The Republican State Representative who Won Tim Walz the VP Nomination - And What to Watch in the 2024 State House Primaries
One race that will tell us the direction of the Minnesota Republican Party
In 2022, Republican State Representative Tony Jurgens was running for a State Senate in District 41, a purple district running along the St. Croix river through the Twin Cities exurbs. Jurgens, a moderate Republican who had won three elections to a swing house seat that made up the southern half of Senate District 41, seems like exactly the candidate you’d want to run in a closely divided district. Despite this, Jurgens lost the Republican Primary by 22 points to Tom Dippel, a conservative activist and election denier supported by the right-wing activist group Action 4 Liberty.
But then Jurgens did something unexpected: He turned around and endorsed his Democratic opponent Judy Seeberger, who in turn defeated Dipple by 321 votes, a 0.7 percent margin of victory. This gave the DFL a one-seat Senate majority, which they leveraged into the “Minnesota Miracle 2.0” legislative session that passed a raft of progressive priorities and, arguably, won Tim Walz the Vice-Presidential nomination.
So, if you want an original answer to the “Why Tim Walz?” question, say that Tony Jurgens did it.1
It’s a reminder that primary elections matter, and that ideologically extreme party factions like Action 4 Liberty can have far reaching effects even (perhaps especially) when their chosen candidate loses.2
The Republican Primary to Watch
If there is going to be a repeat of this story in 2024, it will take place in State House District 41A,3 which makes up the northern half of the State Senate district that Jurgens (and then Dippel) lost in 2022. It is also the second most closely divided district in the state.4 Here, again, we have a conventionally credential (relatively) moderate Republican against an Action 4 Liberty backed conservative activist. And once again, the Action 4 Liberty candidate won the party endorsement, only to be challenged by the conventional Republican in the primary.5
In this case the Tony Jurgens role is played by Wayne Johnson,6 an HVAC business owner and former Washington County commissioner who was endorsed by the seat’s retiring incumbent. Johnson has longstanding times to the district, having represented about one-third of it in the Cottage Grove city council and then the Washington County Board of Commissioners. His web presence emphasizes these ties and endorsements from other Republican office-holders, trade and small business groups who testify to his fiscal conservatism, support for law enforcement, and electability. He is, in short, the kind of candidate you expect parties to run in a 50-50 district like this.
The Tom Dippel role is played by Grayson McNew, a conservative activist and former legislative aide Jeremy Munson, the far-right former state senator who started the New Republican Caucus.7 McNew seems to moved to the district recently – the timeline on his “about” page is a little hard to untangle but I think he’s 258 and went to college in Maryland (2017-2021?), followed by work on political campaigns and the aforementioned stint as a legislative aide. He is a small business owner in the sense that he started a political consulting firm in 2020 that seems to have been inactive for the last two years.9 With the exception of his current day job, he’s spent his entire adult life in politics, and lacks the kind of community ties that supposedly to matter in local elections.
You’d expect a party that is trying to win elections to go with Johnson. You’d expect a party captured by ideological activists to go with McNew. Whoever wins this contest, it will tell us a lot about the direction of the Minnesota Republican Party.
Predicting state primary election outcomes is silly, and I won’t even try here. But, if McNew wins the primary and the DFL ends up with a one-vote majority in the State House, Peggy Flanagan should send a nice gift basket to Action 4 Liberty.10
But that’s it for Action 4 Liberty in swing-district primaries
Notably, none of the other plausibly swing districts feature primaries with an Action 4 Liberty-endorsed candidate running against a more conventional candidate. The closest to a traditional Republican vs. bomb-throwing conservative activist match-up is the Winona-area House District 26A, where Winona City Council member Aaron Repinski won the Republican endorsement decisively, if not unanimously, against Stephen Doerr, who was the Republican sacrificial-lamb candidate in this district in 2022.11 Was Action 4 Liberty chastened by handing the State Senate to the DFL in 2022? Were Doerr’s pro-confederate flag and anti-Islamic statements too much for them? Who can say.
Or, does Action 4 Liberty mostly not need to run insurgent campaigns anymore to get the Republican nomination? This year, Tom Dippel, the conservative activist who kicked off our story, is the Republican candidate in House District 41B, another extremely swingy State House district. Dippel has no primary opponent, and appears to have been the only candidate to seek the party endorsement. Regardless of who wins the McNew vs. Johnson matchup in 41A, Action 4 Liberty won in 41B without a fight.
What about the Democrats?
Notably, there’s no equivalent on the DFL side to the Republican contest in 41A. That’s not to say that the DFL isn’t riven by factional conflict. But this moderate vs. liberal (or liberal vs. left) fight has mostly been confined to safely blue areas in the Twin Cities metro. The only DFL primary in a swing district this year is in House District 26A between two conventionally qualified candidates who seem to agree on most things except which one of them should be the party’s candidate.12
So, as you watch election results come in, scroll past Ilhan vs. Samuels 2.0 and Royce White vs. Joe Fraser to House District 41A. It might have importance consequences. Just ask Tony Jurgens and Tim Walz.
As far as I can tell, no one has asked Jurgens what he thinks about VP-candidate Tim Walz or his own role in making that happen. The only media coverage I’ve seen that notes Jurgens’s role in the massive 2023 legislative session is this Star Tribune article from January. I would be fascinated to see an interview with him about it.
A fact that they are extremely salty about.
In Minnesota, each State Senate district is divided into two State House districts, imaginatively labeled “A” and “B”.
It went 51-47 for Biden in 2020 but 48-44 for Trump in 2016.
The Minnesota “party endorsement” system can be confusing to anyone who doesn’t pay an unhealthy level of attention to state politics. Basically, local party conventions meet in March and vote on whether to endorse one of the candidates running in the primary. The delegates to these local party conventions are elected at precinct conventions that take place in February. Because the only people willing to brave the cold to attend a precinct caucus in February in Minnesota are extremely politically engaged, the conventions that determine party endorsements are dominated by party activists.
However, the party endorsement is not equivalent to the party nomination. Candidates who lose the party endorsement can still run in the primary election in August. Endorsed candidates get some advantages - they have access to state party resources, and usually the state party will send out a few mailers encouraging people to vote for the full slate of endorsed candidates. But non-endorsed candidates win primaries all the time - non-endoresed candidates like Tim Walz, who lost the endorsement in 2018 to Erin Murphy, the candidate of the party’s left wing, but who went on to beat Murphy by nine points in the primary election.
Sadly, no relation to Dwayne Johnson.
For example, he proposed that western Minnesota secede from the state and join South Dakota.
Points for turning his youth into a catchy slogan: “Out with the old, in with the McNew!” McNew does not appear to be a father, but I deem that slogan dad-joke worthy.
Would I be a “small business owner” if I turned on paid subscriptions to this substack?
Technically, it would have to be a two-vote majority, since the State House has an even number of members. A narrow McNew loss in the general could also turn a Republican majority into an evenly-divided State House, which would necessitate some kind of power sharing agreement. Either way, David Hann would be very unhappy.
This is a swing district, but one that has been held for 36 years by DFLer Gene Pelowski. The Republicans didn’t bother to run a candidate against him in 2020, even as Biden only won his district by seven points.
There are a smattering of contested safe-seat primaries, and a contested primary for the State Senate special election that will decide control of the State Senate for the next two years, but none that really reflect DFL factional conflict. Unless you count way-too-online vs. not way-too-online as factions in the Democratic Party.
Oh, right, I guess there’s also a little US House primary contest that might attract some attention.