The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Jennifer Shutt | States Newsroom)

In Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, a Democratic political veteran is trying to accomplish what a string of newcomers have failed at for three decades: to unseat the Republican incumbent.

Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a former corporate lawyer from Janesville, has held the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms, following in the footsteps of his one-time boss, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Steil’s challenger, Peter Barca, a former Democratic Assembly leader from Kenosha, is seeking to return to the House in the seat he held for one term. With two stints in the Wisconsin Assembly under his belt — first in the 1980s and early ‘90s, then again from 2008 to 2019 — Barca also served as secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue from 2019 until earlier this year.

In the Assembly, Barca led the Democratic caucus, but he’s also billed himself as a pragmatist open to bipartisan cooperation, both as a lawmaker and as Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ revenue secretary.

“In my career, I’ve always worked across the aisle, even when I didn’t need to,” Barca said in an interview. “Even when I left the governor’s cabinet, there was an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that quoted prominent Republicans saying, ‘Barca gets it. He knows how to work across the aisle.’”

Barca said that in conversations, voters across the district have told him “they’re very disappointed with their government. They feel like [lawmakers are] not accomplishing anything.”

The Wisconsin Examiner reached out to Steil’s campaign seeking an interview with the GOP incumbent and was referred to the communications director. Three requests via email received no response.

In a newspaper column published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Steil emphasized higher prices for groceries, gas and housing. He also called for cuts in federal spending, in federal regulation and in “wasteful government programs.”

In addition, Steil in his column called the U.S. southern border “unsecure” and that an increased flow of migrants has “allowed dangerous individuals to enter our country illegally.”

“Right now, our country is headed in the wrong direction,” the three-term congressman wrote. “I’m committed to getting us back on track.”

Republicans have had a lock on the 1st District for 30 years — ever since Barca,  after serving in the House for one term, narrowly lost to a Republican in 1994. In 1998, Republican Paul Ryan of Janesville won the seat and easily held it after the district lines were redrawn twice in the GOP’s favor following the census in 2000 and 2010.

Ryan, who rose to become U.S. House Speaker, chose not to run again after 20 years. Steil, a corporate attorney who had worked for Ryan from 2003 to 2004 before law school, won the 2018 Republican nomination to succeed his former employer and was elected to the seat that November. He has been reelected twice since then.

The 1st District, meanwhile, was redrawn again before the 2022 election to include the industrial city of Beloit, making it more competitive, according to political analysts. Nevertheless, Steil won by 11 points after spending $2.4 million while Democratic challenger Ann Roe raised and spent about one-third of that amount.

At the start of 2024, two political newcomers were in the running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Steil. Then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put the 1st District on its target list and recruited Barca to run. After Barca entered the race in April with an immediate list of high-profile endorsements, the other hopefuls dropped out.

Even with more money to spend than the previous Democratic candidate, Barca heads into Election Day out-funded. As of Oct. 16, according to Federal Election Commission records, Steil has raised $5.3 million and spent $4.5 million. In the same period, Barca raised just under $2 million, spending $1.85 million.

High prices and the economy

Both campaigns center economic issues, but from contrasting vantage points.

In the first two years of the Biden administration Democrats enacted four major pieces of legislation. Two passed with only Democratic votes: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), enacted in Biden’s first 100 days, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The other two, the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, passed with some Republican support.

Steil voted against all four measures. In his Journal Sentinel column he didn’t name any of the bills but alluded generally to them, blaming the Biden administration for the inflation spike that started in 2021 and continued into 2022.

“Costs are too high,” Steil wrote. “When I’m out talking to workers, families, and seniors across Wisconsin they are struggling with higher costs due to inflation. Whether it’s prices at the grocery store, the gas station, or the cost of housing.”

Accusing the Biden administration of “reckless spending and a regulatory agenda that dramatically increased costs,” Steil asserted, “By cutting red tape, restoring energy independence, and ending wasteful government programs, we can make prices affordable for everyone.”

Mainstream economists have disputed the argument that places all the blame for the inflation spike on federal spending.

Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview that COVID-19 pandemic relief checks — issued in the last year of the Trump administration as well as after the passage of ARPA under Biden — could be responsible for about a third of the 2021 price spike.

Chinn said worldwide supply chain clogs are as much to blame for driving up prices as the federal spending infusion, however.

In late 2021 and early 2022, he said, ships were backed up at ports, businesses such as restaurants were “having a hard time getting people to come back” because of fears of catching COVID-19, and oil prices were pushed up as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Inflation jumped way up to 9% by mid-2022,” Chinn said. “But then you look at it after that, it came down very quickly without lots of unemployment and without lots of cuts in government spending, even before the Fed started raising interest rates.”

Inflation is now back down below 3%. And while the pandemic relief funds may have contributed to the short-term inflation spike, the money they brought to households “were necessary to support the economy,” Chinn said. “And the fact that they were more generous is probably the reason that we’re [now] growing faster than Western Europe on the average.”

