Working-class ER nurse seeks to flip battleground Wisconsin House seat

Democrats are targeting vulnerable seats this midterm election with working-class candidates they hope will resonate with voters exhausted by the economy.

Some candidates are new to politics, and many have backgrounds as union members and leaders, which the party hopes will give them an edge over Republican incumbents as people have grown weary of Washington and the higher cost of living.

One of these new candidates is Mitchell Berman, an emergency room nurse who Democrats hope will flip a Wisconsin House seat by emphasizing his experience as a worker.

“Being a nurse working in the emergency room, we don’t have the luxury of standing around and not delivering for our patients. We have to make sure that we are addressing concerns in the immediate, making sure that when our patients come in, they leave the emergency department in better condition than they arrive,” Berman said. “That is not happening for folks here in our district.”

Berman is running in a swing district that polling shows is leaning Republican for the House race. It’s the same district that former House speaker Paul Ryan represented from 2015 until he left office in 2019, when he was replaced by Bryan Steil, a corporate attorney and former Ryan aide.

Berman is trying to convince voters that Steil has been out of touch with voters who are seeing costs rise because of White House policies. The campaign is paralleling Steil with Berman, who has worked in healthcare for more than 20 years.

“Coming from a working-class background, understanding what folks are going through [and] having walked a mile in my neighbor’s shoes gives me the ability to look at legislation from the perspective of having some empathy and understanding for what people are dealing with,” Berman said.

He recalled when Scott Walker, the state’s former Republican governor, passed Act 10 in Wisconsin, which stripped collective bargaining rights from most public sector workers in the state, and the negative impact it had on workers. Berman specifically cites his membership in unions as helping him understand how workers have to fight for fair pay and benefits.

“Just seeing the benefits packages, seeing the work-life balance that was afforded to us because of that union was just incredible,” Berman said, adding that workers getting a seat at the table is “the only way they’re going to be able to have a voice when it comes to making sure they get treated fairly”.

In Wisconsin and throughout the midwest, the decline of manufacturing has also hit the region hard as offshoring and trade policies have decimated the industry.

Manufacturing jobs in the state declined from 560,000 in 2001 to 460,000 in 2025, with healthcare jobs surpassing manufacturing in the state for the first time. From January 2025 to January 2026, the state lost 9,500 manufacturing jobs.

Tariffs have led to the loss of 3,910 jobs in Wisconsin, and they are also costing households in the state an additional $1,095 a year, according to a July 2026 report by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois Project for Middle Class Renewal.

Trump has continued to push widespread tariffs, with claims they would bring US factories “roaring back”. Berman noted that his opponent has defended tariffs, despite the higher costs they bring to voters. While he is not against targeted tariffs, the current tariffs have created “an atmosphere and an economy that makes it difficult for manufacturing jobs to survive”.

“Right now people in the district feel betrayed by Bryan Steil because he had made promises to bring costs down, but things have only gotten worse here for people, and I think that’s because of policy positions he’s championed, allowed and abdicated to Donald Trump,” Berman said. “People are starting to recognize that a lot of the woes that they are feeling, when it comes to looking at their bank account at the end of the month, are because of poor decisions made by my opponent.”

Steil’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.