With the first legislative session now behind us since the midterms, the MNGOP is doing some soul searching. Nov. 8, 2022, is a date that few Republican activists will want to relive. But there was one place in Minnesota that managed to buck the huge raspberry that was midterm election night for the statewide GOP.

That place was the Iron Range. There, in the land of DFL giants like Tommy Rukavina, Tom Bakk, and David Tomassoni, the local GOP managed to show the rest of the MNGOP, indeed, the national GOP, what it will take to actually be an America First, working class, majority political party.

Too often since the advent of the blue-collar populists under President Trump, the GOP, statewide and nationally, has thought they could make verbal burps about “workers” and “America First” while continuing to push the policies of yesteryear that many in our floundering middle and working classes have soundly rejected for decades. On the Iron Range, our candidates did more than talk. They actually sought the bare bones needs of the working class and now we are sending Republicans to St. Paul for the first time in living memory.