To all candidates for public office in the most beautiful and beloved state of Minnesota for the year 2026, whether you run for Governor, Senate, Congress, or any other office, I and all who may choose to sign this letter do humbly and earnestly request that you consider the following concerns, priorities, and desires that are most urgent in the hearts and minds of the average, patriotic family whom you are seeking to serve and represent.

Regarding Policy Priorities

While it has been the usual practice of republican candidates in our state to focus overwhelmingly on issues of taxation, economics, regulation, and commerce, I ask you to consider that there are several matters that take a place of priority ahead of even those crucial matters in the lives of many patriotic Minnesotans who wish for their state and their country to thrive so that they may hand them down as an inheritance to their children, just as they received it from their own parents, as our nation's founders intended.

Foremost among these concerns, as proven by the overwhelmingly successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2024, is immigration. For too long, tens of millions of foreigners who do not speak our language, value our heritage and history, share our culture and values, and who do not seem to have the slightest desire to attain any of these things, have been allowed and encouraged to pour into our country and our state, fraying social cohesion and eroding public harmony and trust. The results of this practice have been felt in every area of public life. Our hospitals and emergency rooms are overwhelmed with illegal aliens who have no other normal means of attaining healthcare, and so create a disproportionate burden on our medical and insurance systems. Our public assistance programs have been shamelessly defrauded to the toll of hundreds of millions of citizens’ tax dollars. Our schools are so full of children who do not speak English that much of the efforts of school staff are spent not on teaching our state’s children to read and write, but on facilitating the most basic of interactions between two groups of people who cannot interact together in an orderly way, no doubt greatly contributing to the dreadful reduction in education quality we have seen in our once-exemplary state. Our state’s native citizens struggle to find work at a liveable wage and housing at an affordable price while families of foreigners pool their resources to crowd into a single family home, outbidding American families and driving up prices, while simultaneously accepting work for lower wages than American workers are willing to take, depriving them of honest work and the ability to provide for their families. In short, in an effort to - and this is a generous interpretation - be welcoming to foreigners, we have preferred foreigners over our own people to the point of causing our own people great harm. If you wish to serve Minnesota, I beg of you to put Minnesotans first by pledging to work tirelessly alongside the Trump administration and federal authorities to remove every illegal alien from our great state.

A second priority that is heavy on the hearts of many is “wokeness.” While many on the political right have spent a long time decrying the “culture war” as a losing issue, it has been proven to be the opposite. Whether in blue states like Virginia or formerly purple states like Florida, when republicans have run aggressively against the secular, progressive religion of wokeness, they have won handily and pushed their whole state to the right. I believe the same may well prove true for Minnesota if only our leaders would have the courage and clarity to fight these battles in a similar manner to men like Glenn Youngkin, who is no vulgar, bomb-throwing firebrand. The reality facing Minnesota families is that, if they or their children want to participate in public life, whether by playing sports, availing themselves of public education, enjoying their local libraries, or even taking so noble and virtuous an action as adopting children, they are forced to assent to the doctrines of a totalizing philosophy of racial grievance and sexual eccentricity. In a good, wholesome state, there simply should not be boys playing in girls’ sports. There should not be books in public libraries teaching young people to identify as “transgender.” There should not be posters and lessons in schools that baptize impressionable children into a worldview that denies the realities of human biology. And Christian families who wish to adopt children should not be prevented from doing so for the crime of adhering to their faith, whether by the LGBT mafia or the Indian tribes. In that vein, I beg of you to take decisive policy actions to eliminate the cancer of wokeness from public life, for the good of our state and the flourishing of all families.

The third policy priority I implore you to consider is that of education, which I expect will require less persuasion. The simple fact is that, in our state, the public schools do not exist to train the next generation of Minnesotans to read, write, think, practice basic math and science, or fulfill their civic duties as patriotic citizens. Instead, our public schools exist to serve as daycare centers so that both the mothers and fathers of the students can work, and while the children are at school, they are trained not to read or write or think critically, but to become brainwashed activists who resent their country, as evidenced by such things as the new state teachers license requirements, “ethnic studies” requirements, and displays and lessons such as those found at Harding High School in St. Paul. Instead of training our state’s next generations to be ignorant and resentful, our state’s schools ought to be training young people to read, write, appreciate their heritage, and boldly enter adulthood prepared to serve their families and communities. If the schools of Minnesota could be transformed and corrected, imagine the beautiful future we could enjoy for generations to come.

Finally, inasmuch as you will continue to focus on economic and regulatory matters, I ask you to do so, not primarily for the interest of the abstract concept of “the market,” but for the good of families and communities. I earn a respectable middle-class income, but I am the sole earner for myself, my wife, and our two small children, with more to come, God willing. To put it simply, things are tight, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, and there are many families who would like to enjoy the same arrangement, and there are very many young people who are seeking the kind of life that my family enjoys, with a husband and father working to provide for his wife and children at home. If you make your economic platform and rhetoric a little bit less about what is best for “business and the markets,” and a little more about how to have an economy where many more families can afford to live and thrive with one income, I expect your message will resonate with millions of Minnesotans at a deep level, and your campaign will be rewarded for it.

