Server Waits Tables At Night & Runs For Congress By Day Because She's 'Tired' Of Workers 'Lacking True Representation'
Rebecca Cooke's campaign strategy is simple — speak to workers' needs and values.
Georgejason, Getty Images | @RebeccaforWI, X | Canva Pro No matter what party you belong to or where you fall on the political spectrum, we can likely all agree that most of the people representing us in Washington are fairly out of touch with the real lives and experiences of everyday working people.
Many have never even held anything besides a lush corporate job in their entire lives, going from prep school to Ivy League to elite corporate job or law firm and then on to Congress — and with vanishingly few exceptions, their work in D.C. reflects this. One woman in Wisconsin has had enough of that and is taking matters into her own hands.
Rebecca Cooke, a Wisconsin waitress running for Congress, is 'tired' of workers 'lacking true representation' in D.C.
Cooke says she's running for the House of Representatives on the basis of her "lived experiences" as a blue-collar, working-class, rural Wisconsinite, hoping to bring that underrepresented perspective to bear in the halls of Congress.
There are no two ways about it — what Cooke is trying to do is a tall order. She ran for Congress once before in 2022, when she lost the Democratic primary for Wisconsin's third district by a substantial margin of eight points.
Her district was then won by Derrick Van Orden, a far-right Republican aligned with former President Donald Trump, after nearly thirty years as a reliably Democratic district in the state.
But Cooke believes she's the right person at the right moment to swing that district back in the other direction.
For starters, she feels the political winds in Wisconsin's third district are shifting away from Donald Trump and his allies, whose rhetoric she says people in her community find embarrassing.
That very well may be a safe assumption. Since President Biden stepped down from the presidential race on July 21, polling has increasingly shown that Trump's support is eroding, with some polls even showing that Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has overtaken him.
That includes Wisconsin, where Harris has drastically narrowed Trump's lead over Biden to less than a single percentage point — or nothing at all, depending on the poll.
But Cooke has something far more important in her arsenal than favorable political trends. She actually knows firsthand the problems and issues that her prospective constituents are facing — issues that Van Orden has failed to address, focusing instead on harassing library employees over LGBTQ+-related books and burnishing his reputation as an often volatile far-right agitator.
As a waitress still waiting tables while she campaigns, Cooke says she knows what hard-working people actually need from Washington.
Sure, shifting trends may help. But Cooke has something that all too many of us see vanishingly little of in Washington: a firsthand familiarity with hard work and the economic issues, from housing and grocery costs to trying to fund kids' education.
Cooke has owned her own small business and currently runs a nonprofit focused on helping women business owners. But, of course, nonprofits aren't particularly lucrative — it's right there in the name.
So, like many of us, Cooke has a second job as a waitress — one she's held onto even as she runs for one of the highest offices in the land, campaigning by day and slinging hash by night. It's this experience, working hard for a living at the kind of jobs most D.C. luminaries only pay lip service to, that she says makes her the best-qualified person for the job.
“It’s really important for everyday people to step off the sidelines to represent us,” she told Wisconsin's WPR. Having grown up on a dairy farm, Cooke also thinks this "everyday" representation is particularly important for people in rural areas, who face issues both Van Orden and her fellow Democrats have often overlooked.
“I think there’s a lot of work to do [in rural places]," she told WPR. "And it starts with not writing off any place because it’s too small or it’s too red."
Whether or not she'll prevail remains to be seen, but her instincts certainly seem to be spot-on. "I feel like there’s a lot of people in our district that want to have a representative that has lived experiences that they can connect to," she told the Wisconsin Examiner. "I think career politicians make folks a little bit more leery.”
It's hard to argue with that. Here's hoping her time has come and that other hard-working people can join her in representing regular, hard-working people in Washington.
We've been without a voice for far too long.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.