Randy Bryce Won't Need A Tsunami To Beat Paul Ryan In Wisconsin

The invitation up top was mostly sent to lobbyists and other Beltway crooks for an opportunity to meet the fresh crop of pre-screened conservative Democrats the New Dems are backing for Congress. And when I say pre-screened I mean pre-screened for conservatism and, perhaps more important, for the kind of ethical laxness one needs to join the Blue Dogs, a congressional caucus completely built on selling out to corporate corruption. "Come meet our sleazy new candidates and start bribing them now when they don't cost as much as they will once they get onto the committees you want them on," would have been more to the point.

But look at that list of names. Or this list-- the Blue Dog candidates, some the same, a few different-- who also get screened for the same propensity for future likelihood of moral turpitude. See anyone you've ever heard of? This is the cream-of-the-DCCC's-shitty-crop this year. They've been bragging all over town they are now openly recruiting corrupt conservatives-- they call them Blue Dogs and New Dems-- to run for Congress disguised as actual Democrats. It's not likely you've heard of any of them. They're basically the rubbish candidates who can only win in a giant anti-Trump tsunami. They're in place to ride the hoped-for wave. None of them have brands; they're just a gaggle of centrists with D's next to their names. The DCCC wants to figure out how to create brands for their crap candidates. But they can't. Their big idea this cycle is conservative women vets with no political experience. Great idea... but since none of them have anything to say beyond their own bios, zzzzzzzzzzzz.

You know what the opposite of this dreck is? Randy Bryce, not a DCCC candidate, a WI-01 candidate. No one's ever going to be able to tag him with the Pelosi puppet line or claim he's just another cut and paste Democrat who came down the DCCC assembly-line. No, Bryce is his own inspiration, authentic everyman character, nothing like a DCCC creation, albeit everything the DCCC would like to figure out and bottle. How did he do it?Why did he raise more money-- without any DCCC help-- than any candidate the DCCC has touched all year? And he's not getting those fat $5,000 PAC checks in the invitation above. Instead, Randy has said he doesn't ant the filthy special interest money the New Dems and DCCC and Blue Dogs are begging for for their crooked-junior candidates. Randy refuses to take money from Wall Street or the oil industry. His average contribute is something like $27. That's what real people give... not $5,000 checks in return for an IOU.

Randy Bryce by Nancy Ohanian

Look at this drawing. No one has seen it yet, not even Randy. One of the country's top artists who draws political caricatures, Nancy Ohanian, just did this piece as her contribution to Randy's campaign. Do you think artists are drawing pictures of New Dems and Blue Dogs for the DCCC? I bet not. Not even for invitations to "monthly New DemPAC Coffee Breaks on the Hill with the New Dem Members and their senior staff."

So who's Randy and where did this brand of his come from? A local Wisconsin newspaper, Isthmus sent reporter Erik Gunn to find out. Gunn reported that "He’s on a list of candidates supported by former MSNBC political commentator Krystal Ball’s People’s House Project, which aims to rebuild the Democratic Party as one 'fighting for working people... He’s exactly what the country needs, what the Democratic Party needs,' Ball tells Isthmus, praising 'his ability to connect with regular people... What voters are looking for is that authentic connection.' Ryan is in his 20th year in Congress with a seemingly indomitable record at the ballot box. But Bryce is unlike anyone who has ever challenged him. Can Bryce-- if he wins the Democratic nomination-- succeed in toppling the House Speaker in 2018? Some say no." Who says no? People with no vision, like the folks who run the DCCC and have lost dozens and dozens of House seats in the last decade. And their clueless moron shills in the Beltway media.

“Sorry, but Randy Bryce doesn’t have a chance in hell against Paul Ryan,” declared D.R. Tucker in the Washington Monthly. He predicted the state’s right wing talk radio hosts will “burn Bryce beyond recognition with rhetorical napalm.”

Bryce remains undeterred. Yes, on paper the odds are in Paul Ryan’s favor, he acknowledges. But with Ryan’s popularity plunging, especially after the election of Trump as president, Bryce sees an opening that could allow him to do what no previous challenger has done. “It feels like,” he says, “now’s the time to take him out.”

Randy Bryce was born in 1964. His father was a Milwaukee police officer; his mother worked various jobs, including as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. The family lived on the south side of Milwaukee-- “as far south as we could,” Bryce says, referring to residency rules that required officers to live in the city.

Bryce graduated from Rufus King High School in 1983. He was a good student, says his mother, Nancy Bryce, and was on the football team. He also showed some musical talent, playing the trombone in the school band and performing as Riff, one of the gang leaders in a school production of West Side Story.

