The Democratic Civil War Is Raging — Except In This Swing-state Race

RICHLAND CENTER, Wis. — Rebecca Cooke is roaming the stalls of the Richland County Fair, territory that is familiar, but not always friendly. She’s a Democrat asking farmers and fairgoers alike for their votes in this Republican-leaning, third congressional district of Wisconsin.

Though she has been here before, there’s a sense of wariness — both from Cooke and the would-be constituents she talks to. She’s keenly aware that many people here have never supported a Democrat, and she tersely tells her staff to hang back as she introduces herself to voters. She knows when it isn’t worth lingering, quickly walking along to the next person when eye contact becomes minimal.

The breakthroughs come when she’s able to talk about growing up on a farm, like so many of the people at the fair.

When she approaches a family with children clad in orange shirts — the ones handed out to contestants in the cattle showing competition — the parents seem uninterested at first, barely raising their eyes from their burgers. But when Cooke starts asking questions about the children’s contest — “Are you showing beef or dairy cows?” — and shares her own experience with livestock competitions as a child, their body language loosens. More kids join the group.

Were you nervous, she asks their son, adding, “I know what show day feels like,” with a nod of recognition.

He shrugs, but is eager to show off his fourth-place ribbon, a glossy, baby pink memento of his accomplishment. He offers it to her — she can have it, he says — though she graciously declines.

Moments like this are central to Cooke’s campaign, reinforcing her argument that she can represent the district because she knows it from lived experience. The 38-year-old candidate is a sixth-generation Wisconsinite, child of a dairy farm family, a former small-business owner now working as a waitress when she’s not on the trail.

Cooke is running on kitchen-table issues, she says, including higher wages, better health care and addressing the rising cost of living. It seems like generic talking points for most Democratic candidates, with millions of Americans feeling mired in an affordability crisis and blaming President Donald Trump. But it’s potentially extra potent for someone who argues she has the experience to speak with real authenticity.

“My background is very much rooted in being a dairy farmer’s daughter, having raised animals, and watching my parents really struggle to be able to try to keep our farm amidst all the consolidation that happened with big agriculture,” she tells me as we drive back from Richland Center to Eau Claire, her home base.

But what’s most remarkable is the unusual coalition Cooke has assembled. In the run-up to her August primary, she earned support from figures as ideologically distinct as Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin on the left, and Matt Yglesias and the Blue Dog Coalition on the center.

At a moment when the Democratic Party is often defined by its internal divisions, Cooke has done the seemingly unthinkable — giving progressives and moderates something to jointly rally behind. If she can win in November, her candidacy could offer a blueprint for Democrats, particularly in the kind of purple districts that will determine whether they take power in 2026 and beyond.

Not that she’s interested in wading into the ideological debates of the party. She dismisses my suggestion that she could help resolve the Democratic civil war currently raging.

“It’s not about uniting the party. It’s about expanding the party,” she says. “A big tent Democrat to me means that a Democrat wins the third congressional district because we’re able to bring independents together. We’re able to bring lean-Republicans in and give something to people to believe in again.”

However high-minded that is, it’s also a strategy born out of electoral necessity: Trump has won this very purple district in each of the last three presidential elections, and she’s going to need to make inroads with his voters if she wants to win.

Cooke has come close before. She first ran for the seat in 2022, losing in the Democratic primary, and then made it to the general election in 2024 to challenge GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden. She lost to him by less than three points and outperformed both Baldwin and Kamala Harris in the district, giving her just enough hope for one last try.

The rematch with Van Orden, a MAGA loyalist who recently spoke at Trump’s GOP midterm convention despite the president’s rising unpopularity, will be hard fought. Money has poured in from all over the country, and the $25 million in post-primary ad spending already exceeds the 2024 contest. Both parties know this race will be crucial in helping determine whether Democrats flip the House.

Van Orden has charged Cooke, somewhat paradoxically, with being both too far left and too tied to the establishment. After college, she spent nearly a decade working in Democratic politics: first as a finance director for several congressional campaigns, and later setting up her own political consulting agency, Cooke Strategy LLC, where she worked on state and federal campaigns. She has also had a paid fellowship with a Washington-based think tank, the centrist Third Way. Van Orden has seized on her past political work to cast her as an operative pushed by the Washington elite rather than an actual member of the working class.

Cooke, of course, vehemently rejects those charges, and she points to her family history as well as the relatively modest income on her financial disclosures for backup.

But she is indeed thinking about how her party can rebound from recent defeats and persuade at least some voters who have consistently backed Republicans to join Democrats — and then stick with them.

“At the end of the day, we have to win majorities,” she says. “We have to focus on winning those majorities, and once we win those majorities, how are we going to legislate together to actually accomplish things to hold the House in 2028? I think that’s something that’s important too: How do you create a durable majority?”

Following a 3.5-hour drive back to Eau Claire from Richland County, Cooke heads to The Good Wives, a higher-end restaurant deceptively nestled within a strip mall.

