When Amy Klobuchar ran for president in 2020, I wrote a blog post about her political skills. In today’s column (gift link), I revisit those observations in the context of Klobuchar’s run for governor.
I’ve long noted Klobuchar’s deft use of her dad’s quintessential Iron Range story. Jim Klobuchar was a celebrated newspaper columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune. He wrote about sports and politics with a voice grounded in the blue-collar immigrant traditions of his youth. My iron miner grandfather idolized Jim Klobuchar. His daughters, including my mother, delivered the Minneapolis paper in Keewatin, Minn., mostly to readers who turned straight to Jim’s column.
In fact, one of the great honors of this Iron Ranger’s life is to write a column for the same paper as Jim Klobuchar. A fellow Ranger once made the comparison, though the actual quote was, “So, what, you think you’re Jim Klobuchar?”
Anyway, some mine ore; I mine stories, like Jim Klobuchar before me. His daughter, same age as my mom, is arguably the most significant Minnesota politician of her generation. The first brick of her career was fired in the furnace of an Iron Range political narrative.
I say this not to suggest that making hay out of your Iron Range roots is bad. I’d be in jail if that were the case. It’s just that, if you’re not living here, the story eventually becomes frozen in time.
So where does Klobuchar stand today? She’s got work to do on the Range. I suspect she knows this. She also has more political talent than she’s using. In today’s column, I lay out how the Range ended up here and what Klobuchar, or any candidate, can do to support the region and, for that matter, win the election.
Read “Shaped by Iron Range roots, Amy Klobuchar must chart a new path in former DFL stronghold,” in the Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.
2 responses to “Klobuchar’s legacy is on the ballot”
I read your Strib column. Back in 1988 I was introduced to an Iron Range legislator, Tommy RukaVIna, accent on the penultimate. I’m a native speaker of Croatian, and I thought… what? It should be RuKAvina, the accent on the third from the last. The following year I moved to the Iron Range, and I found that almost nobody with a Serbian or Croatian last name pronounced it properly. Why is that? It’s very simple. The default accent in English is the penultimate. People started changing their name to make it sound more American. So in Ely, a number of people pronounced Klobuchar’s name KloBUTCHer; whereas the way she and her dad pronounced it, KLObuchar is more accurate. Even Finnish names are mispronounced. In Uralic languages the accent is always on the first syllable, but note that Mary PelTOla, running for Senate in Alaska, has her husband’s Finnish name, which should be pronounced PELtola. The process of Americanization is not a melting pot, it’s a meat grinder, and the pressure immigrants are under to Americanize is intense, and that can be seen in the changed spellings and pronunciations of names. As to the question of why the Range no longer votes DFL, I insist it still does, but it does so in the Twin Cities Metro and other urban areas. The liberal kids took the risk and moved away and conservatives stayed behind. The boreal forest has the lowest carrying capacity for humans, and the Range was only able to maintain a large population for a short time, which is typical for mining areas. The world is littered with abandoned mining towns on dead end roads.
Hi Fred — Always love hearing from you and I’m fascinated to hear your expertise on the pronunciations. I know from my research of 1910s and ’20s Mesabi communities that Americanization was an overwhelmingly powerful pressure on immigrants. I’m not sure how much today’s great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren fully understood how much their family histories were contorted by the political fears of their ancestors — fear of exclusion, fear of starvation. I’d even go so far as to say that some racism on the Range dates back to a time when racism was a quick way to relate to a native-born American, or to prove Americanness to peers. There’s an almost performative quality to it. You can’t be excluded if you’re doing the excluding.
I’ve written before that Iron Rangers still elect Democrats to Congress, it’s just that they’re electing Betty McCollum and Ilhan Omar. Perhaps what you say about mining communities is true. I endeavor to find hope where I can. The next decades could become very painful without it.