Mitchell Berman has decided to outsource his door knocking to the Democratic Party of Evanston. In a Facebook reel, the North Shore club shows two of its volunteers, Andy and Glenn, walking Kenosha blocks for Mitchell Berman for Congress. The caption is the whole strategy: “Wisconsin is just up the road, and it could decide who controls the House. A handful of seats will tip the balance, and a few of them are in Wisconsin.”
Indivisible Chicago is running the same play. Its canvass pitch says the group is “focused on Wisconsin Congressional District 1 where Mitch Berman, a progressive Democrat, has a good shot at unseating a Republican incumbent,” and that the drive from Chicago is less than 90 minutes—training, pairing, carpools. A progressive club in Chicago is selling a nurse from Raymond as the local alternative to Bryan Steil.
This is just the latest in a long line of Illinois Democrats jumping into a Wisconsin race. In October 2024, the Democratic Party of Illinois bused staff and volunteers to Kenosha for Kamala Harris and Peter Barca, the last Democrat to try to take this same congressional seat, but lost by more than 10 points. Gov. JB Pritzker, who owns a vacation home in Wisconsin, and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky showed up to kick it off. The state party’s own release put the headline on it: “Illinois and Wisconsin are in this fight together.” More than 100 volunteers canvassed Kenosha that day.
Pritzker has been meddling in Wisconsin politics for several cycles. He has dumped millions into funding liberal candidates in the state where he summers. The Democratic Party of Illinois sent hundreds of volunteers across the border through Operation Swing State. The Evanston party reel is the friendly version of the Illinois machine trying to make Wisconsin blue.
Berman’s pitch is that he’s not funded by billionaires, but his Illinois-imported volunteers holding the clipboards are. They drove up from Evanston because a handful of seats could hand Democrats the House, and Kenosha is the closest swing district, since Illinois has drawn itself reliably Democrat House seats. Illinois is not a swing state. Wisconsin is. That is the only reason the Illinois democrats are here. Wisconsinites have an abbreviation for these types of people, and it certainly applies.
