I knew there was something off about Rebecca Cooke’s campaign for Congress in the 3rd congressional district the LAST time she ran, and lost. That’s a swing Wisconsin congressional district that extends along the Mississippi River Valley through La Crosse and up to Eau Claire. It covers most of the “Driftless Area” of western and southwestern Wisconsin. It’s especially rugged because the glaciers skipped it. And the people are too.
She was making a big deal on social media about being a hard-working waitress, so broke she even posted a photo of her broken-down car! She was a farm kid slinging hash and driving home in a junker with the photos to prove it! She was just like you!
I thought, this political bio seems almost too good to be true. It kind of seems like something a leftwing political operative would dream up in a campaign war room to camouflage that their ideology is completely out of step in a district where folks work with their hands and you can actually find guys whose career is going into the woods and cutting down trees. They probably wouldn’t take too kindly to a political fundraiser who supports gun control. I imagined Rebecca Cooke standing in front of an erase board with a marker a few years ago, and telling a room of political operatives, “I know! What if I get a job at a little diner? I mean, I can’t run as a political hack.” I am not saying that really happened. Just that I imagine it could.
The scary thing is that, in this climate, it might actually work.
Around the same time, WRN’s Jim Piwowarczyk and I discovered that Cooke, the ginger-haired, fresh-faced “waitress,” deleted the website of her former political operative company. Unfortunately for her, there is a site called the “Wayback Machine.”
It revealed that before she was flagging down motorists to fix her junker alongside I-94 or whatever (slight hyperbole there), and occasionally waitressing (which she did actually sometimes do), Cooke was actually a wily left-wing campaign operative and fundraiser, for candidates all over the country, including one named… Kirk Bangstad. Of course, “I was a paid left-wing operative for a loon” and other loons doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it in campaign ads, and so the Wisconsin waitress messaging was born.
Paging Capt. Renault
We reported this a couple years ago, and no one paid attention until Bangstad went really off the rails a couple weeks ago and received a visit from the FBI for it. The media, Cooke and left then ran around like Capt. Louis Renault, the prefect of police in Casablanca, all acting in unison like they were shocked, shocked to discover gambling was going on in the establishment and that Kirk Bangstad is an unhinged jerk. As if he hasn’t said crazy sh*t for years. Apparently some of it crafted in conjunction with Rebecca Cooke.
And then, armed with Cooke’s hastily scrubbed website, the rest of her biography suddenly made sense. The little Eau Claire mercantile store touting American-made goods before it closed (it lasted seven years), cleverly named after her red hair. The non-profit helping women-led businesses that gave out relatively few actual grants. It all seemed a little too pat. Not saying it was. Just saying that it fit pretty neatly.
Derrick Van Orden, the salty super authentic former Navy SEAL chief she keeps trying to oust, and Wisconsin Right Now, aren’t the only folks who noticed this suspiciously large gap between who Cooke wants people to think she is and who she is. Remember Katrina Shankland? She was a far-left establishment Democrat legislator who lost to Cooke in a primary and who, before she did, went wild on her. Cooke also lost to BRAD PFAFF by the way, but that’s another story.
The elections in the 3rd get really brutal because it’s anyone’s seat. It’s a true swing district decided by like 10,000 votes. That’s partly because of the landscape and the people and also because of redistricting years ago that made the 7th more red and the 3rd purple. This was Democrat Ron Kind country until it turned out he drew rental income from a property that housed something called “Asian Sunny Massage.” It wasn’t unusual to see fields with Trump signs AND signs declaring it was “Kind Country,” but he up and quit shortly after that. Republican Van Orden lost to Kind, tried again in a more favorable media and political climate, and flipped a seat held by Kind for decades.
The very qualities that drive the media (and Mark Pocan) nuts about DVO are the very qualities that keep getting him elected. His off-the-cuff, tell-it-like-it-is personality fits a district with a rugged Mississippi River Valley independent streak. I’ve interviewed voters out there, and one guy had a rusted plane in his shed. The bar was populated by deer hunters in orange. The bluffs are beautiful, the Mississippi strong and mighty. Plus, DVO works his district hard in person, usually in a baseball cap and flannel shirt, and unlike some candidates I know, he looks like he normally wears them. He even posed in front of a sign for a town called “Victory.” There really is one.
True Swing Voters
These are communities that flipped by some of the highest percentages in the country from Obama to Trump. One little town named Steuben became the bellwether for the country, attracting a Danish film crew. These towns are filled with folks who don’t need government to survive, not really, but they’re struggling financially. They don’t particularly like government or elites, and they don’t trust regular politicians as usual.
When I interviewed some of these voters in 2016 and 2018, they told me they voted for Trump because he wasn’t a politician. He was something different and they wanted to try that because they think politics is broke, and politicians have forgotten them. One woman told me she didn’t care about his salty language because that’s how people spoke in her bar anyway. Kind of like Van Orden. These folks were Reagan Democrats back in the day.
A lot of these folks don’t even vote. I once interviewed a logger in Crawford County who told me he voted for two people in his life. Trump and the sheriff who was his neighbor. That interview was before DVO was elected, but DVO’s persona would appeal to guys like that because he doesn’t seem like a normal politician. Heck, TMZ posted a video the other day of him riding a Harley to Congress.
The Democrats and media have gone after Van Orden so hard, desperately trying to turn him into a caricature, exactly because of the district he represents.
If he was in a safe district like Tony Wied, instead of one Democrats used to hold and thus have a chance to get back, they’d leave him alone. But he’s not so they play endless gotcha games with him, cherry-pick lines out of his hyperbole and are downright dishonest. If that doesn’t work they’re desperately begging the liberal court to redistrict and draw him out.
