House Speaker Paul Ryan will find himself challenged from both sides next year as he attempts to hold onto his seat in Congress.
Randy Bryce, a Democratic ironworker and union leader, generated buzz when he announced his candidacy for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District on June 18 with an emotionally gripping video ad.
Bryce portrays himself as the anti-Ryan: a blue-collar union man, Army veteran and single father who wants to save the American health-care system from Republicans like Ryan. He projects a working-class image with his hard hat, tool belt, welding mask, blue jeans and T-shirt.
Near the end of his ad, Bryce declares: “Let’s trade places, Paul Ryan. You can come work the iron, and I’ll go to D.C.”
Bryce says he has spent his entire life in southeastern Wisconsin, where the 1st District is located. He took some college classes but never graduated, according to the Daily Cardinal. His campaign says he survived testicular cancer in his 20s and had a “miracle child” in his 40s. In his ad, he claims he has been an iron worker for 20 years.
He represented the Ironworkers Local 8 for nine years as a volunteer political coordinator. He is president of the Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce board of directors, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Veterans Caucus and until recently he served on the Milwaukee Area Labor Council board of directors.
Bryce may be generating intrigue as a dark-horse candidate, but he failed in three previous attempts to win elected office. In 2012, he lost a Democratic primary for state assembly. A year later, he lost a 10-way primary for the Racine County Board of Education, and the following year he lost the general election for state Senate.
“The voters of Wisconsin have already rejected Randy Bryce multiple times,” Republican Party spokesman Alec Zimmerman told the Associated Press. “Instead of fighting for hard-working Wisconsin families, Randy Bryce will say and do anything to get to Washington and defend his liberal special interest friends.”
Cathy Myers, a teacher and vice president of the Janesville School Board, generated less fanfare when she threw her hat into the ring on June 22 to challenge Ryan. Myers touts herself as a single mother of two, a 23-year high-school English teacher, an outspoken community advocate and an avid Harley-Davidson rider.
“Paul Ryan has never faced a challenger with a history of electoral success,” Myers stated in a news release.
However, while Myers has won two school board elections, she has never run for state or national office.
The first Democrat to announce a challenge to Ryan was David Yankovich, who moved from Ohio to Kenosha, Wisconsin, specifically to run against Ryan. Yankovich, who has worked in property management, also contributed to the Huffington Post until Election Day 2016. His last article for the website, published on election night around the time polls closed, was an apocalyptic vision of Trump’s America, written as a fictional dispatch from the year 2019. According to his campaign website, his writing and social media have made him “a nationally recognized progressive voice.”
Yankovich has been a political activist, volunteering for Democratic campaigns in his spare time. He calls himself “one of the original voices of the Resistance against Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.” He claims his passion for public service began when he met his “new hero,” Hillary Clinton, when he was 10.
The top of his website boldly declares his mission: “David Yankovich is a regular guy. He’s not rich. He’s not famous. He’s not a politician. He just recently moved to Wisconsin.
“So why is he running to serve Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District? Because Paul Ryan needs to go.”
Chris Martin, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, has called Yankovich a “liberal carpetbagger who flaunts his own lack of qualifications to run for office.”
While Bryce, Myers and Yankovich will all come at Ryan from the left, the speaker will also face a primary challenge from the right. Businessman and inventor Paul Nehlen, who ran against Ryan in the 2016 GOP primary, is once again gunning for the GOP nomination from the district. Nehlen plans on running as a “Trump Republican” – a populist-nationalist who will stand for America-first policies.
Nehlen’s brand-new book “Wage the Battle: Putting America First in the Fight to Stop Globalist Politicians and Secure the Borders” lays out the principles that make the man tick. It was opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he believed would kill American jobs, that motivated him to run against Ryan in 2016. He credits his 2016 campaign with helping to derail the TPP, which was a major policy goal for the Republican and Democratic establishments.
Nehlen is also now waging the battle against what he calls the “refugee resettlement racket” in which federal contractors are paid to plant mostly Muslim refugees in unsuspecting American communities. He recently directed and produced a documentary called “Hijrah: Radical Islam’s Global Invasion.”
When asked by WND, Nehlen essentially dismissed the three Democratic challengers.
“So far, the Democrats have fielded a teacher from Janesville, an iron worker from Kenosha and a carpetbagger from Ohio – very Ossoff-esque of them,” Nehlen chuckled. “Each of the Democratic candidates for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District seat have said they are for single-payer health care.”
Indeed, all three Democrats appear determined to make health care the central issue of their campaigns. Myers suggested the House version of the bill to replace Obamacare was what spurred her to run against Ryan.
“When I saw Paul Ryan and Donald Trump celebrating the passage of a health-care bill that would throw 23 million Americans off their insurance, increase costs for the disabled on Medicaid and seniors on Medicare and eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions, I knew I had to step up for my community,” Myers was quoted as saying.
Yankovich, on his campaign website, said his mother recently began suffering from complications from undiagnosed COPD and pneumonia. Doctors placed her in a medically induced coma and told Yankovich he might have to make a life-or-death decision for her.
“His mother’s health scare transpired while Paul Ryan was working to take health-care coverage away from more than 20 million Americans,” Yankovich’s website reads. “While his mother is recovering, David was furious thinking about all the Americans who die because Paul Ryan and others in Washington think health care is a privilege and not a right.
“He knew he had to do something, so he decided to move to Wisconsin and run.”
Meanwhile, Bryce’s campaign ad began with a clip of Trump and Ryan at the news conference where they celebrated the passage of the House’s Obamacare repeal. The ad featured Bryce’s mother, who has multiple sclerosis, saying if she can’t take her drug that costs thousands of dollars, “I don’t know what would happen.”
“The system is extremely flawed,” Bryce says in the video, referring to the health-care system. “I work every day so that me and my son have insurance.”
Bryce, who spoke at a Bernie Sanders event during the 2016 Democratic primaries, favors universal health insurance and a single-payer system. The Guardian quoted him saying of his mother: “I shouldn’t have to say, ‘Luckily, she has insurance.’ It should be something everyone has. Single payer works in other countries.”
Whichever Democrat emerges from the primary is sure to face a tough uphill climb to win election to Congress. Wisconsin’s 1st District has been reliably Republican since 1994. Ryan has cruised to victory every cycle since 1998, never receiving less than 55 percent of the vote.
Nehlen, for the moment, remains laser-focused on taking out the 10-term incumbent.
“If we want to see Obamacare truly repealed, a wall built, the refugee resettlement racket defunded along with all the things Ryan funded for Obama in 2015, which we are still funding, by the way, it’s time to retire Ryan,” Nehlen declared.
