When Randy Bryce knocks on a door or rings a bell, loud barks erupt. It seems like there is a dog at every house in this working-class neighborhood adjacent to downtown Racine, Wisconsin. The animals sound more ferocious than friendly, but Bryce’s smile persists through the noise as he greets the strangers opening the doors like they are his best friends. This is his plan to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan in next year’s midterm election: door by door, individual vote by individual vote.

If only he could clone her, it’d ensure that the Democrats’ progressive populist fantasy in Wisconsin would come to life. When Bryce announced this summer he was challenging Ryan, he instantly became the Democratic Great White Working Class Hope. He’s a union ironworker, the son of a cop, an Army vet, a cancer survivor. His mom has multiple sclerosis and featured prominently in Bryce’s campaign announcement video , a slickly produced, emotional appeal that featured shots of southeastern Wisconsin farmland and Bryce in his trademark jeans and T-shirt. “Let’s trade places, Paul Ryan—you can work the iron, and I’ll go to DC,” he says in it, as strings swell. That video went viral, making Bryce a darling of liberals from New York to California.

After a few doors, he discovers the first person who knows him—sort of. “My mom is an English professor and she called me and told me about you,” the woman says. “You are the ironworker. I’m in the union too.” She berates Donald Trump, Ryan, and the “Republicans destroying the country.” They talk for 20 minutes as Bryce nods and peppers her disdain for Washington with invitations to join his effort to kick Paul Ryan out of the beltway.

When I’m watching Bryce knock on doors, it’s a mild fall night by Wisconsin standards. Bryce, stocky with a black handlebar mustache, is sporting jeans and a blue shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow. It’s an outfit for a candidate running as a regular guy, a workingman. Midway through most of his pitches, the dogs appear calmer. Most of the voters (all of whom were on a list of Democratic-friendly addresses) admit to not knowing him but politely accept the literature with excitement in their voices to learn that someone is taking on Ryan.

Racine County is a textbook example of income inequality. In the city bearing the county’s name, the poverty rate is 21.9 according to the Census, up from 13.9 in 2000; abandoned storefronts downtown are not unusual. But the county also contains wealthy towns like Wind Point where the poverty rate is 3.1 percent and the median income is $96,016, more than double the city of Racine’s $41,455.

Ryan has out-fundraised Bryce by a comfortable margin and has more than $10 million cash on hand; he won last year’s election by 35 points. Bryce has never won elected office, though he’s tried before. That’s not to say he can’t win, but even after talking to both sides and voters in the district, I still don’t know whether Bryce fans are being seduced by a deceptive dream where they see everything through a blue tint. Is Bryce a miniature white working class version of Jesse Jackson in 1984—an uplifting but doomed campaign—or Barack Obama in 2008—the real deal?

“Well he can waste $1 million if he wants to,” said Don Taylor, who served as chairman of the Waukesha County Republican Party for 30 years before stepping down four years ago. “I think Paul Ryan is safe.”

That blowing up has come in the form of celebrity shoutouts (including Chelsea Handler and Cynthia Nixon ), endorsements from the progressive Working Families Party and Bernie Sanders (who defeated Hillary Clinton in the district in the 2016 primary), and a haul of $1 million in campaign donations in the third quarter, more than double of what he raised in the second quarter.

Republicans insist that if Ryan runs, the hype around Bryce won’t be nearly enough to result in a win over Ryan, who on Thursday denied rumors he was thinking about retiring. “He has become a legitimate challenger but I don't think he will be able to pull it off,” said Brian Martinez, chairman the Young Republican Club of Racine and Kenosha, two counties in the district. “The speaker has had way too many connections with the community. I know Democrats who are going to vote for Paul Ryan. Randy Bryce was a nobody up until that video came out and he just blew up literally.”

Carl, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, liked Bryce but worried that he doesn’t have much of a chance against Ryan’s machine. Though a Bryce-commissioned poll recently showed that the Democrat was only down 6 points to Ryan, there’s reason to be skeptical: Trump won Wisconsin’s First District by 10 points , and Ryan far outperformed him in a 35-point blowout .

After several blocks of houses, Bryce reached the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union meeting, where he engaged a receptive crowd. It was not easy finding a Paul Ryan fan here. “I mean he’s never here in the district,” says Carl, 37, who has been in the union for ten years. “He is pretty much a corporate puppet.”

“There seems to be more momentum on the Democratic side this time around, than some of Ryan’s earlier elections,” Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “Ryan has an albatross around his neck as part of an unpopular government in an unpopular party under an unpopular president, and any reasonable Democratic opponent is going to get some mileage out of that.”

The enthusiasm over his candidacy is undeniable, but to win, the growing disgust with Republicans and Washington must mature into the kind of fever and upset that sent Republicans into congressional power in 1994. That was only time in the 20th century that a House Speaker was defeated. Not only did Republicans take back the House, but Speaker Tom Foley, a Democrat from Washington State, fell victim to the throw-the-bums-out midterm mentality, becoming the first speaker to lose a seat since Pennsylvania's Galusha A. Grow's loss in 1862.

Steve, 55, a union member who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and Trump in the general election, had a view that seems to be pretty common: He had not heard of Bryce until the event, but was excited to see someone taking on Ryan. “I’m pretty happy for anybody to challenge Ryan,” he said. “I think he hurt the state, he hurt the workers. I have to get more information about Bryce.”

Bryce was raised in 1970s South Milwaukee by his mother and his stepfather, a Ronald Reagan-loving Republican cop who has undergone a political transformation thanks to Randy’s gradual urgings—Richard Bryce voted for Obama in 2008, his stepson’s most successful political persuasion project.

Years ago, Bryce dreamed of following his stepfather in a career in law enforcement, and he enlisted in the Army after high school. After three years, he returned home and landed a job as an outreach specialist for an organization focused on homeless black veterans. “I saw how we were treated by somebody like Reagan, about how we went from heroes to being zeroes,” he told me. “When I started working with homeless veterans, my eyes really opened up. When you look at society and you scratch that surface a little bit, you see what’s hidden under the dirt. That’s where my views started to develop.