Erin Klaus is closing Tangled Up in Hue, her handmade artisan market in downtown Eau Claire, after 18 years. She survived a recession, downtown blight, construction disruptions, and a pandemic. What she couldn't survive was the current squeeze: two years of declining sales, tariff-inflated costs on merchandise like T-shirts, expired Affordable Care Act subsidies, and customers who simply don't have discretionary income left. She was subsidizing payroll from her other job. The store will wind down through the holidays to let its dozens of artists earn what they can. She is not alone. Amy Burke Lepper, who runs One Of A Kind Interior Design and a retail shop called Lagom in Chippewa Falls, has watched clients delay home builds because of cost increases, including tariffs on Canadian cabinets she's sourced for over two decades. Her health insurance premium tripled from over $1,000 to nearly $3,000 per month, so she dropped it entirely — the first time in her life she's gone uninsured. Her retail traffic has been, in her word, "remarkably slow." These stories sit at the center of the competitive race in Wisconsin's third congressional district. Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL and ardent Trump ally who attended the January 6, 2021 rally at the Capitol, has defended the administration's record and the Iran war, while acknowledging the political cost. Trump administration officials have made multiple visits to the district. Van Orden told WISN 12 News that Trump "won this district three times in a row, with increasing margins every single time" and that his congressional accomplishments are "absolutely amazing." He has posted AI-generated videos attacking his opponent and called her and Bernie Sanders "cocktail communists." Democrat Rebecca Cooke is making her third run at the seat. She lost by seven points in 2022 and less than three in 2024. Her pitch is economic populism rooted in biography: she grew up on a dairy farm her family lost to low milk prices, ran a small business, and still works as a waitress. She's aligned with the centrist Blue Dog Democrats but secured Sanders' endorsement. Her platform centers on extending ACA premium subsidies for three years, passing a public healthcare option, expanding Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing, ending the Iran war to reduce price pressure, enforcing antitrust law against corporate conglomerates, and banning AI-driven dynamic pricing. The district's political identity is genuinely split. Ron Kind, a Democrat, represented it for over 20 years before Van Orden's 2022 win. Voters backed Obama twice, then Trump three times, while sometimes supporting Democrats elsewhere on the ballot. Tens of millions in outside spending have flooded the race from both sides. Van Orden has drawn persistent attention for his behavior — threatening a teenage library worker over a pride display in 2021, screaming at Senate pages in 2023, and shouting "lies" at Biden during the 2024 State of the Union. The structural problem facing small businesses in western Wisconsin isn't a single policy failure but a convergence: tariffs raising input costs, expired healthcare subsidies shifting thousands per month onto individual owners, consumer spending declining as household budgets tighten, and a pandemic-era shift to online shopping that gutted downtown foot traffic. Cooke's argument is that these are policy choices with identifiable authors. Van Orden's argument is that Trump's broader economic record justifies the pain. The voters in the middle — the ones who backed Obama and then Trump — are the ones deciding which framing wins. Klaus, for her part, says flipping the seat won't provide immediate relief. "This is just a long journey ahead and it's not going to be a quick fix," she said. "We need to be able to at least get the people in power that are listening to us and ready to do the hard work that comes next." The election is Tuesday. Tangled Up in Hue closes at the end of the year regardless.
