After 18 years in business, Erin Klaus is closing her storefront, a handmade artisan market in downtown Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at the end of the year.

She opened Tangled Up in Hue amid a recession, during a time when downtown was “kind of a ghost town”, weathering construction and the pandemic. But the current economic crisis proved too much. She’s seen a downward trend in sales for two years, and was dipping into her own pocket from her other job, as the executive director of business non-profit Downtown Eau Claire Inc, to pay staff.

“This is the first time it’s out of my control to save my business,” she said. “It just feels so desperate right now for a lot of our small business owners … From the tariff wars to inflation to cost of living to healthcare, I mean, honestly, there’s no money left in the bucket at the end of the day for regular folks and, unfortunately, that means our regular folks who run businesses, too, are just not able to kind of hang on any longer.”

These economic woes feature heavily in the toss-up race for the US House of Representatives in western Wisconsin’s third district, where Eau Claire is located. Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden has stuck closely to Donald Trump and defended the administration’s record, while Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke is making a third run at the seat by tapping into, and commiserating with, economic despair among working people, farmers and business owners.

Communities like Eau Claire are losing small businesses as people are getting pinched financially and don’t have the extra funds to spend, even if they wanted to, she said. The culture of consumerism changed during the pandemic as well, with people wanting quick, online options. Tariffs on, in her case, T-shirts, forced her to eat the added cost. Healthcare subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplace weren’t extended. A paid parking program downtown felt like the final straw. She knows she’s not alone among small business owners.

The messages coming from the Trump administration seem to insist that these economic conditions aren’t happening, or aren’t affecting people like her, to the degree they are, Klaus said. It feels “almost like we’re getting mocked for the hardships that we’re enduring”.

Other small business owners in the district say they’re struggling, too. Amy Burke Lepper, the owner of One Of A Kind Interior Design in Chippewa Falls, has worked with a cabinet maker in Canada for more than two decades, and now those cabinets have added tariffs. A couple of her clients have put off building homes because of costs right now, she said. Her retail shop, Lagom, has been “remarkably slow”. She has no health insurance for the first time in her life because the cost rose from over $1,000 per month for her and her husband to nearly $3,000.

She doesn’t plan to close her business but she decided to speak out about the struggles she’s facing so that people understand how federal policies are affecting small businesses like hers.

“I’m one person, and I know this is affecting everybody else and waking people up to the fact that, you don’t understand that’s why your prices are higher. It’s because of these things. It’s not a magic thing,” Burke Lepper said.

The third district House race

As weeks and months of campaigning have given way to the final days and hours before Tuesday’s US midterm elections, rising prices and affordability have created competitive races in unexpected places. Democrats and independents have found a lane in rural areas stretched thin by gas costs, fertilizer increases, tariffs and healthcare cuts, though the third district was always expected to be competitive.

Before Van Orden’s win in 2022, Democrat Ron Kind had represented the district for more than 20 years. The district, made up of mostly rural and suburban areas, backed Barack Obama twice, then Trump three times, but also sometimes for Democrats elsewhere on the ballot. Tens of millions of dollars in outside spending has poured into the race from both sides.

Trump administration officials have traveled multiple times to the third district in Wisconsin to defend their records. Trump has told his supporters to pretend he is on the ballot this year. Van Orden has defended the Iran war, calling it necessary, though acknowledging it is making it “exponentially harder for Republicans to hold the House and the Senate”.

Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, rallied with Van Orden this week, saying he is “one of our fighters”. Van Orden, responding to a reporter, said he hasn’t shied away from his support of Trump. He has been an ardent Trump supporter, including attending the January 6 rally at the US Capitol in 2021.

“At some point, we have to look at accomplishments and put aside the emotional sway,” Van Orden told WISN 12 News. “Donald Trump won this district three times in a row, with increasing margins every single time. The things that he’s been able to accomplish with a Republican-controlled congress is absolutely amazing.”

Van Orden, a retired Navy Seal, refers to his opponent, Cooke, as “The Crooked One”, claiming she isn’t who she says she is. He has posted AI-generated videos of her. When she rallied recently with independent senator Bernie Sanders, who has endorsed her, he called them “cocktail communists”.

His outbursts – both in person and online – throughout his time in the public eye have drawn attention. He threatened a teenage library worker over a pride month display in 2021, screamed at Senate pages at the US Capitol in 2023, and shouted “lies” at Joe Biden during the 2024 state of the union.

Van Orden didn’t respond to requests for an interview or comment.

Translating economic pain into votes

Cooke has emphasized the ways she can relate to the economic despair the voters in the district feel. She grew up on a dairy farm, she said, and her family had to sell their cows because of low milk prices and competition with larger dairies. She ran a small business in Eau Claire. She still works as a waitress. (She also has worked as a political consultant, which Van Orden has used to attack her working-class credentials.) She has been aligned with the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, but got a Sanders endorsement and campaigned on economic populist ideas.

The first thing Democrats should do is expand the Affordable Care Act tax credit premiums that were allowed to expire, for three more years to “stop the hemorrhaging”, Cooke said. She also wants to pass a public option for healthcare and expand Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing.

The Iran war has “just got to end”, she said, which will help bring down prices. The federal government needs to enforce antitrust laws and take on “corporate conglomerates” that dominate certain industries and break them up, she said. And companies that use AI to surveil customers and set different prices based on this data need to be stopped, she said.

At the restaurant where she works, fewer people are going out to eat because they don’t have spending money, she said. She had to drop her own insurance after the Covid-era subsidies expired. (Van Orden was one of few Republicans to vote to extend them.)

“It just sort of feels like nobody really cares,” Cooke said. “And I think I can talk about those things because I get it. I am in the trenches with everybody else.”

Cooke said she has done the work throughout the district to make her case to voters, and she’ll keep showing up in person for them if she’s elected. She’s gone to small town dairy breakfasts, lutefisk lunches, county fairs, knocked doors. She lost by seven points in 2022, then less than three points in 2024.

“Even if it’s a big blue wave, it will be a ripple here,” she said.

Whatever happens in the election, however, will be too late for Klaus. Tangled Up in Hue will stay open until the end of the year to sell down the products in the store and let the many dozens of artists who sell there earn some money during the holiday season. She’ll keep other aspects of the business open, including an art market on Saturdays, a wholesale element and apparel printing.

Klaus has been a maker since she was a little kid, she said. She’ll find other, new ways to keep that alive. She’s a Democrat, and says she’ll be voting for Cooke for Congress. She hopes more people in the district connect the dots on how their choices for federal offices are hurting the economy now. But, she added, flipping the seat doesn’t immediately resolve all the economic pain.

“This is just a long journey ahead and it’s not going to be a quick fix,” Klaus 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. But it’s certainly not going to be over after 3 November.”