Cooke Seeks Rural Votes to Flip Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District

Democratic congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke and former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) appear at an agricultural policy roundtable event at the Eau Claire-area farm Cooke grew up on. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

At a roundtable on her family’s Eau Claire area farm last week with former Montana Sen. Jon Tester, Democrat Rebecca Cooke argued that if she’s elected to represent Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, she’ll take on the issues that have been plaguing rural America for decades and work to undo the Trump administration policies that are making those problems worse.

But Democrats all over the country, including in Wisconsin and the 3rd CD have had trouble winning rural support in the past.

“We need people who are willing to stand up and speak. I come from an area that in the 1960s was solid blue, and now it’s solid red,” Tester said at the roundtable. That political shift happened, he said, “because Democrats don’t show up.” Nowadays, he added, “Republicans take it for granted” that rural areas are mainly red. “So the opportunity here to help flip this situation around,” Tester said, “so we’ve got people in Washington D.C. that are working for us, everybody — not just rural America, but everybody — but making sure that rural America is at the table is really, really important.”

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Kind represented Wisconsin’s 3rd CD for decades. After his retirement, state Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska), the former state agriculture secretary, ran and lost to Derrick Van Orden in 2022. Cooke subsequently lost narrowly when she challenged Van Orden in 2024.

“Derrick Van Orden has put rural America squarely last,” Cooke said after the event on her family’s farm. “He’s voted time and again for the war in Iran six times that has increased diesel prices, increased fertilizer prices … Farmers here in the 3rd Congressional District are reeling from the impact of reciprocal tariffs on our soybeans and our cranberries, are struggling because of the increased input costs from diesel and fertilizer prices with this war in Iran. And Congress’s failure to expand the ACA tax credit premium for three more years has really hurt a lot of farmers, too. They have seen their premiums go up from $400 to $1,800 a month. Derrick Van Orden has not delivered a successful farm bill out of this Congress. I don’t think that he’s really done very much at all to support our family farms or people in agriculture across this district.”

This year, with the national environment fueling Democratic hopes for victories up and down the ticket in states across the country as President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit record lows, and diesel prices and tariffs on Canadian fertilizer hurt western Wisconsin farmers, Democrats are confident about their chances. The 3rd CD is at the top of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2026 targets. Both parties and a lineup of outside PACs have already spent nearly $30 million on the district with ads that have become increasingly negative.

Van Orden, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, has often brought a combative personality, a penchant for social media trolling and an eagerness to support Trump to his role. A member of the House agriculture committee, he’s touted his work on the farm bill and legislative efforts to change visa programs for immigrant dairy workers. A spokesperson for Van Orden did not respond to a request for comment.

At the Oct. 9 roundtable and during a Wisconsin Farmers Union town hall in Gays Mills the same day, area farmers said Van Orden has done little to help them or mischaracterized their problems while supporting large factory farms over the smaller family operations that define western Wisconsin’s cultural identity even as they struggle to make ends meet.

The group of farmers at the roundtable complained that it has gotten harder for them to get healthcare coverage and that the Trump administration’s cuts to food programs such as SNAP hurt farmers. They also said that Trump’s crackdown on immigration, which spilled over into western Wisconsin during Operation Metro Surge in the nearby Twin Cities, has hurt the labor they depend on. They also worried that a food system oriented toward giving the biggest players a leg up will hasten the destruction of their way of life.

“We can identify the problems, like we know what the issues are, right?” Cooke told the group. “And we need to have people that are solutions-oriented going into Congress. There is a lot of finger-pointing to be had because these are bad things that are happening, but we also need to think about how do we move forward.”

If elected, Cooke will be a first-year Democrat during a Republican presidency but she said she hopes to get assigned to the agriculture committee and that one of her first priorities would be establishing a “right to repair” — which would allow farmers to work on their own machinery rather than paying high prices for repairs at dealerships. She also said she wants to push for a farm bill that “caters to small, mid-size ag,” provide a pathway to citizenship for the district’s immigrant laborers, create a health insurance public option and to expand Medicare to cover vision and dental.

A Rebecca Cooke campaign sign sits in a front yard in Gay Mills. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

In the August primary election, Cooke defeated former Eau Claire City Council president Emily Berge by about 20 points in a contentious race that left some local party activists and voters embittered. Cooke has had to work to try to win those voters back.

Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, told the Wisconsin Examiner that a contentious general election with reams of negative ads can often help a candidate bring their team back together after a bruising primary.

“I think coming out of divisive primaries, parties often confront the challenge of uniting their supporters for the general election,” he said. “There are different ways to go about doing that, but one of the most tried and true methods is a negative campaign against the opposition, because that can really motivate a party’s supporters.”

At the roundtable on her family farm, a roster of invited guests expressed enthusiastic support for Cooke.

“We can get this woman elected. That’s what we can do by getting one neighbor that never voted before, getting one neighbor who don’t think it’s worth it. It is,” Phil Swanhorst, chair of the Eau Claire County Democratic Party, said. “Each and every one of us can make a difference if we work a little bit harder to get her elected than we did two years ago. We got to get this type of woman in Congress to turn this shit around. We got to do it.”

When Van Orden was first elected in 2022, he beat Pfaff by 3.7 points — a result that many Democrats in the state blamed on the disappearance of national money and support in the final weeks of the race. Critics of the national Democratic party’s decision to pull out of the race pointed to the fact that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won the district in his reelection campaign that year.

Two years ago, Cooke outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in the district, losing by only 2.7 points compared to Harris’ 7.4 point loss to Trump. This year national Democrats believe that the time is right for Cooke to get the job done.

Chergosky said that the Cooke campaign doesn’t need to win a landslide among rural voters. Instead, Cooke’s path could involve picking off just enough rural Wisconsinites who vote for her or don’t vote at all — in addition to turning out the Democratic voters in the district’s urban centers of Eau Claire and La Crosse.

“If Cooke can move the rural margins back in her favor even a little bit, then that would go a long way towards helping her win the district,” Chergosky said. “I guess the good news is that it can’t really get any worse for [Democrats] in many rural communities. And so, if they can turn the tide even a little bit, it could go a long way towards helping them win this district, and others like it.”

At the Farmers Union event in Gays Mills, Cooke was joined on the dais by three Democrats running for legislative seats and Alexander Kent, an independent running for the 3rd CD. None of the Republicans running in the area showed up — a fact that Cooke was quick to note.

During his four years in office, Van Orden has developed a local reputation for avoiding his constituents. His debate appearance with Cooke next week, on Oct. 20, will be his first since his 2020 campaign against Kind. He has neglected to hold open town halls with constituents and residents of the district often complain of being blown off by their congressional representative.

“These are frustrating times for our agricultural communities,” Cooke said. “I’m running against somebody and an administration that has done little to help farmers … I’m here today and showing up because, unlike someone that doesn’t show up, I believe it’s important to have these conversations in our community.”

Cooke tries to pick off rural votes in second effort to flip Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District was originally published by Wisconsin Examiner.