What Randy Bryce Built

An unlikely coalition of supporters want a working man in Paul Ryan's seat.

by

Mike Kluka remembers tagging along with his mother when he was about fourteen years old as she knocked on doors in their hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, for Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984.

Kluka’s mother and uncle belonged to the United Auto Workers union and worked at Kenosha’s American Motors Corporation plant, part of the city’s industrial backbone. It was a time when, Kluka says, “you could graduate from high school and walk into a $15-an-hour job.”

But when Kluka finished high school in the late 1980s, the auto plant, by then part of Chrysler, was closing, leaving just an engine factory. Kluka became a union carpenter and, in 1995, left to help build casinos in Las Vegas and power plants in California. Despite his mother’s example, he says, “in my twenties I really hated everything about the idea of politics,” convinced all politicians were self-serving liars.

“This is a guy that I truly believe understands what it is like to get up and go to work every day.”

Time has softened his cynicism, and paying attention has sharpened his sense of urgency. Since returning to Kenosha in 2003, Kluka has watched the industries of his childhood downsize, outsource, or shut down. New employers have taken their place; Kluka helped build Amazon’s massive distribution center located miles from downtown Kenosha out on Interstate 94. But the system is broken, he says. Since the election eight years ago of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and even more so since Donald Trump entered the White House, “it feels like there’s a wall crashing down on us.” To Kluka, the Republican agenda is clearer than ever: “To crush the middle class.”

And that’s why, on a sunny September morning, Kluka has joined more than two dozen other volunteers to knock on doors in Kenosha, to urge his fellow citizens to vote for ironworker Randy Bryce as Wisconsin’s next First District Congressman.

Bryce is also on hand to give a pep talk. “They’re scared, you can tell,” he tells the volunteers gathered around in the Kenosha Democratic campaign headquarters, referring to a round of attack ads highlighting his old arrest record. “Let ’em spend all that money. Because I have you.”

A few minutes later, Kluka sums up his assessment, before heading out on his canvassing assignments: “This guy is a working union brother—that’s important to me. This is a guy that I truly believe understands what it is like to get up and go to work every day.”

Countless politicians—even Trump himself—have run for office professing to champion the hopes, dreams, and perspectives of ordinary working people. The 2018 midterm election cycle has given birth to an army of insurgent progressive stars, from New York to Michigan to Idaho, with their own distinctive backgrounds and biographies.

Even in that crowded field, the solidly built, mustachioed construction worker Randy Bryce—popularly known by his Twitter handle, @IronStache—has managed to become one of the most-watched midterm election candidates, running for the Congressional district represented for the last twenty years by Republican Paul Ryan, now Speaker of the House of Representatives.

For as long as Ryan has been a Congressman, Bryce has been an ironworker, building projects ranging from parking garages to some of Milwaukee’s most recognizable landmarks. While serving also as political coordinator for his union local, he emerged as an outspoken advocate for labor in his community. When Walker took office as governor in January 2011 and soon after introduced his plan to strip teachers and most other public employees of their union rights, Bryce joined the tens of thousands of public- and private-sector workers who staged massive protests at the capitol building in Madison.

“I just remember his consistent presence at the capitol back in 2011,” says JoCasta Zamarripa, a Latina Democratic state representative from Milwaukee who was just starting her first term at the time.

“He’s very passionate about labor issues,” says Chris Liebenthal, a Milwaukee County social worker, union activist, and blogger who got to know Bryce when both were delegates to the Milwaukee County Labor Council. “As I got to know him, he was everywhere. He would help out no matter what union it was, or even if it was a nonunion issue like the Fight for $15, he was there.”

Liebenthal recalls that when he learned Bryce was contemplating a run for Congress, “I said I’d do whatever I could to help him.”

Bryce keeps his dark hair trimmed neat and cultivates his famous mustache so that it’s neither too prissy nor unkempt. He tends to look people in the eye when talking to them. He speaks in earnest tones, and if he asks you how you are and the conversation veers away before you answer, he’s liable to ask you again—not badgering, but as if to make sure you heard.

One of his favorite campaign lines is, “I want to build a bigger table.”

Bryce tends to look people in the eye when talking to them. He speaks in earnest tones. One of his favorite campaign lines is, ‘I want to build a bigger table.’

Bryce was born in 1964. He grew up on Milwaukee’s south side. His father was a police officer, his mother a homemaker and office worker. He couldn’t afford college, so he joined the Army, loosely thinking he might follow his father’s footsteps into law enforcement. When he was posted to Honduras, he became acutely aware of the poverty surrounding him.

