He has the political acumen of Rick Saccone and the misogynistic mind of Blake Farenthold, combined with the winning track record of the pre-2016 Chicago Cubs. He is Jim Hagedorn, the worst midterm candidate in America and, more than likely, the reason Republicans will lose Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District along with their majority in the House of Representatives.
As Republicans face a blue wave, they are about to risk a prime pickup opportunity by backing the candidate equivalent of a tacky 2000s-era political email-forward.
South of the Twin Cities, Minnesota’s 1st District should be a winnable seat for Republicans. It’s a +5 district for Republicans normally, but Trump carried it by more than 14 points. And as partisan luck would have it, incumbent Democrat Rep. Tim Walz just left the seat to run for governor.
These factors should make the race a toss-up. But that will change if blogger/three-time candidate Jim Hagedorn wins the Republican primary.
The electorate knows Hagedorn after watching him run for Congress and lose in 2010, 2014, and 2016, which is nearly the political equivalent of the Cubs’ 108-year championship drought. The difference is that the Cubs Inspire sympathy. Hagedorn does not.
A prolific conservative blogger while a U.S. Treasury Department employee, his Internet archive is full of the locker room talk that even the recently resigned Blake Farenthold wouldn’t find funny. Ahead of the 2002 midterm elections, Hagedorn called Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., “undeserving bimbos in tennis shoes.” During the confirmation hearings of Harriet Miers in 2005, Hagedorn described her Supreme Court nomination as an effort “to fill the bra of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.” Throughout the 2008 presidential election, Hagedorn complimented the Republican ticket, writing, “On behalf of all red-blooded American men: THANK YOU SENATOR McCAIN, SARAH’S HOT!”
In past years, Mother Jones and the Minnesota Star Tribune collected and archived the blog posts that Hagedorn hasn’t scrubbed from the Internet already. Those include conspiracy theories about the birthplace of former President Barack Obama and ruminations about “ungrateful” and “dead Indians.”
Somehow, despite that record, Hagedorn is the front runner. He has raised $481,012, nearly twice as much as his only challenger so far, educator-turned-state-Sen. Carla Nelson. Unless something changes before the June 5 candidate filing deadline, he will win the Republican primary and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the GOP. Democrats couldn’t ask for a better opponent in purple Minnesota, and in the wake of the #MeToo moment to boot.
