Wisconsin GOP Rep Van Orden Trails Waitress Rebecca Cooke In New Poll

Democrats, needing to gain only a handful of seats to flip control of the House, have reason to be optimistic about their chances in western Wisconsin’s third congressional district, where a waitress at a farm-to-table restaurant is hoping to knock off incumbent and first-term Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

Rebecca Cooke leads Van Orden 49% to 48% in a new poll, according to a Democratic Campaign Committee memo obtained by HuffPost. The poll was commissioned by the DCCC.

Although it’s the second survey in about a month to put Cooke ahead, the margin is well within the poll’s 4.9% margin of error. It was taken from Oct. 3 through Oct. 7, and the 400 responses were gathered by landline, cell phone and texts.

The DCCC memo found Cooke had leads in who voters felt better reflected their position on abortion (an 11 point advantage) and which candidate was more relatable (a 6 point advantage).

Cooke, who said she campaigns during the day and then goes to her waitressing job at night three times a week, has emphasized her ties to the local community as a key part of her strategy.

“I’ll spend all day talking to people at a parade, talking to people at a lutefisk festival. I’ll be out with folks all day and then I’ll go into work until about 10 o’clock at night,” she told HuffPost in a phone interview.

With Republicans holding a narrow 220-212 edge in the House, Democrats need only to flip a few seats to take control of the chamber, and Van Orden’s has been high on the target list.

Van Orden eked out a win with 51.8% of the vote in 2022, following the retirement of moderate Democrat Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisc.). The Cook Political Report rates the 2024 race in the district, WI-3, as “lean Republican,” the category only slightly less competitive than the “toss-up” rating.

“From repeatedly bullying children, to being on Capitol grounds on January 6th, to relentlessly attacking reproductive freedom, Derrick Van Orden is one of the most vulnerable members of Congress,” said DCCC spokeswoman Mallory Payne, referencing a number of Van Orden’s scandals from his two years in office.

In early September, a poll for the House Majority PAC, a Democratic group, put Cooke up 49% to 47%. But a poll by the Republican Congressional Leadership Fund in late September put Van Orden in the lead, at 49% to 44%.

If she wins, Cooke would be by no means the first blue collar worker to win a seat in Congress. But, as a Democrat, she would join some relatively well-known company from recent years.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also waitressed and tended bar before winning her seat in 2018. And Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the first Gen Z member of Congress at age 27, was a rideshare driver.

Cooke said she has little choice but to hold down a regular job, though, if she wants to run for office while still paying her bills.

“That’s the reality if you want to be able to run for Congress and you’re not independently wealthy or from an elite background that just allows you to not work. Most regular people can’t just totally give up their job for a year or whatever it takes to run for Congress,” she said.

Amid her campaign — the second one for Cooke, after she lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for the same House seat in 2022 — she still works at The Good Wives, a farm-to-table establishment in an Eau Claire strip mall. Cooke also indirectly helped the restaurant get off the ground, as it’s a beneficiary of a non-profit she founded in 2016 to support women entrepreneurs.

The contrast between her and Van Orden is hard to miss. Cooke, 36, sounds every bit the youth development 4-H Club president and soccer team captain she was in high school. Van Orden, at 55, is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL and known on Capitol Hill for an often brusque manner.

That reputation has only been drawn more sharply by Van Orden’s occasional headline-grabbing episodes. Van Orden was at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. In July 2023, he yelled at a group of Senate pages who were lying on the floor in the Capitol’s rotunda to take pictures of the ceiling.

“Wake the f‑‑‑ up you little s‑‑‑‑. … What the f‑‑‑ are you all doing? Get the f‑‑‑ out of here. You are defiling the space you [pieces of s‑‑‑],” Van Orden reportedly told the pages, according to The Hill, which cited an account given by one of the pages.

At the Republicans’ national convention in July, Van Orden got into an altercation with a Code Pink protester, with each claiming the other had pushed them.

“I think Derrick Van Orden has certainly proved himself to have gone Washington in the way he reacted to those young Senate pages,” Cooke said. “That’s not how we talk around here.”

An emailed request for comment left with Van Orden’s campaign was not answered.

Van Orden and Republicans have taken aim at Cooke’s portrayal of herself as a political newcomer, saying it’s meant to obscure a partisan resume. Van Orden is campaigning on a standard GOP platform this year focusing on immigration and inflation.

In September, the DCCC’s counterpart, National Republican Campaign Committee, touted a report by a conservative Wisconsin website that had reviewed the website of Cooke’s now-defunct campaign consulting company by using the Wayback Machine web archive.

“Rebecca Cooke has spent her career as a paid political activist working to elect far left Democrats like San Francisco radical Kamala Harris and Defund the Police extremist Mandela Barnes. Now she’s desperately trying to hide her past from voters, but they won’t believe her lies and she will be rejected this November,” said NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella at the time.

Cooke downplayed the disclosure, saying it was no secret she had spent time when she was younger helping campaigns.

“It’s a part of my story. It’s always been on my website. It’s been on my printed material. It’s not something that I’ve hid from,” she said.

“By and large, what I’ve focused the majority of — for sure the last 15 years of my life — on, has been rooted in this community that I grew up in,” she said.

Part of Cooke’s pitch is a can-do attitude, which she highlights with an emphasis on her history of community projects and youthful leadership. Her local ties are even reflected in her radio ads, including one where she recites the pledge of the 4-H Club, a youth leadership and development organization focused on agriculture and animal husbandry popular among rural students.

But another of Cooke’s school-age projects has been visibly adopted by the community, and remains part of Eau Claire’s streetscape to this day.

When she was in sixth grade, Cooke said, a friend of hers was struck by a car and killed while trying to cross a busy highway. Cooke and some other students worked with an engineering firm and lobbied the school board and the city council to get an underpass built beneath the highway, she said.

“It was constructed while we were in high school,” she said. “And we all came to the groundbreaking ceremony.”