Austin Peterson’s mild verbal miscue revealed the challenge the Republican candidate faces in unseating DFLer Rob Kupec for a seat in the Minnesota Senate representing Moorhead in this election.
During a League of Women Voters candidate forum at the Moorhead Public Library last month, an audience member asked, “How will you stand up to President Trump and the federal government when they trample on Minnesotan’s rights?”
“Regardless of who the president is two years from now it will not be President Trump,” Peterson replied. “And so looking forward to that – well, looking beyond that, excuse me.”
But by the time Peterson uttered “looking forward,” a swath of voters in the packed meeting room laughed and then cheered the pending departure of a president with a 38% approval rating in Minnesota, according to a KSTP/Survey USA poll.
“Some of you are probably looking forward to that,” Peterson acknowledged, which drew further hoots and hollers.
Kupec and Peterson are seeking to represent District 4, which represents the growing city of Moorhead, plus smaller cities and townships including Audubon, Comstock, Detroit Lakes, Dilworth, Glyndon, and Hawley.
Moorhead is the county seat of Clay County, one of only nine counties in the entire U.S. to vote for the winning presidential candidate in every election between 2000 and 2020. The streak was broken in 2024 when Clay narrowly went for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
The DFL Senate Caucus and the Minnesota Senate Republican Committee each identified District 4 as one of a handful of toss-up races that will determine control of the Senate over the next four years.
Kupec was elected in his first run for any political office in 2022, garnering 52% of the vote to Republican Dan Bohmer’s 47%.
Kupec, a meteorologist, said he had the wind at his back in 2022 following the Supreme Court decision to let states set their own abortion laws.
“I’m knocking on doors in Detroit Lakes, and I’m having a lot of angry women answering the doors, even in the more conservative side of the district,” Kupec said. “They were so mad about the Supreme Court decision.”
Kupec was part of a DFL-controlled Legislature that then clarified and expanded abortion access in Minnesota. Peterson said at the candidate forum that he opposes abortion in most instances.
Trump’s unpopularity notwithstanding, Peterson is a commercial real estate developer who believes he has a winning campaign message: Minnesotans are tired of new laws that add rigmarole and hidden costs to small businesses.
It is a pitch he thinks will resonate because the District 4 borders North Dakota — a state with fewer rules around labor and starting a business, a topic that has inspired legislative ideas from Minnesota DFLers as well.
“It’s really easy to set up a business in North Dakota,” Peterson said.
Rob Kupec was a TV meteorologist at KVRR in Fargo who feared the consequences of a station ownership change.
“They gave me a lot of autonomy to present the weather the way I wanted to, to try new things, and I really valued that,” Kupec said at Black Cat Bakery in Moorhead. “And I thought if another company came in, there’s a good chance that it could go away.”
So Kupec fled before Coastal Television Broadcasting Group bought the Fox affiliate. He decided to run in a Senate district that included Fargo’s Minnesota sister city of Moorhead when incumbent Kent Eken announced his retirement in April 2022.
“It was a midlife crisis,” joked Kupec, who said he and his wife moved to Moorhead 25 years ago. “Instead of a convertible, I ran for the state Senate. I have always been politically engaged and some of what I can do has been limited by being on television.”
Kupec said he didn’t come to St. Paul with “some big agenda.”
During his time at the Capitol, he emphasized infrastructure investment, especially the “very unsexiness of lift stations” — pumps used to collect wastewater in order to stop floods. FEMA has designated Moorhead land near the Red River at a high enough flood risk that property owners must buy flood insurance.
Kupec said $10 million he secured in the state’s most recent bonding bill, plus a $10 million match from Moorhead-Fargo’s Metro Flood Diversion Authority, will enable the completion of a new lift station that will satisfy FEMA and remove the requirement to buy flood insurance.
On a leisurely drive across Moorhead, Kupec pointed to these and other infrastructure updates. For example, $4 million from the 2023 bonding bill went to a new fire station in the city of Dilworth, which abuts Moorhead to the east.
(Our journey was marked by Kupec using his local knowledge to dodge being stalled by trains. He said that 80 trains each day cross a rail line currently operated by BNSF.)
Kupec’s statewide initiatives included sponsoring the Digital Fair Repair Act, which went into effect in 2024. The law forces makers of products like smart phones to publicize enough information about said product so that people can make repairs without having to take it back to the manufacturer.
The lawmaker noted that versions of the bill “had been languishing for years.” Advocates reached out to him to carry the measure after he cut a campaign commercial in favor of it.
“It was taking on Google and Apple and a lot of really big companies,” he said.
Otherwise, Kupec emphasized that 70% of the bills he has introduced have a Republican co-sponsor.
Chief among these is a measure with Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, that would expand tax reductions “in specific Minnesota cities located along the western border,” including Moorhead and East Grand Forks.
Kupec said border city businesses need these breaks in part because they have higher labor costs than their North Dakota counterparts. For example, the minimum wage in Minnesota is $11.41 an hour while it has remained at $7.25 an hour in North Dakota since 2009.
