Trina Swanson Explains Why She Can Win Pete Stauber’s Congressional Seat

 

Trina Swanson is running against Pete Stauber to represent the Eighth district of Minnesota in the U.S. Congress. She talked at a fundraiser largely with Minneapolis voters. They were not in the right district to vote for her, but many care about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and had other reasons to financially support different representation for northern neighbors. The Eighth district covers 21 counties and about 31,000 square miles, from Forest Lake to the Canadian border and Bemidji.

Swanson grew up, and lives now, in Hermantown. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked as a carpenter and a paper mill. Swanson spent 20 years in federal service, including roles with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. She left federal service last year because of concerns about administration policies and founded an immigration law firm.

She indicated her policy priorities are to:

• Establish universal health care and prevent medical expenses from causing bankruptcy.
• Address rising costs for gas, groceries, electricity, rent, and other essentials.
• Reverse cuts associated with the “big, beautiful bill” and improve funding for schools and hospitals.
• Protect the Boundary Waters from proposed mining, which she says does not — contrary to her opponent’s claim — reduce reliance on foreign nations for critical minerals.

Mathematically, her chances are good. There were more than 70,000 DFL votes cast in the August primary, and she received 77 percent, out of an original field that included seven male candidates. Of just over 67,000 GOP primary votes cast, Stauber received 58,000. She has 900 volunteers working on her campaign.

Following are the full comments of what she said to a room full of listeners in Minneapolis on September 21.

 

 

Background

This story sums up my childhood and why I’m here today. My father had thrown out his back when he was working as a carpenter, and yet my parents needed the money. The power was going to get shut off, and there wasn’t work in Duluth. So he laid in the back of his truck while my mom drove him to a job site in Saint Paul — he still points it out to me when we’re in Saint Paul. That’s how I was raised. Those are the people that I will fight for, not the 1 percent of this country.

I started my federal service when I was 18, at the bankruptcy court. That was my job so that I could buy groceries and pay rent throughout college and law school. I graduated law school and I owed $170,000 in student loans.

I ended up working with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and it was an incredible career. I was able to represent our government abroad in Germany and Kenya. I ran our office in Minneapolis for two years. My final job was being the director of international operations, and I was overseeing 13 international offices and an office in D.C. Then Trump and DOGE came barreling in and overnight the rug was pulled out from under us.

It was far worse than the media showed you. I was not allowed to meet with my staff all of them at once. I was not allowed to send emails with new policy guidance or new interpretations of the law because they knew it was illegal and they didn’t want it leaked, so I had to run up and down the hall and tell people word of mouth how to do their job without giving them any top cover.

The final straw for me was being asked to check on a visa, only to find out it was for a spouse of a nanny working for a DOGE member. So, immigration would be okay for them, but not for the rest of us. When I started my federal career, I took an oath to uphold the law and defend the Constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic. And for me, that meant standing up and leaving a career I loved, that I had worked my butt off for 20 years because I wasn’t willing to work for this administration. I needed to be able to sleep at night and have my integrity. So, I left that career. I started my own immigration law firm.

I thought, what is Pete Stauber doing for us? How is he helping my family, my friends, and my loved ones? He wasn’t. I called into his virtual town halls. I asked questions but never get put through because it wasn’t about a gray wolf or how evil immigrants were. Therefore, you could not engage with this man.

I have the skill set in national security and foreign policy and immigration to represent this district. That is why I’m running for Congress and why I will be your next representative in the 8th.

Priorities

A number one thing I want to do is get universal health care in this country. In 2018, I watched my mom have a stroke. She ended up in the very hospital she spent 42 years of her life at as a nurse caring for other people. And when she couldn’t return by the time her Family and Medical Leave Act period ended, they fired her. She found herself without a job, without health insurance — that she was carrying for her and my father, because my father retired after shift work was too hard on his body. I don’t want anyone in this country to be one medical diagnosis away from bankruptcy.

We’re far too wealthy of a nation to not have universal health care, and we can get it done.

We also have to talk about our affordability crisis. We know the prices are going up on gas, on groceries, on our electric bill, on our rent, everything. I don’t think this is right versus left or red versus blue. It’s one versus 99 percent. We have a Congress that represents the 99. We’re going to continue to see the billionaires and the trillionaires grow in number, and the rest of us are going to struggle. Our schools aren’t funded. Our hospitals are not properly funded. You right now cannot have a baby in Isanti County because there is not a maternity ward. That is shameful.

