February 17th, 2026 Len’s Political Note #790 Jake Johnson Minnesota 01
2026 General Election
I read the Downballot. This newsletter reports about who is running for what offices all over the country. It provides other news that might be of interest – the most recent poll results, for instance. Based on their reports and the reports of others, I keep a spreadsheet of candidates for state and federal and some municipal offices.
Not long ago, while reading The Downballot’s list of recent polls, I saw a report about a poll done for Jake Johnson who is running for Minnesota 01. It showed him trailing the incumbent by a 44-41 margin.
I looked for him via the internet. Jake Johnson Weinberger is a different guy. He is an actor. Another actor is just plain Jake Johnson.
If you keep looking, you can find Jake Johnson the math teacher, the union rep, the congressional candidate. Many of you know that I am a retired school superintendent, 25 years in the same small, elementary school district. I love it that math teacher Jake Johnson is a candidate for the House of Representatives.
That was only one poll, the one I saw referenced. It was paid for by Jake Johnson. Nevertheless, we should take his candidacy seriously. He has raised some money. At the beginning of 2026, he had $300,000 available for his campaign. That would not be nearly enough to oppose some candidates who began 2026 with millions. The Minnesota 01 Republican incumbent, Brad Finstad, began the year with $600,000. Jake Johnson can compete with that.
Some candidates entice us with powerful introductory videos. Not Jake Johnson. He enticed me with the lucidity of his statement about himself. His old fashioned photographs were also appealing. Among them is an untitled wedding photograph with him and his wife as groom and bride surrounded by a large number of people – perhaps his siblings and their families.
Jake Johnson is one of eleven children. His dad was a garbage collector; his mom a meter reader. Things got tougher financially after his parents divorced. His mom married a disabled veteran and, Jake Johnson recalls, they could not have gotten through each month without SNAP and Medicaid. He credits those federal programs and his community, his church, and his teachers for keeping him on track.
When I went to graduate school, I read about and was impressed by the small school movement. Those who favored small high schools argued that a school of 600 students was the perfect size. That was large enough for a school to offer enough extracurricular activities and small enough so that all students could participate in them,
Jake Johnson went to the local high school, Stewartville High. The school is about twelve miles south of the high school in Rochester, Minnesota where he now teaches. Stewartville was a 9-12 school with roughly six hundred students. Jake Johnson played football, basketball, and baseball. There, at Stewartville High School, he met his future wife.
Relying on odd jobs and Pell grants, he was able to go to the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, just across the Mississippi River from Minnesota. He and Molly got married after they graduated. Jake Johnson got the first job he applied for – teaching math in Rochester, Minnesota. I know how scarce math teachers are. He might have been the only applicant,
He has been teaching for twenty years and has taught the range – from AP calculus to remedial math. He made it a personal project to help kids in danger of dropping out of school stay in school. Some did not just stay in school. Jake Johnson was able to move them into his accelerated math classes and impressive success.
Jake Johnson was not just a math nerd. He has been his local union’s Government Relations Coordinator, a role that involved him in state-wide budget and policy issues. He has also been a member of the local collective bargaining team where he learned some more about budgets and policy.
Among the photographs on his website is one of him speaking with students in class and another with him and Molly and their four boys sitting on their front steps. Jake Johnson could not be more comfortable in both of those places.
Jake Johnson is also comfortable as a politician. He promises to work to bring down costs, to take on corruption, and to invest in small towns. He addressed those three priorities:
- Bringing down costs: “I’ll vote to end the massive tariffs driving up prices and shutting down export markets. I’ll take on the corporate monopolies that are raising costs for consumers and producers and keeping wages low for workers. I’ll cut red tape so we can quickly build new homes and expand childcare options. And I will support tax cuts for working families and small businesses, paid for by raising taxes and closing loopholes for the super wealthy,”
- Taking on corruption: “I won’t take a dime of corporate PAC money, so I’ll always answer to you. I will vote to ban members of congress from trading stocks and from becoming lobbyists. I’ll support constitutional amendments to establish term limits, to ban pardons for family and donors, and to require a balanced budget. Perhaps most importantly, I will always stand up to corruption in government no matter which party or politician is responsible for it.”
- Investing in small towns: “Our small towns need actual investments, not excessive regulations. That means finally passing a bipartisan farm bill, ensuring farmers have the right to repair their own equipment, and extending tax credits for health insurance. It also means protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans benefits, and undoing the recent cuts to Medicaid … and SNAP. Finally, it includes investing in clean water, special education, and medical research and ag innovation that creates new jobs here in Minnesota, not in China.”
The Republican incumbent of Minnesota 01, a district which runs across the entire southern border of the state, is Brad Finstad. Is he vulnerable?
Brad Finstad is vulnerable in the way that nearly every Republican Member of Congress is these days. He is a Trumper. A former state rep, for nearly ten years he was CEO of the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter, Minnesota. In 2017, Donald Trump appointed Finstad the state of Minnesota director for the US Department of Agriculture, a position he held throughout Trump’s first term of office.
Briefly, in 2021 after Trump was no longer in office, Brad Finstad was the interim Executive Director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association. In 2022, he ran for a special election to Congress, winning the multi-candidate Republican primary by just over a point. He defeated the Democratic nominee in the special election by four.
His next elections were not close. Brad Finstad won the general election in 2022 by more than 10 points, the general election in 2024 by 17. Has anything happened to make him vulnerable? Cities, perhaps.
