On June 18, 2017, Randy Bryce, a member of Milwaukee Iron Workers Local 8, announced that he would challenge Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, for his seat in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District. Bryce’s campaign launch might have received little notice—he had failed in two previous bids for state office, and now was taking on one of the country’s most powerful politicians—but for the online video he released that day. The video, co-produced by Bill Hyers, a top Democratic strategist based in Brooklyn, begins with President Trump introducing a smiling Ryan at a press conference about health care. The video then cuts to an interview with Ryan. “This is about repealing and replacing Obamacare,” he says. “Everybody doesn’t get what they want.” Next comes a shot of green Wisconsin farmland, followed by one of Bryce and his mother, Nancy, sitting in her living room, as Nancy describes the pain she experiences from multiple sclerosis. “It’s like hot knives going through you,” she says. Bryce hugs her after she chokes up expressing gratitude for the medicines she receives that keep her condition in check. At the end of the video, Bryce is standing at a job site, wearing his hard hat and a denim shirt emblazoned with an ironworkers’ union logo. “Let’s trade places, Paul Ryan,” Bryce says. “You can come work the iron, and I’ll go to D.C.”

Released at the height of Democrats’ hopes for their Party’s chances in the midterms, and for winning back the Midwestern states, like Wisconsin, that had handed Trump the Presidency in 2016, the video went viral. Within days, Bryce was appearing on MSNBC, CNN, and other networks. He soon began holding fund-raisers across the country, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and attracting prominent supporters, including Cynthia Nixon, the former “Sex and the City” actress who is now challenging Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor, who offered to help Bryce in any way he could. People began recognizing Bryce on the street and calling him by his Twitter handle, “IronStache,” a reference to the thick mustache he has maintained, off and on, since high school.

Two months later, I flew to Wisconsin to meet with Bryce. I had first spoken with him five years earlier, in 2012, while reporting on the effort to recall Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker. That effort was a response to Walker’s signing of Act 10, a measure that stripped the state’s public-sector workers of collective-bargaining rights. Walker signed Act 10 in March, 2011, just a few months into his first term in office, and—in addition to the recall effort—the new law had provoked enormous protests in Madison and a three-week occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol. Bryce, who was then the political coördinator of Local 8, had been active in the Act 10 protests, but when I met him he was also a reluctant supporter of Walker’s plan to rewrite Wisconsin environmental law so that Gogebic Taconite, a company owned by a billionaire coal magnate named Chris Cline, could build an iron-ore mine in a pristine section of northern Wisconsin. This change to the law was fiercely opposed by Native American tribes and environmentalists, but Cline’s company had promised to use union labor to build its mine, prompting many of the building trades, including Local 8, to back it. “They’re trying to divide us, but my members need work,” Bryce said. (He later recanted his support.) Bryce and I stayed in touch, and, in late 2014, at the onset of another Republican fight with organized labor in Wisconsin—this one over a right-to-work bill that Walker’s legislative allies were pushing—I spent months following Bryce’s organizing campaign against the measure. (Ultimately, Walker signed the right-to-work bill.)

CNN was hosting a town hall with Paul Ryan in Racine, a small city on Lake Michigan twenty-five miles south of Milwaukee, in the southeastern corner of the state. It was Ryan’s first town hall in nearly two years—which some took as a sign that Bryce’s early success was making the House Speaker nervous. As I drove through town to the venue, I saw nearly as many vacant storefronts as open businesses. The industrial jobs that had sustained the local community for generations were mostly gone. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the passage of NAFTA and China’s admittance to the World Trade Organization have cost Wisconsin nearly seventy thousand manufacturing jobs, most in its industrial southeastern corridor. In the Walker era—a period during which Republicans have maintained nearly uninterrupted control of the state’s governor’s office, legislature, Supreme Court, and most of its seats in Congress—Wisconsin has also experienced a large decline of the middle class. Its child-poverty rate has increased dramatically, while funding for K-12 education and the state’s public university system has been sharply reduced. And union membership in the state, which had been fourteen per cent when Walker took office, has fallen by almost half—a change that can be traced directly to the anti-union laws that Walker has championed.

A few hours before the town hall was scheduled to begin, dozens of protesters gathered nearby, on a patch of grass blocked off by barricades—the sanctioned protest area. Many held sheets of paper with their Zip Codes written in black marker, proof of their residency in Ryan’s district and of their exclusion from a forum with their representative. Bryce showed up at around 5:30 P.M., trailed by campaign staff, intending to join the protesters. He was greeted like a rock star. The crowd was mostly older white union workers and Latino immigrants—the kind of voters Bryce was counting on to help him flip the district. Ryan had first won election to Congress in 1998, and the Democrats who had challenged him in 2014 and 2016 each failed to attract more than forty per cent of the vote.

Yet in the lead-up to the CNN town hall, Ryan’s poll numbers were falling. His campaign staff had begun arguing that Bryce was nothing more than a “liberal agitator,” but Bryce’s campaign had reminded people that Wisconsin’s First District wasn’t really that conservative a place—it went for Barack Obama in 2008, and only narrowly for Mitt Romney in 2012, when Ryan served as the Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee. And Ryan’s awkward relationship with Donald Trump—occasionally issuing a mild rebuke of Trump’s latest sexist or racist outrage while supporting and serving as a prominent ambassador for the President’s agenda—wasn’t playing particularly well back home.

Outside the town hall, Bryce did a local-TV interview, took selfies with a few young supporters, and talked to a reporter from Rolling Stone. Eventually, Bryce and his campaign crew headed for downtown Milwaukee, to watch the event from a bar. “You’re like a real-life superhero, Randy,” a woman sitting next to him said. Bryce smiled politely, then turned back to his phone, which he was using to tweet responses to Ryan’s performance. Bryce’s background would make him something of a novelty in Congress, which has long been occupied by the professional class. Of the four hundred and twenty-eight current members of the House of Representatives, three hundred and forty-seven have backgrounds in law or business. Only three are tradespeople. For many of Bryce’s supporters, though, his greatest appeal is that he is an ordinary worker, like them. “We don’t need a lot of people with classroom knowledge,” a retired Kenosha plumber named Tom Nielsen told me. “We need people who have experience in the field and know people who have suffered, been discriminated against, and got thrown under the rug and mistreated. These people deserve better.”