Wisconsin Democrats feel like the national party ignored winnable districts in 2022. This cycle, however, no one is leaving anything to chance.
The 3rd District — a competitive seat represented by the controversial Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden — landed on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list, which comes with money, attention and ad buys. That’s a big shift from 2022 — much to the relief of state operatives — when the Democratic candidate came within four points of winning, but the DCCC had all but abandoned the race.
“I think it was a mistake for national Dems to not get involved in 2022,” a Democratic operative in the state said about the 3rd District. Democrats throughout Wisconsin are “all really happy to see that time and money and attention this time,” they said. “Do we wish it came last time? For sure.”
DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene said in a press call last week that the group is “strongly supporting” Van Orden’s opponent, Rebecca Cooke, and the 3rd District “absolutely is a priority for us.”
The race has been tight from the start: Polling earlier this month from the House Majority PAC had Cooke leading Van Orden by two points and a poll from the DCCC before the Democratic primary had Van Orden a point behind a generic Democrat. The deputy director of communications for Wisconsin’s Democratic Party told NOTUS last month that 2022 was a “missed opportunity” and “there was sort of this hesitancy from national Democrats to get involved in a race that we thought would be really competitive.”
The district had been represented by Democrat Ron Kind for over two decades before his retirement in 2022. But as Democrats shed rural voters, the district trended toward former President Donald Trump in 2020, and national Democrats felt it was more trouble than it was worth to invest heavily in the district, Democrats in Wisconsin told NOTUS. National strategists even admit to that:
“One of the lessons is the [independent expenditure] world tends to ignore the rest of the ecosystem when they’re making these decisions” on where to put national Democratic money, “and I’m not saying that in a pejorative way. That’s just not their job. They’re looking at, ‘I have this amount of money to spend and this number of days to spend it, and how do I win the most races?’” a national Democratic strategist said.
The 2022 midterms went better than expected for Democrats overall, with the party keeping the Senate and making gains in the House, and the state operative acknowledged that was the real priority anyway. But it felt like the national party, at the time, underestimated what local advocates were repeatedly flagging: The district was competitive, and Democrats “could’ve been up a House seat, a Wisconsin House seat.”
Van Orden has since made headlines for his behavior — cursing at Biden administration briefers during a meeting about Israel, cursing at Senate pages and attending the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., prior to taking office (a trip he used campaign funds to pay for).
Van Orden is “a freshman, and he’s vulnerable, coming out of one of the most unproductive Congresses in our history. And I think that he hasn’t been doing any favors for himself with his behavior while he’s been in Congress,” Cooke told NOTUS. “It’s his temperament that I think is going to be a real challenge for him to overcome.”
For his part, Van Orden said that he’s planning to focus on Cooke’s character. “Her entire campaign is based on being deceitful about her background, personal attacks on me and lies about my record,” he said, while questions about the influx of cash were met with pivoting to criticizing Cooke.
“We do our job. Our job is to tell the truth. We tell the truth about Rebecca Cooke,” he told NOTUS.
Not only is Wisconsin’s 3rd District getting a spotlight among Democrats, so too is the tougher 1st District, which is currently held by Rep. Bryan Steil. House Majority PAC announced last week an additional $400,000 in television reservations in La Crosse and Wausau media markets, after having spent millions in both districts earlier this year.
Steil told NOTUS that “the national Dems will always spend money. I’ll continue to go and defend my record.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee, on the face of it, said they remain confident about their odds this fall: “Wisconsin Democrats are in complete shambles, and they have nothing to show other than their failed recruits and abysmal hope of unseating Reps. Van Orden and Steil,” spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement to NOTUS.
Another difference for Democrats this round has been the engagement on the ground.
“Local-level organizing that has laid out their records, and frankly changed the baseline with which people are engaging in these races, has created an environment that invites national investment and makes that national investment impactful,” another national strategist said.
That type of organizing, the national strategist said, is the kind “that allows for someone who is in a windowless basement with very little data to be able to say, ‘Oh, there’s something going on there.’” And it’s the sort of organizing that can’t exist unless you’re battling an incumbent — which Wisconsin’s 3rd District didn’t have in 2022.
Steil’s district is a slightly different story from Van Orden’s — it looks different after 2022 redistricting than it did even a couple years ago, which plays a pretty big role in why Democrats are more optimistic about the race than in years prior.
The district’s Democratic candidate and former Rep. Peter Barca is well aware of it, too. “Where this seat was a plus-7% Republican district when Bryan Steil first won, it has [since] changed dramatically,” he told NOTUS. Barca came into office in a special election, but Republicans have held the district since he lost his reelection bid in 1995.
But the national investment, regardless of how it came about, “certainly does make a difference.
“It really calls attention to this race,” Barca said.
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Nuha Dolby is a reporter at NOTUS and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.