“They had guys that didn’t look like they were in gangs, but they could sing,” Bryce recalls. The show’s director recruited him for a more authentic look. “I said, ‘I’ll do it, but I’m not singing and I’m not dancing.’ I ended up doing both,” he says. His mother went to see the show and was astonished, asking herself, “Holy Cow-- is that my kid?”

He thought he might follow in his father’s footsteps in law enforcement. Unable to afford college, he enlisted in the Army and served three years as a military police officer, including a deployment in Honduras where he befriended local residents-- the man who tended the water system on the base and a jug-eared 11- or 12-year-old boy who was one of many kids hanging out near the bus stop in the nearby community of Comayagua and greet soldiers coming into town on leave. These friendships made him acutely aware, he says, of “the haves and have nots” in the world.

Honorably discharged in 1986, he did “whatever I could to make a living.” For about a year and a half, he worked with a program that helped homeless veterans find housing. He sold appliances for a time.

In 1987, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Uninsured, he was able to get surgery to remove the tumor at Milwaukee’s teaching hospital. Because the operation damaged nerves, he was told that he probably would never have children; 20 years later, he fathered a son (he shares custody with his son’s mother).

Over the next decade Bryce worked as a security guard and in a warehouse, storing and retrieving business records. In his early 30s, he met a retired Iron Workers Union coordinator and applied for an apprenticeship. “I didn’t know anything about construction. I knew how to read a tape measure. That was about it.”

His first job was with a crew repairing a stretch of highway and bridge in Milwaukee. He spent his first day hauling bundles of reinforcing bar, crossing gridwork of already laid rebar (“It was springy when you walked on it”) to take it to other workers who tied it in place with metal wire. When he got home that night, his shoulder was purple and black with bruises.

“It took me about 10 minutes to climb a flight of steps. I was in serious pain…. It was like somebody just beat the tar out of you,” he says. His urine was the color of Coca-Cola. The doctor his mother worked for explained on the phone that it was blood from overexertion; she reassured him it would go away in a few weeks. “I was literally pissing blood after that first day of work,” Bryce says. Something halfway between a wince and a wry half-smile crosses his face at the memory.

Back at work the next day, he was “very slow.” Some of his co-workers weren’t happy, but a union agent who stopped by the job site gave him a pep talk. After three weeks, he had healed up.

He also took to the part of the job that involves working 10, 20 or more stories up in the air as a building goes up. “One of the things I like most about that job is just the view,” says Bryce. During his work on the Miller Park baseball stadium, “I used to race up to the roof when I’d get there in the morning and look at the sunrise coming up over the Hoan Bridge. It’s something a lot of people don’t get to see.”

When the union asked for someone to coordinate political work, Bryce volunteered. The job involved connecting with city, county and state lawmakers. When a big building project-- the kind that employed a lot of ironworkers-- was up for a vote, he’d seek their support. When it got approved, he’d thank them.

The job also connected him with local unions representing Milwaukee County employees. Scott Walker was Milwaukee County executive at the time, and Bryce heard firsthand from union workers about their contentious battles. When Walker launched his 2010 campaign for governor, “I really got active,” Bryce says-- talking with members of his own union about why Walker would be bad for labor. “I saw we were a lot stronger working together.”

After Walker was elected governor, Bryce fought against Act 10, the law that gutted public workers’ bargaining rights. He forged closer connections with Democratic state lawmakers. At their urging, he ran twice for the state Legislature in heavily Republican districts-- once for the Assembly, losing in the primary, and later for the Senate, losing in a newly gerrymandered Republican district to Van Wanggaard.

The 2014 state Senate race looked bleak from the beginning, but Bryce hoped he could boost Mary Burke’s campaign to unseat Walker.

“Randy knew how tough it would be,” says state Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee. “But he believed in the cause and was willing to put himself out there for it.” Although he lost, the experience helped him learn about the mechanics and strategy of campaigning, while also introducing him to rural voters. Bryce also began to tailor a social media persona on Facebook and Twitter, where he uses the handle @IronStache.

As the Iron Workers’ primary political voice, he has nudged the union on its own path. When the Milwaukee building trades locals in 2016 backed Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele for reelection, the Iron Workers instead endorsed Abele’s challenger-- Chris Larson. Both were Democrats running in the nonpartisan race, but the state senator’s challenge to Abele drew support from public employee unions and other progressive groups.

