EAU CLAIRE, Wisconsin — There is a tense scene in the movie Act of Valor when Derrick Van Orden, an active duty Navy SEAL at the time of filming, is interrogating a hardcore bad guy. The grittiness and intensity of the scene would make even the hardest of cynics cave under the pressure.
The moment was completely unscripted, Van Orden said he was just being himself, and the monologue went not from the hip, but from years of military service and experiences, mostly intense, he’d had since first enlisting in the Navy at 18 years of age.
If you take anything from those 5 minutes, 19 seconds of interrogation, it’s that Van Orden is a man who doesn’t do anything dispassionately, even an uncredited part in a movie.
Today, Van Orden lives in Hager City, Wisconsin, with his wife Sara on a small farm, is retired from the military, pursuing a law degree — because why not? — and is running for the Republican nomination for Congress in the state’s 3rd District to try to take on Democrat Ron Kind in the fall.
But first he has to win the primary.
Kind has represented the sprawling district in the House since 1997; in 2016, Donald Trump won the district by 4.5 percentage points.
Van Orden’s announcement came in the early days of the pandemic crisis. “I told my team we have to stop everything we are doing, like sending drafts of fundraising letters,” he said. “We’re not doing any of that. We’re just not going to do this; what we’re going to do is we’re going to start something called Neighbors Helping Neighbors of the Wisconsin 3rd District.”
His team initially balked, saying this is not how you run a political campaign.
“I said I don’t care if this is not how you run a political campaign: We have to help people,” he said in his typical blunt way, and that is how his campaign began.
On Saturday, the Republican Party will be holding its district caucus, a process which includes candidate endorsements. Van Orden is competing against public relations professional Jessi Ebben. A third candidate, John Garske, dropped out from the race late last week.
Garske, along with former governor Scott Walker, endorsed Van Orden this week.
To earn the endorsement, which is basically the imprimatur of party officialdom, the candidate needs to get 60% support among the delegates. If no candidate achieves 60%, then there is no endorsement.
Either way, the state primary is Aug. 11.
There are 18 whole and partial counties in this mostly rural district that contains three medium-sized cities: Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Stevens Point.
Don’t let his new bucolic life mislead you. None of the intensity, or purpose, has changed a stitch from the man who grew up with his mother and brother in abject poverty and went on to serve the country for over 26 years, retiring in November of 2014 as a Navy SEAL senior chief with five combat deployments.
“I decided when Dec. 18 happened, I was going to run: That is the day Kind joined the rest of the Democrats in the House to vote to impeach the president for political reasons.”
Van Orden throws his hands up in the air, “I have had enough. I had enough. It’s that simple, I have served my country, and I believe I am called again to serve because Kind has proved that over and over again that he serves his political party, not this district. The impeachment vote was the straw for me.”
Veterans’ victories for both Republicans and Democrats in congressional races are often attributed to their call to service; last year, Republican Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and Michael Waltz Florida, all three veterans, launched the War Veterans Fund PAC to elect more veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Waltz said at the time of the launch, “We are looking for candidates who served their country overseas and are now ready to serve it again. We want to help elect more veterans because they are natural leaders, problem solvers, and patriots.”
Van Orden agrees, says he fits that bill, and he has no intention on backing down when talking about Kind.
“The people of this district are the hardest working, most honest, family loving people in the country,” he said. “There’s a reason that Sara and I intentionally chose to spend the rest of our lives in my home state, and it’s because of the people that live here.”
“I don’t lie about people, and I speak super plainly, and I’m not going to lie about Ron Kind, not going to lie about what he has done and what he has not done. He went to less than 30% of our committee meetings for one year, I mean, what is that?”
Van Orden says when you are truly called to serve, you serve the district, not yourself or your party’s best interest, and you tell the truth along the way.
“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to do something way more devastating, I’m just going to tell them the truth. And it’s biblical. Well, if people know about this guy, I don’t think they’re going to vote for him.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Hillary Clinton won a Wisconsin district by 4.5 percentage points. Trump, not Clinton, won the district by this margin.
