An ER nurse running for Congress should not be news in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. It is, and the forty years of donor-class discipline that made it news is the point. The Guardian profiled Mitchell Berman this week — a twenty-year emergency-room nurse and union member Democrats have recruited to flip the seat Bryan Steil, a corporate attorney and former Ryan aide, has held since 2019. The district he’s running in should not be curious. It used to send its own to Washington as a matter of course. The two parties spent four decades replacing the working class with the donor class in their candidate pipelines, and now a man who has spent two decades at the bedside is treated as an exotic.
Berman has been in emergency rooms for more than twenty years. He has held the hands of people who came in sick because they waited too long to see a doctor. He has watched what happens when a healthcare system optimized for profit meets patients who cannot pay. He is running in the same district Paul Ryan held from 2015 to 2019 — the seat Ryan used to chair the House Ways and Means Committee and the one that decided the federal budget for a decade. That is the soil in which Berman is asking voters to plant a working-class candidate.
The Republican objection — a candidate with no legislative record, no policy staff, no donor Rolodex is unprepared to write a federal budget — has a point. “Unprepared” is a question of which kind of preparation counts. A corporate attorney who spent a decade representing the interests that offshored Wisconsin manufacturing is also unprepared to represent a district where manufacturing employment fell from 560,000 in 2001 to 460,000 in 2025 — a hundred thousand good union jobs gone in a quarter-century. From January 2025 to January 2026 alone, the state lost another 9,500 manufacturing jobs. Healthcare jobs have now passed manufacturing in the state for the first time. That is what twenty-five years of trade policy and right-wing governance gets you.
Tariffs were sold as the resurrection of American manufacturing. Tariffs have cost Wisconsin 3,910 jobs and are now adding $1,095 a year to the average household’s costs, according to a July 2026 report by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois Project for Middle Class Renewal. Republicans ran on factories “roaring back.” What they delivered was a more expensive grocery run. Berman is not anti-tariff across the board — he has said targeted tariffs can serve a purpose. He is against tariffs that destroy manufacturing jobs and add a thousand dollars a year to household budgets while delivering nothing they were promised to deliver. That distinction is real, and it is the kind of nuance a working-class candidate carries naturally because he lives inside it.
The story that needs telling is the disappearance. Working-class representation in Congress has collapsed over the past half century — lawyers are now the dominant occupational group on Capitol Hill, while the share of members who ever held a blue-collar job has fallen into single digits — and the collapse tracks the destruction of the institutions that produced working-class candidates in the first place. Unions. Collective bargaining. The ward-level party organizations that once recruited miners, machinists, and dairy farmers to run for office and trained them once they got there. Berman specifically cites Scott Walker’s Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public-sector workers in Wisconsin, and what it cost him and his co-workers. He credits his union with the benefits package, the work-life balance, the “seat at the table.” Walker signed Act 10 in 2011, well into Berman’s nursing career. The law didn’t strip benefits from a man who hadn’t yet accumulated them. It stripped the institutional pipeline that would have produced the next Mitchell Berman — and the next one after that.
Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers in 1981 and signaled that the federal government would no longer be on the side of organized labor; right-to-work laws, which require unions to represent workers who don’t pay dues, hollowed them out further. Paul Ryan — the man whose seat Berman is now running for — spent the years after that on the receiving end of the arrangement Walker enforced: a Republican donor class committed to weakening labor, with bipartisan reinforcement from a Democratic establishment that preferred professional-class candidates for reasons of its own.
The 145 million Americans who belong to a credit union and the 42 million served by rural electric cooperatives don’t usually notice when this conversation is about unions specifically. They should. The institutions that produce working-class candidates are the same institutions that produce working-class members, and they are the same institutions the donor class on both sides has spent forty years starving.
Democrats are targeting vulnerable seats this midterm with working-class candidates like Berman, expanding the map into reliably Republican territory where labor’s collapse has been sharpest. In Wisconsin specifically, canvassers are pushing the healthcare message because it travels well in the same districts where unions used to do that work. The midterms do not require a wave. They require five, ten, fifteen seats like this one, in places where the working-class Democratic argument is being made by someone who can be trusted to make it because he has lived it.
Berman is not a celebrity. He is not a polished consultant class. He is not a candidate who has to be packaged and focus-grouped into relatability. He is a person who is in fact a person, who has in fact done the work, and who can stand in front of a union hall and a VFW hall and a kitchen table and say the same thing because it is in fact the same thing because he is in fact the same person. That asymmetry — a man who has spent twenty years at the bedside against a man who has spent a decade representing the interests that emptied it — is the entire race. The polling says this is a Republican-leaning district. The polling also said Donald Trump could not win Wisconsin in 2016. The polling in 2026 is measuring an electorate that is exhausted, broke, and being told by their own representative that things will get better if he stays.
My grandfather in Minnesota sat on the boards of the dairy cooperative and the rural electric cooperative, and the assumption was the same as it was on my mother’s side in Gothenburg, where the union was the political training ground and the parties sent their own to the Riksdag. Different language, same plumbing. The question in Wisconsin’s 1st District is whether that plumbing can be rebuilt at scale — not just one ER nurse in one race, but the next ten, and the ten after that. You don’t flip the institutional collapse with one good press release.
So what do we build instead? The build is the institutional infrastructure that produced him — and that is being rebuilt, slowly, in places. Mondragon, the Basque cooperative federation, has employed seventy thousand people in a single regional economy for seventy years on a roughly five-to-one pay ratio, and when the flagship Fagor co-op went bankrupt in 2013 the federation relocated about 1,700 of its 1,800 Spanish worker-members to other co-ops in the group rather than dropping them on the street. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half in a single year — 46 percent, the Census Bureau measured — and when the expansion lapsed, the poverty came back. Public banks in North Dakota have turned a profit every year since 1919, in the reddest state in the union, and nobody in Bismarck has ever called themselves the Kremlin. These aren’t fairy tales. They’re receipts. They’re what an institutional alternative looks like when the parties finally let it exist.
The race is worth watching. What doesn’t fit in a press release is the work it took to make the race possible — and the work it will take to make the next one possible too.