In front of a friendly crowd at a small-town community center last week, Democratic 1st Congressional District candidate Mitchell Berman launched into the pitch he’s made countless times in the last several months.

“Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I never saw running for Congress on my bingo card,” Berman told the room full of supporters in the Rock County community of Milton.

The son of a roofing contractor and a foundry worker, a first-generation college graduate and an emergency room nurse, he wove together stories from his daily work and his own family’s experience grappling with the healthcare system.

Berman ticked off a litany of priorities he’ll pursue in  the House of Representatives if he is elected and if Congress returns to a Democratic majority in November.  Those included restoring funds cut from federal healthcare programs, supporting union organizing, raising the minimum wage and taking steps to shore up Social Security in the face of threatened cuts in less than a decade.

“Well, we only have 21 days to go. We are in the final stages of this race,” Berman said. “We have always looked at this district as having an opportunity. But right now we’re one point up in the polls.”

A cheer and applause burst from the crowd.

“We are continuing to build momentum,” Berman said. “We are filling rooms like this across the district because people are sick and tired of the partisan politics. They are ready for people to go to Washington and actually get things done.”

Berman is the latest in a string of Democrats who have hoped to turn the 1st CD back to a Democratic seat after decades of Republican representation, including by U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) for the last eight years.

Steil is a former corporate lawyer and one-time aide to his popular predecessor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. When Ryan gave up the seat in 2018 after two decades, Steil easily topped the Democratic challenger, union activist Randy Bryce, whose candidacy drew national attention.

While the margins have narrowed in the ensuing three reelection campaigns, Steil has continued to maintain a solid  advantage — leading the Cook Political Report to label the district “likely Republican” for most of the current term, until recently shifting it to the less-definitive “lean Republican.”

In 2026 Democrats are leaning harder into their campaign to wrest the district from its long-time GOP dominance.

Berman’s campaign sees in the polling trends and the Cook Political Report shift evidence that the seat is winnable thie year. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Wisconsin’s 1st District to a list of races targeted for special attention — and some party spending — this fall.

U.S. Rep Mark Pocan, who has endorsed Berman and spoke at the Milton rally, says this year’s cycle has changed the dynamic of the district, and the race.

In his previous terms, Steil “did his very best to be as flavorless as possible,” Pocan says. “He wasn’t upsetting anyone and he’s a nice guy but he didn’t have positions.”

Steil joins Tiffany rally

Steil’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview despite repeated requests over the last week. The campaign also declined to respond to a list of questions about criticisms that have been lodged against him in the race.

Steil has continued to cultivate an upbeat presence in the district, documented on his office’s social media with visits to local fire departments, healthcare facilities and factories.

He also joined last week’s Waukesha County rally with Republican candidate for governor Tom Tiffany, sponsored by the GOP-aligned Hunter Nation organization, whose members are lobbying for passage of legislation that would create a controversial sandhill crane hunt.

Taking his turn at the podium, Steil excoriated “how radicalized the Democratic party has become, where they are going after all aspects of our culture” — zeroing in on controversies over whether trans girls should be allowed on girls’ sports teams.

“They want to come after our hunting rights,” Steil said, although not spelling out specifics. Steil also condemned “higher taxes on the Democratic side.” 

“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party anymore,” Steil said. “This is a radicalized, activist socialist party that we are seeing on the left.”

Drilling home the Tiffany rally’s get-out-the vote message, Steil urged the crowd to “run on the assumption that the Democrats are going to vote in full strength in the liberal core cities in Wisconsin.” To counter that, he said, “We need to get that message out to our friends, our family, our neighbors, our coworkers, folks in church on how important this election is and how important it is that people like us get out and vote.”

Pocan interprets the shift in Steil’s profile during his latest term as an attempt to advance within the Republican party. “So instead of quietly rubber stamping Donald Trump, he’s now doing it more vocally,” Pocan says.

Drawing a contrast

While Steil has emphasized an image of Democratic radicalism, Berman’s campaign is drawing a contrast  between the Democrat’s working-class background and the Republican incumbent’s history as a corporate lawyer and his voting record in Congress.

“My dad owned a small roofing business that he built from the ground up,” Berman told the Milton crowd. “My mom, she worked long hours in the foundry. But they instilled in me the values of hard work, perseverance, and they taught me to always stick up for the little guy.”

He pointed to a resume that included working part-time at UPS — a union job — to help make ends meet in college, working off student debt after he graduated, and then making a career in healthcare, including 11 years as a Veterans Administration nurse — a job he had to quit because he couldn’t run for political office as a federal employee.

