U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden tours Gilbertson's Dairy in Dunn County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

In the race for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, both Republican incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden and his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke pulled up to campaign events last week in pickup trucks as they’ve each sought to claim status as true “political outsiders” who can bring a different perspective to Washington D.C. 

Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, had never held an elected office before he ran for the seat and lost in 2020 to former Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who had held the position for 26 years. After Kind retired in 2022, Van Orden ran again and won, defeatingstate Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska). Running for re-election for the first time, Van Orden tells voters he’s focused on making policies “where the rubber meets the road.” 

Cooke, a nonprofit leader, business owner and waitress, points to her upbringing on an Eau Claire County dairy farm and has criticized both parties, depicting herself as a moderate in the purple district — which has been won twice by former President Donald Trump.

Both candidates say they represent the working class voters of western Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. Each has  accused the other of being a political insider. 

Van Orden and Republicans have highlighted Cooke’s previous work as a Democratic political fundraiser while Cooke, at an event last week, said that since being elected, Van Orden has “gone Washington.” 

Since Van Orden won in 2022, Wisconsin Democrats have been haunted by the national party’s abandonment of Pfaff’s campaign. Late in the cycle, the national party and its allied groups pulled spending in the district and moved it elsewhere. Van Orden won the race by 3.8 percentage points. 

This year, the outside money has continued to flow towards Cooke’s campaign. House Majority PAC, the Democrats’ largest outside funder of  congressional campaigns, has more than $4 million in advertising reserved in the district while both candidates have individually raised more than $4 million, keeping Cooke’s campaign closer to her opponent’s in available cash than Pfaff had two years ago. 

William Garcia, chair of the 3rd District and La Crosse County Democratic Parties says that national Democrats “learned their lesson” after Pfaff’s loss. 

“Look what you did, you took money out of the 3rd and gave it to places that lost by more,” Garcia said, describing conversations he had with national Democrats after 2022. 

Garcia says with Cooke on the ticket and the renewed national support, he’s confident in Cooke’s ability to return the seat to Democrats. 

“We’re doing great,” he says. “Rebecca Cooke is good at connecting with people, talking with the press and engaging in the issues. We’re going to keep moving that needle.” 

But with just a few weeks left in the campaign, election forecasters believe that needle still points toward Van Orden. Public polling on the race has been limited, but most have shown Van Orden with a lead. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, designates the district as leaning Republican. 

Throughout the campaign, Democrats have criticized Van Orden for contributing to Congress’ inability to pass an updated farm bill. Since taking office, Van Orden has celebrated his appointment to the House agriculture committee, but despite a farm bill passing out of the committee with his vote, it has not passed the full House. 

The 3rd District is home to much of the state’s cranberry industry and a large number of dairy farms. The area, like other parts of Wisconsin and around the country, has seen a growth in the number of large factory farms. But factory farms haven’t become as dominant as in eastern Wisconsin, with some small and mid-size farms holding on. 

“For this congressional district it’s the biggest disappointment,” Garcia says. “He made a big deal of being on the agriculture committee but one of the great failures of this Congress is the inability to pass a farm bill.” 

Van Orden blames the Democratic controlled Senate for the impasse, saying the House is waiting on them to introduce their version of the bill. 

Last Thursday, Van Orden and a small group of supporters toured the 550-cow Gilbertson’s Dairy Farm in Dunn County as he received the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

At the event, Van Orden said “I’m not gambling with your farm,” when discussing the importance of getting a farm bill passed. He talked about making sure the policies set at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are kept up to date with modern farming practices. 

“Government has to operate at the speed of farming,” he said. “Farming should not be beholden to government policies that are decades behind.”

Throughout the race, he’s discussed goals to reduce government regulations on farms and let farmers do their work. 

“We have to understand that farmers are shepherds of the land, they’re the greatest conservationists around,” he said. “Because if you destroy the land, you can’t farm and you’re out of business. So what I want to do is make sure that USDA is keeping up with what farmers need. We absolutely want to maintain this beautiful land, but when you have onerous amounts of regulations, the farmers can’t afford to farm anymore, which means we can’t afford to feed everyone. So the federal government needs to get out of the way of their private businesses, including the agricultural industry, and let them do their job.” 

At an event nearly 100 miles south in La Crosse, Cooke — speaking to a small group of supporters — mocked property Van Orden owns as a “hobby farm” and later told reporters that the version of the farm bill he voted for in committee “doesn’t support small and mid-sized farmers.” 

During the campaign, Van Orden has focused heavily on immigration policy, complaining about unauthorized crossings of migrants at the country’s southern border and highlighting crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in the district. Democratic voters at the Cooke event worried about the effect that Republican immigration proposals, saying Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants could devastate a number of local industries, including agriculture. 

