Three Democrats vie to take on Steil in Wisconsin’s 1st CD in Tuesday’s primary

The race among Democrats to pick a candidate to run in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District for 2026 grew to a record crowd.

The district stretches from Lake Michigan to South Central Wisconsin,  anchored by Racine, Kenosha, Beloit and Janesville. It has been in Republican hands for 32 years — 20 years represented by Paul Ryan, and since 2018 by U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a former Ryan aide and corporate lawyer.

Democrats have gone in virtually every direction in the last three decades in their efforts to recapture the seat — once reliably blue from the 1970s until 1994. For most of the races against Ryan, Democrats only rarely received more than one-third of the vote. Since Steil took over, the margins have been narrower, but still solidly in favor of the GOP.

Forecasts from national oddsmakers have so far kept it in the GOP column in 2026. The Cook Political Report rates the seat as “Likely Republican” — but hasn’t updated that assessment since February 2025.

Steil has amassed a sizable financial advantage, with nearly $5.5 million raised since January 2025 through the middle of July, the most recent Federal Election Commission data show.

Messages tie Steil to Trump

Despite those odds, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed Wisconsin’s 1st CD along with the 3rd CD among the group’s first targets to pick up this year.

Even before that announcement, the current cycle drew a record number of prospective Democratic candidates, with nine people over the last year and a half announcing their intention to run.

Three dropped out before the district’s Democratic convention in April, and two more failed to file nomination papers in June. That left four who filed enough signatures to make it to the ballot for the primary on Tuesday.

Since then, one — Milwaukee alder Peter Burgelis — has dropped out, although he remains on the ballot. Burgelis lives outside the district and was the last to enter, basing his candidacy on the premise that he would be able to raise more money than any of the others in the contest.

He abandoned his campaign after his fundraising report filed July 15 showed him far behind Mitchell Berman, the top fundraiser, and he urged his other 1st CD rivals to join him in backing Berman.

The three remaining Democrats — Berman, Miguel Aranda and Lorenzo Santos — have similar messages. All have focused on President Donald Trump, whose plummeting popularity has increased hopes that Democrats can regain a majority in the U.S. House in November.

They cite affordability, rising costs for healthcare, tariffs that have driven up consumer costs and dampened farm exports, and the attacks on immigrants and immigration enforcement that have led to confrontations and civilian deaths across the country.

All three portray Steil as out of touch with district residents despite his past success at the ballot box, and as a lawmaker who has enabled Trump’s agenda rather than standing up to him. Each argues that they can motivate broad support to score an upset in November.

At the same time, each has a distinctive biography and set of emphases in their campaigns.

Working class message

Of the Democrats on the ballot, Mitchell Berman, a rural Racine County nurse, has been in the race the longest. Berman declared his candidacy a year ago, on Aug. 12, 2025, and since then has garnered a number of endorsements, including from the United Auto Workers, which has a long heritage in the district. Democrats in the state Legislature from Kenosha, Milwaukee, Beloit and Janesville have also signed on to his campaign.

Of the Democrats, he has been the most successful fundraiser, with more than $700,000 in receipts as of this week, according to the FEC. The resources have enabled his campaign to staff up, printing yard signs and flyers and producing merch.

Berman centers his campaign argument on his working class identity, growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and the first person in his family to gain a college degree.

“A lot of the issues that we’re facing today are not Republican issues, they’re not Democratic issues. They are working class and middle class issues,” Berman told voters at a UAW hall in Janesville this week.

“We’re up against people who have no idea what it’s like for you and me to struggle through this economy that they’ve created while they’re sitting in Washington and enriching themselves,” he said.

Berman points to having to still pull emergency room shifts that have forced him to skip some joint candidate forums, such as one held in Kenosha in July.

“I’m a working class candidate, like in the true meaning of working class candidate — I’ve still got to work to pay the bills,” Berman said in an interview.

Healthcare is one of Berman’s chief talking points. Until he entered the race, he worked for the Veterans Administration health system, leaving only because the Hatch Act bars federal employees from political involvement. He says he decided to run because of Trump administration cuts to the VA during the DOGE  operation led by Elon Musk in the first half of 2025.