The family farm Brad Finstad grew up on is about an hour and a half drive southwest of Minneapolis. Minneapolis intrudes on his politics. The other city that intrudes is Rochester — Minnesota’s third largest, with a population approaching 125,000. It is the home of the Mayo Clinic, one of the best known medical centers in the country and it is in Minnesota 01.
On January 14, Brad Finstad had a lengthy interview with a reporter from the Rochester television station KTTC. He was asked about two topics. The day care fraud scandal and immigration enforcement by ICE — both in Minneapolis.
About fraud, Finstad said: “Upwards to $9 billion of state and federal tax dollars, hard-working taxpayer money that was intended to help our neighbors in need, was criminally taken from us, and there was blind eyes turned to this. I mean, we have wrote letter after letter. We have asked the governor and the administration of this state to show us something, show us something that you’ve done to fix this fraud. Has anybody been fired that was administering these programs? And stonewalled after stonewalled, we were just not getting the pieces of information. And it has become the news story of the day. I can’t walk 20 feet down the hall in Congress here without someone asking me, what’s going on in Minnesota? What’s all this fraud about?”
Here is what Finstad should have known, when asked by his colleagues in Congress and the reporter: In 2017, Fozia Sheik Ali was charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money. In 2018, she was convicted of stealing $1.4 million. That’s a lot of money in the childcare world and any where else. What’s more, there are still issues in day care. In Minnesota. Audits have found an error rate of more than 11% in day care charges compared to the national average of 4%. But $9 billion dollars?
Finstad fell for Trump’s racist claim that up to 90% of the day care fraud is caused by people who came into the United States illegally from Somalia. He called them. “garbage.” Finstad also fell for a viral video that purported to show several empty child care centers that were, the video claimed, fraudulently collecting money from the federal government. Of the nine or ten centers in the video, centers which would not allow them to come in to video children without parental permission, one was closed and one was not yet open because it served families whose adults work a late shift.
Brad Finstad, who would like to be known as a tough guy who takes care of the taxpayers’ money, was gulled by right wingers and by Trump. If there had been $9 billion to steal from day care centers in Minneapolis, these centers would be run by national corporations, not by locals who borrow or otherwise scrape up the money to rent or buy sites that can be used for day care.
As for the immigration crisis in Minneapolis, Brad Finstad responded: “I will say that they are arresting and deporting the worst of the worst. We’re talking about sex traffickers. We’re talking about child molesters. We’re talking about drug dealers. And that list now is available on the DHS website where you’re able to see, here’s who they’re pulling off the streets right here in our backyard in Rochester and in southern Minnesota and the Twin Cities. And so, you know, I don’t think anybody in southern Minnesota says, ‘I’m willing to risk it.’ Let’s just see if we can wing it and see if our streets will just magically become safe’…….. I don’t want escalation and I don’t want tempers and, you know, the temperature to rise. But on the same note, how do we in good conscience sleep at night knowing that there is 30,000 people that illegally came into this country that have criminal records? And again, sex traffickers, child molesters, drug dealers, how do we sleep at night knowing that they’re still running free in our streets and not take that serious? “
Business-oriented Forbes Magazine reported the results of a television network review of DHS documents that found fewer that 14% of those arrested for deportation had violent and/or sex crime offenses, 40% had no violations at all except for their illegal entry to the United States. It is not uncommon to be fooled by a political enthusiasm, by claims that are consistent with our own prejudices. We can expect better of our Members of Congress. Especially, since they should have learned that claims by the President are unreliable.
For Brad Finstad, it is not just enthusiasm. At least once in his three years in Congress, he has jumped right into into trouble making and bullying. He was one of about a hundred Republican Members of Congress to vote to strip all funds including salary from the Vice President’s office in 2023. Why do that? Those Republicans decided to blame the Vice President for Joe Biden’s lax policy regarding the southern border. Vice Presidents can be powerful, but they are rarely responsible for governmental policy.
DONATE TO Jake Johnson’s campaign. He could flip this seat. The last Democratic Member of Congress from this district was elected twenty years ago in 2006. He remained in office until 2017. The guy’s name was Tim Walz.
Other Minnesota races
Governor: US Senator Amy Klobuchar is the only announced Democrat. She will not be challenged by any of the half-dozen Republicans interested in the job. You can DONATE if you want.
Attorney General: Incumbent Keith Ellison, along with New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Virginia’s Lt. Governor Gazela Hashmi, he is among America’s highest ranking elected Muslims. His races have been close: 49-45.1 in 2028, 50.4-49.5 in 2022. DONATE. Re-elect him.
Secretary of State: Incumbent Steve Simon is running for his fourth term in that office. He has won by 9 points in his last two races and is a model for devotion to democracy in his role. His Republican opponent, former judge Tad Jude argues for photo IDs to vote and other voter suppression mechanisms. You can DONATE and help him out.
US Congress. With a one seat majority in the State Senate and a tie in the House, Minnesota has not joined the redistricting frenzy. The state has eight congressional districts – four Democratic (DFL) incumbents and 4 Republicans. There could be a contest in MN 01 as described above. There will be a contest in MN 02. The incumbent there is running for the US Senate. At least Four members of the DFL and two Republicans have announced their candidacy.
US Senate. Congresswoman Angie Craig had considerably more funds available to start 2026. Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan is leading in the polls. It is simply too early to know who will be the nominee. The closest Republican to a strong opponent to the Democratic nominee is former sportscaster Michelle Tafoya.