It was at the VA “where I started to recognize that a lot of these issues that we were having didn’t stem from me and my coworkers not having the capability to deliver the type of care that patients deserve,” Berman said. “But we were being handcuffed at the bedside by bad policies that were trickling down from Washington.”

Cuts to the VA health system early in President Donald Trump’s second term exacerbated those issues, he said. “That’s when I realized it was going to take somebody from the ground floor, from the bedside, standing up and fighting for change if we actually wanted to succeed.”

Berman said an insurance company denied his mother a colonoscopy in her late 40s despite a doctor’s recommendation because she wasn’t yet 50. At 49 she got the procedure in an emergency, he said, and was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer.

“So that same insurance company that denied that preventive procedure then began increasing our premiums,” Berman said. “At that point they could no longer afford insurance. Medicaid was the safety net that caught my mom.”

The massive tax and spending bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress enacted in mid-2025, with its cuts amounting to nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years to Medicaid, along with other provisions, are a key talking point for Berman, who points out that Steil voted for the cuts.

The war in Iran that has driven up gasoline and diesel fuel prices and tariffs that have hobbled farmers also contribute to escalating difficulty for families in the 1st District, the state and across the country, Berman told voters in Milton.

He blames Steil for not voting to block the tariffs or end the war.

“You know, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for all representatives to be in Washington working for us, making Washington work for working people, because that’s what they should be doing,” Berman said. “So, while he’s making it more difficult for us, we’re here at home, struggling, trying to put food on the table, trying to make rent.”

Spotlight on  Steil’s record

With increasing tenure, Steil has advanced to new leadership roles, expanding his opportunity to advance his legislative priorities. His higher profile has also made him a bigger target for Democrats.

In January, as chair of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees federal election-related policies, Steil introduced the Make Elections Great Again Act.

Federal law generally delegates election administration to the states, minimizing the authority of the federal government. The Steil legislation would impose new national requirements on states, including mandating photo IDs in all states and setting new restrictions for what qualifies as a legal ID.

Among many other requirements, the bill would also compel states to check every 30 days on whether existing registered voters are still eligible. It would “improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat,” Steil said when he introduced the legislation.

The bill has not advanced. The Trump administration and Republican leaders instead focused on the SAVE America Act, which included similar requirements for voter citizenship verification and other limits. The SAVE America Act stalled in the U.S. Senate after passing the House.

Voting rights groups condemned the SAVE Act and also rejected Steil’s bill.

“Election officials — including in Wisconsin — have shown again and again that elections are secure,” said Samuel Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting Is Local, when Steil introduced his measure. “Codifying suspicion into law doesn’t strengthen democracy; it undermines public confidence and puts election workers in harm’s way.”

Oversight, votes and campaign donations

Steil also chairs the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence — a panel that, among other things, oversees the crypto currency industry.

Earlier this month, the crypto PAC Fairshake launched a pro-Steil ad in the Milwaukee media market, reserving $735,914 in airtime for the ad, WisPolitics reported. According to Tech Influence Watch, an independent organization that tracks tech political spending, crypto interests have spent $1.3 million to support Steil in the 2026 election, a mix of campaign donations and independent spending.

In a post on X earlier this month, Steil wrote approvingly of a Commodities Futures Trading Commission announcement of advanced rulemaking on regulations for crypto transactions and crypto asset markets.

Steil “advocates for clear digital asset regulations, emphasizing consumer protection. His support may influence regulatory frameworks moving forward,” reported the outlet Coinfomania, which covers the crypto industry.

Steil’s campaign did not respond to a question about what his call for “clear regulations emphasizing consumer protection” would mean in concrete terms.

He is one of a bipartisan group of 21 lawmakers who cosponsored  legislation on regulating the crypto industry that the industry had sought. After passing the House, the bill foundered in the Senate, in part due to Democrats’ objections over President Donald Trump’s profiteering from crypto transactions, HuffPost reported.

At Berman’s Milton rally, however, Pocan suggested the outcome of the proposed legislation would be looser regulation for crypto businesses — “making sure they don’t have enough regulation so they can continue to operate in that dark realm.”

The Milwaukee Courier linked Steil’s votes to campaign donations from interested industries. The bills involved were not enacted. The donors included Blackstone, a corporate owner of rental housing nationwide, which made its contribution around the time Steil voted on bills cutting rental assistance and increasing mortgage fees; banking and credit businesses around the time of a vote to reduce regulations including on banking firms; and mortgage companies around the time of a vote that would have raised fees for borrowers.

Steil’s campaign did not respond to a question about the donations and bills identified in the Courier reports.

