3rd Congressional District Democrats say they’ll represent regular people better than Van Orden

In the six years since U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden first entered Wisconsin’s political landscape, Democrats have often run against the Prairie du Chien Republican by pointing to his long list of perceived character flaws. 

The multiple instances of yelling at teenagers, attending the protest that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the gun he brought to the airport, tirades against constituents, the hundreds of tweets he sends every week, lying to the press that he didn’t vote to cut Medicaid. Just this week, he’s made online posts calling Palestinians “unrepentant savages” and said a pro-Palestinian protester in New York should “catch a 5.56 with his face,” referring to a type of ammunition commonly used by the military and in AR-15 style weapons. 

Van Orden has also refused to debate his Democratic opponents and has never appeared for an in-person town hall with constituents. People and local government officials in the district complain that he’s difficult to reach for help on local issues — and often openly antagonistic when the people asking for help are Democrats.

Those objections to Van Orden’s temperament are motivating to the Democratic base of the 3rd Congressional District. At the No Kings rally in La Crosse in late March, just the mention of Van Orden was met by one attendee with a fart noise.  

But since Van Orden won the seat following Democrat Ron Kind’s 2022 retirement, those character complaints have not been enough. After losing to Kind in 2020, Van Orden defeated state Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) in 2022 and former nonprofit leader Rebecca Cooke in 2024. 

Van Orden’s seat is once again a national priority for a Democratic Party trying to win back a House majority. Running in the Democratic primary Aug. 11 to unseat him is Cooke and former Eau Claire City Council President Emily Berge. Former Ho-Chunk legislator Rodney Rave had been running for the nomination but dropped out of the race and endorsed Berge last week. 

Both women told the Wisconsin Examiner that they believe the key to winning over Wisconsin’s swingiest congressional district is persuading voters they will do the work to show up for the people of western Wisconsin. 

‘Pragmatic’ or ‘bold change’?

“You can’t just be pointing out why the other side is bad. I think it has to also be like, if Democrats win back the House, if I’m able to flip this seat, what are we going to do differently?” Cooke said. “So talking about what I intend to do in Congress versus just what the failures of Derrick Van Orden, I think is what people are really looking for in what feels like a very hopeless time for a lot of people.”

To instill hope for a future without Van Orden, “I’m talking about the ideas, and policy that I’ve heard, frankly, from voters in this district,” Cooke said.

Berge said that since he was first elected, Van Orden has become increasingly difficult to work with. She pointed to a conversation she had with him about housing and homelessness in Eau Claire a week before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term last January. Van Orden “just yelled and he blamed,” she said.

“What I’m telling people is that we can make change, we just have to elect people that are focused on the voters, we have to elect people that want to bring people together, and to actually create real change,” Berge said. “I am in these small rural towns and cities and villages, and people are showing up like they are ready for a representative to show up and to hear what they have to say and to understand what they’re going through, and that’s different right now.”

The two candidates have identified similar issues as the largest problems facing residents of the district — most notably access to healthcare and the increasing cost of housing, groceries and childcare. Cooke, who calls herself a centrist, tends to propose more moderate ideas than Berge. 

On healthcare, for example, Cooke wants to expand Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing while working to improve the insurance available to people under the Affordable Care Act. Berge has proposed making Medicare coverage available to all Americans.

“I think that having that kind of broad base of support is going to be helpful in moving things across the line within my own party, within the majority,” Cooke said. “But also I think having that pragmatism of how do we work across the aisle to actually get things done is something that I’ve talked about in all of my campaigns of being more of a centrist and wanting to actually move the ball forward.”

That entails finding “ways to build relationships within the House and even within the Senate to get things done,” she said. “I know that that’s going to be the goal of Democrats is to not just walk the walk when we have a majority this fall.” 

Berge said that rather than thinking about the issues on an ideological spectrum between conservative, moderate and liberal, she views them through the lens of class and the gap between the richest people and the poorest. 

“People want bold change,” Berge said. “It’s not left versus right or middle, it’s bottom versus up, and people are sick of it. You know, we have one billionaire, one billionaire in the 3rd Congressional District, and yet all these federal policies that make his life better.”

She didn’t name names, but John Menard, the home improvement retailer and an Eau Claire resident, is believed to be the district’s only billionaire.

“What about the other 749,000 people?” Berge said. “Like we all deserve a shot at a good life, and that’s the sentiment that people want. So, I don’t know how to categorize that, if that’s moderate, left or right, but it’s just what people want.”

Lopsided odds vs. winning record

Since Cooke announced last March that she’d be running again for Van Orden’s seat, she has been the Democratic front-runner. She’s been endorsed by national political figures including Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and is running with the support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

Cooke has also built a sizable fundraising operation. Despite a promise not to take corporate PAC money, she raised nearly $6.5 million in the most recent filing period — more than Van Orden. Berge, meanwhile, raised $565,000 for that same period. 

Cooke told the Examiner that her campaign’s recent internal polling shows she has a 46-point lead in the primary. An internal poll the campaign released in March, when it was still a three-way race, showed Cooke was favored by 43 points.

But Berge says that neither the money nor those out-of-state endorsers are registered to vote in the district, adding that she’s not afraid to push against the party’s establishment to stay in the race. 

“It’s this myth that whoever has the most money will win elections,” Berge said. “On one hand, people say let’s overturn Citizens United, and then the other hand they say, ‘well, we have to only support the person with the most money,’ but we need to support people that are showing up for people in local communities, and let the primary play out, and not put fingers, thumbs on the scale.”

Citizens United was a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found it is unconstitutional to place limits on the political spending of corporations and labor unions on the grounds that doing so violates the 1st Amendment. 

When voters in the primary head to the polls in August, they’ll be weighing if they should nominate Cooke — who previously lost the 2022 primary for the seat, won the 2024 primary but went on to lose that year to Van Orden. Berge said that on the trail, voters frequently mention Cooke’s 0-2 record as a concern. 

“That does come up as probably the number one thing that people say is that well, she’s lost twice, and that’s why they’re voting for me, because they appreciate I’ve been elected three times,” Berge said. 

But Cooke says that her loss to Van Orden by less than three percentage points, in a year in which the national political landscape favored Republicans, is an asset, not a flaw. 

“I don’t think there is any skepticism about electability,” she said. “I outperformed every Democrat on the ticket in 2024. I outperformed [Kamala] Harris by 9,000 votes, and I outperformed our senator, Tammy Baldwin, by 5,000 votes in this district. And so, in what was a red wave year to perform that well, I think we’re feeling really good about our chances this cycle.”