Rebecca Cooke Wins Primary to Take on GOP Congressman Derrick Van Orden

Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat, is running for the open seat in the 3rd Congressional District. (Rebecca Cooke for Congress)

Rebecca Cooke won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District Tuesday. She’ll go on to face Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden in the general election for one of the seats that will decide which party wins control of the House of Representatives.

Cooke, a former small business owner who operates a non-profit and works as a waitress, ran a campaign touting her position as a political outsider, leveraging a long voting record by her opponent, state Rep. Katrina Shankland (D-Stevens Point) in the state Legislature into a win in the western Wisconsin district. As of 10:45 p.m. on Tuesday, when the race was called by the Associated Press, Cooke held a 7% lead over Shankland. Mortgage Broker Eric Wilson also ran, earning just 8.8% of the vote.

The 3rd District largely covers western Wisconsin’s Driftless Area from Grant County in the southwest corner of the state to Chippewa, Dunn and Eau Claire counties further north, but an offshoot of the district map shoots into central Wisconsin, putting Portage County, and Shankland, into the district. In order to win, Shankland needed to retain enough votes from her home region while peeling off enough support in the largely Democratic small cities of the larger portion of the district such as La Crosse.

Cooke won by 24% in her home county of Eau Claire while retaining La Crosse County by 8%, enough to outlast Shankland’s massive 84% of the vote in Portage County and 61% of the vote in Wood County.

Throughout the primary, Cooke was able to raise more funds than her Democratic opponent, helping her hurdle the torrent of endorsements Shankland received from unions and elected Democrats from the district and across the state.

During the race, the two candidates’ policy views appeared similar, but Cooke painted herself as the outsider with support from centrist Democrats. Early in the primary she was endorsed by the House Blue Dog PAC, a group of moderate Democrats who have won races in districts won by Trump.

Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at UW-La Crosse, says Cooke’s win shows the power of her outsider image in the 3rd District. He added that despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, Cooke and Van Orden mirror each other as candidates who have attempted to position themselves as political outsiders.

“In a sense, Cooke and Van Orden are political opposites, but they both do tout that outsider brand, and I think that’s the one parallel between Cooke and Van Orden is that their theory of the electorate is that voters reward outsiders,” he says.

In a primary that got heated in the closing weeks, with the two candidates trading barbs about Cooke’s lack of experience in government and Shankland’s voting history.

After the race was called for Cooke, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin said in a statement it was ready to unite behind her.

“The Democratic Party of Wisconsin is excited to unite behind Rebecca Cooke tonight, and for the next three months we’re going to do everything in our power to elect Rebecca and make Derrick Van Orden a one-term congressman,” Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said. “Derrick Van Orden is an embarrassment to Western Wisconsin, and it’s time for his time in Washington to come to an end. For nearly two years, Van Orden has been a one-man clown show, making headlines for petty temper tantrums while his actual responsibilities—like funding the government or passing the Farm Bill—have fallen by the wayside. It’s time for a pro-choice Congresswoman who grew up on a dairy farm and fights for working people to replace an anti-freedom disgrace.”

For more than two decades, the 3rd District was represented by Democrat Ron Kind, who won the purple district several times even as a majority of voters their cast ballots for former President Donald Trump. Kind defeated Van Orden in 2020.

Since entering the political scene, Van Orden, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, has frequently made headlines for public outbursts and incidents. Over the last four years he’s drawn attention for yelling at the teenage employee of the Prairie du Chien public library over a LGBTQ pride display, attempting to bring a firearm onto an airplane, yelling at teenage Senate pages for taking pictures in the U.S. Capitol rotunda and heckling President Joe Biden during this year’s State of the Union address. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, he got into a dispute with an anti-war activist over waiting in a line, accusing her of assaulting a member of Congress.

Van Orden also used campaign funds to attend the rally that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Van Orden has said he did not go past the building’s security perimeter yet reporting from the Daily Beast shows that he took pictures behind the barricades.

In 2022, Van Orden won his seat against state Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska), who had also previously been the secretary of the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Pfaff, who defeated Cooke in the Democratic primary that year, ran a campaign criticizing Van Orden’s history of outbursts, arguing that’s not what the district stands for. Van Orden won by 3.8 percentage points in a race in which the national Democratic party and affiliated groups withdrew funding for Pfaff — angering Wisconsin Democrats who believed the seat was winnable.

Chergosky says “[Cooke] is really going to have to persuade the national party to invest in this seat,” to defeat Van Orden, who did not face a primary challenger and begins the campaign with nearly $2.5 million in funding, according to the Federal Elections Commission.

Throughout the primary, Cooke out-fundraised her competition, bringing in more than $2 million in campaign contributions to Shankland’s $800,000, but as an “outsider” she’s never faced the full onslaught of a negative political campaign from a Republican opponent and his allied outside groups.

“Democrats will be really banking on Cooke’s fundraising abilities to make this district competitive, then with that fundraising, she can establish her brand as a political outsider,” Chergosky says. “Now she has not been through the wringer of a full-on negative campaign, so that would remain a real unknown about how the campaign would unfold …. And a big question about the election is how that would play out when she is targeted with millions of dollars of negative campaign resources.”

Ahead of her primary win, Cooke was already starting to see attacks against her. In late July, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel political columnist Dan Bice reported that despite painting herself as an outsider, she had previously worked as a political fundraiser for Democrats across the country.

“Rebecca Cooke spent her career as a paid political activist electing radical leftists,” Mike Marinella, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said.

In recent days, national news outlets including the New York Post have reported that her non-profit, Red Letter Grant, which provides grants to small businesses operated by women, gave $2,000 to the restaurant where she works as a waitress, a deal Marinella told the Post was “sleazy.”

Rebecca Cooke wins Democratic primary to take on Derrick Van Orden in November was originally published by Wisconsin Examiner.