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. Nine 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 (Withdrawn) 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. Seeking the endorsement late in the game. The Renegade. 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
Post Script
Cyle Cramer has withdrawn his campaign.
Bob Helland is the sort of candidate who causes party committees to look nervously at one another as if someone has released a honey badger into the endorsement banquet. The record is what it is: Independence Party candidate for Secretary of State in 2014, where he pulled 94,065 votes (4.9 %) statewide; DFL congressional hopeful in 2016, where MinnPost described him as a man who thought the two-party system was broken and corrupt and who insisted that he was “not a true DFLer” but rather a “progressive independent”; Republican primary candidate in 2018 for state House; and by April 1, 2026, back on the record as Democratic again. It is, on paper, the sort of affiliation history that would make a normal PR consultant burst into flames. But seen another way, it reads less like ideological confusion than the increasingly common American experience of wandering from booth to booth in a collapsing political carnival, discovering that every game is rigged, every tent is moldy, and every animal depressed. Elephants, donkeys, dogs, and ponies. Worn out from 6 nights a week and twice on Sunday. Helland’s history may not prove that the two-party system is broken, but it certainly suggests he has spent more time than most out in the field kicking the tires and finding, over and over again, that one of them is flat and the other is infested with rats. The risk with Helland is that the same quality that makes him interesting also makes him hard to contain, and American politics loves a container. Voters claim to want independence right up until an actual independent-minded person appears, at which point they begin searching frantically for a label gun and a supervised holding area. MinnPost’s old portrait already had the essential tension: a candidate seeking DFL endorsement while openly criticizing the distortion created by the two-party system, courting nontraditional constituencies, and refusing the comfort of a clean partisan identity. That can be refreshing. It can also make party regulars break out in hives and leave ordinary voters wondering whether they are witnessing creative politics, political shenanigans, or a person trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle by shaking the box. The upside is obvious: in an era of prefabricated candidates and factory-sealed messaging, Helland comes off like an actual human being who may at any moment say something unscripted and alive. The downside is equally obvious: independence in America is still treated less like a governing philosophy than a behavioral abnormality, and a candidate who refuses to sit nicely in one corner is often punished for their wanderings.
Carrie Mitchell presents herself as a serious, civic-minded candidate grounded in public service, labor, and the material struggles of ordinary people. In her convention remarks she frames politics not as theater but as the fight to help people build better lives, asking who will have the courage to stand against rigged policy, corporate economic oppression, and the daily crush of rising costs. She roots herself in Minnesota biography and public service: a lifelong Minnesotan, educated in the Minnesota State system, a former teacher, union member, and union leader who speaks in the language of fairness, affordability, healthcare, and respect. There is a real moral steadiness in it, and unlike some candidates who sound manufactured in a consulting lab, she sounds like a person with an actual public ethic. The danger with Mitchell is not insincerity. It is overaccumulation. The platform remains a loaded pizza of good intentions: Medicare for All, clean energy, clean water infrastructure, union rights, workers compensation reform, affordable housing, public education from preschool to PhD, stronger competition policy, small farmer support, debt restraint, and intergovernmental alignment. She does at least offer a hint of sequence by calling for a timeline on Medicare for All implementation and attention to economic and pension stability, which is more concrete than pure applause-light politics. But the broader problem remains that the campaign still risks sounding like a catalog of worthy commitments rather than an actionable set of goals. She seems like a good person. She may even be a good candidate. But in a race like this, goodness without sharper prioritization can blur into yet another well-stocked reform menu without a clear first move.
Luke Gulbranson enters the race trailing a very modern kind of electricity: celebrity energy. In an era when “reality star” is enough to make half the country pay attention and the other half brace for impact, his entrance brought immediate visibility to a field that had previously been struggling for broad notice. Gulbranson is best known for Bravo’s Summer House, and also appeared on Winter House and Selling the OC, which means he arrives with a built-in public profile most congressional hopefuls can only dream about. His announcement video presents the picture of a humble Iron Range son, a man speaking in broad heartfelt strokes about hardship, dignity, and bringing some sense back to Washington. But even as that kind of recognition can energize a sleepy contest, his stated intention to continue on to the primary regardless of the endorsement risks sabotaging an already destabilized opposition vote and further scattering anti-Stauber energy at the very moment consolidation might matter most.
The risks are not subtle. First there is the cultural baggage of reality television itself, which for some voters reads not as familiarity but as unseriousness, vanity, or portable drama. Second, there is a certain vagueness to the presentation so far: the emotional outline is there, the biography is there, the “I get it, I’m one of you” register is there, but the concrete governing architecture remains comparatively soft. Third, to public knowledge, he comes into this race without prior campaign or elected experience, which means voters are being asked to make a substantial leap from recognition to readiness. That does not make him fake, and it does not make him incapable. But it does make him a high-variance candidate: attention-rich, experience-light, emotionally legible, and still unproven where politics gets ugliest and most real.