Regarding Messaging and Rhetoric

Beyond these matters of specific policies, I have another urgent request, namely that, whatever office for which you may be running, that you run - and, if you win, govern - as if the very existence of our state as we know it is at stake, because it is. We have been defrauded and robbed by enemies foreign and domestic. We have been undermined, demoralized, and persecuted by our democratic rulers, as demonstrated by Tim Walz’s tyranny during the Covid-19 pandemic and the psychotic excesses of the 2023 legislative session while the DFL held a government trifecta. It is time for republicans in Minnesota to speak and act as if the DFL are the enemies of the people of Minnesota, because that’s exactly what they are. Together, they have robbed us, tyrannized us, slaughtered our unborn children, deliberately maleducated our students, and imported tens of thousands of foreigners who have no regard for our state, our country, our laws, our religion, and our heritage. There will be many on the right in Minnesota who are made uncomfortable by the thought of calling our political opponents “enemies.” There may be many who would even say that to do so would not be Christian. To that, I reply that when Christ commands us to love our enemies, it means that we really do have enemies, and we are fools if we pretend otherwise. I do not ask any candidate to be vulgar, mean spirited, or nasty. That truly wouldn’t be very Christian, or very Minnesotan. What I am asking you to do is to be clear-eyed and to approach the political battle ahead of you for what it really is; a battle for the life and soul of Minnesota.

I suspect that some of you who read this - whether candidates or voters - will react to much of what I’m advocating for by scoffing and saying in your minds, “If any candidate does what this letter asks, he will never win in Minnesota!” While I am asking Minnesota republicans to perhaps be more “aggressively conservative” than usual, and while that may seem politically suicidal given our circumstances of fighting for victory in what has been a reliably blue state for decades, I humbly submit a few facts for consideration. First, the further-right, MAGA wing of the republican party has not underperformed the more moderate brand of republican that has been common in our state and nationwide in recent decades. Donald Trump came within 2% of winning Minnesota against Hilary Clinton. Royce White, who is, if anything, more bombastic and polarizing than Trump performed significantly better against Amy Klobuchar in 2024 than any of her previous, moderate republican opponents. And the last presidential candidate to receive Minnesota’s electoral votes was not a moderate, but the rather un-moderate Richard Nixon in 1972. While that isn’t precisely a stunning list of victories, I think it establishes that, at a minimum, a more old-school, populist conservatism has just as much chance of triumphing in Minnesota as moderate, neoconservatism, which has been taking a beating in this state for my entire lifetime, not least of all within the last decade during the rise of Donald Trump.

That being said, I would still suggest a few modest deviations from what might be called the Trump school of politics, in favor of what I’ll call the J.D. Vance school of politics. In his Vice Presidential debate against our Governor, Tim Walz, fellow midwesterner J.D. Vance demonstrated a way in which a candidate in the most high-profile and high-stakes of political contests can forward a political platform that is unapologetically conservative, populist, and America-first, while also maintaining rhetoric and a demeanor that is amiable, kindly, benevolent, enthusiastic, and even conciliatory at times. While we must swim in our moralistic political culture of Minnesota Nice - which has been expertly weaponized by the DFL up until now - we do not need our republican candidates to simper and apologize in the face of progressive attacks, nor do we need them to take the Royce White approach of slinging insults and vulgarity at our opponents. Instead, we might take a leaf out of the book of J.D. Vance, who utterly eviscerated Tim Walz with a kindly smile on his face and a warm tone of voice. That, I believe, will be the winning model for conservative candidates in the North Star State if we have the fortitude and clear thinking to adopt it.

What Are You Fighting For?

Minnesota is more than one of fifty arbitrarily appointed provinces in the country we call the United States. Minnesota is not merely an economic zone in which to facilitate monetary transactions. Minnesota is not just a parking space for Somalians, Mexicans, and Indians who are looking for a better paycheck than they can get in their own countries, only to send much of their stolen wealth right back to those very same countries.

Minnesota is the nineteenth state to join the Union after the original thirteen. Minnesota was the frontier before the frontier, about which western movies and adventure films would seldom be made, but which has been the backdrop for countless episodes of human courage and resilience. Minnesota is a place where men from the eastern states and western Europe carved out a mutual life together, forming a new sub-identity within the umbrella of Americanism. Minnesota is a state where brave, Christian men carved out civilization and home out of a cold, wild frontier. She was built with timber, wheat, and iron, by treaty, settlement, and war, by men like Henry Sibley and Alexander Ramsey who, rather than being honored by our state’s leaders, are disdained and discarded by the left and ignored and forgotten by the right. She was built into one of the most beautiful, peaceful, and wholesome states in the nation by ordinary men like my great-great-great-grandfather and millions of others who farmed, logged, or mined for the good of their families.

That heritage, culture, and history is what needs to be fought for in Minnesota. More than anything else, Minnesota has been a home for a uniquely peaceful, orderly people to live a quiet, virtuous life, raising their families, worshiping God, and loving their neighbors. That has been eroded by decades of progressivism, unchecked migration, and market-centric thinking. But it can be restored, if only we have the will to do so.

It will not be enough for republican candidates to point out the excesses of the radical DFL in recent years. It will not be enough to describe the far-left policies that we are against while shaking our heads in disbelief. It will not be enough to say over and over again that Walz and the democrats have failed Minnesota. Scott Jensen tried that in 2022. Scott Jensen failed. Instead, we need republican candidates to put forward a thorough, enthusiastic, positive vision for a good Minnesota that carries on our proud heritage and peaceful, orderly way of life for many generations to come. Nothing less will yield any lasting victory.

For the good not only of the men and women who will consider voting for you in 2026, but for the good of many future generations of Minnesotans, I humbly ask you to ponder these things, pray to the Lord Jesus Christ for courage and wisdom, and apply this to your efforts to serve the people of Minnesota in the labor of government and politics.

Sincerely, and with all good will and hope for your success,

• A Minnesotan