Q Report: CD8 DFL 2026
To: Agents, Anons, Politicos, Weirdoes, Underground Press, Et. All
From: Q (K00)
Re: CD8 DFL 2026
All,
2026 and the north woods have once again produced an elite pack of DFL strivers, emerging from the snow with a web site, a promise, and a platform claiming that they alone can explain Northern Minnesota to Washington without sounding like an extra on Fargo. Five DFL candidates now stalk the thawing turf of CD8, a district rated R+7 and still red enough to hand Donald Trump 56 percent of the vote. You will find no bigger fan of Trump than the incumbent, Pete Stauber. A man so deeply encamped within Trump’s butt that he has surrendered all hope of escape. But first the Democrats must struggle among one another, spending precious resources of money and time pimping their own brand of dream reform. Their own flavor of progressive fantasia. It is the season of the nerd.
Dear reader, allow me to enterform you. Let us explore the possibility, together.
Emanuel Anastos has the sort of platform that reads like it was written not to persuade a hard to win district, but to prove moral virtue to a jury of the already convinced. Universal healthcare with no out-of-pocket costs. Free public college and trade schools. A $20 minimum wage. Ending corporate influence. Strong environmental protections. Ending U.S. support for Israel. Easier immigration. And there, glowing like a road flare in a gasoline pool, the call to abolish ICE. It is an ideologically coherent package, I’ll grant him. But coherence is not the same as viability. In CD8, this is not a platform so much as an exercise in philosophy. Desperately pushing at the Overton Window while seeking fresh air.
The danger to Anastos is Ruined Pizza Theory 101: one radical topping spoils the whole pie. “Abolish ICE” is the sort of phrase that slams the door on all Republican voters and at least half of independents before the candidate ever gets around to wages, schools, or healthcare. Once the electorate decides you are offering ideology instead of representation, the rest of the menu barely matters. You can have the finest crust in Duluth, but if half the district thinks you dumped battery acid on the cheese, nobody’s asking for another slice. Speaking for myself, abolishing ICE does not go far enough. The Department of Homeland Security itself was a post-9/11 panic room built in fear and grown like a tumor through perpetual mission creep. Tear the thing down and return us to a saner operational structure. But that is the point: if I am the one making that argument, you are no longer in ordinary district politics. You are in deep water. The theory I roam. Somewhere so far left of Che Guevara he’s over the horizon to the right, even as we continue left, looking for the other end of the horseshoe.
Cyle Cramer is what happens when a candidate mistakes volume for quality. On first glance his platform feels broad and energetic, a grand buffet of jobs, education, farming, healthcare, mining, tribal sovereignty, reproductive rights, energy, infrastructure, labor, public safety, and democratic freedoms. On closer inspection it becomes something stranger: a document so stuffed with ambitions, acts, fixes, modernizations, credits, reforms, and strategic promises that it begins to read less like a governing plan and more like a liberal manifesto after 10 consecutive coffees and a minor spiritual breakdown. There is a thoughtfulness to it, sure. Thorough? Yes. Also a kind of policy maximalism that suggests the campaign never found the courage to say no to any idea it liked.
The danger to Cramer is not one toxic plank. It’s ruined pizza everywhere. There are too many toppings, too many sauces, too many separate theories of action piled onto the same collapsing crust. Profit-sharing incentives, buyback restrictions, living-wage tax credits, anti-gouging disclosures, co-ops, farm-bill reforms, universal preschool, student debt changes, Medicare expansions, drug negotiation, tribal taxation, energy research, mining modernization, and still more “coming soon.” It is aspirational in the way a man might aspire to rebuild a cathedral, a power plant, and a canoe in the same weekend. Without focus, effort diffuses. Without a central mission, nothing gets done. In the end the platform does not reassure me that he has a functional plan. It suggests he has many plans and no ruthless instinct for which one matters most.
John-Paul McBride presents himself as the outsider intellectual of the field, the candidate who has no patience for stale orthodoxy and no desire to speak in the embalmed language of ordinary campaigns. His Ballotpedia responses are vivid, personal, and impossible to confuse with boilerplate. He talks about autism, universal healthcare, climate apocalypse, democratic collapse, the need for Congress to defend itself, and the necessity of confronting fascism without compromise. In a field where much of the language is polished to a cautious sheen, McBride at least has the virtue of sounding like an actual person with an actual interior life, which in modern politics can feel obscene.
The danger to McBride is that his candor reads less like courage than an open invitation to political self-destruction. “ICE must be destroyed” is already a district-killing phrase for many voters. Adding that the Department of Homeland Security itself should be broken up sends the whole thing beyond reform and into institutional arson. Then there is Lady Eboshi, the fictional character he says he would want to be. A fascinating choice for a film lover, perhaps, but not an auspicious one for a public servant. Lady Eboshi is brilliant, charismatic, and modernizing, yes. She is also the woman who shoots the Forest Spirit in the neck and nearly gets everyone killed in pursuit of ambition she mistakes for justice. An interesting character study, but not a comforting political metaphor. McBride does not come off like a man trimming his sails for electability. He comes off like a man loading philosophy, grievance, apocalypse, and symbolic dynamite into a t-shirt cannon and firing it into the air.
Wendell Smith comes off the page like a man who has spent enough years cutting people open to have lost interest in ornamental language. He is a general surgeon, Air Force veteran, and longtime Iron Range physician, and his campaign wastes no time converting that biography into accusation. Healthcare is in danger, hospitals are at risk, Republicans and Pete Stauber are implicated, public health funding is being gutted, and the people paying the price are actual people. From there the platform expands into Medicare for All, education, labor, unions, the environment, mining, anti-corruption, ICE restraint, and voting rights. All fun stuff.