For example, they call him an “insurrecti*nist” for being at the Capitol on that fateful day in January, when actually he just went to the peaceful and lawful rally, left and didn’t join in when things started getting out of hand, and then promptly condemned it. Or take the time they mocked him for months for scolding and getting salty with pages lying on the floor of Congress. He was upset they weren’t showing decorum at the very spot where soldiers and presidents have lain in state. Can you imagine what he saw and who he lost during those five combat deployments? C’mon. Spare me the faux outrage.
Well, except Mark Pocan. There’s something else going on there. He’s acting like an upset but still obsessed love-struck teen who got rejected by the prom king. Now they’re a historic X rivalry, but DVO should probably start ignoring the guy. X rivalries quickly go the way of Loomer vs. Owens, and it just gives the media fodder. But I get it. I wouldn’t take Pocan’s endless stream of crap sitting down either.
It’s only the media (and Pocan) who act perpetually shocked that a former Navy SEAL chief with five combat deployments swears on X, though. I mean he’s a former Navy SEAL chief with five combat deployments to places like Bosnia and the Horn of Africa. What did you expect him to do? Offer people tea and crumpets and read them EE Cummings poetry by the firelight? C’mon. They have Pocan for that. When he’s not living on X.
How Dare You Never Hold Political Office!
Shankland lost in part because of her tone-deaf messaging. She actually ran ads trashing Cooke for never holding political office in a district that dislikes career politicians. It reminds me of that union ad that trashed Spencer Pratt for not wanting to give free taxpayer-funded homes to the LA “unhoused.” Katrina’s clueless messaging helped Cooke win that primary. You’ve gotta know your district.
“Cooke appears at the bottom of the screen along with all caps text stating ‘REBECCA COOKE HAS NEVER HELD PUBLIC OFFICE.’” That’s an actual paragraph that ran on Wisconsin Public Radio about a Shankland ad.
But on the other stuff, her darts hit a bull’s eye.
Shankland said Cooke was “caught lying about her background as a political fundraiser, backs out of debate, and begs for dark money help against Shankland.”
Van Orden said the same thing but he’s a former Navy SEAL, so he said to Cooke, “Today is about you flat out lying to everyone in #WI03 about your background.” He then called Cooke a “Crook.”
After the first go-around, Cooke started threading her political background into her bio just enough to not be accused of outright leaving it out, but it’s not her emphasis.
Cooke once told the liberal Wisconsin Examiner that she was an “outsider,” saying, “You know, I don’t come from a career background in politics.” The story mentioned that she worked as a waitress for three days a week but left out her extensive work as a political operative, which is about as insider as they come.
As for that non-profit, The New York Post reported last time around, that Cooke was “accused of self-interested double-dealing after financial disclosures revealed she worked at one of the small businesses that her nonprofit gave a grant to” – the restaurant where she sometimes waitresses.
A closer look at Red Letter Grant organization that she founded shows that the nonprofit only gave out 17 grants while Cooke was earning compensation there during recent years, and, in the most recent tax form available, the nonprofit spent more money on its employees than it did on grants.
When she’s not touting her waitressing skills, Cooke’s website calls her a “small business owner and nonprofit leader.” However, Cooke’s small business, a store called Red’s Mercantile, closed in 2022. Her other business, a small consulting company, formed the basis for her more extensive work history as a leftist political operative and fundraiser.
“I just finished waitressing,” she stresses in a recent campaign video. Yet her 2025 federal financial disclosure form for Congress lists her compensation only as “advising” for Flytedesk, but then says she is no longer advising it, as well as Cooke Strategy, her political consulting firm. She earned only $7,085 that year filing as a waitress.
Reid Hoffman, and Voter Angst
Van Orden and his team have spent the entire campaign season trying to remind voters who Cooke really is. The problem is there isn’t much media out there, and Cooke is a prolific fundraiser. Big shocker that a political fundraiser would be a good political fundraiser. She isn’t very picky. She even took dough from a PAC funded by an Epstein island visitor, Reid Hoffman last time, and won’t pledge to not take more.
The race also could dictate control of Congress and hence the future of the Free World so there’s also that.
Van Orden faces a much tougher political climate this time, due to voter angst over gas and Iran and Trump, to whom he’s aligned, but he’s also an incumbent, which helps. When he was honest about that, the media predictably jumped all over him. They tried to turn it into a hit piece that he said something about not paying attention to campaigning because he was focused on policy. The horrors. Other than Ron Johnson, DVO is the politician the media love to cherry-pick and distort. They can be imprecise speakers because they speak from the heart without a typical politician filter, and sometimes they pay a price for that. But it’s also exactly why voters keep electing them.
The Moment the Mask Dropped
There was one moment where the mask dropped.
Cooke was confronted on camera and asked why she called the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “disgusting.” The camera caught her dashing off so fast that she left her car trunk open. But it’s on video.
“I feel like the way that the Trump administration has been using ICE around our communities is disgusting and wrong,” Cooke said, in a video shared by the NRCC.
And then there’s her comments about Eau Claire. Van Orden wrote:
“In a series of social media posts from her former business, Red’s Mercantile, Cooke complained about being ‘back living in my predominantly white hometown’ and claimed ‘quiet racism’ had ‘always been there and has never been challenged or called out.’
Cooke went even further, comparing Eau Claire to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the wake of the George Floyd riots and riots-related unrest, claiming the same racism was ‘institutionalized’ in western Wisconsin communities.”
Cooke also lectured residents not to “lean on your POC friends.” It’s always privileged white liberal women who rush to tell minorities how they’re supposed to feel, by the way.
There’s also her gushing over Zohran Mamdani. And Bernie actively campaigning for her. How far removed is she really from the ideologies of Francesca Hong?
Yeah that will really play in the 3rd CD. If voters find out about it anyway.
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