Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.
Thank you to everyone who tuned in last night for our live conversation with Ben Gruber, a Wisconsin legislative candidate who is a political star in the making precisely because he has no interest in being a political star. He offered so many key insights into how Democrats are perceived in rural America, what voters are truly thinking about, and how to deliver an authentic populism that can rewrite our political reality.
The whole conversation is above and I urge you to watch it. You can also read the write up and watch some clips below. This was the first of our new weekly series with key swing state legislative candidates, with much more to come.
Note: I need to hire a new contributor to expand our coverage at Progress Report, but paid subscriptions are tumbling and I need to reverse the slide to make it viable. Every new subscription (just $5!) and donation will get us closer to growing our reach and doing more impactful journalism.
When Ben Gruber knocks doors across the vast, rural expanse of Wisconsin that he’s running to represent in the state Assembly, he doesn’t immediately identify himself as a Democrat. The party affiliation isn’t something he’s trying to hide, per se, he’d just rather be seen as neighbor who understands the everyday challenges that people in his working class community face.
Plus, if he can get people talking about their problems, like how much they pay for health care or the funding gaps facing their public schools, it’s much less likely that loyal Fox News viewers are going to warn him off their porch upon learning about the D next to his name.
There were two such abbreviated exchanges over the course of the 80 or so doors he knocked on Tuesday evening, though Gruber, who grew up and spent most of his life in these small towns, knew how to keep the temperature down.
“I don’t have to change everybody’s mind,” Gruber told Progress Report, “but I tell them on the way out the door, ‘Hey, when I’m in office, this conversation doesn’t mean that I won’t work for you.’ So feel free to reach out.’”
Gruber knows how to talk to Republicans in part because he used to be one. Not that he was particularly engaged or ideological; it was just something he inherited from his parents, the default for his sliver of southwest Wisconsin. Now, he’s running to represent the state’s 51st Assembly district on a pro-worker, pro-freedom progressive platform, aiming to flip a swing seat in a swing state that couldn’t be more essential to Democrats, especially in the ongoing redistricting war.
Democrats have to flip five seats to take control of the Assembly, and if they can flip Gruber’s district, they’ll be on pace to get it done.
Ben Gruber is not a professional politician, has no burning desire to run a campaign, does not feel the pull of the spotlight in any way. Ironically, that also helps make him the sort of candidate that Democratic strategists might wish into existence.
Consider the aesthetics, with the thick salt and pepper beard, and the salt of the earth career journey, from a firefighter to farmer to conservation warden.
Then there’s the role as the local president of his union, a statewide chapter that he revived from the brink of oblivion through aggressive organizing and aggressive grievance filing.
Add in the ideological populism — the loathing of corporate welfare, disdain for corrupt billionaires, belief in public schools and public lands — and ability to inspire “anger and hope,” as he describes it, and you’ve got a prototype for this particular moment and the challenge of winning back voters who abandoned the party generations ago.
Critically — and here’s where he is different from so many Democrats, who obsess over messaging instead of actual policy — Gruber knows that it takes actual investment in people to win them over.
“Rather than asking people to believe in the Democratic Party again, we need Democrats who are going to go get shit done and show people why they should be believed in,” Gruber says. “The Republican Party will use every bit of its power and consolidate all the power it can to make their own lives better. And the Democratic Party seems to be willing to do everything in its power to not make anybody’s life worse.”
It’s hard to shake that perception, but the surge in the cost of living is giving the Democrats a once-in-a-generation opening with rural voters, he says — if they’re willing to stand up to Big Tech corporations that are building data centers, the politicians who offer them subsidies while shutting down schools and police stations, and the utility companies that are transferring the cost to working people.
The first inkling that Gruber wasn’t actually a conservative came in 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker and the new Republican trifecta triggered mass outrage by passing Act 10, the law that stripped public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain.
Working as a firefighter at the time, Gruber’s union was exempt from the devastating attack on organized labor. He wasn’t particularly involved with his local — the one meeting a year he attended happened to involve free beer — but he was gripped by a sudden sense of solidarity and anger over the attack on his brothers and sisters in the union.
As Wisconsinites swarmed Madison in protest, with upwards of 100,00 people occupying the capitol, Gruber found himself experiencing a minor crisis of political faith.
“I went, I don’t know if this is what I want,” Gruber remembered. “I started to question, like, what are my values? What do I actually value instead of what does my dad say?”
The transition was slow — Gruber still wasn’t particularly engaged in politics — and took another big step with Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016. He knew that he couldn’t align himself with such a crass grifter, but he also wasn’t all that keen on insiders and powerful familial dynasties, so he voted third party that year. In hindsight, he says, he’d have voted for Hillary Clinton, whose surprise loss in Wisconsin doomed her campaign.
For Gruber, it was becoming the president of the state’s AFSCME local for conservation wardens that finally pushed him towards the Democratic Party; along with rebuilding the union, Gruber also filed the lawsuit that has Act 10 on the verge of being struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His campaign for legislature mirrors the approach he took when rebuilding the union, which always centered on fighting, delivering, and solidarity.
“I didn’t go ask a hundred people to give me their [union] membership dues and join,” Gruber said. “We just went out and picked fights and made their lives better and showed them that we were going to stand up for them and that we’d be there when they needed us. And people went, I think I want to be part of that.”
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