Democratic Field Grows in 1st Congressional District Election

Democrat Gage Stills, right, meets with voters and a recent event for his 1st Congressional District campaign. (Stills Congressional Campaign photo)

The number of Democrats hoping to represent the party in the 2026 race for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District has grown to three, all from Racine County and all positioning themselves as working-class candidates who contrast sharply with the incumbent.

Gage Stills, a 25-year-old community activist, said he comes to the race with “a strong working-class perspective on things, and I know what a lot of these families are going through — I’ve lived it.”

Stills said Friday that he launched his campaign in mid-July, running “under the radar” without a mass media announcement but with a campaign website and a Tik-Tok account to which he posts videos once a week.

That made him the second entry into the Democratic field for the 1st District, following Randy Bryce, who ran and lost in 2018 and announced May 20 he would try again. A third Democrat, nurse Mitchell Berman, entered the race August 12.

Each of the three are seeking the Democratic nomination to run against U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville), the incumbent now in his fourth term.

In an interview, Stills described his upbringing as one of a family “living paycheck to paycheck and not entirely certain where the next meal is going to come from.”

Even in those circumstances, however, he added, “My parents, they took good care of me and they raised me right and they raised me to care about the world and care about people.”

Stills said that “a big factor” in his decision to run was “the One Big Beautiful Bill and how much it does to hurt the working class and how much it does to hurt folks who are in the lower middle class.”

The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is what Trump and the legislation’s GOP backers dubbed the mega-bill that extended tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term in 2017. The legislation, which Trump signed on July 4, also made significant cuts to Medicaid and federal food assistance and rolled back clean energy tax breaks that Congress and then-President Joe Biden enacted in 2022, among a number of other provisions.

Stills said Trump’s policies that ramped up the deployment of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers with arrests that have swept up immigrants, a number of whom were legally authorized to be in the U.S., were an additional factor in his decision.

“I have a lot of family who are Hispanic,” Stills said. “Some of my family members have married immigrants, and they came here legally, but you know, that’s not entirely guaranteed protection these days.”

He said his upbringing led him to believe “that it doesn’t make sense to complain if I’m not going to get in there and try to do the work.”

Stills said he as a cybersecurity analyst after working for about five months as a state corrections officer and before that in retail sales. He said he was active in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Racine in 2020 and has volunteered with local environmental organizations and at a community homeless shelter.

The race for Congress is his first time running for a political office. While he acknowledged some voters might be wary, he said that he has “no political ties to anybody. I don’t owe anything to any corporation” — making him a fresh face that voters would appreciate.

“I think for too long we’ve seen politicians that, sure they’ve held political office, but they don’t use that office to help the people,” Stills said.

Steil is a corporate lawyer who previously worked as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Janesville Republican who represented the 1st District for 20 years after he was first elected in 1998.

Steil won his first term in 2018, defeating Bryce by a 12-point margin, and won subsequent races with a similar spread.

Stills said he believes he can overcome that gap. “I plan on speaking to the people’s needs,” he said.

While he didn’t attend a listening session that Steil held July 31 at which many constituents directed angry comments to the congressman, Stills said he followed news accounts of the event.

The people who attended “raised valuable concerns that it seemed that he just tried to brush off, or blame on Biden, which doesn’t work anymore,” Stills said.

“We know the votes that he’s casting,” he said of Steil. “We know that they’re not for us. And I think that the people are waking up to that.”

Stills said he wants to aim his message to people all across the political spectrum — left, center and right alike.

“I think that more and more people are going to look for an alternative,” he said. “I think that alternative should be a voice that speaks for them, that comes from the same place as them, a working class perspective.”

Democratic field grows in 2026 contest for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.