BAXTER - Incumbent Rep. Rick Nolan didn't ride anybody's coattails to re-election on Tuesday.
In defeating Republican challenger Stewart Mills, Nolan outperformed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in startling fashion. Nolan was 12 points better than Clinton in Aitkin County, 11 better in Carlton, 13 in Itasca, 15 in Pine, 10 in St. Louis, 16 in Koochiching and on down the line.
Asked to give strategic insight into how Nolan performed like that to carry his third-straight election in Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, his campaign manager said that outside of the DFL's vaunted ground game working overtime in recent weeks, it was nothing so unique.
"The fact is Rick Nolan is just a strong candidate," Joe Radinovich said, citing a record that has earned Nolan repeated praise for being one of Congress' more effective members.
The 44-year-old Mills was unavailable to comment on the race, said his campaign spokesman Troy Young.
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Entering 2016, Mills had convinced himself that Nolan was the product of riding higher-profile Democrats' coattails to election victories.
But Mills' second consecutive loss to Nolan, 72, proved the opposite in that Nolan could sway an electorate on his own and despite an underperforming ticket above him. Trump resonated with 8th District voters - outpointing Clinton by 16 points, 54 percent to 38 percent - in a way Mills did not.
Mills garnered 49.6 percent of the vote to Nolan's 50.2 - a closer race than their 1.4 percent margin in 2014 despite there being almost 91,000 more votes cast.
By midmorning Wednesday, Nolan was greeting the media at Arrowwood Lodge at Brainerd Lakes for the first time since his overnight win was secured. He talked about himself in relation to President-elect Donald Trump.
"They want a change agent," Nolan said of voters. "They view him and they view me as agents of change and people, in my case, who have experience in both the business arena and political arena."
A minority member like never before - with both houses of Congress and the executive branch soon to be Republican - Nolan sees multiple possible alliances with Trump and the opposition party.
"They want to see change in the trade realm and I'm hopeful we can kill this Trans-Pacific Partnership," Nolan said, citing the Barack Obama-negotiated trade pact with several Asian countries that many have come to view as imbalanced against American industries and workers. "I look forward to working with President-elect Trump on that. He says he's against it and I hope he is. We need his support to kill that deal."
Nolan also said he's currently working with Republicans on legislation that would add a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling that gave corporations personhood and a STOP Act that would end the practice of legislators dialing-for-dollars. Republicans Walter Jones of North Carolina and David Jolly of Florida respectively, have cosponsored those legislative maneuvers.
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"There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that feel a compelling need to change the way we do politics," said Nolan, fresh from a race that cost roughly $22 million between the two campaigns and their independent supporters.
Nolan was also quick to say he's prepared to go to the mattresses, too, for the preservation of Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
"I'll fight them all the way on it," Nolan said, before later outlining the landscape. "Speaker (Paul) Ryan and the Republicans have talked about wanting to turn Social Security over to Wall Street, turn Medicare over to the insurance companies and repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would take insurance away from 18 (million) to 20 million people."
Nolan was pleased to hear Trump discuss rebuilding U.S. infrastructure. As a member of the House's transportation and infrastructure committee, Nolan will have a front row seat to the prospective rebuilding of federal bridges, roads and more - including the Soo Locks between lakes Superior and Huron that are so vital to Duluth's shipping industry.
"We need to stop all these endless wars of choice that are costing us billions of dollars we can't afford and in many respects are so counterproductive - taking money and intellectual energy away from rebuilding our own country and investing in our own people," Nolan said.
With that, Nolan pulled the curtain on the 2016 election, telling the assembled media that he was leaving to spend the rest of the day hunting in a deer stand.