The Berman campaign has highlighted the findings. A TV ad also highlighted earlier reporting on Steil’s votes for federal tax breaks for data centers and donations totaling $300,000 to his campaigns from related industries.

Curbing Congressional stock trading

Besides the issue of the crypto industry’s pro-Steil ads, the Berman campaign has targeted the spot’s message, crediting Steil with writing a bill “banning members of Congress from trading stocks.”

A measure Steil authored, the Stop Insider Trading Act, prohibits members of Congress and their families from buying new stocks and hikes the penalties for violating an existing law against failure to disclose stock purchases and insider trading.

After passing the U.S. House, Steil’s bill stalled in the Senate when it failed to clear 60 votes to move forward to a vote in the chamber. In a Facebook post, Steil blamed Democrats for blocking the bill.

But Pocan says that when Steil’s bill was introduced, it effectively halted the momentum for a stronger, bipartisan measure banning members and their families from buying, selling or owning stock.

Their bill was on a trajectory to garner  enough support to force a House vote on the measure, Pocan says. That stalled after Steil introduced his bill, which would allow members to continue to own or sell stock and included a provision that allowed them to buy stock if they were reinvesting dividends.

“That is the opposite of a stock ban bill, but he’s taking credit for it,” Pocan told the crowd in Milton.

Even in the face of repeated Democratic disappointments in the district that go back decades, Pocan contends the 2026 race offers a new context. Voters’ disenchantment with Trump is part of that, but Democrats are also betting on a message that highlights the incumbent’s record in terms that resonate with people this year.

“I think those are all stances in a year that corruption is a big issue,” Pocan says. With his status as an outsider rather than a politician, “I just think Mitchell Berman in many ways is the right candidate right now.”

Lilly Goren, a political scientist at Carroll University in Waukesha, sees too many unknowns to offer a clear prediction. 

“I think the potential things that could make a difference — and I don’t know if they will — are that the map is slightly different, and whether the Blue Wave, if it comes to pass, will be sufficient to bring an upset to such a consistently Republican district,” Goren says.

There have been anecdotal reports that Trump supporters are ignoring survey calls, which could mean pollsters aren’t hearing from voters who could make a difference in the result. 

On the other hand, Trump’s record-low approval ratings “suggest that Republican support is not necessarily out there and enthusiastic,” Goren adds. “The question becomes, also, whether people come out and vote, or whether they stay home.”

Baylor Spears contributed to this report.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s investments helped make him millionaire, nearly doubling his net worth from $812,000 to nearly $1.9 million since he went to Congress, Wisconsin Watch reports. According to the financial data tracking platform Unusual Whales, Steil’s stock portfolio was the fourth most profitable among members of Congress in 2025, outperforming the S&P 500 by 62.5%. Yet Steil is running as a watchdog on congressional stock trading. 

“You deserve a Congress you can trust, that’s working for you. … I’m leading the charge to ban members of Congress from trading stocks,” Steil says in a campaign ad now running in Wisconsin’s suddenly competitive 1st Congressional District.

The ad refers to Steil’s Stop Insider Trading Act, which failed in the Senate this week. Steil blamed Democrats for blocking his attempt at “ethics reform” and vowed to keep fighting.  But Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin called the bill a “sham,” pointing out that there are much stronger bills that, unlike Steil’s, require members to divest their stock holdings.

Steil’s bill allows members of Congress to keep and sell stocks. It places no restrictions on their purchases of cryptocurrency holdings, betting in prediction markets or trades in industry-specific mutual funds or private stock offerings from corporations. 

These giant loopholes drew the attention of Steil’s colleague U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, who grilled Steil on the shortcomings in his bill during a House Rules Committee hearing on July 20. 

“There are many bills that have been introduced … that would ensure that the sale and the purchase of stocks is banned, and this bill does not do that,” Neguse pointed out. He and Steil debated whether a disclosure rule in Steil’s bill is a sufficient safeguard (Neguse didn’t think so), and why the bill didn’t cover prediction markets. 

The Senate unanimously passed a ban on members and staff participating in prediction markets, just one week after a U.S. special forces soldier was charged with using classified information to bet on the capture of the Venezuelan president. Members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information they could use for personal gain by placing bets on wars, economic crises or elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned. Why can’t the House pass the same ban, Neguse asked. Steil replied that he has been working on a separate bill concerning prediction markets, which are a “new and novel technology.” 

“It took the Senate a day!” Neguse shot back. “It’s a one-page resolution. It literally is a paragraph. It just says members of the Senate are banned from participating in prediction markets.” Neguse suggested that the House adopt the Senate’s language and pass the same resolution immediately. 

