MENOMONIE, Wis. — It’s his second shot at the seat and Derrick Van Orden is now feeling the urgency in drumming up support for this race.
“This is the most critical election in my lifetime and your lifetime I think,” Van Order told a crowd of voters in the parking lot of the Dunn Country Republican Party headquarters on Wednesday.
The Republican congressional candidate for Wisconsin’s third district lost his 2020 bid to Democratic incumbent Ron Kind.
But now that he’s retiring, polls and fundraising numbers show Van Orden with the edge over his 2022 opponent, Brad Pfaff. Since entering the race, Van Orden has raised more than $6 million compared to Pfaff’s $1.6 million.
And in October, the online newsletter, Cook Political Report, changed its rating for the race to Likely Republican from its previous Lean Republican rating, showing more voter support behind Van Orden.
“My message is this: if you want to get somebody in office, who’s going to do their best to make it easier to live in the United States of America and more secure for you and your family, you need to vote for Republican ticket up and down,” Van Orden told Spectrum News.
While on the trail in Menomonie, the candidate stuck to Republican hot-button issues like the economy, crime and illegal crossings at the U.S./Mexico border.
Meanwhile, Pfaff said he wants to alert voters about Van Orden’s potential involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Democrat has rolled out multiple ads featuring a picture taken that day of Van Orden near the Capitol grounds.
“He was part of Jan. 6, that shameful, awful, deadly day,” Pfaff told Spectrum News. “He’s not running for office in order to bring us together. What he’s doing is, he wants to disrupt. He wants to create havoc. He wants to create chaos. That’s not who we are here in western and central Wisconsin.”
Van Orden admits he was one of thousands of people who traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally featuring then-President Donald Trump but told Spectrum News he did not join the crowds that stormed the Capitol. He’s now shrugging off claims that he was, saying voters aren’t concerned.
“This is what I’m saying: the only people I’ve heard during this entire campaign — and we’ve traveled to combine our miles about 180,000 miles from me and my staff during this campaign speaking to thousands and thousands and thousands of Wisconsinites,” he told Spectrum News. “I’ve heard Brad Pfaff bring this up, and activist journalists. That’s it.”
Supporters at his event agreed, telling Spectrum News that they’re focused on the issues that Republicans are centering in their messaging, which are aimed at taking back the majority control of the U.S. House and Senate.
“You name it: the economy, gas prices, food prices, inflation, interest rates. The list goes on and on,” Republican voter Jim Zurawski said. “It’s craziness.”
Wisconsin’s third congressional district was once solid blue. Trump broke a streak of Democratic Presidential candidates elected by the district in 2016 and won the district again in 2020, despite losing the state to Joe Biden in 2020.
This increasingly conservative district is now poised to elect a Republican congressman for the first time in a quarter century.