Mark Pocan | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 2017 | |
| Chair of theCongressional Progressive Caucus | |
| In office May 23, 2017 – January 3, 2021 Serving with Pramila Jayapal | |
| Preceded by | Keith Ellison |
| Succeeded by | Pramila Jayapal |
| Member of theU.S. House of Representatives fromWisconsin's2nd district | |
| Assumed office January 3, 2013 | |
| Preceded by | Tammy Baldwin |
| Member of theWisconsin State Assembly from the78th district | |
| In office January 3, 1999 – January 3, 2013 | |
| Preceded by | Tammy Baldwin |
| Succeeded by | Brett Hulsey |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Mark William Pocan (1964-08-14)August 14, 1964 (age 61) Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | |
| Relatives | William Pocan (brother) |
| Education | University of Wisconsin, Madison (BA) |
| Signature |  |
| Website | House website Campaign website |
Mark William Pocan (/ˈpoʊkæn/POH-kan; born August 14, 1964) is an American politician and businessman serving as theU.S. representative fromWisconsin's 2nd congressional district since 2013. The district is based in the state capital,Madison. A member of theDemocratic Party, Pocan is co-chair of theCongressional LGBT Equality Caucus and chair emeritus of theCongressional Progressive Caucus. From 1999 to 2013 he served as a member of theWisconsin State Assembly, representing the 78th district,[1] succeedingTammy Baldwin there,[2] whom he also replaced in the House when Baldwin was elected to theU.S. Senate.
Pocan was born and raised inKenosha, Wisconsin.[3] He graduated from Harvey Elementary School, Washington Junior High School, andMary D. Bradford High School in 1982, where he was elected senior class president.[citation needed] He attended theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a bachelor's degree injournalism in 1986.[4]
Shortly after graduating, Pocan opened up his own small business, aprinting company named Budget Signs & Specialties, which he continues to own and run as of 2012.[4] He is a member of theAFL-CIO, which he joined as a small business owner.[5]
Pocan's active years at UW–Madison in College Democrats led to his election in 1991 to theDane County Board of Supervisors, where he served Madison’s downtown community for three terms, leaving the board in 1996.[4]
In 1998 Pocan's longtime friend and ally,Tammy Baldwin, gave up her seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly to make a successful run for Congress. Pocan ran to succeed her in the western Madison district and won a three-wayDemocratic primary with 54% of the vote. He faced noRepublican opponent in the general election and won with 93% of the vote against an independent. He won reelection in 2000 with 81%—the only time he faced a Republican challenger. He was unopposed for reelection from 2002 to 2010.[6]
As a state legislator, Pocan earned a reputation for moving the Wisconsin political debate to the left. One of the most outspoken progressive members of the state assembly, he focused on issues including corrections reform, the state budget, education funding, and fighting privatization schemes.[citation needed]
For six years, Pocan sat on the Joint Finance Committee, including a term as co-chair.[7][8] He also took on a leading role among Assembly Democrats, running caucus campaign efforts in 2008 when Democrats went from five seats down to retaking the majority for the first time in 14 years.[citation needed]
Pocan is one of the few progressive Democrats to have joined theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative-leaning organization that produces model legislative proposals. He used his membership to investigate the organization's agenda and sponsors and wrote a series of articles on his experiences with ALEC for the Madison-based magazineThe Progressive from 2008 to 2011.[9][10][11] On the September 29, 2012, edition ofMoyers and Company, Pocan said, "ALEC is a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests that eventually the relationship culminates with some special-interest legislation and hopefully that lives happily ever after as the ALEC model. Unfortunately what's excluded from that equation is the public."[12]
In 2012, Baldwin gave up her congressional seat in order to run for the U.S. Senate and Pocan decided to run in the open2nd congressional district. He won a four-candidate Democratic primary with 72% of the vote. He won all 7 counties in the district, including the heavily populated Dane County with 74% of the vote.[13] The 2nd district is extremely Democratic, and it was widely believed that Pocan would win the general election as its nominee.[14] On November 6, 2012, Pocan won thegeneral election, defeatingRepublican Chad Lee 68%–32%.[15][16]
In January 2020, Pocan endorsed SenatorBernie Sanders for president.[17] On July 19, 2024, he called forJoe Biden to withdraw from the2024 United States presidential election.[18]
In July 2024, in protest of theGaza–Israel conflict, Pocan chose not to attend Israeli prime ministerBenjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress.[19] On March 4, 2025, he walked out of President Trump's address to Congress while Trump was speaking.[20]
On June 25, 2025, Pocan posted a comment onX tellingWhite House deputy chief of staffStephen Miller, who is Jewish, to "go back to1930's Germany". The White House condemned the post asantisemitic, but Pocan did not apologize, claiming he would refuse to engage with what he called the "racist base of the GOP" and saying that "normal people" understood he was comparing Miller's views to those of theNazis.[21]
Pocan identifies as aprogressive Democrat. He is a member of organizations including Wisconsin Citizens Action, theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, Fair Wisconsin[31] and Midwest Progressive Elected Officials Network.