On the road between the two events, the city of Arcadia is home to Ashley Furniture, the largest furniture manufacturer in the world, which is heavily dependent on Hispanic immigrant workers. More than 63% of the city’s population is Hispanic, according to census data, and 44% of the community speaks Spanish. In western Wisconsin, an estimated 70% of the workforce on local dairy farms is made up of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America.

At her La Crosse event, Cooke appeared at the local Korean War Memorial where she received the endorsement of National Security Leaders of America, a group of retired members of the military and former staff at the Departments of Defense, State and Veterans Affairs. 

After losing his first campaign to Kind in 2020, Van Orden attended the rally in Washington D.C. that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The veterans’ group highlighted Jan. 6 saying Van Orden’s presence near the Capitol that day should disqualify him from office. Cooke said she was “humbled” by the endorsement, which also gave her campaign an avenue to contrast Van Orden’s military record without criticizing his service. 

“[Van Orden] has done an incredible amount since launching his first campaign for this seat,” she said. “Unfortunately, none of it has been to benefit his constituents and our community. It has been in service of his own ego and his own political advancement.” 

Pfaff’s campaign in 2022 focused heavily on attacking Van Orden for perceived  character flaws. In addition to his  attendance at the Trump rally on Jan. 6, Pfaff pointed to an incident in which Van Orden tried to bring a loaded gun onto an airplane and a time he yelled at a teenage library employee in Prairie du Chien over a LGBTQ book display for Pride month. After he was elected, Van Orden made headlines for yelling at teenage Senate pages for taking pictures in the Capitol rotunda.

While Cooke mentioned some of those outbursts, she kept the focus on policy. 

“We have so much to do here in this district when it comes to service,” she said. “Our communities still need access to better health care, health care that they can afford, and so many of our families really are struggling to make ends meet. Whether that’s filling up at the gas tank or getting to the grocery store and being able to pay for their rent all in the same month, and to have a little bit of money left over.”

“We also know that we deserve leaders that build up our democracy,” she continued. “As these folks mentioned, I’m running against someone who is an election denier. He participated in the Stop the Steal rally. He is shaking the very pillars of our democracy.” 

But Van Orden, asked about his attendance at the Trump rally on Jan. 6, said he condemned the attack on the Capitol and criticized a reporter for asking about it, saying, “next time do your homework before you ask me that question.” 

Despite all the negative headlines that have surrounded Van Orden before and since he took office, he summarized the choice in his re-election race as a simple calculation: Are voters better off now than when President Joe Biden won office four years ago? Although Republicans have held a majority in the House since 2022.  

“Are you better off now than you were three and a half years ago or four years ago? The answer is no,” he said. “We’re closer to World War III than we have been in my lifetime because of weak strategic leadership by the Biden administration. So everybody just ask yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago? And if they’re honest, they’re going to say no. That means you need a change in leadership.”

Faith leaders with the Dane Sanctuary Coalition spoke out against anti-immigrant rhetoric at the Midvale Community Lutheran Church Thursday | Wisconsin Examiner photo

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance traveled to western Wisconsin this week to double down on his spurious attacks on immigrants, promising to “kick these illegal aliens out.” 

It was the second time in two weeks that Republicans have campaigned in the rural, western part of the state on their “mass deportation” platform. 

The region where Vance and U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden made their recent stands against immigrants is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Immigrants make up a large majority of the workforce on area dairy farms and they do most of the heavy lifting for other key businesses in the area including Ashley Furniture — the world’s largest furniture manufacturer — and the Pilgrim’s poultry processing plant. 

Western Wisconsin has experienced a big recent demographic shift with an influx of Latin American immigrants. And those newcomers have revitalized small towns across the region that were in decline because young people are moving away, leaving an aging white population. Mexican restaurants, grocery stores and other small businesses have given new life to fading Main streets and young families have filled schools that were on the brink of closure from low enrollment.

It’s hard to keep up with all the falsehoods politicians are spreading about immigrants in this campaign season. Among the doozies Vance dropped during his visit to Eau Claire was his baseless assertion that immigrants caused two area hospitals to close recently and that mass deportation will “make the business of rural health care much more affordable.”

The closure of those rural hospitals was agonizing for the communities that struggled to hold on to them. An aging patient population, low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, trouble finding and keeping staff, and a larger harsh landscape for nonprofit hospitals were among the factors that caused the hospitals to close. But neither the legislators who worked on the issues nor hospital management pointed to immigrants as the problem. There’s good reason for that.

