Republican Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL backed by former President Donald Trump, won the congressional race against Democrat Brad Pfaff for Wisconsin’s open Third Congressional District seat.

The Association Press called the race on Wednesday at 10:24 a.m. Central time.

Van Orden released a statement regarding his victory, saying, “With a dwindling number of precincts left to report in the district, all of which have historically voted Republican, and with several major outlets calling our victory, it is time to get on with the people’s work.”

This is not the first time Van Orden has made a run for this seat. He ran and narrowly lost against Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) in 2020 as the Republican nominee and was planning to run against him again in a rematch before the Democrat decided to retire after a slew of bad press surrounded him.

Kind announced last year that he would retire. Breitbart News at the time had extensively reported on the seedy massage parlor Kind rented part of one of his properties to, known as “Asian Sunny Massage” and previously named “Impression Spa.”

In 2021, after Kind dropped out of the race, Van Orden told Breitbart News that “Pelosi is going to hand-pick another candidate to run against me, and that person is going to have to carry Nancy Pelosi’s radical leftist water.”

“I’m fighting against an agenda, and the agenda is massive spending,” Van Orden explained at the time. “It has led to uncontrolled inflation, people that want to have open borders, which means, in essence, we don’t have a nation, and people that want to instill socialism into our country, critical race theory into the military, into schools — that’s what I’m fighting against. So that has not stopped.”

On the other hand, Pfaff attempted to run as a moderate Democrat but ended up campaigning with pro-defund police Mandela Barnes, who ran against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. As Breitbart News reported, Pfaff held a virtual campaign event with Barnes.

Despite all of this, the outcome of the race comes as no surprise to some, as polls showed Van Orden with a huge double-digit lead. In August, a Cygnal poll showed that Van Orden held a substantial 12-point lead over the Democrat, 50 percent to 38 percent.

At the time, Cygnal’s memo noted that data indicated that the “political environment significantly favors Republicans in this district” to fill the open seat left by Kind.

The data also suggested that Van Orden held a significant edge in name identification and favorability, which allowed him to expand his lead beyond the ten-point lead the Republican candidate had on the generic ballot.

Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.