Bryce was also not afraid to forge his own path on the larger stage. The national Iron Workers Union had endorsed Hillary Clinton in November 2015, well before the primaries. But Bryce favored Bernie Sanders and spoke at a Sanders rally (he couldn’t officially speak for the Iron Workers because of the Clinton endorsement). Once Clinton secured the nomination, though, Bryce backed her “as the only alternative” to Trump. Had Clinton won Wisconsin, he would have gone to Washington, D.C., in December to cast one of the state’s 10 votes for her in the Electoral College. “I’ve been called everything from a Bernie Bro to a Hillbot,” says Bryce, “which is pretty funny.”

Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District runs roughly from Lake Michigan to the Rock River Valley and from the Illinois border to a little south of Interstate 94. Political veterans used to label it a swing district; Democrats held the seat from 1971 until 1995. But since the 1994 wave election that flipped control of Congress to the GOP, it’s been solidly red.

Ryan, then a 28-year-old former Senate aide and conservative think tank policy writer, first won the seat in 1998, narrowly beating a Kenosha Democrat. It was the most competitive race he’s ever faced. He won his next four reelection bids by nearly 2 to 1 against an anti-abortion Janesville doctor running as a Democrat. A well-funded challenger in 2008 didn’t do much better-- even as as Barack Obama won his first presidential term and carried the district by 5 percentage points.

In 2012, as Obama was running for reelection, Kenosha County Democrat Rob Zerban mounted a serious challenge to Ryan, who was also on the ballot as GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s running mate. Romney-Ryan lost the state, but Ryan held his Congressional seat. Zerban challenged and lost again in 2014.

...When Bryce broke it to his mother that he planned to run she had two concerns. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Nancy Bryce told her son. And, she added, “We don’t have money. How can a person from a normal middle-class family do that?”

Bryce explained to her how campaign fundraising works. And, eventually, broached the idea of her participating in a video. “I’m not the type of person who wants to be recognized,” she says. But when it became clear she could be an effective centerpiece for her son’s debut video, she put aside her misgivings.

Given the timing-- amid the intense battle by Republicans to follow through on nearly eight years of threatening to “repeal and replace” Obama’s Affordable Care Act-- it was natural to make health care a central theme. But the video isn’t so much about policy as biography-- establishing Bryce’s bona fides as a man of the people and casting Ryan as increasingly detached from his district. Bryce frequently points out that Ryan hasn’t held an open town hall meeting for constituents in more than 650 days.

On YouTube the video logged more than half a million views in its first six weeks. “Is it normal for a campaign launch video to make you cry?” a viewer wrote in the comments.

In July, David Yankovich ended his own campaign and endorsed Bryce. Meanwhile, Janesville teacher and school board member Cathy Myers entered the race just days after Bryce but has gotten none of the national media coverage Bryce has.

Some in Bryce’s camp have suggested the early strength of his challenge may have spurred Ryan to agree to the speaker’s CNN Q&A in Racine Aug. 21, moderated by Jake Tapper. That event, Bryce backers contend, doesn’t undermine the no-town-halls talking point, because CNN picked the audience and screened the questions, although many were critical. Ryan’s office declined to comment for this story.

Yet the question remains-- can Bryce translate the enthusiasm he’s generated into defeating Ryan at the ballot box? In a Bloomberg News national poll in mid-July, 34 percent viewed Ryan’s performance favorably and 48 percent negatively-- nearly the reverse of a December 2016 survey (47 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable). Ryan’s unfavorable ratings have soared in other polls as well.

...Only two sitting House speakers have been voted out of office by their constituents in the nation’s history, the most recent in 1994. Ryan also reportedly has $9 million-plus in his campaign fund.

Then there’s the complication of festering divisions between some partisans for Sanders and Clinton that have persisted months into the Trump administration. Bryce believes he can win over both sides, appealing to “those that voted for Bernie and those that voted for Hillary,” he says. “We’re going to need to get everybody together.”

[You can contribute the Randy's campaign bu clicking on the Blue America thermometer on the right.]

He also believes he’s got a chance at winning over working-class Trump backers-- some of them his own co-workers. “He told people what they wanted to hear,” says Bryce, who would point out to them Trump’s history as a developer of stiffing subcontractors-- who hire most ironworkers. Since the election, more than one workmate who voted for Trump has quietly come back to him. “They’ve told me, ‘You were right,’” he says.

Local Bryce supporters don’t deny the odds, but contend Ryan is beatable. “It’s a very big challenge,” says Ryan’s 2012 and 2014 challenger Rob Zerban, who has endorsed Bryce-- but adds, “I think Randy just stands so much better of a chance than I ever had.”

Bryce believes he can overcome the funding gap and the Democratic losing streak “by just being genuine.”

“People want somebody they can trust,” he says. “I’m not trying to sell them something that I’m not.”

Nancy Ohanian created this piece too