Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District has been held by Republicans since 1995. It is the seat Paul Ryan held for two decades before becoming Speaker of the House. It is the seat Bryan Steil has held since 2018, winning every race since then by around 10 percentage points. And in the final days of the 2026 midterms, it is, according to one major forecaster, a toss-up.
That shift did not happen overnight, and it did not happen because the district suddenly changed its politics. It happened because a first-time Democratic challenger, 40-year-old emergency room nurse Mitchell Berman, has run a campaign designed to look and sound like southeastern Wisconsin itself, because national Democrats belatedly added the race to their priority target list, and because the national environment has turned against the party in power. Whether that is enough to unseat a four-term incumbent with a large cash advantage is a different question, and it is the question voters in Kenosha, Racine, Janesville, Beloit and the Milwaukee suburbs will answer on 3 November.
As with every race in this article, the polling must be read with care. Polls are snapshots, not results. The public polling in this district so far has been unusually thin, and much of it comes from partisan sources: polls released by the Berman campaign, by Democratic campaign committees, or by a Democratic-aligned super PAC. Those polls can be informative, but they are not neutral, and they should not be treated as if they were. The ratings shifts from nonpartisan and other forecasters are a separate signal, and they are worth distinguishing from campaign-released numbers.
What is not in dispute is the stakes. Republicans hold the House by a narrow 218-214 margin, and Democrats need a net gain of just three seats to take control. A seat like Wisconsin’s 1st would not, on its own, decide the House, but in a chamber that may be decided by a handful of seats, every additional pickup provides cushion for a slim majority in early 2027. That is exactly how USA TODAY framed Berman’s candidacy on 1 November: a late addition to House Democrats’ target list who could provide cushion if Democrats win a narrow majority. The race matters, in other words, not because it is the most likely flip in the country, but because it shows how far the battlefield has expanded.
Why the Wisconsin 1st District House race became competitive
The district itself explains much of the story. It borders Illinois and encompasses some of Milwaukee’s outer southern suburbs, along with mid-sized cities such as Beloit, Janesville, Kenosha and Racine, and the small towns in between. It voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, but Republican candidates have carried the seat in every presidential election since. President Donald Trump won the district by 2 percent in 2020 and by 4.5 percentage points in 2024, according to USA TODAY’s account, while Steil himself has overperformed Trump, winning by around 10 points in each of his races since 2018.
The district lines became less strongly Republican with new congressional maps that went into effect in March 2022, losing Waukesha County, the state’s largest Republican-leaning county. That change did not make the district Democratic, but it narrowed the Republican lean and made a strong Democratic campaign more plausible than it had been under the old lines. A district that once looked safely Republican now looks, in the language of forecasters, like a place where a good candidate in a good year could compete.
National Democrats acted on that possibility late. Berman was added in September to House Democrats’ “Red to Blue” target list, the programme for challengers the party believes can flip Republican-held seats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision gave Berman additional fundraising and organisational support, and it signalled to donors and outside groups that the race was worth investing in. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which had rated the race as leaning Republican after previously rating it as likely Republican, reflected that shift in its own ratings, while Fox News moved the contest from “lean R” to “toss-up” on 27 October.
Those ratings moves should not be over-read. Cook still rates the race as leaning Republican, not as a toss-up, and other forecasters remain more cautious than Fox News. A ratings shift is a judgement about competitiveness, not a vote count. But the direction of travel is clear: a seat that was once rated as likely Republican is now rated as competitive by at least one major forecaster, and that alone would have been surprising a year ago.
The challenger: an ER nurse running as a Wisconsin regular
Berman’s biography is central to his campaign, and it is deliberately presented in contrast to Steil’s more conventional political resume. Berman, 40, is an emergency room nurse with no previous elective experience. He won the Democratic primary on 11 August, defeating second-place finisher Peter Burgelis, a Milwaukee alderman who did not live in the district and later dropped out, along with two lesser-known challengers. He was raised about 50 miles north of Green Bay, in Peshtigo, a manufacturing city of under 3,500 people. His father owned a small roofing company, his mother worked at a foundry, and his uncle and grandfather owned dairy farms.
“I know what it’s like to get dirt under my nails,” Berman told USA TODAY. A first-generation college student, he went to nursing school, married his wife Jillian, who also works in the hospital system, and raised two daughters in the rural Racine County home the couple built together. He spent a decade working at a Veterans Affairs hospital. In his telling, that background is not just biography; it is the basis for his argument about health care, costs and who Congress serves.
His campaign advertising leans hard into that image. In one ad, Berman appears in scrubs and says, “In the ER, I don’t ask you how you vote, I ask where it hurts.” In another, he is filmed fishing, wearing a handgun in a holster, and says he is not looking to get rich, just to hunt, take his daughters to Green Bay Packers games and make life easier for families like his. In a third, he shoots at a clay pigeon labelled “Data Center”, a jab at the rapid expansion of data centres that is unpopular among many voters, especially in rural areas. The message is consistent: Berman is presenting himself as a Wisconsin man first and a Democrat second, and he has deliberately avoided close association with national Democrats in his campaign.