Attacking ‘no’ votes

Barca and Democrats are highlighting Steil’s votes against the four bills.

The infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act both included provisions aimed at boosting clean energy to help curb climate change.

At a September news conference in Racine, Mayor Cory Mason praised both bills for funding investments that enabled the city to increase its clean energy and address climate change at the local level. A reporter asked Mason, who has endorsed Barca, about Steil’s votes against the legislation.

“Having federal partners that believe investing in communities like Racine is really critically important,” said Mason. “I think it’s unfortunate that he didn’t take the opportunity to make those investments.”

Barca said that while campaigning, he has heard “a lot about middle class [people not] being able to afford things.” He criticized Steil’s vote against the Inflation Reduction Act in that light, particularly because of provisions in the law that lower Medicare drug costs.

The Inflation Reduction Act instituted a $35-a-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare patients. It also capped their out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year starting in 2025. And for the first time it empowered Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on the prices of prescription drugs.

Pointing out Steil’s vote against the bill, Barca said, “If I’m in the Congress, I’ll help work to negotiate prescription drug costs for everybody, not just for Medicare.”

In his Journal Sentinel column Steil didn’t address the law directly, but wrote that he favors “more price transparency” by drug companies, including proposed legislation that would require TV drug ads to list the prices of the drugs they’re advertising.

Steil also mentioned his support of a bill nicknamed the SPIKE Act that would require drug companies “to publicly disclose why they jacked up prices.”

That legislation was introduced by Democrats in 2019 and again in 2021, but did not pass, and has not advanced in the current Congressional term.

Federal taxes

Steil was elected after the passage of a signature piece of legislation during Donald Trump’s presidential term: the 2017 tax cut.

The bill permanently cut the corporate income tax rate to 21% from 35%. It also included temporary measures — marginal tax rate cuts across the board, doubling the federal child tax credit and nearly doubling the standard deduction — which will expire Dec. 31, 2025.

Whether to extend or rewrite the 2017 law is expected to be a top issue for Congress in the coming year.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the legislation’s corporate tax rate cut only benefited the highest-paid 10% of employees. The nonprofit center also found that the overall law “was skewed to the rich,” giving the top 1% of households by income an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 and the bottom 60% of households an average tax cut of less than $500.

Steil has said he would support an extension and has cosponsored U.S. House legislation to make its cuts permanent.

“He’s voted to go along with the old system of giving all the tax breaks to the top 1%,” Barca said. “I would work to give middle-class tax relief.”

As an example, he cited a provision included in the ARPA pandemic relief bill that temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit. Attempts to revive the expanded credit after it expired at the end of 2021 foundered.

Barca has also cited his experience in the Small Business Administration, where he was a regional administrator in the 1990s after leaving Congress, as an additional qualification, along with his success in passing economic development legislation in Wisconsin. “Small businesses need help. They need technical help. They need access to capital,” he said. “Those are things I know a lot about.”

Reproductive rights and immigration

As in many state and national races this year, Barca and the Democrats are also leaning into reproductive rights.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that established a federal right to abortion, Steil praised the ruling on social media, declaring himself “proudly pro-life” on Twitter (now renamed X).

Steil was among a group of Republican members of Congress who signed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn Roe.

“Today’s decision will bring this important issue back to the states. This is a great victory for life,” Steil tweeted.

Steil has said he favors permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

Interviewed on WISN-TV, Steil dismissed the prospect of a national abortion ban. “Speaker [Michael] Johnson has made clear that a national abortion ban is not going to move forward in the House,” he told the television station. “And I would not support such a move in the House, either.”

Nevertheless, Democrats and reproductive rights advocacy groups have charged that, if Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress, a national abortion ban would be on the agenda. They’ve also pointed to anti-abortion advocates who oppose making exceptions for rape or incest.

Barca has also cited Steil’s endorsement of House legislation declaring that a fetus is a “person” under the U.S. Constitution. Advocates for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have said the law, if enacted, would threaten the technology that many couples have used to enable them to conceive children.

Steil has said he does not oppose IVF. Barca, however, said that the congressman has not signed on to legislation that would explicitly guarantee the legality of the procedure.

Steil’s campaign, and his priorities in the House in the last year, have also highlighted immigration. He has spearheaded legislation banning noncitizens from voting in all elections — they’re already excluded from voting in federal elections — and joined other Republican candidates in decrying the surge in migrants at the Southern border.

In November 2023, Steil and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference in Whitewater to call attention to an influx of migrants that had led to strained resources in the community and blame the Biden administration’s management of the border.

Local officials and residents, however, said that event as well as publicity in right-wing media falsely connected the community’s immigrant population, which had been growing for years, to the short-term surge at the border. The city’s police chief also debunked claims of an immigrant-driven crime wave.

Barca has criticized Steil for joining other Republicans in Congress who disavowed a border security bill that the White House negotiated with a group of conservative GOP senators.

Congressional Republicans abandoned the deal at the urging of former President Donald Trump, who has built most of his campaign to return to office around attacking immigration.

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