MANKATO — Jake Johnson started off his speech to a crowd of supporters in Mankato on Friday the same way he always does.
“I grew up in Stewartville, the son of a garbage man and a meter reader, and I have 10 siblings growing up in a little three-bedroom household,” he said. “We needed help, and we had it.”
Johnson highlighted how his family relied on Medicaid and SNAP money growing up, how he relied on PELL grants to give him the ability to go to college. He’s said that seeing someone in office trying to take those things away is what’s driven him to challenge Rep. Brad Finstad’s hold on the 1st Congressional District of Minnesota.
Those comments started off a speech Johnson gave at a fundraiser, held on Friday by former state lawmaker Jack Considine in coordination with DFL Rep. Luke Frederick and Minnesota House hopeful Leah Hanson.
“We started putting it together as fast as we could, there were a lot of people that really wanted to participate in something for Jake here,” Considine said, noting that the event came together in about a week.
The fundraiser featured both Frederick and Hanson as speakers, and also featured a guest speaker spot from Sen. Tina Smith, who was capping off a day spent in southern Minnesota touring local projects and communities.
“I believe that most people, and certainly people in the 1st District, don’t wake up every day saying, ‘I’m a Republican, what am I going to have for dinner,’ or, ‘I’m a Democrat, I need to figure out how to who’s going to drive the kids to after-school events today.’ People are just trying to figure out how to make their lives work, they’re trying to figure out how to hold it together,” Smith said.
That belief is why Smith is confident that Johnson can beat Finstad in the race in November. For Johnson himself, he cites numbers showing how much more support he’s gotten since launching his campaign.
“How do we know we’re going to win? Well, we probably started this campaign off about, I don’t know, down 15, down 20 (percentage points.) Our most recent polling has us tied, functionally, and so we’ve got 39 days left, 39 days left for this to all payoff,” he said.