That presentation has a political purpose. The district is middle-of-the-road, and Berman’s campaign knows it cannot win by running as a national progressive. He holds conventional Democratic positions on several issues: he supports abortion rights and wants to end the war in Iran. But he also tacks to the middle on issues of importance to rural voters, telling NBC News that he supports commonsense policy to reduce gun violence without infringing on the Second Amendment. His policy platform, as reported in local coverage, includes raising the federal minimum wage, expanding child tax credits and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, expanding Medicaid, and pushing for a ban on members of Congress owning stocks. Those positions are his campaign’s stated platform, and voters can weigh them against Steil’s record.
The incumbent: a former Ryan aide with a leadership role
Steil, 46, has a very different biography, and it is one that has served him well in this district. He was raised in Janesville, where Ryan also grew up, attended Georgetown University, interned on Capitol Hill, and joined Ryan’s team as a staff assistant in 2003 before becoming a legislative aide. After leaving Ryan’s office in 2004, he attended law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as an attorney in the manufacturing industry, a key sector in southeastern Wisconsin, before his congressional bid. Ryan announced his retirement in April 2018 and endorsed Steil to be his successor in June, before the August primary. Steil was elected that November over Randy Bryce, a progressive ironworker nicknamed the “IronStache” who had drawn outsized national attention.
Since then, Steil has built a profile as a low-key, less vocally partisan member than some of his Wisconsin colleagues, while remaining closely aligned with the Republican leadership. He now serves as chair of the influential House Administration Committee, which oversees both federal elections and day-to-day operations in the lower chamber. That role gives him institutional importance beyond his district, and it is part of why his re-election matters to the Republican conference: losing a committee chair is a bigger blow than losing an ordinary backbencher.
Steil’s campaign platform, as reported in local coverage, centres on cutting government spending, securing the border, and protecting both Social Security and Medicare. In the closing weeks, he has tried to address cost-of-living concerns with advertisements touting his votes to lower taxes and saying he will protect Social Security. He has also seized on Berman’s criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to argue that the Democrat wants to defund law enforcement, an accusation Berman denies. That exchange illustrates how the race has been fought: Steil presents Berman as too liberal for the district, while Berman presents Steil as too tied to corporate donors and the Washington establishment.
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Barry Burden, quoted by USA TODAY, said Steil’s tenure in congressional leadership during an anti-incumbent election year could present a problem for the incumbent. “It makes it easy for Berman to say he is part of that establishment thing that you Wisconsin voters understand is not working well,” Burden said. That is an academic’s assessment, not a finding of fact, but it captures the dynamic Berman is trying to exploit: an incumbent who is part of the leadership in a year when voters are frustrated with Washington.
What the polls say, and what they do not
The public polling in Wisconsin’s 1st District is a case study in why source labels matter. Three public polls have been released in the general election, and all three show the race within one point, according to a summary published by WisPolitics. But all three come from Democratic-aligned sources, and that context changes how they should be read.
The first, published in August by the Berman campaign from Impact Research, showed Berman narrowly trailing Steil, 49 percent to 48 percent. The second, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee analytics poll released in late September, showed the race even at 48 percent to 48 percent. The third, a House Majority PAC poll released in early October, showed Berman leading Steil by one point, 48 percent to 47 percent. House Majority PAC is a Democratic-aligned super PAC, and its poll is a partisan survey, not a nonpartisan one. The Berman campaign has cited these polls as evidence of momentum, and it did so again on 27 October when it announced the Fox News ratings shift. That is a campaign’s argument, and it should be reported as such.
There is no comparable set of recent nonpartisan public polls in the district to balance those numbers, which is itself a limitation. Forecasters that do not rely on a single poll, such as the models that incorporate fundamentals, fundraising and past results, have been more cautious. One forecast updated on 31 October gave Steil an 83.2 percent chance of winning, projecting a 53 percent to 47 percent margin and rating the race as likely Republican. That model and the Fox News toss-up rating cannot both be precise descriptions of the same race; they reflect different methods, different assumptions and different tolerances for uncertainty. The honest conclusion is that the race is closer than Steil’s past margins would suggest, but how close remains uncertain, and no single poll or model settles it.
The money picture is clearer, and it favours Steil by a wide margin. According to Federal Election Commission records cited by USA TODAY, Steil had $2 million on hand as of mid-October, compared with Berman’s $351,000. That gap reflects Steil’s incumbency, his leadership role and his established donor network, and it means Steil can outspend Berman on advertising in the final days even if outside groups help Berman. Berman’s campaign has pointed to outside spending in support of Steil, including more than $1 million in October from Fairshake, a cryptocurrency industry-aligned group, as evidence that Steil relies on outside money. Steil’s supporters would point to the same spending as evidence of broad support for the incumbent. Either way, the cash advantage is real, and it is a structural obstacle for any challenger.
