And So It Begins
I got a text from Matt Woestehoff.
If you know the history, that's already a strange sentence. Matt and I ran against each other for city council. We didn't see everything the same way. That's putting it mildly. So when he reached out and said he had a crazy idea and wanted to talk, I'll admit I was curious more than anything else.
I said sure.
He made his case. Run as the DFL candidate in 31A. Take on Harry Niska, House Majority Leader, heir apparent to Tom Emmer, a man whose full-time job is now managing a caucus in St. Paul rather than representing the people out here in Ramsey and Andover.
I didn't say yes right away. I went home and thought about it. Talked to my wife.
That part matters more than it might sound.
She's been pushing me for years. Not toward politics, toward honesty. The kind that's uncomfortable. The kind where you actually have to look at what you've believed and ask yourself whether it still holds up.
I grew up south of here. Voted Republican nearly my whole life. Believed the party stood for something worth defending. And for a long time, I was good at explaining away the parts that didn't sit right. You do that. You find the justification, you focus on the policy, you tell yourself the other stuff is noise.
January 6th was not noise.
I sat there watching it on television and I didn't recognize what I was seeing. That wasn't the America I believed in. My wife looked at me and didn't have to say anything. We both knew something had shifted that wasn't going to shift back.
I ran in 2022 to try to fix it from inside, to be an alternative, to show that the Republican Party in 31A could be something different. The party establishment made clear they weren't interested. Fine. I learned something from that too.
So when Matt texted, I wasn't starting from zero. I'd already done the reckoning. I'd already stopped asking permission from people who weren't going to give it.
What surprised me was Matt himself. I expected a pitch. What I got was a genuine conversation from someone who clearly cares about this community and doesn't much care which team gets credit for making it better. He said something that stuck: doing good work in government is about helping people, not about politics.
He's right. And honestly, I needed to hear it from someone I'd once stood across from on a ballot.
I'm not a perfect Democrat. I won't pretend otherwise. There are things I'm still working through, positions that have evolved, and plenty I'm still learning. But I'm someone who looked at what his party became and made a choice. That choice cost me something. I made it anyway.
Harry Niska has a safe seat and a caucus to run. I've got a community I actually live in. Horses, neighbors I know by name, years involved on boards and commissions. And a former opponent who believed in this enough to sign on as my campaign manager.
That's a strange origin story. But I think it's the right one for this moment.
-Brian