Can blue-collar progressive Randy Bryce topple Paul Ryan?

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The video went up on YouTube on Father’s Day.

The opening shot: Donald Trump outside the White House, calling Paul Ryan to the podium at the Rose Garden celebration following passage in the U.S. House of the American Health Care Act.

The video cuts to a sunrise over southeastern Wisconsin farmland; sound bites from a Ryan TV interview play over solemn piano music: “This is repealing and replacing Obamacare,” says the Republican House speaker from Janesville. “Everybody doesn’t get what they want.”

The scene shifts to a bungalow living room on Milwaukee’s south side. In the background, slightly out of focus, is a slender 70-year-old woman. In the foreground on a sofa, a man with a deep tan, jet-black hair close-cropped on the sides, and a thick, black mustache, rubs his eye, wiping away a tear.

The woman speaks in voiceover: “It’s a very painful condition. It’s like hot knives going through you. You can’t talk.” The man with the mustache explains that his mother has multiple sclerosis. She has insurance for the 20 drugs she takes, but he knows many other people do not.

The video then shows him sitting on a porch, chatting with residents, strolling with his arm around his 9-year-old son, then walking onto a construction site, hard hat on his head. The music swells toward a climax, and so does the man’s voiceover: “I decided to run for office because not everybody’s seated at the table. And it’s time to make a bigger table.”

With that video, union ironworker Randy Bryce kicked off his campaign against Ryan for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. After just one day, the video helped raise $100,000, mostly in small donations, from around the nation.

Stories about the video and Bryce quickly appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, the New Republic, Vanity Fair and a host of other publications. Esquire Magazine political columnist Charlie Pierce came from Boston to interview Bryce at his kickoff rally in a Kenosha union hall the weekend after the video was released.

Bryce professes surprise at the near-viral quality the campaign has taken on and the media surrounding his candidacy. “It’s been surreal,” he says.

The national coverage and enthusiasm among political activists feed on each other, and Bryce continues to ride those waves with the endorsements of politically active celebrities like actor Ron Perlman. He’s on a list of candidates supported by former MSNBC political commentator Krystal Ball’s People’s House Project, which aims to rebuild the Democratic Party as one “fighting for working people.”

“He’s exactly what the country needs, what the Democratic Party needs,” Ball tells Isthmus, praising “his ability to connect with regular people…. What voters are looking for is that authentic connection.”

Ryan is in his 20th year in Congress with a seemingly indomitable record at the ballot box. But Bryce is unlike anyone who has ever challenged him.

Can Bryce — if he wins the Democratic nomination — succeed in toppling the House Speaker in 2018? Some say no.

“Sorry, but Randy Bryce doesn’t have a chance in hell against Paul Ryan,” declared D.R. Tucker in the Washington Monthly. He predicted the state’s right wing talk radio hosts will “burn Bryce beyond recognition with rhetorical napalm.”

Bryce remains undeterred. Yes, on paper the odds are in Paul Ryan’s favor, he acknowledges. But with Ryan’s popularity plunging, especially after the election of Trump as president, Bryce sees an opening that could allow him to do what no previous challenger has done. “It feels like,” he says, “now’s the time to take him out.”

Randy Bryce was born in 1964. His father was a Milwaukee police officer; his mother worked various jobs, including as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. The family lived on the south side of Milwaukee — “as far south as we could,” Bryce says, referring to residency rules that required officers to live in the city.

Bryce graduated from Rufus King High School in 1983. He was a good student, says his mother, Nancy Bryce, and was on the football team. He also showed some musical talent, playing the trombone in the school band and performing as Riff, one of the gang leaders in a school production of West Side Story.

“They had guys that didn’t look like they were in gangs, but they could sing,” Bryce recalls. The show’s director recruited him for a more authentic look. “I said, ‘I’ll do it, but I’m not singing and I’m not dancing.’ I ended up doing both,” he says. His mother went to see the show and was astonished, asking herself, “Holy Cow — is that my kid?”

He thought he might follow in his father’s footsteps in law enforcement. Unable to afford college, he enlisted in the Army and served three years as a military police officer, including a deployment in Honduras where he befriended local residents — the man who tended the water system on the base and a jug-eared 11- or 12-year-old boy who was one of many kids hanging out near the bus stop in the nearby community of Comayagua and greet soldiers coming into town on leave. These friendships made him acutely aware, he says, of “the haves and have nots” in the world.

Honorably discharged in 1986, he did “whatever I could to make a living.” For about a year and a half, he worked with a program that helped homeless veterans find housing. He sold appliances for a time.

In 1987, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Uninsured, he was able to get surgery to remove the tumor at Milwaukee’s teaching hospital. Because the operation damaged nerves, he was told that he probably would never have children; 20 years later, he fathered a son (he shares custody with his son’s mother).

