It began, Jake Johnson admits, as a lark.
It was April 2025. President Donald Trump was at the apex of his second-term power. His tariffs were reordering the world economy. DOGE was terrorizing the federal workforce. Law firms were surrendering to Trump’s demands. The House and Senate passed budget resolutions that cleared the way for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and its deep cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.
Here in Minnesota’s rural 1st Congressional District, which runs along the Iowa border, no Democrat had volunteered to challenge Republican Rep. Brad Finstad — and understandably so. The incumbent had just won reelection to a second term by a whopping 17 points in a district Trump had won by 12.
So when Johnson, a high school math teacher who had never run for office before, announced his candidacy, the few elected Democrats in the area didn’t challenge him for the nomination, probably concluding, as Johnson put it, that “this new kid can be the sacrificial lamb.”
Johnson, the father of four teenage boys, hired a former student to be his manager, and, outside of school hours, the two set off to campaign in Johnson’s 2011 Toyota Sienna minivan, its flat-tire light permanently on and duct tape holding up part of the rear bumper. He tried to get help for his campaign from the national Democratic Party, but “they wouldn’t pick up the phone,” Johnson said.
They do now. Since July, Johnson has been on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of its top prospects. He has been outraising Finstad, and in the latest quarter brought in $1.3 million. Two tracking polls in the past two weeks for the Democrats’ House Majority PAC found the race to be a statistical dead heat. A poll for Minnesota’s KAAL-TV released Monday night had Johnson leading by two points, also within the margin of error.
Republicans are concerned enough that a group affiliated with House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota) is pumping $600,000 into the race. “We feel confident about winning,” Finstad consultant David FitzSimmons told me, “but never expected anything less than a competitive race.” He calculates that outside groups have spent $4 million to boost Johnson.
Not bad for a schoolteacher and a novice pol who never expected he could win. “I don’t want to say we weren’t thinking about winning, because of course you want to win,” Johnson told me as I went door-knocking with him on the outskirts of Owatonna city this weekend. “But it was more of, like, somebody’s got to do something here. I didn’t want to be somebody who would just sit around hoping that somebody else would do something.”
Johnson’s candidacy is typical of two ways in which Trump has shaped the midterms. The president’s deep unpopularity has made Democrats competitive in places where they would ordinarily have no business winning elections. And Trump has motivated an unusual crop of working-class candidates: Several of the Democratic nominees in competitive races this cycle, including Johnson, work ordinary jobs and didn’t follow the usual paths into politics.
There’s a part-time waitress in Wisconsin, a snowplow driver in Pennsylvania, a machinist in Ohio, a firefighter in Montana, a farmer in North Carolina, a fisherman in Alaska, a school principal in Florida, a sheriff’s deputy in Texas, an ER nurse in Wisconsin and an ER doctor in Arizona. Three Democratic nominees in competitive House races are pastors, in addition to a pastor running for Senate in Kansas and a seminarian in Texas.
Running for Congress is often a rich person’s pursuit because working-class candidates can’t afford to take a year or two off from their jobs. Johnson campaigned for months while holding down his teaching job, reducing his classroom load to 60% in the spring semester. He has taken the fall semester off, which means going without his $90,000 salary and living only on the $18,000 a year his wife earns working with deaf students in a middle school.
If he loses, he goes back to the classroom on Monday, Nov. 9. And if he wins? “I’m not going to lie: I don’t know what we’ll do,” he told me. His congressional salary wouldn’t start until January, and he and his wife have already burned through most of their savings. Neither comes from wealth: Johnson and his 10 siblings are the children of a trash collector and a meter reader, and he grew up on SNAP and Medicaid and went to college on Pell Grants and subsidized loans.
But that struggle gives him credibility with voters who might tune out an elite candidate. “We were dirt poor,” Johnson said at last week’s debate with Finstad. “But because of that support, I got to climb into the middle class.”
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Here in southern Minnesota, a Democrat hasn’t won since Tim Walz did in 2016, and the sprawling fraud scandal involving Medicaid and other benefits has been a drag on Democrats in the state this year. (Finstad, in his latest ad, ties Johnson to the now-unpopular Walz by using a doctored photo to place the two of them together.) The Cook Political Report judges the seat “likely Republican,” downgrading that from “solid Republican” over the summer.
But the fact that Minnesota’s 1st is even being seriously contested is a measure of how Trump has expanded Democrats’ map. It is one of the seats on the outer bounds of what is possible for Democratic pickups if the expected wave materializes in three weeks.
