She's a waitress. He's an insurrectionist. She may take his seat in Congress.

I spoke with Rebecca Cooke, a 36-year-old restaurant server in Wisconsin who's coming for ultra-MAGA Rep. Derrick Van Orden's job this year.

Amid a newly competitive presidential election and a nail-biter of a fight for Senate control, you’d be forgiven for sleeping on the many of the House races this cycle. But there’s a pretty wild match-up in Wisconsin that could turn into a film-worthy political underdog tale, and it’s definitely got my attention.

Rebecca Cooke is a single, 36-year-old restaurant server in Eau Claire, Wisc., who’s never held political office before. She’s spent this summer driving her old, beat-up Ford Escape around her district talking voters during the day and waiting tables at night, trying to run a scrappy campaign while making ends meet. And last week, she handily beat out two other candidates, including a sitting state representative, in the Democratic primary–teeing her up to challenge incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R) for his seat in Congress. 

Two days before winning the primary, Cooke told me in a phone interview last week, her car stalled on the highway between campaign stops. So when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called to congratulate her personally on Thursday for becoming the Democratic nominee – as she was bumming a ride home from one of her staffers because she can’t afford a new car – she found some absurdity in the moment.

“My campaign manager is dropping me off at my shitty apartment, where my car is dead out front,” she said. “Just the dichotomy of that. I got off the phone and we started laughing.”

Cooke is now directly taking on a bombastic MAGA congressman who attended the Jan. 6 insurrection. (Van Orden claims he didn’t cross the police barricades at the Capitol that day, but a Daily Beast investigation showed otherwise.) The former Navy SEAL is a loud, combative fool, much in the same vein as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. He’s prone to public outbursts, has cursed out teenage congressional pages, brought a loaded gun to the airport, and recently lied about being assaulted by a progressive protester at the Republican National Convention.

At least a few voters in Van Orden’s district, apparently, are thrilled at the prospect of him losing his seat to a kind local waitress who’s in many ways his polar opposite. Cooke says people are her tables have started writing her encouraging messages like “Beat that bastard” and “Beat Van Orden’s ass” on their checks.

“People love to see a working-class, blue collar woman doing this work and running for Congress,” she told me. “People really see themselves in what I’m doing. I think there’s a lot of dignity in hospitality work – I’m almost canvassing as I’m waiting tables every night.” 

Based on the make-up of Wisconsin’s 3rd district, Cooke very much has a chance at unseating Van Orden. The seat was held by a Democrat for 26 years, Ron Kind, before Kind retired in 2022. This same district also voted for Obama before swinging to Trump in ‘16. National Dems are now feeling so bullish about Cooke’s chances of flipping the seat back that the DCCC just added her to its coveted “Red to Blue” program–meaning it’s going to prioritize her race in terms of money, attention and resources. 

Cooke is also pretty optimistic about winning this race. In addition to being a working-class political outsider of the kind that the voters there usually like, she has the empathy and “Midwestern nice” approachability that Van Orden sorely lacks. She grew up on her family’s local dairy farm and founded a non-profit to support local women entrepreneurs, including rural health clinics and bookstores. Her brother is a firefighter, her sister’s in the teacher’s union. She’s undeniably charming and likable, and she knows how to talk to Republican voters on issues like Medicare and abortion and raising the minimum wage in a way that doesn’t alienate them. 

“I’ll talk to older voters on expanding Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing, and they’ll say, ‘So what are you?’” she told me. “And I like people to wonder what party I’m in and to connect with me on values and on a personal level. Derrick is not working across the aisle. He’s used Congress in an egotistical manner to inflate himself. People are tired of chaos and bickering, and he sows chaos.”

One young voter, Megan Kling, caught Cooke’s attention when she showed up to a campaign event with two little girls and then slipped out early. When Cooke caught up with the Kling afterward, the woman said she’d felt like she didn’t belong there as a conservative but that she was curious to hear Cooke talk about abortion. Kling said she’d recently discovered 20 weeks into a pregnancy that her son had a fatal birth defect, but she had to travel to Minnesota for an abortion because Wisconsin bans the procedure after 14 weeks.

“It was an incredibly brave thing to say to me, a stranger, on the side of a road,” Cooke told me. 

“I always get goosebumps when I talk about Megan.”

Kling ended up appearing in a campaign ad for Cooke, where she shares her abortion story publicly. “I did not have the choice to do what was right for me and my family in my home state, and that felt very deeply wrong,” Kling says in the ad. 

Cooke seems to have a knack for finding common ground with conservative voters who might be a little open-minded. “The way I talk a lot about issues is flipping Republican talking points on their head,” she said. “They talk about freedom a lot. Derrick talks about freedom a lot. Well, are you talking about reproductive freedom? He’s called for a nationwide abortion ban.” 

Van Orden, meanwhile, has been going after Cooke much in the same way Donald Trump would–mostly by misspelling her name as “Crooke” and claiming she’s a “shady political insider pretending to be a philanthropist” because her nonprofit, Red Letter, once gave a small grant to the restaurant where she now waits tables. 

“The NRCC has attacked me as if this is a quid pro quo, as if I was trying to front this $2,000 grant to then become a waitress?” she joked on our phone call. “I’m kinda like, yea, my job where I make $18K a year? OK, sure.”  

If Cooke manages to unseat a far-right sitting congressman and insurrectionist, having started with no money or political connections, it will be a pretty satisfying victory to witness for many people. But she’s got a long couple months ahead of her. 

“Zero to a hundred right now,” she said at the end of our call. “It’s like being on a rocket ship without seatbelts.”