BNB Note:
Below, is a guest editorial from Erik Osberg, the DFL candidate running to represent Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District.
My name is Erik Osberg, and I’m running for Congress because I believe we can do better.
When you run for office, you receive no shortage of advice. As an outsider and not a career politician, I got a lot. When we started this campaign on March 11 of 2025, I was told by several “political experts” that we should focus on three main issues. This is the “tried and true campaign strategy that everyone uses.” Our three main issues were agriculture, education, and healthcare – three areas that are vitally important to me personally, and to the district as a whole. So many people who live in this district have a job related to one of these areas, and even if they don’t, we are all greatly impacted by each of these issues. So, off we went, focused on fighting for our agricultural community, working to improve healthcare, and fully funding education.
Over the past nineteen months, talking to voters has repeatedly validated the importance of these three issues. And I’ve talked to a lot of voters. In fact, since this campaign began, I’ve put on over 48,000 miles, and held over 320 public events. We’re currently in the midst of a “Fish Fry Town Hall” tour, holding a town hall in each of the 38 counties in this district. At these town halls, we invite everyone, regardless of political persuasion, and I answer any and all questions that people have. More importantly, we listen.
As our campaign started to grow, so too did the current administration’s level of power in our political system. Everywhere we went, people were suddenly talking about the Constitution. No longer do we have three “co-equal branches of government.” Instead, we’ve seen an executive branch that controls everything, and legislative and judicial branches that have become little more than a rubber-stamp for the President. As a constitutionalist, I believe this is a dangerous precedent to set and that no president, regardless of party, should wield that kind of power in our democracy. Our Constitution was created, in part, to combat exactly that. People are very concerned right now about affordability, and that too is a constitutional issue. Much of the uncertainty we’re seeing in our economy is a direct result of tariffs and a war that nobody wanted. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, which includes tariffs. Declaring war is also supposed to be something only Congress has the power to do. Over the past 19 months, our Constitution has been treated as a suggestion box instead of what it’s intended to be – the law of the land. And so defending the Constitution became our top priority.
The second thing that changed our campaign priorities was the growing realization that money controls everything in our political system. The reason we make so little headway on issues like education, agriculture, and healthcare, is that societal progress often conflicts with personal and corporate greed. Corporate money that dominates our political system has essentially turned our elections into auctions. We need to overturn Citizens United and return the power to the people. And so getting corporate money out of politics became our number two priority.
One of the mantras of this campaign has been that we need to pave a different path to achieve a different outcome. And so we decided to forgo the conventional wisdom about only having a “top three issues” platform, and instead created a five-point plan, a plan that was developed by listening to you, the people of Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District.
Once again, my name is Erik Osberg, and I’m running for Congress because I believe we can do better.