The danger with Smith is the old habit of mistaking professional prestige for transferable political genius. He is a surgeon, yes, and plainly serious. But expecting a surgeon to fix healthcare is a little like letting the fox repair the hen house. All due respect to his service and profession, but expertise in one field does not always translate to another. A man can be excellent inside the operating room and still have no special gift for rebuilding the bloated insurance-cartel corpse engine that passes for US healthcare policy. The white coat earns respect and attention. It does not, by itself, generate the cure.
Trina Swanson is probably the most compelling figure in this field: an intelligent and successful woman running against a steadfast row of dudes (myself included). She backs universal healthcare, wants to protect insurance tax credits and lower drug prices, supports mining and miners, insists copper-nickel mining must meet real scientific and engineering standards, and frames Boundary Waters protection not as scenery worship but as defense of a living regional economy. She talks about affordability in the language of kitchen tables rather than think tanks, and about local care, local wages, and local futures in a way that suggests she is actually listening to the district instead of merely projecting onto it.
The risk with Trina is not that her goals are unserious. The risk is that honesty, steadiness, and good faith remain inadequate tools in a patriarchal society that is still eager to discount a woman’s attempt to help unless she arrives wrapped in someone else’s permission. If there is a vulnerability here, it is only a lingering danger at the edges of presentation, not a lack of purpose. The greater risk lies outside of any control: that a region willing to entertain five versions of male ambition may predictably find a way to second-guess the woman offering practical help. One can name that problem, but naming it does not solve it.
Then there's me. Not seeking the endorsement. The Independent. The Dark Horse. The Radical.
Or rather, the sad Clark Kent disguise I used to wear to work named Jeremiah Liend. Bemidji born. Bemidji raised. Dramatist. Writer. Father. Former mayoral candidate. Former gubernatorial write-in eccentric. Former DFL candidate. A person who has already thrown their fragile human body against the walls of public scrutiny more than once and lived to tell the tale. Ballotpedia, in its dry necromantic fashion, records the basics: education, previous campaigns, vote totals, reformist policy, and the sort of résumé that reads almost normal until you find the details. Normalcy has never been the point. Not for this Q.
The point is that while the professionals were busy professionalizing, the republic rotted from the inside out. Corporations became people. Money became speech. Presidents became kings. Justices became partisans. Elections became endurance rituals for donors and special interests while actual working people were expected to clap politely from the cheap seats and then go back to work (always harder and consistently for less). So that year, finding the old machinery too diseased to worship, Jeremiah Liend announced an independent run for Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District under the dangerously unfashionable motto “Liberty and Justice for All”. Not for donors. Not just for people we already agreed with. For all. A funds-free campaign. No donations. No endorsements. No conventional machinery. Just a direct appeal to public reason and enough signatures to prove the thing deserves to breathe.
The platform is not some complex Gordian Knot to explain. It is three clean strikes at the load-bearing corruption of American government. First: publicly funded elections to drive a stake through the black heart of Citizens United and the corporate cash orgy that followed. Second: expanded impeachment power to answer the abomination of presidential immunity and remind the executive branch that a republic is not an empire. Third: Supreme Court term limits, because no society should be ruled for half a century by the unkillable opinions of nine robed tyrants. It is not a total blueprint for Utopia. It is a triage plan for a constitution bleeding out in the dirt.
Many would call it unrealistic, but unrealistic is pretending the current system is functioning. Unrealistic is watching money devour every institution in public life and insisting one more lobbyist approved moderate with a five-point jobs plan is going to fix it. Unrealistic is asking decent people to keep choosing between cowardice and spectacle until the whole machine finally bursts into flames. I’m not selling certainty. I’m selling a ladder out of the pit. Selling the preposterous idea that government should belong to the people again. You know, the old classic stuff. Democracy. Accountability. Shared reality. What should be the basics, but is somehow instead a bare minimum we consistently struggle towards achieving.
Ballotpedia also preserves the wonderfully inadvisable and therefore perfect details: Jeremiah describing himself through sustainability, electoral reform, legal reform, cannabis legalization, STEAM values, and the belief that corporations are not people and money is not speech. It also captures the more mythic texture: the fictional character answer of “Q,” and the internal two-wolf war between Hunter S. Thompson and Hubert H. Humphrey. That is not normal candidate language. It is much more entertaining than normal candidate language. It gives you the plastic line between Clark Kent and Time Messiah.
In review of the ceremonial host of DFL strivers, I arrive at last at the shameless conclusion: I am cooler than these nerds. But also better at nerding than them. Not because I am cleaner, more perfect, more polished, or more electable in the dead-eyed monetizing sense. But because I am honest about the dysfunction. Honest about the game. Honest about the players. Honest enough to refuse donations. Honest enough to say that if the people do not want this, then it should not happen. Honest enough to ask not for your money, but for your attention, your signature, your reason, and perhaps, if the internet is feeling sufficiently weird, a little virality. Jesus Jumping Jack Christ on Creatine, where is that damned virility?
Maybe the republic is not saved by another respectable résumé, another donor approved moderate, another candidate with a pleasant and careful way of saying nothing. Maybe it is saved, if it is saved at all, by people willing to sound absurd while speaking the truth. People willing to risk embarrassment, defeat, and ridicule in service of something larger than themselves. People willing to be called impossible by a nation that has mistaken division for authority. I have been called worse. I leave it to you, dear reader, to do your research, trust the plan, and know that in the end, Q wins.
1∞ <3
Q
Jeremiah Liend for District 8: Liberty and Justice For All
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