This is a special longform feature story by Dan Shafer at The Recombobulation Area.
Previous pre-election feature stories have included “Bird on a Wire” in 2022 and “Joy and Desperation in the Fox Valley” in 2024, both of which won awards for “Best Long Hard Feature Story” from the Milwaukee Press Club.
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There’s a certain simplicity to Rebecca Cooke’s approach — to her campaign, to her politics, to, seemingly, her worldview. This is not a criticism. This is a good thing.
Cooke is the Democratic candidate running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, located largely in western Wisconsin. It’s the state’s second-largest district in terms of land area, and on this crisp, sunny Saturday in October, she’s covering a lot of ground. Her day begins in Eau Claire, where she attends the Hmong New Year celebration; later, she attends a lutefisk dinner at a rural church in the village of Ferryville in rural Crawford County; and she ends her day in La Crosse at the County Democratic Party’s fall dinner.
In between, she hosts a cookout for supporters in the city of Viroqua, located in the Driftless region. At Eckhart Park, a few dozen supporters gather not just to pick up new campaign signs and literature, but to build relationships with one another — and this is an intentional part of Cooke’s campaign, and something she’s been doing since she first ran for this seat in 2022. It’s not just about campaigning and the goal in front of them, it’s also about building community. There’s a participatory element to Cooke’s campaign that you can see in this kind of setting. It gives people “confidence and togetherness,” Cooke says, along with “a little bit of extra time to talk to me, to see each other.”
The group sits down at park benches, bratwursts and paper plates in front of each of them, and Cooke gets up to speak under the park pavilion. She talks about health care; she talks about tariffs; she talks about transmission lines and data centers; she talks about the war in Iran. On each issue, she outlines a direct connection to something happening in the 3rd Congressional District. She talks about her five-point platform — “lowering costs, combatting corruption, bolstering agriculture, supporting small business, and rebuilding an American dream we can actually grasp.” She also talks about candy bars.
“So, I have these 3 Musketeers in my hand,” she says.
She gestures to a man named Rick, who is there for the cookout, but isn’t among those wearing Cooke T-shirts or hats like many in the rest of the group. This is someone Cooke met while campaigning, door-to-door. Cooke had gone to his house when out canvassing and recounts the first conversation they had.
“We were talking just about how things are going, right?” she said. “He was talking to me about how much he loves 3 Musketeers and how every time he goes to Walmart, it just gets more expensive. His story really stuck with me, just thinking about how costs really impact people…It’s a lot harder to enjoy things.”
After the primary, Cooke looked up Rick’s address and mailed him a package of 3 Musketeers bars. “It was just kind of something I wanted to send him to brighten his day,” she said, adding that this wasn’t something she ever intended to be part of the campaign, adding, “I was raised to do good things when no one’s watching.” But, at this cookout event, Rick showed up with a few of those candy bars to share with Cooke and with the group. In his own charming, unexpectedly roundabout way, he’d become part of that community that Cooke has been building.
“It’s those small interactions that mean the difference in winning elections — showing up and listening to people,” she said to the group before they go out for an afternoon of campaigning. “You don’t need to mail people 3 Musketeers bars, but it’s those sorts of conversations.”
“People just want to be heard right now.”
The 3rd is Wisconsin’s most competitive congressional district, and the only to change partisan hands within the last 15 years. Democrat Ron Kind served there for 13 consecutive terms from 1997 to 2023. When he retired, Republican Derrick Van Orden won the race for the open seat in 2022.
This has, in many ways, been ground zero for the political realignment that has occurred in the era when Donald Trump has become the dominant figure in American politics. This district is home to more counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016 than all but one1 (FOOTNOTE: Iowa) in the entire country. This is Obama-Trump central.
Even viewed through a nationwide lens, where many places experienced this Obama-Trump phenomenon, there is a distinct cluster of these counties in the Driftless region, which spans western Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota, northwestern Illinois, and northeastern Iowa, with the Mississippi River cutting through it. This region gets its unique topography — rolling hills, bluffs and ridges, winding rivers — from the fact that, unlike much of the rest of the Midwest, this region was never flattened by a glacier.
This unique geographical region also contains its own unique politics, too. There’s an independent streak, a distinct anti-establishment energy, and a myriad of economic challenges that have contributed to this dynamic. This all seemed so perplexing a decade ago when it first occurred, but is less so now as this realignment has come to define much of our politics in the years since.
Some of the trends in this region have been especially stark. Vernon County, for example — home to Viroqua, where Cooke held that cookout and traded a few candy bars — swung from a county that Barack Obama won by a 22-point margin in 2008 to one Donald Trump won by more than 4% in 2016. In neighboring Crawford County — a more rural part of the region where Cooke would attend a lutefisk lunch in a church basement — a 27-point advantage for Obama in 2008 turned to a nearly 14-point advantage for Trump in 2024. Democrats’ efforts to claw back what they’d lost have not yet proven successful.
And if 2016 served as a stunning result for many who did not see the Obama-Trump realignment materializing, it was the 2024 presidential election that drove home how much these political changes were no fluke. Western Wisconsin, and in particular, the Driftless region in the southwest corner of the state, was in many ways the area of the state that delivered Wisconsin for Trump a second time.
Realignment’s right hook had struck again. Four of the five counties that shifted most toward Trump from 2020 to 2024 were all clustered in the southwest corner of the state — Lafayette (6.5-point shift), Iowa (6.1-point shift), Crawford (5.9-point shift) and Grant (5.9-point shift). With Wisconsin turning out to be the closest of any of the seven swing states in 2024, these shifts in a state decided by less than 1% in many ways proved decisive. Madison and Dane County continue to be a reliable Democratic powerhouse, Milwaukee’s numbers didn’t drop off the way many other major cities in the Great Lakes did, and the Fox Valley and Green Bay held serve, with only minor rightward shifts. But if there was any “red wave” in 2024, it crested in the Driftless.
