Economic Populism

Can a Waitress Running on Economic Populism Beat a MAGA Republican Who Yells at Teens?

Rebecca Cooke has a chance to secure one of the biggest upsets of 2024 by defeating Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin.

Noah Lanard

Rebecca Cooke has spent many nights this year waiting tables during her race for Congress in a Wisconsin swing district. She is a 36-year-old service industry worker and nonprofit leader with a chance to secure an upset in a tight House race.

It’s not the typical profile for a future congressman. She has no personal fortune to self-fund her campaign or elected experience. But Cooke—running in a district that covers much of rural southwestern Wisconsin and includes the cities of Eau Claire and La Crosse—hopes a moderate version of Democratic populism can win back Trump voters.

“A big part of our identity and why I wanted to run for Congress is because I feel like there’s a lot of corporate monopolies that have really robbed us of our farming traditions, and that have really crippled a lot of our rural economy,” Cooke told me. She stressed the need for robust antitrust enforcement and supporting organized labor. “I like to tell people often that I’m progressive where it counts,” she said.

Cooke’s district leans Republican—but not by much. Trump carried the area by about 5 points. In 2022, Derrick Van Orden, a right-wing Republican and former Navy SEAL, won the seat after Ron Kind, the longtime moderate Democrat incumbent, announced his retirement. Cooke is now running to unseat Van Orden, who has quickly established a reputation for being one of Congress’ worst-behaved members.

Cooke is affiliated with the moderate Blue Dog wing of the party and has (literally) placed herself in the middle: In one ad, she stands in the center of a dirt road on her family’s farm and criticizes those who are “too far left” and “too far right.”

When I spoke to Cooke last month one of the first things she brought up about herself was that her parents had been forced to sell their cows when she was a kid because they couldn’t compete with big companies. It was a gutting development given that her family has farmed in the district for more than 150 years.

Cooke winning could play a major role in allowing Democrats to take back the House, where they need to flip four seats to regain a majority. It would also further establish that running young political outsiders like Cooke is a way for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning districts that have sometimes been considered out of reach.

Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, says Trump is expected to carry the district again. “I think it is very likely that Cooke will need a decent amount of ticket splitting to go in her favor in order to win the election,” he explained.

Cooke is not alone in adopting her combination of moderation and populism. Since 2022, the Blue Dogs have been taken over by a new generation led by Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska). The new Blue Dogs still take positions that anger some on the left like voting against a student debt relief bill because it didn’t do enough for blue collar workers. But they lean less towards the Chamber of Commerce and more towards emphasizing support for people in the trades.

Gluesenkamp Perez and Cooke are the same age and are also running against far-right Republicans who were once members of US special forces. Gluesenkamp Perez has a rematch against Joe Kent, the retired Green Beret she defeated in 2022 in what was perhaps the biggest upset of the last cycle.

The two millennial women have become friends and talk frequently. Cooke described Gluesenkamp Perez as an “incredible mentor.” The congresswoman has picked Cooke up at the airport when she’s come to DC and given her clothes. “Our districts are sort of similar,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “Rural. Family farms. People that care about American manufacturing. People in the trades. And, you know, she drives a shit box [car]. She’s great.”

Gluesenkamp Perez has little patience for parsing exactly how she and fellow Blue Dogs should be categorized ideologically. “The political spectrum is not real,” she told me. “It does not exist in nature. What does exist is our farms getting consolidated, seeing young farmers get priced out of land by Chinese investors, having big corporations tell us we can’t fix our own stuff, not being able to buy a pair of work boots that last more than six months.”

Gluesenkamp Perez said she and Cooke “are trying to build a body that is more representative of the normal experience of being an American today.” As she put it: “America is not made up of just lawyers, and the congressional body shouldn’t be.”

Kent and Van Orden, who was at the January 6 rally in Washington, DC, are similarly extreme but Van Orden is maybe the less likable of the two. “She’s running against a really weird dude. This insurrectionist Derrick Van Orden,” Gluesenkamp Perez said about her colleague in the House. “After I endorsed Becca, he shoulder-checked me on the floor.”

In March, Van Orden made news for yelling “lies” during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union. As I’ve written, it was only the latest in a string of embarrassing outbursts. Last year, Van Orden was criticized for yelling at a group of teenage Congressional pages for lying on the floor of the rotunda. Among the things he reportedly told them were:

“Wake the fuck up you little shits.”

“What the fuck are you all doing?”

“Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I don’t give a fuck who you are, get out.”

In 2021, while running for Congress, Van Orden yelled at another teenage page. In that case, the incident took place at the Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, library. Van Orden objected to a Pride Month-themed display—directing particular ire at the inclusion of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a satirical children’s book that imagines a world in which Mike Pence’s pet rabbit Marlon Bundo was gay. (Van Orden is the author of Book of Man: A Navy Seal’s Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood.)

When we spoke, Cooke said residents of the district are ready for a member of Congress who is “going to go out there and get shit done and not embarrass us.” But she mostly stuck to a more typically Wisconsin style of shading her opponent. “He lives on a hobby farm in the district,” Cooke noted, “and I think there’s some differences in the way in which we grew up.”

Cooke spent more time emphasizing her own priorities of defending women’s right to choose, keeping hospitals in the district open, lowering prescription drug prices, protecting family farms, and taking on powerful corporations.

“People are struggling to be able to pay their rent, to get gas at the gas pump, and go to the grocery store and have a little bit of money left over,” Cooke said. “I credit a lot of that to corporations that are price gouging consumers off the backs of their workforce. When you see record profits, that really means stolen wages.”