After returning to Milwaukee, he worked for a year and a half helping connect homeless veterans with housing, then took a variety of other jobs. Diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1986 and having no medical insurance, he got treatment at a teaching hospital but also wound up having to declare bankruptcy. A succession of other low-wage jobs followed until, in his early thirties, a chance acquaintance recruited him to an ironworkers apprenticeship program.

It was that job, Bryce says, that set him on the road to a solid middle-class life. And it was the union that gave him training and health insurance, and acquainted him with politics. In Wisconsin’s 2016 presidential primary, he voted for Bernie Sanders, but when Hillary Clinton was declared the Democratic nominee, he not only supported her but was chosen to cast a vote for her in the Electoral College if she had won the state.

Bryce had already been mulling over a run for office when Wisconsin state Senator Chris Larson approached him during the 2017 immigrant rights May Day parade in Milwaukee. “There was a movement ready for a leader,” Larson says. “I told him his name came up as we were trying to brainstorm good candidates to run against Paul Ryan.”

Wisconsin’s First District is a national microcosm, with urban pockets flanked by outlying suburban communities and separated by rural expanses. Once a thriving manufacturing hub where autos and tractors and machinery built by union labor helped foster a thriving middle class, it has in the decades since been a poster child for U.S. deindustrialization, economic inequality, and racial segregation.

Democrat Les Aspin, a centrist who combined an academic air with a reputation for being a pragmatic expert on military defense, represented the district for two decades, then became Bill Clinton’s first Defense Secretary. His seat shifted to Republican control in 1994. Ryan won it narrowly in 1998 and went on to hold it securely for the next two decades, in large part due to Republican gerrymandering that redrew the district in his favor.

With that considerable boost, Ryan built a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that returned him to office time and again. Along the way, he cultivated an image of youth, sincerity, and policy gravitas. At his earnest constituent town hall meetings in those early days, he gave himself a platform, complete with PowerPoint slides, to promote his plans to privatize federal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Ryan has long advocated replacing Medicare with a system based on vouchers that the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation has pointed out “would shift costs and risk onto future generations of Medicare beneficiaries.” Ryan led several failed House attempts to scrap Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. As citizens fearing the loss of health coverage began to converge on Congressional constituent meetings, Ryan became a lightning rod for their anger.

Along the way, he cultivated an image of youth, sincerity, and policy gravitas.

In 2012, Ryan ran as Mitt Romney’s pick for Vice President, but hedged his bet by standing for re-election. Pundits began poking holes in Ryan’s policy-wonk reputation. The Romney-Ryan ticket lost Wisconsin but narrowly won the First District, while Ryan beat his most promising Democratic challenger to date, a Kenosha County Board member named Rob Zerban, by a margin of more than eleven percentage points.

Ryan’s winning streak also helped build—and was in turn powered by—his prodigious fundraising. It got a lift from the reapportionment that followed the census in 2000 and again after 2010, giving Ryan a more comfortable margin in future races. Ryan’s 2015 ascension to Speaker of the House helped elevate his profile, and Trump’s 2016 election expanded his potential power. But also made Ryan a national target for scrutiny and attack.

Larson explains that a loose national network of grassroots, progressive activists and organizers had since as far back as 2011 been searching for a strong candidate to oppose Ryan. Trump’s election amped up the urgency and the opportunity. If Bryce wanted to run, Larson assured him, there would be backing.

Bryce launched his challenge to Ryan on Father’s Day 2017 with a YouTube video that made him a national star from the moment it went up.

The introductory spot began by yoking Ryan to Trump. It followed with a sketch of Bryce’s own Everyman biography: as the middle-aged son of a mother afflicted with multiple sclerosis who fears she may lose access to the twenty drugs she needs; as the single father of a pre-teen boy; and as the construction laborer in a hard hat and steel-toed boots getting ready to walk the girders of new buildings rising from the Milwaukee asphalt.

In a single day, the campaign raised $100,000, and within a week stories about Bryce had appeared in publications from The Washington Post to Politico. The New Republic interviewed Bryce, and Esquire writer and acerbic political blogger Charlie Pierce flew out for his kickoff rally at Kenosha’s United Auto Workers union hall.

“I really think it was the contrast of this worker, this regular Wisconsinite with a hard hat, completely blue collar,” Zamarripa says. “I just think that captured the press’s attention and the public’s attention. Because here’s a guy that’s the exact opposite of his opponent, Paul Ryan.”

