Outside groups have spent nearly $1M to turn last western Minnesota DFL Senate seat red
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Seventeen days before the November election, state Sen. Rob Kupec roused a room full of volunteers before they set out to knock on Moorhead voters’ doors. He was flanked by five fellow DFL senators lending their support and staff to the homestretch of his reelection appeal.
Four represent the Twin Cities metro and one represents Mankato.
All hail from hundreds of miles away, because Kupec is the only senate Democrat in western Minnesota.
“I am one of those unicorn Democrats that's running in a district that Trump won,” Kupec said.
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Republican challenger Austin Peterson wants to change that. The rural real estate developer is hoping his pro-business agenda will be enough to energize rural voters in the Red River Valley while courting enough voters in the blue city of Moorhead.
“There's a lot of things they’re not going to agree with me on, but what they want is they want to be able to keep their business in Minnesota,” he said. “They want their family to grow up in Minnesota, and they just want some relief.”
The race in Senate District 4 has attracted a lot of attention and money because the DFL has a fragile, single-seat majority in the state Senate. Flipping any district could mean taking control.
“You get a net gain of one, and everything changes in that chamber,” said David Sturrock, a political science professor at Southwest Minnesota State and former Republican Party official. “The stakes are very high, and that makes a district like number four a prime target.”
In the most recent campaign finance reports filed late last month, more than $1 million has been spent by outside groups on this race. Peterson’s supporters are outspending Kupec’s by a ratio of nearly 10 to one.
"The outside spending is the thing I worry the most about, that it has just been so lopsided and one-sided,” Kupec said.
The vast majority of that money is being spent on negative ads attacking Kupec, which have reached more than a million views on YouTube in the past two months.
While he hasn’t had much money behind him so far, Kupec has received support from big names. Just this week, he announced endorsements from both the Minnesota Farmer’s Union and Minnesota Farm Bureau, notable because the latter usually endorses conservative candidates.
And last month, DFL U.S. Sen. Tina Smith visited a Moorhead farm to support Kupec’s campaign and talk about issues affecting rural voters, which Kupec has focused on during his tenure in the Legislature.
He serves as vice chair of the Agriculture, Veterans, Broadband, and Rural Development committee, where he helped establish more farmer safety nets and pushed to expand farmers’ right to repair their equipment.
But it might take more than that to win red, rural Minnesota, Sturrock said.
“It’s a cultural dimension as much as hard policy. You're a Democrat running in greater Minnesota. That's a harder sell than it used to be,” he said. “You have to give rural and small town voters reasons to be comfortable with you.”
And on that front, Peterson may present the former weatherman with some gusty headwinds.
The rural challenger
Peterson lives in Hawley, a town of just over 2,000 people in Clay County. A good chunk of his online presence is focused on his rural way of life. He’s a family man, a hunter, a fisherman and a churchgoer.
Those traits are exactly what Peterson needs to highlight if he wants to win, Sturrock said, since rural Minnesotans need to trust him before they vote for him.
"[If] I've got things in common with you, I can be comfortable that I'm sending you off to St. Paul,” he said. “You'll have lots of decisions, and I can trust you to make those decisions the way I would like them to be made.”
Peterson said his passion for business has manifested in real estate.
“I'm addicted to business. I love seeing people become successful because of risks they took,” he said. “We need leaders in St. Paul that understand that there's so many challenges that are associated with getting a business off the ground, running, maintaining the business.”
Peterson has been endorsed by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and its affiliated “Pro Jobs Majority" committee is one of the biggest spenders in the race.
Peterson’s business background guides his politics. One of the tenets of his campaign is affordability, and most of his solutions involve cutting regulations to make things like childcare and housing cheaper.
But Kupec said most of those regulations are there to keep children and homes safe.
The two candidates have also found areas of agreement. While Peterson is generally in favor of cutting state spending, bulking up rural emergency medical services is a personal priority for him.
Five years ago, his 9-month-old daughter had a seizure and stopped breathing.
“We called 911 and EMS told me that they did not know when they could get an ambulance to our house,” he said. “I realized at that moment that I was going to not only have to get my daughter breathing again, but get my daughter to the hospital.”
He did, and she’s OK. He still gets choked up when he talks about it.
“It was flat-out the worst day of my life,” Peterson said.
Rural EMS funding has been an issue in Minnesota for years. Emergency aid bills have passed with bipartisan support and have helped bridge some funding gaps, but both candidates agree lawmakers need to enact a more permanent solution.
“The general support between the two parties is there,” Kupec said. “We all agree that that needs to get done.”
Kupec and Peterson signal political independence
Sturrock said Kupec and Peterson are both vulnerable to trickle-down crossfire aimed at party leaders with low approval ratings. The party in control of the White House typically does poorly in the midterms, and that's being amplified by high gasoline and diesel prices.
And in Minnesota, DFL candidates may still face the brunt of the blame for the state’s fraud issues.
“The Republican candidates have a ball and chain around their ankle metaphorically. That's Donald Trump,” Sturrock said. “Democratic candidates have a ball and chain around the other ankle, and that's Tim Walz."
Both candidates have argued they aren’t party loyalists.
Kupec pointed to his tenure in the state Senate, where he’s sometimes split with his party to push for Republican-favored agriculture bills that he said represent the interests of the district.
“Fidelity to the district around specific issues is more important than fidelity to the party on a certain issue,” he said. “And if there is a vote along party lines that would really negatively impact the district, you should vote with the people in your district on that one."
On fraud, he said since taking office in 2023, he’s pushed for efforts to add more oversight and increase penalties for people who take unfair advantage of state programs.
“We appropriated these funds because we saw a need, and the people that had that need, they didn't get those funds because of some pretty poor oversight by this administration — by the Walz administration,” he said.
Peterson calls himself a right-wing moderate and said he “doesn’t agree with Trump on everything,” but he failed to cite a specific example of where he breaks with the administration.
“A lot of the things that they're trying to cast me in this district is — they're trying to tie me to Trump,” he said. “I don't know Trump, OK? Trump doesn't call me at home. He doesn't text me. We don't have a relationship at all.”
In his interview with MPR News, he defended the war in Iran and the administration's trade war. And on the surge in immigration enforcement earlier this year, during which two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by federal immigration agents, he said “things weren’t handled perfectly,” but wouldn’t say whether the shootings were justified or not.
“I think Metro Surge could be summarized as a federal government that has a responsibility to deal with immigration and a state that was unwilling to work with our federal government,” he said.
He does distance himself from some of the people spending money on his behalf. He was surprised to see the attack ads against Kupec starting as early as March, and dislikes ads that claim Peterson will “stop Somali gangs.”
“We shouldn’t target people,” he said. “I think there's enough facts with his voting record that they could spend a million dollars just talking about.”
Kupec said he’s upset that the groups in his corner haven’t spent as much on the race yet.
“Their plan, apparently, was to spend some money at the end of the race, and you hope that that's not too little, too late,” he said.
Sturrock expects Democrat-leaning groups will show stronger numbers next week, when another campaign filing deadline will reveal how much more money groups have spent on this race in the last month.
