Ryan Exit Heightens Chances of Flipping Key District

By ROGER BYBEE

“The entire nation is looking at Wisconsin’s First District race,” thundered Sen. Bernie Sanders at a Feb. 24 rally to about 1,500 roaring supporters of left-populist labor leader Randy Bryce packed into a Racine, Wis., hall.

Bryce, Ironworkers Local 8 political director, has been running a high-profile campaign against US House Speaker Paul Ryan since summer. Despite the excitement, endorsements from the likes of Sanders and surprising levels of fund-raising, the prospect of unseating Ryan — a 20-year incumbent, the powerful Speaker, and sitting on a $10.4 war chest — remained an uphill fight despite a mounting “blue wave.”

But Ryan’s April 11 announcement that he will not be running again in November has exploded with huge implications nationally and for Wisconsin’s First District.

For Republicans and their donor class, Ryan’s decision is a devastating blow to their chances for heading off mounting Democratic momentum. “I think this is the captain abandoning the sinking ship,” fumed former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. “Members are pissed. I think this is going to cause some angst.” Another Republican wailed, “This is a titanic, tectonic shift. This is going to make every Republican donor believe the House can’t be held.”

Thus far, 38 Republican House members have announced that they are not seeking reelection, with Ryan’s plans adding more gloom to the GOP. The ambitious Ryan, who already ran as his party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2012, clearly does not want to take the blame for Republican defeats in November that would diminish his chances for a future presidential run.

Ryan’s decision will also diminish his role as Trump’s key enabler in Congress. Ryan shamelessly transformed himself from a Trump critic in 2016 into a craven lapdog once Trump was elected, as reported in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.

Ryan’s two decades in the House have been distinguished by his stone-hearted neglect of the most vulnerable Americans, including those in his own southeastern Wisconsin district wracked by deindustrialization. Ryan fought to slash food stamps, school lunches, unemployment compensation and foreclosure assistance, all in the name of not allowing our already threadbare safety net to become, in his words, a comfy “hammock.” Instead, Ryan slavishly devoted himself to padding the thrones of big donors like the Koch brothers in bestowing ever-larger tax cuts for the top 1% and Corporate America.

Southeastern Wisconsin—with its flailing factory towns and depressed rural pockets — now has the opportunity to elect a genuinely progressive voice to Congress for the first time in the past six decades, having been represented almost continuously by neo-conservative (pro-Reagan military buildup, pro-Nicaraguan contras) Democrat Les Aspin and right-wing Republicans like Ryan. Two progressives, union activist Randy Bryce and educator Cathy Myers, are aggressively seeking the opportunity to run to replace Ryan.

Bryce is well-known for his activism in the fierce winter 2011 battle against Scott Walker’s plan to cripple public-sector unions and his role in other labor struggles, veterans’ issues, and serving as a Sanders surrogate in 2016. The potential for a candidate like Bryce was prefigured when the Vermont senator captured 71 of 72 counties in the 2016 Wisconsin primary with a class-accented message that challenged rising inequality and growing corporate power.

Bryce is instantly identifiable as a burly working-class guy in a blue-collar shirt whose left-populist message seems to instantly resonate with other working-class people shut out of power by corporate-Republican alliance and mocked by liberals as a solid mass of Trump supporters (despite evidence to the contrary). He’s been interviewed by GQ, but clearly ignores their fashion tips for stylish gentlemen. Bryce is known on Twitter as “#Ironstache” for his union roots and his trademark bushy black mustache. One state legislator described Bryce as “a perfect Wisconsin ethnic mix: half-Mexican and half-Polish.”

Bryce’s biography has prompted more than one observer to remark that he seems to have stepped out of a Bruce Springsteen song. He is a cancer survivor and an Army veteran who barely scraped by economically until he got a union job as an ironworker.

Bryce sees himself as an advocate for the interests of the entire rainbow of the working class. He hammers hard at corporations offshoring of jobs, the need for free college to open opportunities for poor and working and imperative of a “Medicare for all” single-payer health plan. But his politics are not limited to bread-and-butter issues alone. He has been arrested at a “Dreamers” protest outside Ryan’s office and stands up for LGBT rights. “Working people are now standing up together,” he declared to a standing ovation at the rally with Sanders.

Bryce will be competing against another progressive for the Democratic nomination to be settled in an August 14 primary. Myers is a long-time teacher and a school board member in the de-industrialized factory town of Janesville. She often speaks of her roots working hard in her parents’ diner. Myers has a strong following, reflected in endorsements from 20 elected officials in the district. A friendly, engaging woman, she has built support with her backing of Medicare-for-all healthcare, support for immigrant rights (she was also arrested at the pro-Dreamers protest), and women’s reproductive rights. She pushes for a halt to hazardous Enbridge pipelines carrying tar-sands oil through the district. Most fundamentally, she calls for “unrigging” the unequal economy by “rebuilding it from the bottom up.”

At this point, Bryce seems to have the inside track. He kicked off his campaign with an ad where Bryce dons his welding mask and dramatically offers Ryan a bold dare: “Let’s trade places. Paul Ryan, you can work the iron, and I’ll go to D.C.” The ad went viral and ignited extensive national publicity with coverage in numerous publications, appearances on MSNBC and other major outlets, and a Hollywood fundraiser with actress and comedian Chelsea Handler. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell’s predicted that Ryan is “going to hell” and ““Ironstache is coming to take his place.”

At this point, Bryce has snared an impressive list of endorsements, including Bernie Sanders, congressional members including Wisconsin’s Gwen Moore and Marc Pocan and California’s Barbara Lee, along with numerous local officials.

But especially crucial on the ground in the district will be Bryce’s endorsements by major unions like the United Auto Workers and Service Employees International Union deeply rooted in the district and have strong electoral ground operations.

The most recent polling shows Bryce running “dead even or ahead” of all the possible Republican contenders and a generic Republican, Bryce communications director Lauren Hitt told The Progressive Populist.

On the Republican side, gerrymandering of the district—designed to diminish the voting power of its industrial communities –has given the GOP an edge in recent years. But CNN, even before Ryan’s exit, called the district no longer “safe Republican” turf. The GOP’s most prominent and well-funded candidate is widely-reviled Paul Nehlen, who opposed Ryan in the 2016 GOP primary with endorsements from Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and kind words from Trump himself.

Nehlen has increasingly displayed his racism and anti-Semitism, and Ryan and other Republicans have repudiated him. But some of the best-known Republicans with district ties like former Trump aide Reince Priebus have declined to run. At this moment, corporate lawyer Bryan Stell appears likely to step into the Republican primary.

Regardless of who wins the August 14 Democratic primary, the Republicans’ disarray gives progressives a remarkable opportunity to flip the district from the fervent free-market fundamentalist Paul Ryan to someone set on moving Congress toward Medicare-for-all health care and other programs advancing social and economic justice. Stay tuned.

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based labor studies instructor and writer who edited the Racine Labor weekly for 14 years. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018

Populist.com