She’s waitressed here since 2022. Back then she had just lost her first congressional race, the lease of the small retail store she ran was going up and she no longer wanted to be a boss. Waitressing had always been something she could return to throughout her life, since she was 16 years old, so she did just that. Today, she is wearing the same outfit she’s worn since 5 a.m., when she first hopped on the road to campaign, simply swapping out her brown boots for brown clogs.

Every Friday and Saturday she’s here, usually from around 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. for a shift that starts with sweeping the floors and rolling the hand towels in the bathroom. Behind the counter, huddled next to another server and bartender, there is no trace of the aspirational politician who was roaming the fairgrounds just hours ago. The only tell is from the people around her: A table of four middle-aged women whisper amongst themselves before asking if she’s the politician they’ve been seeing on TV, excitedly saying, “That’s the lady from the ads!”

“She’s not kidding when she says that she waitresses. She was literally our waitress, like a month or so ago,” says Nicole Homer-Lundgren, 44, a Cooke supporter I met at a different event, Eau Claire Fall Fest. “Our focus right now is being able to feed our people, being able to feed our families. I think Rebecca has a better understanding of that.”

In addition to squeezing in around 10 hours a week of waitressing while campaigning, Cooke’s financial picture is a bit of a hodgepodge. Her latest financial disclosure to the House lists $12,326.79 in waitressing income this year through July 14; the prior year, she made $18,900 from waitressing. Last year, she received $60,000 in income from Small Business Advisors LLC, a consulting company she set up to advise small businesses, but none this year. She also owns a small rental property that she’s used as an Airbnb, which makes her between $5,001 and $15,000 in income each year. And she’s reported paid fellowships from Third Way and the Pipeline Fund, a progressive organization that supports down-ballot candidates, though Cooke hasn’t been active with either of those organizations this year, her campaign says.

In the end, Cooke says, her finances remain strained. “I think I’m going to have a really hard time next month paying my mortgage, because everything’s sort of depleted at this point,” she says.

It is this side of Cooke that made her a promising candidate in Sanders’ eyes, says Faiz Shakir, a longtime senior adviser to the left-wing icon. When Sanders was in western Wisconsin for an event in early 2025, she passed along a note saying she wanted to attend but would be unable to because she was working, Shakir recalls. Sanders, intrigued by her day job, decided to visit her instead at The Good Wives. At that point, Cooke had yet to decide whether she’d run for office again, but Sanders told her that his door was open.

“He was very excited to see someone run for office who has the experience and the understanding of what struggling people are going through, people living paycheck to paycheck,” Shakir recalls. “In order to be a working-class candidate in Sen. Sanders’ mind, you have to really understand: What is your community going through?”

Like Sanders, many progressives across Wisconsin quickly rallied behind Cooke, though she ultimately faced a more spirited primary challenge from the left than expected.

Perhaps that should not be a surprise; Cooke makes it very clear that she does not consider herself a progressive.

“I am a moderate. I ran an ad last cycle of me standing in the middle of a road talking about how people in D.C. are either so far left or so far right,” she says. “I do not identify as a progressive.”

Her admiration for Sanders, she says, is because he is a politician still in touch with the working class — not that he is a leading member of the left. She doesn’t support universal student loan forgiveness or Medicare for All. And she certainly doesn’t agree with any comparisons to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was also a waitress before jumping into politics.

It wasn’t a fact she attempted to hide from Sanders, either. When she later visited Sanders in D.C. for his endorsement, his first question to her was whether she’d support Medicare for All. She said no, saying she didn’t find it a realistic goal though she did back an expansion of health care. She was not a candidate that checked all his boxes — he told her this himself — but decided she could be a valuable partner in reaching a similar goal: improving the life of working-class voters.

Cooke’s relationship with the Blue Dogs, meanwhile, starts with Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who is now co-chair of the caucus of moderate House Democrats. The two were already aware of each other during the 2022 cycle because of their similarities — moderate Democratic women of the same age running a campaign focusing on their working class background — and connected following Gluesenkamp’s win. The two became good friends soon after, and Gluesenkamp Perez convinced Cooke to run again in 2024.

For the Blue Dogs, Cooke was exactly what they were looking for: a “normal,” working-class moderate who had never held elected office, in the words of Phil Gardner, a senior adviser at Blue Dog Action. Gardner first flew out to Wisconsin back in 2023 to meet Cooke and decided she was the “real deal.” She became the first candidate the Blue Dog PAC endorsed in both the 2024 and 2026 cycle, even before Sanders’ endorsement made headlines.

“She does really represent what a lot of younger people, a lot of people in rural areas, a lot of people who work on their feet for a living don't see in the Democratic Party,” Gardner says.

Last year, Cooke was also among the featured guests at WelcomeFest, “the moderate Democrats’ Coachella,” where centrists argued the party needed to veer toward their wing after Democrats’ crushing 2024 defeat to Trump. In one panel discussion, Cooke made the case for courting voters no matter where they stood on the political spectrum. “I’ve always said that there’s no community too small or too red that we’re not showing up in,” she told the crowd.

It’s worth noting that some of Cooke’s economic proposals fit comfortably within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, strengthening union rights through the so-called PRO Act, capping out-of-pocket costs for essential drugs and aggressively enforcing antitrust laws.