His immediate healthcare priorities would be to restore enhanced subsidies for  insurance policies purchased through the ACA marketplace and to reverse cuts to Medicaid that were part of the massive 2025 tax-cut and spending law. He said he also wants to see an ACA public option — a federal insurance plan that people could purchase through the marketplace.

Emergency services and military experience

Lorenzo Santos, the former Racine County emergency services manager, is the most recent of the three to have entered the primary race. An East Coast native, Santos served in the U.S. Navy, then took a job as an industrial sales manager. His territory included Wisconsin, and he settled in the state, then moved into the emergency services role after getting a degree in Homeland Security. He gave up the Racine County job in April after entering the congressional primary.

Santos previously ran in the 1st District primary in 2024, but left the field along with other Democratic hopefuls after former state Department of Revenue Secretary Peter Barca entered the race.

Barca was the last Democrat to hold the 1st District seat, losing it to a Republican after one term in the 1994 election that flipped the U.S. House from a Democratic majority to a Republican one.

Santos bases his pitch on his experience in both private and public sector positions as well as his military service.

“I understand the national implications. I understand the international implications. I understand the economic implications of what this administration is doing right now,” Santos told the audience during the July 17 Kenosha forum, organized by the activist group Hands Off Kenosha. In his closing, he said, “I’m ready to take the fight.”

Santos has taken positions that have a slightly harder edge than some of his rivals — Medicare for All to address healthcare, vociferously condemning the U.S. war with Iran and categorically rejecting data center development projects.

“I’ve heard overwhelmingly that our communities are opposed to them and not enough of our elected officials are standing with them on this issue,” Santos said in an interview.

Santos contrasted Berman’s healthcare positions with his own support for Medicare for All — which he called “the first bill that I think we should be putting into legislation” at the Kenosha forum.

Berman responds that it will be faster to implement the policies he has focused on such as the public option and restoring ACA subsidies and reversing Medicaid cuts.

“Being an emergency room nurse, I’m very pragmatic,” Berman said in an interview. “When someone comes into the hospital emergency room and they’re hemorrhaging, the first thing that we need to do is stop the hemorrhaging. And I think that right now is ensuring that people can afford to go to the doctor.”

On data centers, Berman told a questioner at the Janesville UAW hall that he wants to see regulatory guardrails, assurances that “they’re paying their own way” rather than saddling the public with costs for the energy they use, and that they don’t contribute to air or water pollution. “And also, I think communities ought to have a say on whether they come in or not,” he said.

University administrator and school board member

Miguel Aranda, a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater administrator, the third candidate, is frank about the shoestring campaign he’s running.

“There’s no consultants involved at this point,” he said at the Kenosha forum. “It’s almost a one- or two-man team doing all of this.”

 Aranda, who entered the race a few weeks after Berman, was born in the U.S. to parents who emigrated from Mexico.

He points out that he’s the only candidate in the primary who speaks fluent Spanish. That could give him an advantage, he has said, with the district’s growing Hispanic population.

“One of many reasons I put my name in was to really start cracking into that populace that usually doesn’t vote for primaries,” Aranda said in an interview.

A Whitewater school board member, Aranda has emphasized education as well as immigration reform in his campaign.

He is circumspect on some issues. Asked during the Kenosha forum how he would propose to fix the country’s healthcare problems, Aranda replied, “I don’t want to give people the false promise that that’s in the past if I were to win.”

Aranda said he supports Medicare for All, but also sees the pathway there as a complicated one that would include addressing public education funding and immigration reform.

Like Berman, Aranda is running while also holding down another job — which has made the effort tiring, he admitted in an interview.

“I tell people I’m going to go all the way to August, and after that we’ll see what happens,” Aranda told the Kenosha audience. “But you know, if I can’t fly, I’m gonna keep running. If I can’t run, I’m gonna keep walking, and if I can’t walk, I’m gonna keep crawling, and that’s what I want all of you to do.”