re finding people angriest about? I know you post a lot on data centers, among other things...
We had a $2 billion corporate welfare giveaway to data centers in our last state budget here. And I think that the center of the anger is just straight-up neglecting our communities and blatant corruption and giveaways to billionaires. It makes our life unaffordable. People are struggling to get health care, and the state legislature is giving money to private schools and data centers that really should be working in our communities. It’s always some form or another of that message.
Do you find that people are engaged more than they have been in the past, or they’re willing to think about voting differently?
I do. I think there’s a little bit of an awakening. And I don’t know that it’s Republicans that now want to vote for Democrats. I wouldn’t say that we’re there, but what I do see is just an overwhelming anger at incumbents and political parties and systems in general, to where people want change. I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot of appetite in rural Wisconsin for a Democratic wave, but there’s a lot of appetite for a change wave, and people want something different.
How do you convince people that the Democrats represent something different?
Quite frankly, I don’t. I’m running against a 12-year incumbent, and I’m not out there trying to sell the Democrat Party. I’m out there trying to sell Ben Gruber as somebody who served our community, and that’s the change that we need. And I think it then lies upon people who get elected as Democrats to step up and do good things, to bring forth meaningful legislation that impacts people’s lives in a positive way. And then you can go out and sell the message that that party is working for you. I don’t know that we can do that without having a record to look back on.
But right now, the incumbents and the Republicans control so much of the bad stuff that is happening. That’s what we’re running against.
Do you think, should Democrats take the state trifecta, you’ll be able to get enough done to convince people of that?
It’s going to be an uphill battle, no doubt. The winds that we have to push against, and the bad things that have been done by the Trump administration and by the Republican administrations and state legislators here in Wisconsin for a decade and a half — it’s going to be difficult to fix in two years. So that’s where we need people with leadership skills who can communicate that and show people that we’re making progress. I’m not going to sit here and tell anybody that it’s going to be easy. It’s going to be a real uphill battle to come back with enough results in two years to convince people that things are going in the right direction.
What are the things that you’d prioritize most in the legislature?
Public school funding has got to be a day-one priority. We’ve underfunded especially rural public schools in favor of private voucher schools in Madison and Milwaukee. And people’s property taxes are going up at a time when they can’t afford gas and groceries. We have got to stop that. And then the second has got to be community funding. Shared revenue here in Wisconsin has been a longstanding promise that was supposed to keep rural property taxes down in farming communities. And the Republicans have cut shared revenue, again, in favor of tax cuts for billionaires.
Does the school privatization stuff seem like it’s made a big difference, politically? Has it been people’s entry into politics, even if they’re more usually conservative?
I don’t know how many people that’s motivating. What I find a lot is that there’s a lack of knowledge out there amongst the public about how much money is being diverted from public schools to private voucher schools. It’s still pretty well hidden here. People are slowly learning about it as we have more and more referendums and failed referendums and schools closed.
But one thing that the Republican legislature has done a good job of is turning the blame back around and blaming our local school districts and school boards, in a real sleight-of-hand trick that hides the fact that in the last budget cycle of two years, they took $1.8 billion and gave it to private schools — that came from public taxpayer dollars. So they’ve been able to do that, and that’s something that, if we regain power in the legislature, we have to not only fix, but we have to be really forward-facing in how we message it.
Running in a rural district is difficult in some ways; it’s hard to knock doors, for example. As someone who’s running in a place where Democrats haven’t really competed for a long time, or haven’t really got the infrastructure, what have you found to be effective campaign-wise?
My Assembly district covers two and a half counties, and it’s actually a larger landmass than Rhode Island. 59,000 people in this district, and it’s slightly larger than Rhode Island. So the challenges are incredibly unique, in that when we go door-knocking in our rural areas, we can’t see the next door. Sometimes it’s a one-, two-, three-mile drive in between doors we’re going to knock. The driveways are often over half-a-mile. So relational organizing has been just really important.
That’s where I think my union president and union organizer experience has really paid off. Just convincing people that we’re going to offer a different brand of politics, a different brand of leadership, but we need their help to get it across the finish line. Asking people to host events in their farm shop, tailgate town halls where we’ll go to a cul-de-sac or a barnyard and we’ll drop the tailgate on the pickup truck and we’ll have a town hall with five people. “Call your friends and neighbors, and we’ll be there.”
Relational organizing and social media to some extent has been helpful, but really it’s just convincing people that they’re part of the team, and talking to their friends and neighbors and families is what’s going to push it across the finish line. And I think that’s where we found our success and really hit our stride.
Are people skeptical of that? Politics has been so tribal and alienating. How do you convince them they’re part of it?
When people say, “I don’t want to talk about politics,” or “It’s uncomfortable to talk about politics,” I say, “That’s great. I’m not asking you to talk about politics. What I want you to talk about is impacts.” Don’t make it partisan. When people say they don’t want to talk about politics, what they don’t want to talk about is partisan politics. But when we ask people to talk about impacts to their neighbors and impacts to their farm and impacts to the land that their family has owned for generations, and when their neighbors had to do a brat fry to pay for their kids’ cancer treatments, these are all things people are willing to talk about.
They just don’t want to talk about Republican or Democrat. They don’t want to talk partisan politics, and helping people make that distinction has been really important. When you run in a rural community like this, you have to be grounded in the reality of the district and you have to have roots in the district. People have to know you or know somebody who knows you before you show up and start spouting that stuff. And that’s where we’ve been able to connect.
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