RACINE, WI—Across Sycamore Avenue from the union hall, the Star Roller Rink has gone to winter hours, so it's closed on this desultory Saturday afternoon. The union hall has three vacant offices that you can rent, their metal mailboxes flapping open in the wall. There's a certain amount of loss in the neighborhood that settles on your shoulders like the autumn mist that's thickening into a steady rain. Randy Bryce, the Democratic candidate for Congress in the First Congressional District of Wisconsin, has come to the union hall to charge up some volunteers and to begin the homestretch of a long campaign that began when the district was first represented by Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin.

At the beginning, Bryce was a YouTube superstar; his announcement video was an instant hit. Along with an equally viral video from Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Bryce's video was among one of the first stirrings of what the Democratic Party quickly branded as the Blue Wave. Bryce was running against a sitting Speaker of the House and McGrath's running in the home district of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Since then, a hundred different things have happened. The president* has driven the country like a gleefully drunken trucker. Most recently, the brawl over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is said to have kicked over the entire board for the upcoming midterms. (We'll see about that. At the moment, the theory looks a lot like horse-race journalism on the part of scared people who still are wondering how Donald Trump happened.) One of the things that happened that nobody expected is that Paul Ryan threw in the towel.

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"He's been in for 20 years and, for the past year, I've helped everyone who's run against him," Bryce said. "I'd call them up, I'd say, 'Come to our union meeting. Let's get you some help.' The last person who ran raised, I think, $30,000, and that isn't going to get it done. We had to put something stronger together.

"I'm convinced that we could have beaten him but just, even if it had been close to him, Speaker of the House against a guy walking in off a construction site, that's horrible optics if he has any other career moves in mind. I was at home when I heard the news, so I took a while, because there was a rumor last year that he was going to drop out. I said, I have to see him drop out with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. At the end of the day, I'm not going to lie, my face hurt from smiling. But it was, he's not on the ballot, but his ideas are. He had somebody hand-picked to take his place. (A former Ryan staffer named Bryan Steil, who is a dead ringer for the incumbent.) I'm sure he had a heads-up that was going to happen."

There are two places in the country in which the midterms will determine not only if the country has had enough of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, but also if the country has had enough of two decades of conservative Republican politics. The first is Kansas, where Governor Sam Brownback and a Republican legislature have run the state's economy into a ravine. Now, a Democratic state senator named Laura Kelly is running neck and neck with Kris Kobach, the infamous vote-suppressor who manages to bridge longtime conservative sabotage of government with the reckless vandalism of Trumpism. In addition, Democratic candidate Sharice Davids, a gay Native American woman who also is a former MMA fighter, has run such a strong campaign in the Kansas 3rd that, despite some recent rookie mistakes on her part, the national Republican Party has given up on incumbent Kevin Yoder. Kansas has to determine if its days as a wingnut policy lab rat are over. This is the same decision facing Wisconsin now.

"We wanted to do what we loved to do. And then Scott Walker came in and dropped the bomb."

For the past decade, the state has been the vehicle for Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this midwest subsidiary. Walker, and his pet legislature, have taken an ax to everything worthwhile in Wisconsin's proud progressive history. In the state that invented the the primary election, the Republicans gerrymandered the maps so thoroughly that even the Supreme Court noticed. In the state that produced "The Wisconsin Idea," the philosophy that the university research should benefit the state and all its residents, Walker and his legislative running buddies made war on the state university system.

The state that invented the workman's compensation law became Ground Zero for a successful union-busting campaign led from the state capitol. If they could pull this off in Wisconsin, the architects of this assault figured, it could work anywhere. And they've pulled it off. This election cycle, though, is a verdict on what they've done, too. Tony Evers is running slightly ahead in a tight race for government against Walker, who still may harbor hilarious presidential aspirations, and Bryce and Steil are locked in another dead heat. The airwaves are now an endless festival of dark-money PAC advertising.

"We just wanted to raise our families," Bryce told the 20-odd folks who'd shown up at the union hall. "We wanted to do what we loved to do. And then Scott Walker came in and dropped the bomb. It was an attack on public-sector workers, and I was in a private sector union, but I knew it was a matter of time before they came after us. Everybody had a place in line. That was why you saw so many building trades doing laps in Madison after the attack happened. They turned Wisconsin into a test lab, an anti-worker test lab, and they were fairly successful."

That was the theme of Bryce's kickoff ad, in which he offered to trade jobs with Ryan; if the Speaker would walk the high iron, Bryce would go to Washington. Since Ryan quit, Bryce's taken the full force of the modern conservative political machine. His past failure to pay child support became an issue during the Democratic primary, and it's now a feature of a series of television commercials produced by the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity. Decades-old DUI busts came to light. His own brother, a police officer, made a commercial for Steil. And Paul Ryan's SuperPAC is prepared to airlift a kiloton of cash into the race for the last month. You only get to be a YouTube star for a while. Then you become a candidate, stepping into the meat grinder.

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"I figured it would," he said. "My mom, she was like, Randy, they're going to come after you. I was like, Mom, they already are. Everything about my life is public record, especially talking about the DUI 20-years ago. It was a stupid thing to do. I apologized for it and it hasn't happened since."

The rest has been an endless train of union halls and county fairs and high-school gymnasiums. There will be two debates, and a forum-style joint appearance. Every campaign in Wisconsin right now is at the knife's edge. Randy Bryce, who thought he had to beat Paul Ryan, now has to beat Paul Ryan's ideas, and Paul Ryan's cramped and jargon-choked notions of what self-government really means. Those ideas have transformed the state of Wisconsin into a perversion of itself. A candidate who also is a union ironworker is a kind of reminder of the way things used to be, of ideas that were declared obsolete long before their time by people who never believed them in the first place.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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