In April, however, Ryan announced that he would not seek re-election. Taking credit, Bryce coined a catchphrase that puts a snarky twist on Republican vows to undo the Affordable Care Act, declaring, “We just repealed Paul Ryan. Now it’s time to replace him.”

But Bryce will hardly have an easy path to victory on November 6.

Ryan representatives have flatly denied that Bryce scared him off, citing polls showing Ryan to be running twenty points ahead. But Bryce’s campaign manager, David Keith, says internal polls in the months leading up to Ryan’s announcement showed the gap between the two was “within the margin of error.” He tells The Progressive, “Paul Ryan, as a political operative, is very smart. He knew the type of expensive, bruising campaign he would have to run to be competitive, and the nature of this election cycle. He saw Conor Lamb”—the Democrat in a Pennsylvania special election for Congress in March—“win in a seat that had many more Republicans than [Ryan’s] seat does.”

But Bryce will hardly have an easy path to victory on November 6.

The first public head-to-head polls in the race, released in the second week of September, show his opponent with a six-point edge over Bryce among likely voters, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website.

The Cook Political Report has consistently rated the district “Lean Republican” since Ryan dropped out, and was sticking to that assessment as of mid-September. And Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, after having rated the district a toss-up for most of the summer, shifted it back to “Lean Republican” in mid-August. One reason: A state Supreme Court candidate backed by Republicans lost to a Democrat-backed candidate in April, but carried the first district by about five points.

Already, Bryce is being deluged with attack ads, many calling attention to his nine lifetime arrests—some for participating in protests, but also one for driving under the influence in 1998. His Republican opponent is corporate lawyer Bryan Steil, who easily won the August Republican primary, and on Election Night held himself out as a political outsider, a claim the Bryce campaign has pushed back on.

“He’s not a manufacturer, he’s a corporate attorney,” Keith says of Stiel. “He says he’s not a Washington insider. He worked on the Hill. He was Paul Ryan’s staffer. He drove his car.”

Bryce’s campaign hopes to win over at least some independents who voted for Trump in 2016. At the Kenosha canvassing, volunteers were given the addresses of residents who had been pegged as “undecided.” The object, a staffer explained, was persuasion, not just mobilization.

And the contrast between the two candidates is stark. Steil, on his issues webpage, vows to fight “costly” education mandates, back “reforms that make health care more affordable and more accessible,” and “defend law abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights.” The page is silent on how to accomplish these goals, as it is on immigration, environmental issues, climate change, income inequality, or the rise of white nationalism.

Bryce backs the Fight for $15, Medicare for All, green jobs, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, broader background checks for gun purchasers among other measures, immigrant rights, and, of course, stronger federal support for unions.

Yet given that the First District went for Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016, the question is inevitable: Can any Democrat win the district as it’s now constituted? And will Trump’s most enthusiastic backers, some of whom are clustered in the white working class, actually vote for someone like Bryce?

Denise Cox is one Bryce volunteer who thinks that’s possible. The sixty-one-year-old grandmother, a Navy veteran, has voted for only one Democrat for President in her life—Jimmy Carter—because she felt the party was too weak on defense. But over time, she became less satisfied with the Republican Party over such issues as climate change. She liked Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election and was disappointed he wasn’t the Democratic nominee.

Will Trump’s most enthusiastic backers, some of whom are clustered in the white working class, actually vote for someone like Bryce?

The separation of immigrant families at the border was what finally pulled her away from the Republican Party for good, she says. When she went looking on Twitter, “thinking there’s got to be something better,” she stumbled across @IronStache. She liked what she saw.

“This is a real person, with real experiences,” Cox says. She likes his support for Medicare for All, and respects that he’s a veteran. “That’s very important to me.”

Hearing Cox talk on a phone bank about her own political shift, the Bryce campaign made a video with her aimed at persuading other, potentially like-minded voters. “I think the majority of people in this country are ready for big changes, and I am excited about that,” she says. “The more I talk to people, the more I realize that I’m not unique.”

Bryce, in an interview with The Progressive, tells of a fellow ironworker who was a vocal Trump supporter before the election. “He was razzing me, ‘We’re going to drain the swamp!’ All that kind of talk,” Bryce recalls.

“I wouldn’t put him down,” he continues. “I wouldn’t call him names, say things like ‘You’re an idiot if you’re going to vote for Trump.’ I was like, ‘What do you think he’s going to do for you? He’s lying to you.’ ”

At a recent ironworkers event, Bryce ran into the man again. He says his coworker had a change of heart after seeing the reality of Trump in office. “He came up to me at that event and he’s like, ‘OK, own this. Go kick some ass.’ He was completely on board.”