And here is where Kupec and Peterson’s priorities converge — and yet also where Peterson says Kupec and the DFL are harmful.
“We’re giving businesses too much of a reason to leave our state,” Austin Peterson said.
Peterson suggests meeting at his office building for an interview on his campaign. This wouldn’t be notable, except the building is in Fargo, North Dakota.
The choice was deliberate. As a real estate developer in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, he wanted to emphasize how subtle changes in proximity can belie vastly different regulatory landscapes.
“You didn’t feel the difference driving from downtown Moorhead to downtown Fargo, but there’s a tax difference,” he said. “There’s a business difference. Everything about it is different, and it’s geared to benefit North Dakota businesses, and it puts a crutch on Minnesota. So we have to get rid of that.”
Peterson’s property developments include a commercial business park and medical campus in Hawley. Rather than an “issues” tab on his website, he has a landing page for just one issue: economic development.
Peterson repeated a phrase familiar by now to anyone following the Minnesota Republican Party: “unfunded mandates,” which means local governments, businesses, or individuals bearing the cost and compliance effort of new state rules.
Pressed for an example of these unfunded mandates, Peterson mentioned Paid Family and Medical Leave.
The state program, which kicked off this January, requires businesses to let workers get paid up to 90% of their normal salary to take weeks off for major medical or caregiving life events. Its funding mechanism is a payroll tax that employees and employers both contribute toward.
Neither North nor South Dakota has paid leave.
He says Kupec helped make it happen.
“One of the deciding votes happened to be the senator in this district, and in my opinion he could have said, “Hey, let’s pause it. Let’s see what this could do,’” he said.
(At the candidate forum, Kupec said he was open to exploring revisions to the nascent program.)
Peterson, who is 40, hails from North Dakota but now calls the rural part of District 4 his home. He lives about 30 miles east of Moorhead in Rollag, which, if Googled, turns up a massive steam threshers festival, where people showcase oldfangled farm equipment used to separate grain.
Unlike these steam-run machines, Peterson touts an “all gas, no brakes” campaign mantra. He bills himself as the proverbial high-energy, shaker-upper in the race, which voters can take or leave.
Growing up, Kupec glowed in Peterson’s living room as the area weather man. Most of his recollections of the television personality, however, are relatable to many Upper Midwest kids of a certain age: waiting for the chyron to tell him if school would be canceled.
Outside of his professional life, Peterson serves on his church board, the Hawley School Board and a little-known state board called the Minnesota Legislative Salary Council, which is tasked with recommending lawmaker salaries and per diem rates.
Minnesota’s Supreme Court chief justice appointed Peterson to the council, which is required to be bipartisan.
With that experience banked up, Peterson said he understands the importance of working across the aisle in a purple district.
“Just because I’m on the Republican platform doesn’t mean I can’t have a conversation with a Democrat and say how can we work together,” he said. “That’s what this district needs.”
Peterson received a political baptism by fire at the League of Women Voters’ event where both candidates gave impromptu answers to 29 different questions posed by audience members.
The queries ranged from whether to totally end the social security tax benefit (both candidates said ‘yes’) to the very issue tearing Minnesota apart: The increasing cost of registering a pontoon boat.
(In all seriousness, the cost to register a pontoon boat varies depending on the length of the vessel. Both Peterson and Kupec answered this question by veering to the more familiar political ground of car tab fees, though Peterson said he would like to reexamine fees on all recreational vehicles. Kupec noted that pontoon boat fees are important revenue for the state, because they help fund the state Department of Natural Resources.)
On some subjects — such as gun control — Peterson clearly defined himself as a conservative.
Peterson said he would have voted ‘no’ against the gun control package Kupec helped pass in the Senate banning assault weapons, but he would have fought for the non-gun related school safety measures in the bill.
But Peterson also distanced himself from Trump by stating his opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iran and the White House’s efforts to punish journalists and further restrict their access to decisionmakers and public records.
“Journalism is an important part of our society,” the Republican candidate. “Whether you like it or not, they have a duty to inform people.”
But on topics that veered away from economic development or hot-button issues, Peterson at times lost his footing.
For example, on ending Minnesota’s 32-year-old ban on nuclear power, Peterson said he would “explore all options” and spoke neither well nor poorly of nuclear power.
Kupec said he would like to end the ban. “We still don’t know what to do with nuclear waste,” he told the crowd. “But it is a good, clean, carbon free source of electricity.”
Peterson was not the only one moving to the middle. Kupec took stances that may play better in Moorhead than Minneapolis, like joining Peterson in questioning legislation by state Rep. Aisha Gomez, DFL-Minneapolis, to levy a 1% tax on people with wealth assets of over $10 million.
“We are one of the highest taxed states in the country,” Kupec said. “I would be very tepid on that proposal.”
The post You might need a weatherman to know how this Minnesota Senate district blows appeared first on MinnPost.