Debra Topping (Nookomis) is not just another résumé in the pile. She is an Anishinaabe mother, great-grandmother, Fond du Lac Band member, former Elder Advocate, co-founder of R.I.S.E. Coalition, and a person with a long public record of showing up for land, water, and community. She has been visibly involved in resistance to Line 3 and later Line 5, speaking publicly about protecting wild rice, waterways, treaty resources, and future generations. She was also named a 2022–23 Teaching Fellow at United Theological Seminary’s Leadership Center for Social Justice, which fits the broader picture of someone known not only for conviction, but for service, seriousness, and thoughtful public engagement. The thing that stands out most is not theatrical militancy, but moral steadiness: careful with her words, respectful in her conduct, and plainly motivated by care for people and place rather than ego or performance. That matters. In a field crowded with ambition, she reads like a genuinely good person who has already done meaningful work. The risk with Topping is not her character, her values, or the seriousness of her commitments. It is campaign infrastructure. For all her real-world credibility and activism, she does not appear to have the same media footprint, campaign buildout, or readily visible communications machine as some of the better-known or better-financed contenders. I wish communication were less dependent on mass and repetition than it is, but in the absence of a reliable and predictable chain of public forums, campaigns increasingly have to build and maintain their own methods of organization, amplification, and voter contact. Being behind the ball on those skills is a real risk, no matter how otherwise strong a candidate may be. A good candidate still has to be heard, found, understood, and remembered. If the message does not travel, the virtues do not scale.
Appendix: Electability Risk Matrix
Using a base score of 50, with up to three benefits worth +5, +10, or +15 and up to three risks worth -10, -20, or -30, the field presently shakes out like this:
Trina Swanson — 60
Wendell Smith — 50
Debra Topping (Nookomis) — 45
Jeremiah Liend — 45
Luke Gulbranson — 45
Bob Helland — 40
Carrie Mitchell — 35
Emanuel Anastos — 25
John-Paul McBride — 20
Full scoring breakdown
1. Emanuel Anastos
Benefits
Ideological coherence: +10
Progressive authenticity: +10
Message clarity: +5
Risks
District mismatch / philosophy over representation: -20
“Abolish ICE” electability drag: -20
Perceived ideological extremity: -10
2. John-Paul McBride
Benefits
Strong authenticity: +15
Distinctive / memorable voice: +10
Candor: +5
Risks
“ICE must be destroyed” district-killer: -30
DHS breakup / institutional arson vibe: -20
High philosophical volatility: -10
3. Wendell Smith
Benefits
Professional credibility: +15
Veteran / physician biography: +10
Message tied to material harm: +5
Risks
Prestige may not transfer into politics: -20
Broad platform beyond core lane: -10
4. Trina Swanson
Benefits
Strong district fit: +15
Practical tone / kitchen-table framing: +15
Most compelling overall profile in the field: +10
Risks
Gendered electability penalty / structural sexism: -20
Minor presentation vulnerability at margins: -10
5. Jeremiah Liend
Benefits
Distinctive anti-corruption mission: +15
High originality / memorable brand: +15
Proven ability to secure district votes before: +15
Risks
Late entry / structural disadvantage inside endorsement process: -20
No conventional money / institutional machine: -20
Absurd-truth-teller brand limits mainstream uptake: -10
6. Bob Helland
Benefits
Real campaign history / persistence: +10
Coalition instinct: +10
Anti-two-party authenticity: +10
Risks
Party-switching / brand instability: -30
Institutional discomfort / distrust: -10
7. Carrie Mitchell
Benefits
Public-service and union background: +10
Earnest pro-worker credibility: +10
Tone of seriousness and public ethic: +5
Risks
Message sprawl / loaded pizza platform: -20
No sharp first move or prioritization: -20
Goodness without force risks political blur: -10
8. Debra Topping (Nookomis)
Benefits
Documented public service and activism: +15
Moral seriousness / respectful public presence: +15
Distinctive Indigenous leadership profile: +15
Risks
Limited media footprint: -10
Thin visible campaign structure / communications apparatus: -15
Reliance on outside forums rather than self-built amplification: -10
9. Luke Gulbranson
Benefits
Celebrity visibility / instant name recognition: +15
Compelling working-class and Iron Range biography: +10
Emotional accessibility / broad human appeal: +10
Risks
Reality TV cultural baggage: -20
Vagueness / soft governing architecture: -20
No proven political or campaign experience: -10
There it is. The nerd board. The danger chart. A weird little scoreboard by which public perception can be estimated. Please take with grain of salt. Existence subject to change.
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