His base is not asking for an apology. “Why wasn’t the same shadow cast on the people burning down buildings and attacking the police the summer before?” Ms. Pedersen asked. “Why were those thugs not painted the same way as the Trump thugs?”
Democrats are not giving Mr. Van Orden a pass.
“The idea that Wisconsin would allow someone who was part of the Jan. 6 insurrection to go to Congress, the idea that we could even contemplate that, is deeply troubling,” Tammy Baldwin, the state’s Democratic senator, told party volunteers in Eau Claire before sending them off to canvass.
But Mr. Pfaff sees it as a distinct possibility, if not a probability.
Nationally, the Times/Siena poll found, 71 percent of Republicans said they would be comfortable voting for a candidate who thought the 2020 election had been stolen, as did 37 percent of independent voters and a notable 12 percent of Democrats.
Mr. Pfaff, whose family has farmed in La Crosse County for seven generations and who served in the state and federal departments of agriculture, said he did not so much argue that Mr. Van Orden’s presence at the Capitol disqualified him. Instead, Mr. Pfaff said, it was “a window into his soul,” revealing “who he is as an individual” — too partisan for a district that, in the last 42 years, has been represented by a moderate and openly gay Republican, Steve Gunderson, and then by a centrist Democrat, Mr. Kind.
But the district has changed. The consolidation of family farms into corporate operations has dislocated families from land they had worked for generations, turning them into employees of big agribusiness. Local manufacturing has been buffeted by globalization.
“That has had a real impact on the people of this district,” Mr. Pfaff said. “They do feel that we’ve been left behind.”
In the long rural stretches, hills and coulees between the hipster hangouts and union halls of La Crosse and Eau Claire, Van Orden and Johnson campaign signs jostle with faded Trump-Pence placards. Mr. Pfaff, who noted that Democratic super PACs were not coming to his aid, said it would be pointless in any case for outsiders to ask local voters to reject Mr. Van Orden as a threat to the political order.
