As expected, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler on Sunday told the New York Times he’s making a bid to lead the national party, taking on Minnesota Dem chair Ken Martin, former Maryland Gov Martin O’Malley, and Jim Skoufis, a New York state senator nobody ever heard of.

“My platform in this race is unite, fight, win. Uniting starts not with recriminations but with reckoning and with curiosity and data. And then you use all that to inform the way that you fight the next battle,” Wikler said in the interview with the Times, who noted he did not answer a question about how much support he already has among the national party’s delegates. Kind of important as Martin claims he’s already wrangled 83 out of the 448 voting delegates for the February 1st chair election.

That said, Wikler probably isn’t too far behind O’Malley in name recognition given his profile and if you put it strictly in terms of Ws and Ls his record leading the party since 2019 is solid if not sterling. He couldn’t unseat piece of shit Senator Ron “RonAnon” Johnson in 2022 and obviously convicted felon President-Elect Trump flipped the Badger State back red this year, but those were both very narrow losses (in fact Wisconsin was Kamala Harris’s closest defeat). The wins include 2020 for Biden, successful defenses for Gov Tony Evers and Senator Tammy Baldwin, and, most significantly within Wisconsin, two state Supreme Court seats that flipped the bench from 5-2 conservative to 4-3 liberal, a new majority which broke the extreme GOP-rigged gerrymanders in the state legislature.

So Dems could do worse for a new captain at the helm. We’ve yet to hear the other guys make their cases to lead the party, but Wikler’s record – and age, at 43 – make it hard to argue against him.