Greetings all. Sending along the recording of my live talk from earlier today with Devin Remiker, Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. This is an important conversation for many reasons and I hope you will watch or listen as soon as you can.
Today Hopium is launching a “Winning Wisconsin” campaign to help raise $250,000 for our gubernatorial candidate David Crowley and the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Simply, this community has invested a lot in Wisconsin these past few years and now we must finish the job by working to elect David Crowley Governor and flip the state house and state senate. It will get us a trifecta and finally, and fully, restore democracy to a state who had seen it taken away by illiberal, authoritarian Republicans. Contributions to Winning Wisconsin will be split evenly between David Crowley and the Wisconsin Democrats.
This community provided enormous support for Janet Protasiewicz (2023) and **Susan Crawford **(2025) in their successful efforts to flip Republican held Supreme Court seats blue. **Protasiewicz’s win **gave us control of the state Supreme Court which allowed us to throw out the outrageous GOP gerrymander in 2024 that had made Wisconsin something other than a democracy. Those new maps, even in a year VP Harris lost Wisconsin, allowed us to gain 4 state Senate and 10 state Assembly seats in 2024 (Hopium put a $150,000 into this effort). This year we need to flip 2 more Senate seats and 5 more Assembly seats to flip both chambers. Given the far more favorable climate this is a doable thing and we just have to go for it people!
To complete the trifecta we also need to elect David Crowley governor. Despite a very challenging primary, and unprecedented spending by his GOP opponent election-denier Rep. Tom Tiffany, Crowley leads in all three general election polls we’ve seen so far:
Learn a bit about David through a video ad from when he first launched his campaign:
Here is how Devin told the inspiring story of how we got to the point where winning it all this year in Wisconsin was possible. It is one of the best examples there is of what a strong state party can do:
Absolutely. I’d like to start by going back to 2017. In the wake of the shock victory of Donald Trump in Wisconsin and in states across the country, Wisconsin was in a pretty dire place. Republicans controlled our Supreme Court, controlled almost every statewide office — with the exception of the good U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, and a secretary of state they’d stripped entirely of any sort of power when they seized the trifecta in 2010. They had borderline supermajorities in both legislative chambers after implementing one of the most aggressive gerrymanders in the entire nation, according to one study from Harvard. Starting that year, we made a commitment at the state party to organize year-round. To build off the same model Obama used with Organizing for America, to build neighborhood teams that could help make change and talk to voters all across the state. In 2018, we swept the statewide constitutional offices, we won our first legislative seat since the Republican gerrymander had been put in place. Through the years since then we notched victories in the Supreme Court, which ultimately resulted in the rigged maps being struck down at the state legislative level, and opened up the opportunity that we have this year —
which is to win a Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin for the first time in almost two decades.This is really what all of the work, all of the support we’re extremely grateful for has led up to, this opportunity. Most of what [fmr. Gov.] Scott Walker has done to our state is still on the books — whether it’s the anti-worker policies, the way he tried to stack the deck electorally by making voter registration more difficult and curtailing early voting. All of that is still the law of the land in Wisconsin. We’ve had a fantastic governor, Tony Evers, who’s wielded a mighty veto pen to stop things from getting worse. But with the trifecta, we would actually be able to tear down [Scott Walker’s] legacy brick by brick and move Wisconsin forward to build something better.
In the coming weeks we are also going to hear from David Crowley and the two state legislative leaders leading the fight to flip their chambers, Greta Neubauer, Minority Leader of Wisconsin State Assembly (left), and Dianne Hesselbein, Minority Leader of Wisconsin Senate (right).
Finally, I asked Devin to talk about where our money would go, and how the state party works with the state legislative leaders. Here is some of what he said:
In Wisconsin, things are a little bit different than in some states — we run this coordinated campaign out of the state party, and that’s true of many states across the country. But something we uniquely do is try to raise the resources through WisDems, to ensure we’re able to fund it so candidates can focus on running their races and communicating about what they'll do for Wisconsin, rather than needing to fund the coordinated campaign themselves. Which means the more we’re able to take on that burden… it makes a really substantial difference to their ability to communicate to voters across the state. Meanwhile, us, having supported that year-round organizing work, means that since 2017 until now, there has not been a year, a day, a month where we’ve not had staff organizing folks across Wisconsin.
Enjoy this interview with the leader of the one of best state parties in the country, Devin Remiker, hit like so more will see it, share it with others, and keep working hard all. For we have a country to save, and elections like these ones in Wisconsin to win all across the country, together - Simon
Devin Remiker was elected the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in June of 2025. He is a lifelong Wisconsinite, born and raised in Two Rivers, and a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. Over the past decade, he has been at the heart of some of the most important political fights in Wisconsin, working tirelessly to make our state stronger. He believes that by organizing, empowering, and engaging grassroots leaders in every corner of the state, Wisconsin Democrats can meet this moment and win.
Devin began his career in politics working for the campaign of State Representative Steve Doyle, before managing a successful campaign for La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat. He then joined Congressman Ron Kind’s campaign in 2014 while still in college. After graduating, he continued working for Ron Kind, also leading the State Senate Democratic Caucus’ field operation in 2016, before returning to Kind’s campaign and serving as his campaign manager until he joined WisDems as political director in 2018.
In 2020, when the world ground to a halt mere weeks before Wisconsin’s critical Supreme Court race, Devin engineered the party’s vote-by-mail program, which became known as the “pandemic playbook,” which other states and the Biden campaign adopted.
After Wisconsin helped elect President Joe Biden, Devin played a crucial role in defending Biden’s victory during the recount and resisting efforts to overturn the will of Wisconsin voters. He then became WisDems Executive Director, guiding the party out of the pandemic and back to in-person organizing. Under his leadership, Democrats re-elected Governor Tony Evers in 2022—the first time since 1962 that Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor while Democrats held the White House. That same cycle, the party launched the “Save the Veto” campaign and made unprecedented investments to support Mandela Barnes’ 2022 U.S. Senate bid.
In 2023, under Devin’s leadership, the party helped elect Justice Janet Protasiewicz with record-breaking financial support and an unprecedented organizing effort for a spring election. When Republicans, led by Robin Vos, threatened to impeach the newly elected Justice, Devin quickly organized and led the Defend Justice initiative, ultimately forcing Vos to back down.
In 2024, Devin served as a Senior Advisor to the Biden-Harris and later Harris-Walz presidential campaigns, helping build the largest campaign effort Wisconsin had ever seen. Against the odds, Wisconsin remained the closest battleground state and defied the national red wave. Devin went on to lead the WisDems’ People v. Musk campaign, generating grassroots pushback and a wave of earned media against the flood of Elon Musk–backed dark money targeting the state.
Devin has been instrumental in building WisDems’ organizing program, which is considered the gold standard among state parties nationwide. Throughout his career, he’s never backed down from tough fights. He knows how to build coalitions, empower teams, and craft winning strategies.
Devin lives outside Reedsburg with his wife, Emma, and their two pugs, Wilbur and Francis.