Across the country, immigrants use the U.S. medical system far less than people born in the U.S. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that: “Recent immigrants were responsible for only about 1% of public medical expenditures even though they constituted 5% of the population,” and “immigrants’ medical costs averaged about 14% to 20% less than those who were US born.”

As Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, has seen that phenomenon up close. She explained during a panel I participated in this week that given a choice between seeking medical care and staying on the job, “immigrant workers will choose to keep working every time, unless it’s a dire emergency.”

Meanwhile, national research shows that immigrants — including those without legal status — pay more into government health care programs through tax withholdings than they use in benefits. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes, about a third of which went to Medicare and Social Security —  programs they will never be able to use —Wisconsin Watch reports. Without them, U.S. safety net programs would take a big hit.

Other misleading campaign talking points mix up immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal authorization, like most Wisconsin dairy workers, with refugees and asylum seekers like the atrociously slandered Haitian refugees Vance and Trump have been falsely accusing of eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — who are here under U.S. protection and therefore not, contrary to campaign rhetoric, eligible to be deported. 

Antonio De Loera-Brust, a United Farm Workers spokesman, told Wisconsin Watch that the point of anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a real policy plan. After all, deporting millions of workers would be logistically impossible, in addition to depriving U.S. agriculture of a huge portion of its labor force. Employers who support Trump despite his threats, De Loera-Brust theorized, aren’t worried about losing their workers — they see the rhetoric as a way to frighten farmworkers so they don’t demand their rights. “I don’t think you need to psychoanalyze it that much further beyond, ‘This is in their economic interest,’” he told Wisconsin Watch.

He has a point. There is nothing coherent or logical about the barrage of hateful rhetoric about immigrants. Fear itself seems to be the point. And a system in which a disempowered workforce lives in fear is a system that is bound to be rife with exploitation.

Still, some farmers do object to the nasty characterization of immigrants. They point out that there is no legal visa for year-round farm work, even though the U.S. has depended on these workers to do jobs Americans don’t want to do for decades now. They want a visa program that recognizes that work and gives the people who’ve been here a long time a path to citizenship. 

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about all the political flame-throwing over communities supposedly afflicted by immigrants is that many of the people who live in those communities don’t agree that they are afflicted at all.

I found this out when I interviewed local leaders in Whitewater, Wisconsin, which was the focus of a lot of misleading political spin about a supposed sudden “flood” of Nicaraguan asylum seekers causing a crime wave. It turned out that story was false.

Eau Claire, like Whitewater, has been welcoming asylum seekers from other countries for years, and, as in Whitewater, residents there say the experience has enriched their community.

Matt Kendziera, executive director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, lived in Eau Claire for 29 years before moving to Madison last year. He said he never heard divisive talk about the arrival of people from other countries in the community until Vance visited this week to talk about the scourge of immigration. “Eau Claire has been a wonderful and welcoming community to the refugees who are there,” he  told me. Many former refugees have become community leaders, he added, running for city council and becoming active in the local schools. 

I spoke to Kendziera Thursday during a news conference at the Midvale Lutheran Community Church in Madison, where faith leaders who are part of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition were speaking out against “the growing number of vicious, racist lies, hatred, bomb threats, persecution and death threats against asylum seekers,” according to a coalition press release.

“This church has had the privilege of accompanying asylum seekers,” said Midvale Lutheran’s co-pastor, Rev. Katie Baardseth. Families from Cameroon, Ukraine and Colombia fleeing persecution and violence had found “peace and success in Madison,” she said. The experience of welcoming those families had benefited the congregation, she added.

Rabbi Jon Prosnit of Temple Beth El talked about Jews’ historical experience: “We’ve been targeted, we’ve been scapegoated. … We are always on guard lest our own hearts harden,” he said, adding that welcoming and protecting outsiders is “the most repeated injunction in the entire Torah.” 

Ibrahim Saeed, president of the Islamic Center of Madison, described the history of the Muslim people as a history of persecution and exile but also of being welcomed by strangers. God made humanity, he said, “so you can get to know each other, not to despise each other.”

Without a doubt, there’s a demographic shift going on in Wisconsin, especially in rural areas. But community leaders, employers and regular citizens in Wisconsin communities like Whitewater, Eau Claire and Arcadia have embraced the change and the energy and economic and cultural benefits that come with it.

It’s inspiring to talk to people who have opened their hearts, welcoming newcomers and feeling their own lives and communities enriched by the experience.

Contrary to all the toxic rhetoric, immigration is a net plus for our country, and especially for the white, rural areas the Trump/Vance campaign is targeting in Wisconsin. Beneath the noise of the political campaign, a lot of people in those communities can tell you about it.