‘Iron Stache’ Randy Bryce Seeks Rematch Against Rep. Bryan Steil
Democrat lost to Republican in 2018; Steil has held 1st District since then.
Randy Bryce in a still from the video for his 2026 Congressional campaign. (Bryce campaign photo)
Randy Bryce, the former iron worker who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Wisconsin’s First District in 2018, is taking another shot at the seat, focusing again on a pitch for voters to send an everyday worker to Washington.
Bryce announced Tuesday he would seek the Democratic nomination to run against Republican incumbent Bryan Steil in 2026.
Bryce said he expects the top issues in the race to be preserving Social Security and other safety net programs, resisting President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs and attacks on immigrants and pushing back against the general climate of fear as Republicans enact the Trump agenda.
“I cannot sit and just watch this happen,” Bryce said in an interview Monday. “And with Trump it’s even worse now, with people literally being afraid.”
Bryce’s first 2026 campaign video, launched Tuesday morning, hearkens back to the 2018 campaign, when “one man stood up to Washington,” in the words of the opening narration. “He’s not a politician or a billionaire. He’s something much more rare in Congress, someone who actually works for a living.”
The video puts Trump and his policies front and center, and it depicts the 2026 campaign as finishing a job that Bryce began in his first run for the seat.
When the president’s image first appears, the narrator says, “as old enemies come out of the shadows…” A follow-up shot shows a welder — Bryce — in a darkened workshop, and the narrator says, “we need him one more time.”
“I’ve never left the job unfinished,” Bryce tells the camera. “For 20 years, I’ve helped build Wisconsin with these hands while they shipped our jobs overseas. I stayed right here fighting for working families. Trump promised to bring manufacturing back. Eight years later, we’re still waiting.”
Bryce made national headlines with the 2018 race — a campaign he launched the year before with the intention of running against the district’s 20-year incumbent, then-U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan.
Ryan, who by then was U.S. House Speaker, unexpectedly declined to run for an 11th term however. Since then Bryce has claimed credit for having “chased Paul Ryan out.”
Steil, a corporate lawyer who was once a Ryan congressional aide, ran in Ryan’s place after handily overcoming five primary election challengers.
Bryce’s campaign was widely seen as energetic and novel for the district, which has been in Republican hands since the 1994 election. With the exception of Rob Zerban in 2012, Ryan’s Democratic challengers since 2004 garnered only about a third of voters, ranging from 30% to 37%. In 2018, Bryce finished with 42%. Since that election, Democrats have cleared from 40% to 45% in the 1st CD.
Since that campaign Bryce has headlined a fundraising operation raising money for progressive political candidates, many of them with working-class backgrounds akin to his.
Bryce is entering the 2026 campaign midway through the first year of a Trump term. Progressive and Democratic Party groups who asked if he would run again pointed out that his last campaign had roughly the same timing in Trump’s first term, Bryce told the Wisconsin Examiner, and the decision to run has “been gradually building.”
Cuts to the Veterans Administration is another issue that helped push him to run, said Bryce, a U.S. Army veteran. The agency is one of several that have been disrupted by the DOGE operation (the “Department of Government Efficiency,” although it is not an official U.S. government department) that until recently was run by billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk.
The campaign video plays up Bryce’s longtime social media nickname, “IronStache” — trading on the thick mustache he has sported for decades. While it shows flashes of Steil’s face and includes snippets of voters who are criticizing the incumbent, neither the narration nor Bryce mention the incumbent by name.
In the interview, Bryce said in addition to working with the union and grassroots progressive groups that rallied behind him in his first race, he would make an appeal to disaffected Trump voters who are being harmed by current federal policies.
“I want to go places where Democrats normally haven’t gone,” he said. “I want to bring more people together.”
Steil is “listening to his leadership [in Congress] and his donors, he’s not listening to the people that voted for him,” Bryce charged. “And he’s not doing anything to stand up to Trump. The Constitution was drawn up to stop somebody like Trump. But Congress isn’t doing their job. They’re helping enable whatever Trump wants to go on.”
In Wisconsin’s 1st CD, ‘IronStache’ Bryce decides to seek a rematch in 2026 was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.
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