WASHINGTON – Trina Swanson came to Washington, D.C., recently looking for help in reaching a formidable goal — the unseating of Republican Rep. Pete Stauber.
Swanson, a Democrat and former federal employee, is the underdog for the Iron Range-based 8th District congressional seat.
Swanson is campaigning hard in a race that is coming into focus, but she's hindered by limited campaign funds and by running in a former swing district that has shifted decisively towards the GOP.
“It’s become such a 'red' district,” Hamline University political science professor David Schultz said.
Elected to Congress in 2018, Stauber has easily won reelection three times with at least 57% of the vote.
Yet Swanson, citing concerns about inflation and the economy, thinks Stauber could lose this time. “People are hurting right now,” she said. “This is a different year.”
So, she came to Washington seeking support and money. Swanson has been endorsed by EMILY’s List, an organization that supports pro-choice female candidates, and by Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement.
She said she also attended three fundraisers here hosted by some of her former colleagues at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
President Donald Trump, in his last election, won the 8th District with 56% of the vote.
Democrats have vastly expanded their map of the U.S. House districts they are targeting this year. They are betting on Trump’s low approval rating and the soaring costs of gasoline, groceries and health care and are targeting districts where Trump won by as much as 16 percentage points — even one district in New York that the president won by more than 20 points.
Still, the 8th District may be out of reach for Democrats.
That’s because there are distinct reasons for its shift to the GOP, Schultz said. One is that union members have become more conservative and union membership itself has declined on the Iron Range.
Schultz also said district residents often split with the DFL Party over social issues and think Democrats, exemplified by Twin Cities residents, don’t like mining.
“And people in the 8th District need jobs,” Schultz said.
Despite the challenges, Swanson, 46, is not deterred.
“I’m not doing this for fun. I’m doing this for the win,” she said.
Having positioned herself as a moderate, Swanson said she reached out to the New Democrat Coalition, a group of more than 100 centrist U.S. House members. Swanson said she also met with officials of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to try to win their support.
That may continue to be elusive. The DCCC has only one Minnesota congressional race “in play” — the contest between Jake Johnson and Rep. Brad Finstad in the 1st District.
While Swanson has demonstrated that she’s a good campaigner, having held more than 180 events in the district, fundraising and other factors work against her.
The last reports filed with the Federal Election Commission dated July 22 show that Swanson has raised about $316,000 for the race while Stauber raised $1.8 million.
And Gov. Tim Walz, likely unwittingly, dealt Swanson a blow with his moratorium on all permitting and environmental review work on nonferrous mining projects in the district’s Rainy River watershed.
“That moratorium has not helped Swanson at all,” Schultz said.
A Trump loyalist
Stauber, 60, lives in Hermantown, which is coincidentally Swanson’s hometown.
A former elite hockey player and longtime police officer, Stauber has embraced Trump’s position on issues like tariffs and the war.
In his opening statement in a debate on WDIO on Tuesday, Stauber, like Trump, blamed inflation on former President Joe Biden and blasted Biden for “open borders” that “let dangerous criminals walk right into our country.”
While other Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump because of his plunging approval ratings and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Stauber told MinnPost he is not worried.
“He’s slipped a few points,” Stauber said of Trump’s popularity. “But in northern Minnesota, President Trump is looked upon positively.”
Stauber’s success is based largely on unflagging support for the Northland’s mining interests, which he called “a huge economic driver” in the district.
As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Stauber was able to push forward legislation this year that eliminated a Biden administration 20-year moratorium on mining for nonferrous minerals in Superior National Forest, a watershed for the Boundary Waters.
The legislation, signed into law by Trump, bars all future presidents from using their authority to put a moratorium on mining in the forest.
“That legislation is durable,” Stauber said. “No future Democratic administration can do the same (as Biden) or anything similar.”
Stauber hopes to make a bid for the chairmanship of the Natural Resources Committee in the next Congress. But if Democrats manage to flip the House on Nov. 3, Stauber said he’d be content with being the highest-ranked Republican on the panel.
“After the election, we are going to put our foot forward,” Stauber said.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Stauber said he assures potential voters that the price of gasoline and diesel will drop when the war ends and promotes Trump’s tax cuts, which have been popular.
“And at every event and every door I knock, they talk about fraud,” Stauber said.
So, the congressman is not only campaigning against Swanson. He’s also helping GOP colleagues running against Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who’s in a tough race for reelection, and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who’s running for the U.S. Senate. Stauber repeatedly blames them, along with Gov. Tim Walz, for fraud.
Skill sets to do the job
Swanson began her career working for the federal government soon after graduating from the Mitchell Hamline School of Law worked for the U.S. bankruptcy court and then the Minnesota field office of the USCIS.
Unlike Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, which enforce immigration law, the USCIS is an administrative agency that handles applications for permanent residency, U.S. citizenship and work permits. It also manages humanitarian programs like asylum and refugee processing.
Swanson said she left that agency because she was pressured “to do things I thought were unethical” after Trump was reelected.
One of those things was a mandate on not putting any written guidance on interviews conducted with refugees seeking to live in the United States. Another, Swanson said, was that she was asked to check on the issuing of a visa for the spouse of a nanny who worked for a high-ranking official at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
She moved back to Hermantown to be near her family and became an immigration lawyer.
Then the political bug bit.
“I realized we weren’t getting the representation that we need,” Swanson said. “And I realized I had the skill sets to do the job.”
So, she is campaigning in person and on social media on promises to bolster the Iron Range’s economy and reverse a trend, accelerated by Trump administration Medicaid cuts, that has shuttered rural clinics and eliminated maternity wards in rural hospitals.
Stauber said a $50 billion rural hospital fund established in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill" will keep rural hospitals and clinics solvent.
But those facilities say the $193 million Minnesota was allotted this year does little to offset the loss of revenue from the Medicaid cuts.
Swanson said at Tuesday’s debate that she supports Medicare for All, a proposal that would put the federal government in charge of administering health care “or anything else that would provide universal health care.”
Swanson’s messaging may strike a chord with voters, but she is indisputably the underdog in the race. That's because Stauber has positioned himself in the district in a way that has shielded him from the Democratic advantage in these midterms, Schultz said.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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