Of course, that wave could yet be flattened by a billion dollars of Republican spending that is attempting to shift voters’ focus from high prices and the Iran war to the fear that Democrats are transgender communists.
If the wave does take place, however, it might sweep in some long-shot candidates on the target list, along with a few “accidental” ones from races that weren’t on anybody’s radar. In DCCC fantasies, Democrats will be competitive in New York’s 21st District and Tennessee’s 9th (Trump won both by 21 points) and the 2nd District of Arkansas (Trump +16) — all added last week to Red to Blue.
Most likely only a fraction of the 46 races on the Red to Blue list will go Democratic, but candidates appear to be in striking distance in the 6th District of Kentucky (Trump +15), Iowa’s 2nd District (Trump +10), the 35th District of Texas (Trump +10), South Carolina’s 1st District (Trump +13) and here in Minnesota’s 1st.
Voters are hurting here, as they are throughout the country, from high gas prices and inflation generally. But this is one of the nation’s top agricultural districts, and Trump’s tariffs and high diesel prices are crushing farmers. Because the area is home to the Mayo Clinic, it is also feeling the cuts to scientific research and to rural health care; Mayo last year closed six facilities across southern Minnesota.
Going door-knocking with Johnson over the weekend, I watched him win over one disenchanted voter, an elderly woman named Bonnie.
“I’m asking you to send me to Washington, D.C., to bring down costs and tackle corruption,” he began. “Lord knows we need it.”
“Never going to happen,” she shot back. “I don’t care who we get in. The world’s so f---ed up right now.”
But then they got to talking, about his work as a teacher, about her kids and grandkids, about her battle with cancer, about whether she should mow her lawn.
“I’m about as regular a guy as you could meet, and I think we need a lot more of that in Washington,” he told her.
His long Minnesota vowels matched hers. By the end, she was all agreement.
“I am not going there to work for a party or work for some political leader,” he said.
“Right!” she responded.
“If that gets me kicked out, then so be it.”
“Right!”
“Go back to the classroom, where I probably belong anyway.”
“Right!”
Johnson moved to the next house. “I’ll call her a ‘lean Jake,’” he said.
Later he stopped at a brewery in downtown Owatonna, where Johnson had asked locals to come and bring their shopping receipts showing the higher prices they’re paying. A farmer reported that he spent $71 for 2½ gallons of motor oil for his tractor — up from $30. The owner of a wine bar talked about the 27% increase in the price of Spanish olives because, she said, of the tariffs. A retired social worker recounted the increasing food and vet expenses for her service dog.
Brian Fay, a forklift operator, showed Johnson the $2,100-a-month bill for his health insurance and said he still can’t find a participating doctor — while the insurance company CEO makes $34 million a year.
“It’s certainly not a system that’s set up for folks like us,” Johnson responded. “We need a public option so that people can buy into it and get out of a private system that’s ripping them off.”
Yes, he supports the public option, and he wants to end Trump’s tariffs, restore Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and clip the wings of ICE. But if he were to win, he might quickly prove to be a headache for his fellow Democrats. He supports term limits and a balanced-budget amendment, and he said he will vote against any debt-limit increase unless the federal budget is balanced. “I’m sticking with it even if it costs me my job,” he told me, “even if my party hates me.”
I joked that he’ll be the new Tom Massie.
“That’s high praise,” he replied.
He wouldn’t even commit to supporting Hakeem Jeffries for speaker, saying, “I want to see who’s on the ballot.”
He has no use for the “woke” or for the DSA types who have prevailed in several safe Democratic seats. When one man demanded at a Johnson town-hall meeting that the candidate use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, Johnson replied: “It’s not a term I’m going to use.” The man stormed out of the room.
At another of Johnson’s 21 town halls, he told a conservative questioner that while he supports “basic rights” for trans people, “I do believe that males should play in male sports and females should play in female sports.”
Johnson figures his many heresies could earn him a primary challenge in 2028 — but that, he said, “would be a good problem to have.”
First, he’ll have to win what had been an unwinnable race. The KAAL poll found that Trump’s favorability rating in the district is a net negative 16 points, which dragged Finstad to a net negative of 8 points while the lesser-known Johnson has a net positive of 11 points.
You don’t have to be a math teacher to know this should add up to an interesting night on Nov. 3.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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