Randy Bryce naturally seemed a little out of place when I met him in New York last week. He was visiting, like many aspiring politicians do, to raise cash. An ironworker from Wisconsin, he is middle America personified – a man who works with his hands and has a drooping moustache. His collar is quite blue.

“The message is just a really simple one,” Bryce told me, sipping coffee in a small, crowded diner a block from Madison Square Garden. “It’s ‘I didn’t invent lighting, I didn’t invent the internet’ but just a simple message of ‘Look, so here’s somebody who’s gonna stand with you, that has been standing with you and works next to you every day.’”

The candidate, who’s self-aware enough to have the Twitter handle @IronStache (130,000 followers and counting), is running for Congress against Paul Ryan, the Republican House speaker. An army veteran and cancer survivor, he belongs to Iron Workers Local 8. He’s a proud Democrat and union man in a state that is run by Republicans who fight for labor conditions that would make an oligarch in Charles Dickens’s England proud.

An ad announcing Bryce’s long-shot campaign recently rocketed him to internet fame. It opens with Donald Trump and Ryan celebrating the Obamacare repeal bill’s passing the House, and quickly pivots to the story of Bryce’s mother, who has multiple sclerosis and needs health coverage to survive.

“Let’s trade places. Paul Ryan, you can come work the iron and I’ll go to DC,” Bryce says as string music soars.

He reportedly raised $100,000 in the ad’s first 24 hours of being online.

It’s easy to be cynical about people like Bryce, especially as more and more 2016 postmortems agonize over the white man’s flight from the Democratic party and declare that Hillary Clinton failed because she paid too much attention to so-called identity politics. He can seem like the pundit’s idea of a solution to a party too drunk on cosmopolitan values to connect with people who once voted for Democrats and now cheer Trump. He’s easy to fetishize – and sneer at.

But when you talk to Bryce, you can see the nuance beyond the meme. He’s run for office before and knows how to drop a soundbite (he used with me the same line that’s in his ad, “not everyone’s seated at the table and it’s time to make a bigger table”) and can speak movingly about a time when even Republicans in Wisconsin wanted to work with labor unions instead of crushing them.

He’s a populist who, unlike Democratic congressional leaders, unapologetically supports the single-payer healthcare legislation championed by Bernie Sanders. He doesn’t sacrifice social issues (he’s pro-choice and pro-gay marriage) and is comfortable talking about the inequities of the criminal justice system and the ways police power can punish black and brown people, even though his father was a cop and his southeastern Wisconsin district is more amenable to Trump’s law and order fearmongering.

“It’s perfectly acceptable to have a ‘We back the badge’ sign on your front lawn and ‘Black Lives Matter’. One doesn’t cancel out the other,” he said. “I’ve seen some things that I just, I don’t know how it can happen and people could get away with it - especially when there’s actual video evidence and people are found not guilty.”

Added Bryce: “If I see something with my own eyes - a guy running away and a police officer shooting – things like that I have no explanation for. I know my dad wouldn’t accept something like that.”

Can this progressive ironworker (and his mustache) swipe Paul Ryan's seat? Read more

Bryce argued police need to be able to scrutinize the bad behavior of their brethren: “I don’t want to lessen the fact that someone’s life is being taken away. But from my perspective [it’s like] somebody getting by with a crappy weld on a build; somebody’s life could depend on it if you put a shoddy weld and you leave it there; you don’t fix it, that’s a problem for me. And I think the same thing as far as police go; if they see a co-worker doing something that’s wrong, that needs to be called out.”

What Bryce probably can’t do is win. He will raise a lot more money than the typical challenger taking on a vaunted incumbent like Ryan. Bryce’s growing star power will help him, but sitting speakers don’t lose elections and Ryan’s district went for Trump by 11 percentage points. If Ryan wins comfortably again (in 2016, he won by 35 points), there might be a few centrist Clintonistas who cluck their tongues at another Sanders acolyte falling short. They will learn all the wrong lessons, but that’s nothing new.

Regardless of Bryce’s ability to over or underperform expectations, he is representative of where the currently moribund Democratic party needs to be – not just in the near future but right now. It must be, without any lingering reservations, a party of the working class and the poor, a party that exists in this country to counter, in courage and in numbers, corporate excess and capitalistic inhumanity.

“Martin Luther King, he was shot marching for labor rights and I think that it’s important for us to make sure that, as we move ahead now, we need to take everybody with us,” Bryce said, the diner clinking and rattling with New York life.

Added Bryce: “We have to carry people that are hurt with us because there’s going to be a time when we need to be carried.”