Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat candidate for Congress, facing off against Derrick Van Orden, has based her campaign on the image of a scrappy waitress and owner of a small business who is making do in western Wisconsin. However, the newly available financial disclosures tell another story.
From January 2025 to July 14, 2026, Cooke earned over $90,000 from a combination of waiting tables, rental property income, and political fellowships. The median income for households in Wisconsin’s third congressional district is about $73,000.
Among the sources were fellowships at the Washington, D.C.-based Third Way and the Madison-based The Pipeline Fund. The financial disclosure only lists that the fellowships paid more than $5,000 each. In reality, Cooke earned $30,000 in previous reports from Third Way alone.
Cooke has repeatedly cast herself as an ordinary Wisconsinite who waits on tables in order to earn a living and therefore understands the difficulties faced by working families. However, the figures contradict this portrayal; since she has earned more than $90,000, including a five-figure sum from a centrist D.C. think tank, she is well above the economic level of the rural and small-city district which she hopes to represent against Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden.
If a person is having difficulty covering their expenses on $30,000 from a single political fellowship, in addition to passive income from rental properties and other sources that bring their total income above $90,000, then the idea of what constitutes struggle has changed. It will be up to the voters in western Wisconsin to decide whether the ‘waitress’ description still applies, given that the candidate’s own disclosures show an income exceeding that of a typical household in the area.
