BLUE RIVER, Wisconsin—My ancestors settled in rural Southwestern Wisconsin in the 1820s, and it is in this region that I learned about politics. My great-grandfather served for almost four decades as the village president of this community located just south of the Wisconsin River. He was an economic and social progressive who campaigned in rural Grant County for “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the U.S. Senator who founded The Progressive, and his friend John Blaine, a Lincoln Republican who a century ago served six years as one of Wisconsin’s most radical governors.
When I was born, the Congressman from the district was Gardner Withrow, a railroad union activist from La Crosse who was elected several times on the ballot line of Wisconsin’s independent Progressive Party. Withrow finished his career as a liberal Republican who voted for civil rights, strong unions, and rural policies that helped family farmers stand up to corporate agribusiness.
The lines of Withrow’s old Third Congressional District have changed somewhat during the ensuing decades, but the values that historically underpinned its politics have remained reasonably consistent. As the Republican Party abandoned the progressive stances associated with Blaine and Withrow and veered to the right, the district began to back Democrats. Western Wisconsin voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for every other Democratic presidential nominee until 2016—when Republican Donald Trump narrowly won the region and the state. Joe Biden increased Democratic numbers in 2020, when he carried the state once more for the Democrats. That year, the Third District re-elected its Democratic Congressman, Ron Kind, and sent a crew of Democratic state senators and representatives to the Wisconsin legislature.
Kind, who was first elected in 1996 and served for a quarter century as a quiet member of the House Ways and Means Committee, decided against seeking re-election in 2022. So the Third District was up for grabs.
On a map where Democrats faced several tough contests, the Third shaped up as something of a bright spot. The 2022 Republican nominee was a noisy right-winger named Derrick Van Orden, who had won 48 percent of the vote in 2020. But Congressional redistricting had gone reasonably well for Democrats in Wisconsin. The Third District was competitive. And Democrats had a solid candidate in state Senator Brad Pfaff, a Western Wisconsin native with a track record of leadership on the agricultural issues that mattered to the district’s many dairy farmers.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the party’s strategists, consultants, and donors should have recognized that keeping the Third was not only possible, it was mission critical in a midterm election year where the party needed to fight for every seat it could get.
Unfortunately, the Democrats in Washington, D.C., who make decisions about where to allocate resources in fights for Congressional control have a blind spot when it comes to rural, small-town, and small-city districts like the Third. The party has lost one rural enclave after another in the Upper Midwest in recent election cycles: Northern Michigan’s First District in the Upper Peninsula, Northern Wisconsin’s Seventh District, and the at-large districts of North and South Dakota in 2010; Northern Minnesota’s Eighth District in 2018; Western Minnesota’s Seventh District, and Eastern Iowa’s First and Second districts in 2020. In 2022, it was the Third District’s turn to be the Democratic Party’s missed opportunity.
In early October, Axios reported that “Wisconsin Democrat Brad Pfaff, running to succeed retiring Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, isn’t getting any outside backup in his race against Republican Derrick Van Orden. House Majority PAC reserved time in the district later this month, but a source familiar with the group’s plans said it intends to cancel those reservations.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel announced that the “Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [DCCC] did not invest any money in Pfaff, and Pfaff was not on the committee’s ‘Red to Blue’ list, which puts a focus, along with extra resources, on the party’s key races.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should have recognized that keeping the Third was not only possible, it was mission critical.
The Third wasn’t the only district where D.C. Democrats abandoned their candidate. Winnable contests in Oregon and Texas experienced similar patterns of disengagement by the Democratic Party’s supposedly savvy strategists. In fact, when I started speaking about the abandonment of Wisconsin’s Third District before the election, I heard story after story from grassroots activists about neglected contests in regions of the country where Democrats historically have been viable—and should have remained so in 2022.
It was clear before the election that Democrats were screwing up by neglecting rural and exurban districts that might have voted narrowly for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but that had not moved completely to the Republican column. Instead of fighting for these districts with a progressive and populist economic message rooted in the historic farmer-labor politics of the past century, Democratic insiders like then-DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney focused their attention—and their considerable campaign treasuries—on protecting vulnerable incumbents in suburban districts where the party made modest gains during Trump’s presidency. Some of those suburban districts were winnable, and there is nothing wrong with paying attention to them. But in their narrowly defined approach to targeting districts and to messaging, Maloney and his compatriots abandoned rural Democrats. In doing so, they put themselves at a disadvantage in the competition for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats went into the midterm elections with a slim majority in the House—220 seats versus 212 held by Republicans. In typical midterms, the Democrats, as the party in power in the White House and Congress, could have been expected to lose up to thirty seats in the House. But 2022 was not a typical election. Concerns about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn abortion rights protections, former President Trump’s rejection of the 2020 election results, and the growing extremism of the Republican Party kept Democrats in the running. Instead of losing dozens of seats, they lost just a handful—including, ironically, Maloney’s in the suburban counties outside New York City. When all was said and done, the Republicans took the House with a razor-thin majority of 222 seats to the Democrats’ 213.
If the Democrats could have won just five more districts, they would have held the House and maintained a far greater ability to govern in the second half of President Biden’s first term. And five districts were there to be won—in rural and exurban America. One of them was the Third District in Western Wisconsin.
Van Orden proved to be a weaker contender than the strategists in Washington, D.C., had imagined. A hotheaded candidate embroiled in multiple controversies, he would have been vulnerable to a well-funded television and radio ad campaign—as well as intensive grassroots organizing—that held him accountable for his association with Trump’s cabal of election deniers, his harassment of a teenage librarian over a display of books on LGBTQ+ subjects, and getting caught with a loaded gun in his carry-on bag as he tried to board a plane. But the Republican’s campaign owned the airwaves in October and early November, while Pfaff was sidelined.
Van Orden’s campaign raised $6 million compared with just $1.4 million by Pfaff’s campaign. Outside groups that supported the Republican put another $1.38 million to work on Van Orden’s behalf, according to the campaign watchdog group OpenSecrets. The final numbers gave the Republican a $5 million spending advantage. Why? Because Maloney and D.C. Democrats had imagined that Pfaff was a “weak” candidate.
They were wrong.
Despite being significantly outspent, Pfaff finished with more than 48 percent of the vote. That was a higher percentage than was won by top-priority Democratic candidates such as Virginia Representative Elaine Luria and New Jersey’s Tom Malinowski—both of whom enjoyed full support from the DCCC, the powerful House Majority PAC, and other Democratic groups.
Pfaff won the Third District’s three largest counties and kept the Democratic percentages—even in the rural, Republican-leaning counties—high, proving that the party could remain competitive in counties that Pfaff targeted with his message of ardent support for the family farmer, rural schools, and keeping small-town post offices open.
“There is simply no spinning this: Derrick Van Orden is underperforming expectations” in the Third District, Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse wrote on election night. “And plenty of Democrats are going to be furious at the party organizations and affiliated PACs for not giving Brad Pfaff some help in this one.”
That help would have made all the difference. Yet, it never arrived. Even after the results confirmed him as one of the strongest candidates Democrats had in a competitive open-seat race in 2022, Pfaff received no public apology from Maloney or the D.C. Democrats. But he had the truth on his side. “I firmly believe if there would have been greater resources that would have been provided, we would’ve won this race,” he said.
If there is any lesson that national Democrats should take from the 2022 election cycle, it is that they could have kept the House if they had simply believed that they could win the confidence of rural voters in Midwestern communities like Blue River. ◆