Pocan supports decreasingU.S. military spending.[32] Pocan,Pramila Jayapal, andBarbara Lee attempted to reduce the size of the $740 billionNational Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, but their motion was rejected 93–324. Jayapal and Pocan, the Congressional Progressive Caucus's co-chairs, said, "Every handout to Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman is money that could have been spent on ending the [COVID-19] pandemic, keeping small businesses afloat and staving off an economic meltdown."[33]
Pocan has called himself an opponent of "corporate power" and corporations "that get too big".[34] In March 2021, he criticizedAmazon for itstreatment of workers, including behavior he described asunion busting and "mak[ing] workers urinate in water bottles". The company denied that delivery drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles, but later recanted the statement and apologized to Pocan.[35]
In 2022, Pocan authored legislation to impose a moratorium onmergers and acquisitions in the food and agricultural sector.[36] He supports reforms to federal agriculturalcommodity checkoff programs, including requiring that the programs publish budgets, be audited, and not contract with lobbyists or engage inanti-competitive practices.[37]
In July 2019, Pocan voted against a House resolution introduced by RepresentativeBrad Schneider opposing the GlobalBoycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targetingIsrael.[38] The resolution passed by a vote of 398–17.[39]
In May 2021, Pocan and representativesRashida Tlaib andAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez drafted a resolution to block the sale of precision-guided weapons to Israel after theBiden administration approved the sale.[40]
After the April 2024drone strikes on aid workers from World Central Kitchen, Pocan,James McGovern,Jan Schakowsky,Nancy Pelosi, and 36 other Democratic members of Congress wrote PresidentJoe Biden an open letter urging him to reconsider planned arms shipments to the Israeli military.[41][42]
In 2023, Pocan was among 56 Democrats to vote in favor of H.Con.Res. 21, which directed President Biden to remove U.S. troops fromSyria within 180 days.[43][44]
In September 2018, Pocan supported legislation invoking theWar Powers Resolution of 1973 to stop U.S. involvement in theSaudi-led intervention in Yemen, saying, "The world's worst humanitarian crisis has been triggered by our secretive, illegal war in Yemen waged alongside the Saudi regime. As the Saudis usefamine as a weapon of war, starving millions of innocent Yemenis to near death, the United States fuels, coordinates and provides bombs for Saudi airstrikes, and secretly deploys the military to participate in on-the-ground operations with Saudi troops."[45]
In April 2019, after the House passed the resolution withdrawing American support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Pocan was one of nine lawmakers to sign a letter to President Trump requesting a meeting with him and urging him to sign "Senate Joint Resolution 7, which invokes the War Powers Act of 1973 to end unauthorized US military participation in the Saudi-led coalition's armed conflict against Yemen's Houthi forces, initiated in 2015 by the Obama administration." They wrote that the "Saudi-led coalition's imposition of an air-land-and-sea blockade as part of its war against Yemen's Houthis has continued to prevent the unimpeded distribution of these vital commodities, contributing to the suffering and death of vast numbers of civilians throughout the country" and that Trump's signing the resolution would give a "powerful signal to the Saudi-led coalition to bring the four-year-old war to a close."[46]
In June 2018, Pocan announced that he would introduce legislation to dismantleU.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and establish a commission to determine how the government "can implement a humane immigration enforcement system"[47] after visiting theMexico–United States border and witnessing "the nation's immigration crisis".[48] RepresentativesPramila Jayapal andAdriano Espaillat joined Pocan in introducing the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act in July 2018.[49]
On December 18, 2019, Pocan voted for both articles ofimpeachment against PresidentDonald Trump.[50]
On February 5, 2025, Pocan introduced the Eliminating Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy (ELON MUSK) Act, which seeks to ban special government employees—especiallyElon Musk—from obtaining federal contracts.
