Ben Wikler

Benjamin McDonald Wikler (born February 3, 1981) is an American politician and the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since July 2019. He is a former Senior Advisor at MoveOn. Early life and education Ben Wikler grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where he cofounded The Yellow Press, a student-run newspaper. While a student, he won election to the student senate and launched Students United in Defense of Schools with Peter Koechley to demand increased school funding and succeeded in allowing students to elect a representative to the Madison School Board. He also organized protests against granting Coca-Cola exclusive access to Madison schools. During high school he also worked for Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Ed Garvey and on the first congressional campaign of now-Senator Tammy Baldwin. In 1999, he began attending Harvard University, where he studied economics. While a student, he cofounded the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) and the Harvard AIDS Coalition. He represented the SGAC at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on AIDS in New York City, the UN World Youth Forum in Senegal, and the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona. He also worked for economist Jeffrey Sachs and interned for Russ Feingold. He also served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy and contributed to The Onion. While at Harvard, he joined TeamFranken, a group of students who assisted Al Franken in writing his No. 1 bestseller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Wikler took a term off to help Franken "through every step of the process" of writing the book. "When I was staying with the Frankens [to finish the book], we'd get up around 10 or 11 and then work for fourteen or fifteen hours," he told an interviewer. "We'd stop only for meals and a little break before dinner. It was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating, because he's so funny. We were constantly cracking up."