Instead, Steil has crafted a narrow bill that imposes fines on members and their families if they bet on specific government policy matters that come to their attention through their congressional work. Like his narrow stock-trading bill, which avoids making members give up lucrative investments, the Stop Lawmakers from Predicting Act takes a permissive view of members interested in playing in prediction markets unless there is a specific, demonstrable conflict of interest that a member’s colleagues on the House ethics panel deem worthy of a fine.

At best, that’s a different goal than the “Congress you can trust” Steil talks about in his campaign ad. Instead of protecting the public from corrupt public officials who seek to profit from their privileged perch, Steil is intent on not making things too uncomfortable for his fellow members sitting on cushy portfolios.

It says a lot that Steil’s prediction market bill and his Stop Insider Trading Act both have the full support of President Donald Trump. As Baldwin points out, Trump is exempt from Steil’s proposed restrictions on stock trading, even though Trump made 21,000 stock trades and added $2.2 billion to his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term.

This is the real hole in Steil’s claim to be an ethics watchdog in Congress. His compromised reform proposals don’t come close to making up for the heavy lifting he has been doing in office carrying water for Trump. He has been a chief enabler for a president who is setting new records for unethical behavior as he uses his office to enrich himself. Along with his weak efforts at “ethics reform,” Steil has been pushing new voting restrictions dear to Trump’s heart. His proposed national Voter ID Act is even more restrictive than Wisconsin’s toughest-in-the-nation voter ID law, barring the use of student IDs to vote and potentially disenfranchising millions of eligible voters who don’t meet the requirements. 

Steil does not present as a rage-filled MAGA warrior. Like his mentor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, he has repeatedly won reelection by comfortable margins while projecting a friendly, thoughtful image in his home district, even as his work in Washington diverges from his constituents’ interests. But as crises pile up, it’s getting harder to put a pleasant gloss on loyalty to an administration that is rapaciously devouring the nation’s wealth while trying to disenfranchise its citizens. 

Wisconsin’s 1st CD has attracted national attention recently as the political landscape gets tougher for Republicans even in solidly red House districts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Steil’s reelection race to its Red to Blue list and an internal DCCC poll conducted Sept. 21-23 — with a margin of error of 4.4% — found the race is a dead heat between Steil and his challenger, former VA hospital nurse Mitchell Berman, with the two candidates tied 48-48 among likely voters, a plurality of whom identified as Republicans.

A new Berman campaign ad, paid for in part by the DCCC, which now sees Steil as a target, emphasizes Steil’s stock portfolio. In it, Berman declares, “Public service shouldn’t be about getting rich.” Steil couldn’t have said it better himself.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans did not gain any support Wednesday from Democrats as they attempted to advance a bill that mashed together two hot-button midterm issues: requiring voter ID in federal elections and limiting stock trading for members of Congress.

The Republican-led bill, titled the Stop Insider Trading Act, failed 53-47 when lawmakers stayed solidly within party lines for the procedural vote. Most legislation requires 60 votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, to advance.

The House-passed measure attached a voter ID requirement onto a base bill prohibiting members of Congress and their spouses and close family members from purchasing certain stocks, and requiring a public notice and waiting period prior to selling stocks. 

House lawmakers approved the legislative package by a 232-192 margin.

While 13 House Democrats supported the bill, sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., despite plenty of criticism, Senate Democrats did not bite.

“The Senate GOP let their counterparts in the House take out all of the ban’s teeth and fill it with poison pills so it could never pass. This bill has no reform, no accountability, no substance,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor prior to the vote Wednesday.

House and Senate Democrats panned the legislation for being a weaker version of other bipartisan bills aimed at stopping members of Congress from potentially profiting off insider knowledge while trading stocks. The issue has drawn support from both parties over the past several years.

“Under (the) Republican bill, members would still get to own and sell stocks. And most importantly, this bill doesn’t do anything – anything – to stop Donald Trump from trading stocks. I guess Republicans forgot that Trump has made nearly 30,000 stock trades in the past year and raked in billions – more than all of Congress combined,” Schumer continued.

The New York Democrat also said the measure “would make voting more difficult in every state than it is now” and described it as “some of the most twisted, radical schemes Trump has ever dreamed up to rig our election.”

ID for voting

Under the measure, a voter would be required to present a current state-issued driver’s license or identification card, passport, valid military or veteran ID, or tribal government-issued ID card to be able to vote. 

If a voter doesn’t have one of the listed physical forms of identification, state election officials could issue a provisional ballot. The voter would then have three days to provide the accepted ID or an affidavit that the voter doesn’t have one because of religious objections to being photographed.