Pocan isopenly gay. He credits his political activism in part to an incident soon after he graduated from college and opened his printing business, when two men followed him after he left a gay bar and beat him with a baseball bat while they called him "faggot" and other anti-gay slurs.[51] Thisgay bashing incident spurred him to become active in the Madison LGBT community.[52] Pocan was the only openly gay member of the state assembly afterTammy Baldwin's election to Congress, and one of three LGBT members of the100th Wisconsin Legislature,[5] alongside Sen.Tim Carpenter (D–Milwaukee) and bisexual Rep.JoCasta Zamarripa (D–Milwaukee).
On November 24, 2006, Pocan and his long-term partner, Philip Frank, were legally married inToronto,Ontario.[53]
Pocan's brother,William S. Pocan, serves as a circuit court judge inMilwaukee County.[54]
Pocan is among the few U.S. representatives not to identify with any religion.[55]
Pocan has received the following recognitions while in office:
| Year | Election | Date | Elected | Defeated | Total | Plurality | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Primary[60] | Aug. 14 | Mark Pocan | Democratic | 43,171 | 72.16% | Kelda Roys | Dem. | 13,081 | 21.87% | 59,826 | 30,090 |
| Matt Silverman | Dem. | 2,365 | 3.95% | |||||||||
| Dennis Hall | Dem. | 1,163 | 1.94% | |||||||||
| General[61] | Nov. 6 | Mark Pocan | Democratic | 265,422 | 67.90% | Chad Lee | Rep. | 124,683 | 31.90% | 390,898 | 140,739 | |
| Joe Kopsick (write-in) | Ind. | 6 | 0.00% | |||||||||
| 2014 | General[62] | Nov. 4 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 224,920 | 68.40% | Peter Theron | Rep. | 103,619 | 31.51% | 328,847 | 121,301 |
| 2016 | General[63] | Nov. 8 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 273,537 | 68.72% | Peter Theron | Rep. | 124,044 | 31.16% | 398,060 | 149,493 |
| 2018 | General[64] | Nov. 6 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 309,116 | 97.42% | Joey Wayne Reed (write-in) | Rep. | 29 | 0.01% | 317,295 | 300,975 |
| Rick Cruz (write-in) | Ind. | 8 | 0.00% | |||||||||
| Bradley Jason Burt (write-in) | Dem. | 1 | 0.00% | |||||||||
| 2020 | General[65] | Nov. 3 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 318,523 | 69.67% | Peter Theron | Rep. | 138,306 | 30.25% | 457,205 | 180,217 |
| 2022 | General[66] | Nov. 8 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 268,740 | 70.99% | Erik Olsen | Rep. | 101,890 | 26.92% | 378,537 | 109,797 |
| Douglas Alexander | Ind. | 7,689 | 2.03% | |||||||||
| 2024 | General[67] | Nov. 5 | Mark Pocan (inc) | Democratic | 320,317 | 70.05% | Erik Olsen | Rep. | 136,357 | 29.82% | 457,257 | 136,940 |
| U.S. House of Representatives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of theU.S. House of Representatives fromWisconsin's 2nd congressional district 2013–present | Incumbent |
| Preceded by | Chair of theCongressional Progressive Caucus 2017–2021 Served alongside:Raúl Grijalva,Pramila Jayapal | Succeeded by Pramila Jayapal |
| Preceded by | Chair of theCongressional Equality Caucus 2023–2025 | Succeeded by |
| U.S. order of precedence (ceremonial) | ||
| Preceded by | United States representatives by seniority 113th | Succeeded by |
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