Over the next decade Bryce worked as a security guard and in a warehouse, storing and retrieving business records. In his early 30s, he met a retired Iron Workers Union coordinator and applied for an apprenticeship. “I didn’t know anything about construction. I knew how to read a tape measure. That was about it.”

His first job was with a crew repairing a stretch of highway and bridge in Milwaukee. He spent his first day hauling bundles of reinforcing bar, crossing gridwork of already laid rebar (“It was springy when you walked on it”) to take it to other workers who tied it in place with metal wire. When he got home that night, his shoulder was purple and black with bruises.

“It took me about 10 minutes to climb a flight of steps. I was in serious pain…. It was like somebody just beat the tar out of you,” he says. His urine was the color of Coca-Cola. The doctor his mother worked for explained on the phone that it was blood from overexertion; she reassured him it would go away in a few weeks. “I was literally pissing blood after that first day of work,” Bryce says. Something halfway between a wince and a wry half-smile crosses his face at the memory.

Back at work the next day, he was “very slow.” Some of his co-workers weren’t happy, but a union agent who stopped by the job site gave him a pep talk. After three weeks, he had healed up.

He also took to the part of the job that involves working 10, 20 or more stories up in the air as a building goes up.

“One of the things I like most about that job is just the view,” says Bryce. During his work on the Miller Park baseball stadium, “I used to race up to the roof when I’d get there in the morning and look at the sunrise coming up over the Hoan Bridge. It’s something a lot of people don’t get to see.”

When the union asked for someone to coordinate political work, Bryce volunteered. The job involved connecting with city, county and state lawmakers. When a big building project — the kind that employed a lot of ironworkers — was up for a vote, he’d seek their support. When it got approved, he’d thank them.

The job also connected him with local unions representing Milwaukee County employees. Scott Walker was Milwaukee County executive at the time, and Bryce heard firsthand from union workers about their contentious battles. When Walker launched his 2010 campaign for governor, “I really got active,” Bryce says — talking with members of his own union about why Walker would be bad for labor. “I saw we were a lot stronger working together.”

After Walker was elected governor, Bryce fought against Act 10, the law that gutted public workers’ bargaining rights. He forged closer connections with Democratic state lawmakers. At their urging, he ran twice for the state Legislature in heavily Republican districts — once for the Assembly, losing in the primary, and later for the Senate, losing in a newly gerrymandered Republican district to Van Wanggaard.

The 2014 state Senate race looked bleak from the beginning, but Bryce hoped he could boost Mary Burke’s campaign to unseat Walker.

“Randy knew how tough it would be,” says state Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee. “But he believed in the cause and was willing to put himself out there for it.” Although he lost, the experience helped him learn about the mechanics and strategy of campaigning, while also introducing him to rural voters. Bryce also began to tailor a social media persona on Facebook and Twitter, where he uses the handle @IronStache.

As the Iron Workers’ primary political voice, he has nudged the union on its own path. When the Milwaukee building trades locals in 2016 backed Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele for reelection, the Iron Workers instead endorsed Abele’s challenger — Chris Larson. Both were Democrats running in the nonpartisan race, but the state senator’s challenge to Abele drew support from public employee unions and other progressive groups.

Bryce was also not afraid to forge his own path on the larger stage. The national Iron Workers Union had endorsed Hillary Clinton in November 2015, well before the primaries. But Bryce favored Bernie Sanders and spoke at a Sanders rally (he couldn’t officially speak for the Iron Workers because of the Clinton endorsement). Once Clinton secured the nomination, though, Bryce backed her “as the only alternative” to Trump. Had Clinton won Wisconsin, he would have gone to Washington, D.C., in December to cast one of the state’s 10 votes for her in the Electoral College. “I’ve been called everything from a Bernie Bro to a Hillbot,” says Bryce, “which is pretty funny.”

Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District runs roughly from Lake Michigan to the Rock River Valley and from the Illinois border to a little south of Interstate 94. Political veterans used to label it a swing district; Democrats held the seat from 1971 until 1995. But since the 1994 wave election that flipped control of Congress to the GOP, it’s been solidly red.

Ryan, then a 28-year-old former Senate aide and conservative think tank policy writer, first won the seat in 1998, narrowly beating a Kenosha Democrat. It was the most competitive race he’s ever faced. He won his next four reelection bids by nearly 2 to 1 against an anti-abortion Janesville doctor running as a Democrat. A well-funded challenger in 2008 didn’t do much better — even as as Barack Obama won his first presidential term and carried the district by 5 percentage points.

In 2012, as Obama was running for reelection, Kenosha County Democrat Rob Zerban mounted a serious challenge to Ryan, who was also on the ballot as GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s running mate. Romney-Ryan lost the state, but Ryan held his Congressional seat. Zerban challenged and lost again in 2014.