We’re going to prioritize the 99 percent. We’re going to undo that big, beautiful bill. We know there are still cuts coming after the midterms that are only going to hurt people.

I also will fight to protect the Boundary Waters. We cannot allow mining by a foreign company, headquartered in London, out of Chile, that wants to come in and take those minerals and extract them. They can’t be processed here. We don’t have smelting plants in the United States. They’ll likely be shipped to China, and then we can beg to buy them back with tariffs in place.

Pete Stauber likes to say it reduces our reliance on foreign nations for critical minerals. It absolutely does not, so I will fight to protect the Boundary Waters area.

Source of Optimism

I went to a farmer in Aitkin County recently. This man had voted for Trump every time. He had voted for Pete Stauber every single time. He invited me into his home. We had an hour-and-a half–long conversation. He explained all the things he’s dismayed about. The same things everyone should be: rising price of gas, the trade wars, the tariffs, the prioritizing of buddies, the corruption. We had a great chat. I explained who I was and why I was running and what I was going to support, and I left with a $3,500 check.

He also took a yard sign. He is willing to publicly support me, and now he’s putting together a town hall for the farmers in his area, so they can hear from me and talk to me.

This is how I know that the tide is shifting. People are paying attention. They’re upset, and that is how I know we can beat Pete Stauber, one farmer at a time, one miner at a time, one nurse at a time. We’re going to have these conversations on how he’s harming the people in our district and in this state by being a rubber stamp for the Trump administration.

Anything you can do to support this campaign would be incredibly appreciated. I’m a political outsider. I wasn’t the anointed one by the DFL. I didn’t come in with money backing me. I don’t have wealthy donors. I have made it here, proving myself one day at a time.

I had the DFL say, “Who are you? Why do you think you can do this? Maybe you run for a state position. Start a little smaller, Trina.” I don’t do well when I’m told to start smaller. I got that caucus endorsement against eight other candidates on the first ballot with 74 percent of the vote. And then, I won the primary with 77. I had the most votes for a Democratic primary person in 36 years. Now we’re here today, and we’re going to get it done.

About the Mining Issue

I’ve struggled with how my position against the mine in the Boundary Waters watershed is flying in the Iron Range. We’ve had honest conversations with the unions. I said, I recognize you’re not going to like this position, but here are the reasons I’m against it.

1) It is a foreign corporation, already been fined for environmental infractions, led by Antofagasta who rents his house to Ivanka Trump. We can follow the money trail, right?

2) We’re not smelting here — the money is in the smelting and the processing. There’s a sweetheart deal with China to do it for free. None of it makes any sense to me. We also know that most of the extraction will be robotic. So it will not be a long-term job generator.

I talk about being pro-mining and pro-environment protections. We have to push these companies to use greater technological advances, even if it impacts their profit. That’s what we should be doing to be good stewards of our environment.

Miners enjoy the same things we do — fishing and hunting. They want to be able to eat more than two fish out of a lake and not have the sulfite levels be too high.

Will I lose some people for my position? Yes, but we can have an honest conversation about why I came out on that side. We can use science to see if we can do it responsibly. If we can, we move forward. If we can’t, we don’t.

I toured the Talon mine, because I don’t think anyone should be making decisions without getting facts from both sides. I saw their rigs and how they’re ensuring there’s no runoff and minimizing the impact.

I don’t know if we can do it in a way that doesn’t destroy our environment right now. I think it needs to go through the processes. We need to use our experts. We need to use our regulatory permitting processes. And then, can we do it? Have we gone through environmental reviews?

We also need bonds and lines of credit. We can’t be having subsidiary LLCs filing bankruptcy, and the parent company gets off free, taking their billions of dollars in profit and we’re left holding the bag. But those bonds have to increase as inflation happens, so that the value is the same 10 years down the road. There’s a lot we can do as responsible people in government to ensure that it’s done responsibly.

We also need investment in other industries. We have to diversify. There are 600 miners laid off, for over a year. Pete Stauber has done nothing about that. He goes on TV and says he represents a failed state. Well, if that is true, how are you getting corporations to come in and invest?

We have the greatest trade schools in the country. We have a smart workforce. We’re routinely in the top five for schools, environment, health. We should be attracting companies to come in and invest and create jobs so we’re not reliant on a single industry.

On Data Centers

It is the one issue that has united the right and the left. The data centers have been done really poorly — there’s been a lack of transparency. I don’t think an elected official should ever sign an NDA. Period.