Of course, Cooke rejects any ideological labels for these proposals. “Those aren’t progressive policies,” she says. “Those are just the right thing to do.” To her, they are common-sense responses to existing issues for voters, regardless of whether they’re Democrat or Republican: the notion that wages are not keeping up, health care is too expensive and large corporations have too much power.

But that framing, which has a populist tinge, may be what allows Cooke to bridge the Democratic Party’s ideological divide. She presents her positions as extensions of the life she has lived — on a dairy farm, in a small business, behind a restaurant counter — and the economic pressures she has seen up close. There’s something for both factions in the party: stronger unions and higher wages for progressives, and a more pragmatic approach to governing for moderates. It’s an approach that might also attract voters across the aisle, which is a particularly important task in a race as tight as hers.

“If the party is able to get to a place where we can have our differences of opinion, everybody has their voice, but we’re still able to work together and sort of talk through those things — I think that’s a very healthy place,” Gardner says. “But that will require people like Becca, who both sides of the equation view as a credible broker.”

If Cooke’s working-class experience has been essential to her story and campaign messaging, Van Orden is doing his best to chip away at that image.

He has pointed to her previous work on political campaigns and consulting to portray Cooke as a Democratic insider who is being pushed by the Washington ruling class. He has even given her a Trumpian nickname: “The Anointed One.”

“Rebecca Cooke is a professional political consultant that occasionally waits the table, and she understands that the profession that she has chosen from — really since she got on at college — is resoundingly despised by the people she’s saying that she wants to represent,” Van Orden told me. “She is a chameleon because she’ll say or do anything for personal political power.”

To further paint her as an elite, he’s also hammered on her “waterfront property” — to the point, Cooke had to come out and make a “Welcome to My Crib” style video of her home on Tainter Lake. The video shows her giving a tour of a small, rundown house with a peeling wood deck that leads to murky green water.

“This is very annoying to me because he’s acting like I’m some like rich chick,” she says. “Anybody that knows me knows the house I grew up in, the family that I’m from, where I live now.”

Cooke defends her most recent political fellowships, saying that they have all been projects anchored in understanding working-class candidates and voters — initiatives that, if anything, have helped her in her own race. As for the Small Business Advisors job, “It’s not like I made six figures or something doing that,” she says. “I’m still waitressing, and I’m still struggling to make ends meet.”

Perhaps more potentially damaging to her brand in a purple district, however, are Van Orden’s accusations of her being a socialist. He points to Sanders’ support for Cooke as evidence that she is tied to the more radical wing of the party. Here lies the double-edged sword of garnering wide appeal: The more factions Cooke brings into her coalition, the more ways her opponents have to recast her.

And Van Orden — who is a bit of a prolific poster on X, tagging Cooke multiple times a day — has jumped on the opportunity: In one AI-generated video, he has her depicted as a red duck in a DSA shirt, saying “I walk like DSA, talk like DSA. I am DSA, all the way.” In another, he reposts an image created by his campaign that shows photoshopped images of Cooke alongside prominent progressives like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Still, Van Orden may be playing defense in the race as Trump creates an increasingly hostile environment for Republican incumbents, particularly among farmers. While agriculture may not employ the largest number of people in the district, it is woven into the region’s social and economic fabric. Everyone knows someone who works on a farm or has a career built around beef or dairy production, from manufacturing to transportation.

And so Trump’s recent move to increase beef imports in a bid to lower rising food costs has stung many in Cooke’s district. The effort has drawn criticism from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, warning that cheaper foreign beef could undercut American producers.

It hasn’t been easy for Van Orden to be the loyal MAGA soldier: When rumors spread that Trump was planning to quadruple Argentine beef imports last October, he released a statement that both urged the administration to stand behind American farmers while also saying “I stand with this administration.”

“What the president is trying to do is balance taking care of our ranchers and farmers with consumers that don’t ranch or farm,” he reiterated in an interview.

As Van Orden tries to defend Trump’s economy, Cooke hopes to capitalize on voters’ frustration toward the administration as the cost of living continues to creep up. This, she has determined, is the winning message in the district and the best way to keep voters focused on their pocketbooks, rather than her party label.

She has also become adept at pitching her economic policies in ways that might be palatable to a conservative audience.

Take antitrust enforcement, which is largely progressive-coded: “The consolidation that’s happened in agriculture, I think that’s something everybody can come together on. That’s really pushed family farms and family producers out.”

Earlier in the day, as we’re driving back from the county fair, she looks out the window as large swaths of pasture and dairy barns pass by. Next to her is a steak sandwich wrapper from the Richland County Beef Producers, the very group of local farmers she says are being squeezed by major corporations.

Cooke’s theory is that the way to reach those voters is not to lecture them about what they should believe, but to show up in the places where they already are and talk to them about their lives.

Whether that is enough to overcome skepticism of the party label she carries won’t be clear until Election Day. But as Cooke sees it, building a durable Democratic majority begins with the same kind of work that she says has defined her campaign from the start.

“How do you win majorities?” she says. “You do it by one county fair at a time.”