Earlier this year, Democrats began to survey the newly Trumpified political landscape and sought to mount a strong challenge to Ryan. David Yankovich, an Ohio man who had gained a following for writing critically about Trump on HuffPost and Raw Story, moved to Wisconsin and announced in early May he would challenge the speaker.

But Bryce was also being encouraged to run. For several weeks, he contemplated the idea. In May, Bryce went to Milwaukee to march in the May Day parade organized by immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera. There, Larson approached him, asking permission to circulate his name as a potential Ryan challenger. Bryce agreed.

Larson says he was impressed by Bryce’s steadfast work to help organize opposition to Act 10, but also by his continued engagement on a range of issues, including the battle to prevent passage of the 2015 union-weakening “right-to-work” law. Bryce is “somebody who’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes and willing to take the time to do it,” Larson says.

Progressive political activists put Bryce in touch with Democratic strategist Bill Hyers, who had guided the campaigns of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and other successful Democrats. “He has a reputation of helping underdog candidates — progressive candidates,” says Bryce.

He recalls Hyers telling him, “It’s time to start moving ahead.” The two bonded over their shared military experiences — Hyers is also a former Army MP — and Bryce was impressed by the “positive” videos that Hyers had commissioned for some of his winning campaigns. “It wasn’t like throwin’ tomatoes at the opponent and just blasting with a bunch of lies or twisting numbers. It was about family and about values — things that were important to them.”

When Bryce broke it to his mother that he planned to run she had two concerns. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Nancy Bryce told her son. And, she added, “We don’t have money. How can a person from a normal middle-class family do that?”

Bryce explained to her how campaign fundraising works. And, eventually, broached the idea of her participating in a video. “I’m not the type of person who wants to be recognized,” she says. But when it became clear she could be an effective centerpiece for her son’s debut video, she put aside her misgivings.

Given the timing — amid the intense battle by Republicans to follow through on nearly eight years of threatening to “repeal and replace” Obama’s Affordable Care Act — it was natural to make health care a central theme. But the video isn’t so much about policy as biography — establishing Bryce’s bona fides as a man of the people and casting Ryan as increasingly detached from his district. Bryce frequently points out that Ryan hasn’t held an open town hall meeting for constituents in more than 650 days.

On YouTube the video logged more than half a million views in its first six weeks. “Is it normal for a campaign launch video to make you cry?” a viewer wrote in the comments.

In July, David Yankovich ended his own campaign and endorsed Bryce. Meanwhile, Janesville teacher and school board member Cathy Myers entered the race just days after Bryce but has gotten none of the national media coverage Bryce has.

Some in Bryce’s camp have suggested the early strength of his challenge may have spurred Ryan to agree to the speaker’s CNN Q&A in Racine Aug. 21, moderated by Jake Tapper. That event, Bryce backers contend, doesn’t undermine the no-town-halls talking point, because CNN picked the audience and screened the questions, although many were critical. Ryan’s office declined to comment for this story.

Yet the question remains — can Bryce translate the enthusiasm he’s generated into defeating Ryan at the ballot box? In a Bloomberg News national poll in mid-July, 34 percent viewed Ryan’s performance favorably and 48 percent negatively — nearly the reverse of a December 2016 survey (47 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable). Ryan’s unfavorable ratings have soared in other polls as well.

The most recent Marquette University Law School poll, conducted by Charles Franklin, shows Wisconsin voters evenly divided on the incumbent. But those aren’t the voters who will be casting ballots. So far, 1st District polling data has been scarce, although a Bryce campaign fundraising appeal touts internal numbers showing him up 44-41.

Another precedent suggests the odds are in Ryan’s favor: Only two sitting House speakers have been voted out of office by their constituents in the nation’s history, the most recent in 1994. Ryan also reportedly has $9 million-plus in his campaign fund.

Then there’s the complication of festering divisions between some partisans for Sanders and Clinton that have persisted months into the Trump administration. Bryce believes he can win over both sides, appealing to “those that voted for Bernie and those that voted for Hillary,” he says. “We’re going to need to get everybody together.”

He also believes he’s got a chance at winning over working-class Trump backers — some of them his own co-workers. “He told people what they wanted to hear,” says Bryce, who would point out to them Trump’s history as a developer of stiffing subcontractors — who hire most ironworkers. Since the election, more than one workmate who voted for Trump has quietly come back to him. “They’ve told me, ‘You were right,’” he says.

Local Bryce supporters don’t deny the odds, but contend Ryan is beatable. “It’s a very big challenge,” says Ryan’s 2012 and 2014 challenger Rob Zerban, who has endorsed Bryce — but adds, “I think Randy just stands so much better of a chance than I ever had.”

Bryce believes he can overcome the funding gap and the Democratic losing streak “by just being genuine.”

“People want somebody they can trust,” he says. “I’m not trying to sell them something that I’m not.”