Jake Johnson supporters mostly celebrated wins by other Democrats at his Rochester watch party.
The crowd erupted whenever positive results flashed across big screens, signaling a growing blue wave flowing from the Sun Belt into the Midwest.
Absent, though, from an otherwise upbeat atmosphere were decisive vote returns in the Rochester Democrat’s own race. In the 1st Congressional District, Johnson ran behind incumbent Republican Brad Finstad almost the entire evening.
His brief, sole address to the crowd during the night came about a half hour after the polls had closed. “I’ll keep this short because we don’t know anything yet, but we are encouraged by the early results as they are coming in,” he said.
Before midnight, campaign manager Nik Marda stepped to the mic to say they didn’t expect the race to be called that night. Most people left, including Johnson.
More than two hours later, Marda called Johnson to inform him he was ahead. Decisive batches of votes finally tipped the race in the teacher’s favor by 323 votes, according to Secretary of State totals, and they came from the county he needed most.
Johnson declared victory Wednesday, but the race is likely headed for a recount.
In his victory speech Wednesday, Johnson said his campaign defied “Washington math” that gave him long odds to win.
“Our math told us something different,” he said. “Our math told us that southern Minnesota was ready for true representation.”
Johnson is from Olmsted County, the most populous county in the southern Minnesota district. The final precincts to report vote totals came from there, specifically a handful of precincts in the district’s biggest city, Rochester.
Chatter at the event referred to a 60% county vote share the challenger needed in order to have a chance. He received 62%, a 10-point shift from the previous Democratic candidate’s haul against Finstad in 2024.
Johnson began the day in Mankato, the district’s next biggest city. He tipped off nothing when asked how much he needed to rely on the population centers to win.
“I’ve been everywhere, man,” he said. “And, honestly, I think one of the lessons that I’ve learned from this is far too often the Democratic party has just said ‘Rochester, Mankato, Winona, let’s hope for the rest.’ I don’t think that’s the way to run a campaign.”
And it wasn’t how he ran his campaign. Whereas Finstad alienated constituents by refusing to hold town halls — randomly scheduled tele-town halls were no substitute — Johnson made in-person town halls in all 21 counties one of the central themes in the race.
He brought along a scoreboard to the events to mark how many he’d held compared to Finstad’s zero. Assuming Johnson’s lead withstands a likely recount, he pledged to keep scheduling them as long as he’s in Congress.
Showing up like this may have helped him chip away votes in Finstad strongholds. Finstad still won Jackson County by 36 points, his best showing this year, and 16 of the 21 counties overall.
Yet Finstad performed worse in every county compared with two years ago. In deep-red Nobles County, for example, he went from winning it by 37 points to winning it by 17 points.
Ryan Dawkins, a political scientist at Carleton College, referred to shifts like this as a “rural revolt against the incumbent administration.” Look at Iowa just across the border from the 1st Congressional District, he said, where a blue tsunami hit another place where farmers and rural residents felt the hurt on diesel and fuel prices.
But to have any chance of winning, versus losing by a respectable margin, Johnson absolutely needed wide margins in the bigger counties. He got those.
Finstad wins in Blue Earth, Winona, Nicollet and Mower counties in 2024 turned into Johnson wins in 2026. Those votes that put him in the lead came from Olmsted County. An already blue county in 2024, he expanded the margin by 20 points on election night.
The ingredients for a Johnson win all fell into place this year, Dawkins said.
“There needed to be exceptional turnout among Democratic constituencies, crossover appeal from rural farmers and then a large subsection of traditional voters would have to choose not to turnout overall,” he said.
The post How Jake Johnson closed the gap on Brad Finstad in Minnesota’s 1st District appeared first on MinnPost.