We also didn’t know it was Google for months. We had no idea how they were going to cool the chips. They now just told us it’s a closed-loop system. So, it reduces water reliance, but that means the energy use goes up. We also know Blackwater, who bought out Minnesota Power, is behind getting the data center in.

Then we can look at the fact that Google has asked for tax abatement. Google’s effective tax rate last year was about 7.1 percent. The corporate tax rate is 19; it was 27 before Trump 1.0. They’re already not paying their fair share of taxes.

Town officials called me in and said, “You’re mischaracterizing some stuff. We want to talk.” So I sat down with the city council. I asked, “Why are you giving them tax abatement?” I was told, “That’s a question for Google.” I said, “No, it’s not. Of course Google is going to ask for tax abatement.” The response is that schools are getting money — $45 million over 28 years — but with a tax abatement, they’re not paying all of these taxes. Our property taxes go up, and our schools are struggling —  it’s just dangling a carrot.

It’s a community decision, right? It’s a Hermantown decision about whether they let it come in. Labor wants the jobs. It will be good [building] jobs, but a question was asked if they’ll use project labor agreements, and they did not answer it. They said there will be enough workers for every laborer here — and that was not the question. The question is, can a company come in and underbid on a project because there is no project labor agreement in place that means you have to pay prevailing wages. Google did not say yes to that.

So there’s a lot of issues we have to talk about on that data center. We have no guardrails. There are no regulatory safeguards in place around AI or on the data centers, and we need them. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep opening them up at breakneck pace and do what they want to do to maximize their profit before it all crashes.

Audience Question: Will you be supportive of articles of impeachment for President Trump?

Absolutely. I also think his political appointees and other government employees have to be investigated and held accountable for criminal actions. We can’t be 50 years down the road and say, ‘Nothing happened to these folks. Nothing happened to the people that told their employees to do things that were unconstitutional ,or that didn’t give people due process, or the countless things we saw on our streets.’

I also, though, want to make sure that when we gain control, we pass laws. I don’t want it to be to spend two years just going after this administration while the American people continue to suffer. It’s going to be a balancing act.

Audience Question: How are your colleagues from the federal government running and working together?

There is a great cohort of former federal employees that left or got fired, and this is their way of fighting back. We’re going to have a freshman class that’s filled with pragmatists that have worked for both sides of the aisle — that’s what we do as federal employees. We have to come to a table with best ideas of how things should be done, from different backgrounds — look at the problem, identify solutions, gain buy-in, and implement those solutions.

That’s what Congress needs to get back to: showing up and talking at that table and finding solutions and getting it done. I’m really hopeful that these federal employees — that aren’t entrenched in political parties and systems — can come in and do that together and form that coalition and help make that change in Congress.

There’s also a great Guardian article that just came out about all the union people running for office. People that speak to labor issues. I was shocked about how few are in Congress right now: 8 to 13 percent for the Democrats and even lower for the Republicans.

Those are the folks who understand the working class and middle America and what’s happened to it — and how trickle-down economics is not working, how we need to get back to having that fulsome middle class.

I think both the federal employees and having people that have been in unions and understand labor are going to be key to this next Congress.

 

The Ask

We are trying to get out on the airwaves, to get digital ads, to get billboards, to get that name recognition that Pete Stauber already has, so that people know who I am and what I stand for. SI know people are struggling, but until we get money out of politics, we’re unfortunately playing in the sandbox.

We are running ads on streaming and digital platforms, but not cable television. Unfortunately, we are in three media markets. If we want to hit the entire district, we have to buy in the Twin Cities and Duluth and Fargo.

We are visiting the very red, persuadable areas of the district and trying to get Republicans and Independents to show up and have conversations. Encourage people to come talk to me and share on social media. That all helps.

It’s about getting people to think outside of party lines and look at me as a candidate and not necessarily as a DFL-endorsed candidate and highlighting the actual votes of Pete Stauber. He voted against the infrastructure bill, but he cuts the ribbon for the Blatnik Bridge [that connects Duluth to Superior]. We’re trying to stick to the facts and talk about what he’s actually done and not done — kitchen table issues.

If you’re willing to door knock or call, we have texting parties. Or call your own contacts. Before the primary, we asked everyone to call eight people they knew to tell them about me. And asked them to call eight people they knew to tell them about me. That spreads quickly.

Find Trina Swanson’s campaign page here

 

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