Additionally, state officials would be prohibited from accepting absentee ballots unless the voter attaches a copy of a valid ID, the last four digits of their Social Security number with an affidavit that they cannot obtain a photo ID, or a notarized statement that the voter personally completed their ballot.

‘Commonsense legislation’

Senate Republicans pushed for the bill ahead of the vote, including Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, who posted Monday on X, “This bill would ban congressional insider trading. We need to pass this commonsense legislation and restore integrity to Congress.” 

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pointed to a Department of Justice indictment announced Wednesday to argue in support of the legislation.

Quoting a post on social media about DOJ allegations that 10 noncitizens voted in a previous election, Lee wrote: “Every Senate Democrat just voted against legislation that would stop this.”

While the DOJ has alleged instances of isolated election-related crimes, widespread voter fraud has never been credibly proven. 

A database published in 2024 by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation surveying millions of votes cast in seven states over decades found reported cases of fraud to be less than 1%, according to an analysis of the results by the progressive Brookings Institution.

A comprehensive body of research has found the practice to be exceedingly rare.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley vowed Monday to pass a slate of measures to cut down on corruption in government with proposals he said would prevent elected and public officials from profiting from their positions. 

Crowley, who is running against Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, said he would include the policy items in the upcoming state budget if elected governor. Election Day is Nov. 3.

“State elected officials… are there to serve the public to do a public service, not to just sit in public office. They are there to use their offices to help people. That could be anything from helping get a pothole filled to securing legislation for a new healthcare facility,” Crowley said during a press conference outside the state Capitol. “It should not be a vehicle to get rich by gaming the system. We see that running rampant in Washington right now, while Wisconsinites are facing higher costs on everything from gas to groceries to their health care.”

Crowley said the proposals would demand transparency and accountability from elected officials in the face of Congress not taking similar steps.

Two of the proposals would seek to bar politicians from being able to make money from knowledge they acquire through their public work. Crowley wants to ban politicians from trading individual stocks and require public officials who already own stocks to place then in a mutual or index fund or blind trust so they don’t have specific knowledge of the individual stocks they own. Another proposal would prohibit elected officials from participating in prediction markets and prohibit public employees from using insider government knowledge to personally profit.

“Prediction markets should be used for things like sports — not profiting off of our politics,” Crowley said. “Our political system is already overrun with dark money from billionaires. We don’t need to give them or others any reason to make more money off of their money by trying to further influence our elections.”

Crowley also said he would seek to prohibit members of the Public Service Commission from working for utility or energy companies for two years after leaving office. PSC commissioners are responsible for regulating public utilities including electricity, natural gas, water and telecommunications. 

Wisconsin law currently only bars former commissioners from testifying before the PSC for a year after leaving office. 

Crowley said he wasn’t worried the restriction would discourage prospective commissioners. The governor is responsible for choosing appointees to the Public Service Commission and appointees are subject to confirmation by the state Senate. 

Crowley did not point to any specific examples, but said the proposal is meant to prevent conflicts of interest. 

The final policy would prohibit the deletion of documents and correspondence by state legislators. 

Lawmakers in Wisconsin have had an exemption since 1961 from a law that requires a broad array of public officials to keep their records of communication and other official documents related to their work. The exemption allows legislators to delete emails and destroy records as long as they have not yet been requested under the public records law. 

Crowley said changing this will ensure that “journalists, the courts and most importantly you, the public, can see how their elected officials are or are not serving them.” 

Outgoing Gov. Tony Evers and Democratic lawmakers have previously sought to close the loophole, though the proposals have gone nowhere in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

“We have seen lawmakers try to hide how they spend taxpayer dollars on things that absolutely in no shape or form serve the public,” Crowley said.

Crowley said the proposals would help restore trust in the government. 

“We need these laws on the books because the system as it is today does not work for working Wisconsin families,” Crowley said. “They see politicians across the state and in Washington doing better than them. They’re doing fine, and in many cases, they’re thriving, and how can that be when diesel right here in the state of Wisconsin is nearly $6 a gallon?… It’s because of legalized corruption.”

Tiffany said in a statement that he has not traded any stocks while serving in Congress. He said he agreed there should be strong policies implemented to “to root out fraud and corruption at every level of government” but said he would go further than Crowley. 

“We should modernize OpenBook Wisconsin so taxpayers can easily search how their money is being spent, set clear response-time standards for open records requests, create agency dashboards that disclose contractors and violations, and strengthen ethics rules to prevent legislators from subcontracting for lobbying entities. As governor, I’ll also audit all of state government to uncover waste, fraud and corruption and make sure taxpayers are getting the results they deserve,” Tiffany said.