Allegations, denials and the fight over character
As in many close House races, the final weeks have featured sharp exchanges over character, and those exchanges deserve careful labelling. The National Republican Campaign Committee, through spokesperson Zach Bannon, called Berman “a far-left activist who triggered an elementary school lockdown”, referring to an incident in which Berman’s children’s school temporarily barred outside visitors, while continuing normal lessons, after he arrived to file an open-records request. Berman’s campaign responded that the NRCC’s comments were “a false attack”, saying school administrators confirmed the restriction was due to a threatening phone call received from out of state. Both statements are on the record, and they cannot both be complete descriptions of the same incident. Readers should treat the NRCC’s characterisation as an allegation from a partisan campaign committee, and Berman’s response as a denial from his campaign, rather than treating either as an established fact.
A similar caution applies to Steil’s argument about law enforcement. Steil has argued that Berman’s criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement amounts to wanting to defund law enforcement. Berman denies that characterisation. The underlying policy question, what Berman actually proposes for immigration enforcement funding, is separate from the campaign shorthand, and voters who care about it should look at Berman’s stated positions rather than either side’s summary.
Berman, for his part, has taken shots at Steil’s support from outside groups, arguing that Steil puts corporate donors above district families struggling to afford gas, groceries and health care. That is Berman’s campaign argument, in his own words, and it is the core of his closing message. Steil’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for the USA TODAY profile published on 1 November, which means Steil’s own closing argument in that piece comes through his advertisements and his party’s statements, rather than a direct interview. That absence is itself a fact worth noting: in a race this close, the incumbent’s voice in a major profile was represented by surrogates and advertising, not by the candidate himself.
Why this race will still matter after election day
Whatever happens on 3 November, Wisconsin’s 1st District will remain a useful test of a broader question: can Democrats expand the House map into districts that Trump won, in states where they have not traditionally competed for House seats? In 2018, the last time Trump was in the White House for a midterm, Democrats unseated Republican incumbents in districts Trump had won two years earlier, picking up 41 House seats in the process. Wisconsin Democrats like Berman hope to do the same this time, and the national environment, with Democrats favoured in the generic congressional ballot and in House forecasts, gives them a plausible path.
But the district also shows the limits of that strategy. Steil has won by double digits before, he has a large cash advantage, and he has a personal brand in Janesville and across the district that is separate from the national party. Republican strategists have argued publicly that Democratic consultants have propped up candidates like Berman, but that Wisconsin voters will not buy the presentation, especially against a strong incumbent. Former Speaker Ryan, through a spokesperson, called Steil “principled, effective, and a tireless advocate” for the district and said he was confident voters would re-elect him. Those are partisan endorsements, but they reflect a real argument: incumbency, local ties and fundraising still matter, even in a wave year.
The House stakes give the race its national context. NPR’s analysis of the final competitive landscape, published on 29 October, found 70 districts where both parties are investing at least six figures, with Democrats favoured in 220 seats according to Cook Political Report, 17 listed as toss-ups and another 30 potentially competitive but leaning toward Republicans. Republicans’ narrow 218-214 advantage appears, in NPR’s assessment, all but certain to give way to Democratic control. If that assessment is correct, the question is not whether Democrats win the House, but by how much, and whether seats like Wisconsin’s 1st provide the cushion that makes a narrow majority workable. A House majority of one or two seats is very different from a majority of ten or fifteen: it changes what legislation can pass, how leadership manages dissent, and how much leverage any individual member holds.
That context is also why leadership questions will follow the election, whatever the margin. If Republicans lose the House, as forecasters expect, questions about Speaker Mike Johnson’s future and about who leads each party in the next Congress will move to the foreground, as examined in Johnson could face a three-way leadership fight if Republicans lose the House. If Democrats win narrowly, their own leadership and their ability to hold a fractious caucus together will be tested immediately. Wisconsin’s 1st District will not decide those leadership contests on its own, but it will contribute to the margin that makes them easier or harder.
For voters in southeastern Wisconsin, the choice is more immediate. It is between a four-term incumbent who chairs a major committee and argues he has delivered tax relief and protection for Social Security and Medicare, and a first-time challenger who argues that an emergency room nurse who has worked with veterans, raised a family on a nurse’s pay and hunted and fished in the district will fight harder for families facing rising costs. Both campaigns have spent the final weeks making that choice as stark as possible. On Tuesday, voters will make it for themselves, and the result, whether it is a Steil hold or a Berman upset, will tell us something about how far the 2026 map really expanded, and how much a candidate’s biography can matter when the national wind is at his back.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from USA TODAY, WisPolitics and NPR Illinois.