Tad Jude likes a civil debate. For six decades he’s relished the opportunity—and he’s had many of them—to converse with Minnesota voters and elected officials at every level of government and of every political persuasion.
So as he nears his 73rd birthday, Jude has been left somewhat flummoxed because he says his U.S. House opponent, former Minnesota Sen. Kelly Morrison, DFL-Deephaven, has avoided invitations to debate him as they vie for the open seat representing Minnesota’s Third Congressional District, currently occupied by Democrat Dean Phillips.
The mild-mannered, soft-spoken retired judge, former state legislator and county commissioner said as much last week during an interview on a Twin Cities radio station.
While a handful of media outlets have described the contest between Jude and Morrison as “a quiet, Minnesota nice contest” for a coveted open congressional seat in the west metro suburbs, Jude doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t necessarily agree (with that assessment), because I know there’s one side (in this race) that has gone dark,” Jude told KTLK News Talk FM radio show Jon Justice on Wednesday. “We haven’t had debates. We haven’t had candidate forums. The League of Women Voters haven’t been involved. And, I mean, that’s the Biden strategy. The Biden strategy was to stay in the basement. And that’s what I’ve seen in the Third District.”
The retired judge and longtime elected office holder whose political career spans 50 years and across the political spectrum says he’s never had this much trouble getting a political opponent to engage in civil debate.
On Friday, Jude says he and Morrison will finally do just that as they participate in a segment on TPT’s “Almanac” news program. While Morrison’s campaign manager Megan Hondl told Alpha News on Monday that the Oct. 25 debate has been scheduled for weeks, Jude said Morrison’s team has avoided several other opportunities to engage with him in a public forum.
Jude, of Maple Grove, said voters deserve to know the difference between how he and Morrison view the issues west metro Minnesotans care most about, including inflation, public safety, and squandered federal spending on projects that impact the Third District.
“If you look at the price of housing, the price of groceries, the price of insurance, the price of everything, it continues to go up and up and up over the last four years,” Jude told Alpha News in a recent interview. “Voters don’t want to pay high property taxes and income taxes and sales taxes and have that money just disappeared.”
Contrasting views on policy and bipartisanship
Jude continues to hold the distinction of being the youngest person ever elected to the Minnesota legislature. He was a Democrat at the time, all those years ago in 1972 when as a 20-year-old he defeated five-term incumbent Republican John Wingard by just 296 votes. As politics at the Minnesota Capitol evolved over the decades, so did Jude’s political affiliation. Once a pro-life DFLer, Jude switched parties 30 years ago at the tail end of a seven-year stint as a state senator. He then ran (and won) as a Republican for the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, where he served a four-year term. He retired from politics in the mid-90s, but in 2011 he ran for judge in Minnesota’s 10th Judicial District and emerged victorious from among a field of 24 candidates.
Jude also ran two unsuccessful campaigns in 2022, first for the Republican endorsement for attorney general, which he lost to Jim Schultz. He then ran for Hennepin County attorney, but lost in a non-partisan primary, an election eventually won by controversial progressive Mary Moriarty.
During his 2022 campaign for attorney general, Jude explained that his party affiliation switch from a DFLer to Republican more than 30 years ago was precipitated by Democrats in the legislature increasingly becoming hostile over his pro-life views on abortion. That’s just one issue where Jude and Morrison have a stark contrast.
A medical doctor by trade, Morrison is one of the most progressive DFLers in the state legislature. If Morrison wins her election, she would be among the first “pro-abortion rights OB-GYNs” in Congress, according to an NBC News profile of her campaign.
Morrison told NBC this summer that, if elected, she would “feel a real obligation to work on an effort to codify Roe v. Wade so that American women have access and protection.”
Morrison served one term in the state House but jumped to run for state Senate in 2022. She has authored a number of politically controversial bills in her short time at the Capitol, including a physician-assisted suicide proposal pushed during the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions, a bill to implement ranked-choice voting statewide and a proposal to expand a mining ban by 1.9 million acres in northern Minnesota. She’s also been a sponsor for a handful of far-reaching legislative proposals to expand abortion in Minnesota, including signing on as a lead author of the Protect Reproductive Options Act last session, which many consider to be one of the most extreme abortion laws in the country.
Cash advantage versus elected experience
While Jude’s candidacy represents an unprecedented level of elected office experience that he would bring to the Third District seat, the political veteran has a lot of catching up to do in the fundraising arena.
Campaign fundraising filings ending in September show Morrison has raised more than $2 million heading into the final weeks of the race. She had spent about half of that as of Sept. 30.
Jude had raised $300,000 as of September since he entered the race earlier this year.
But Jude says he believes voters will turn to his “nonpartisan” problem-solving experience in several public offices he’s held. If elected to Congress, he plans to advocate for policies that curb inflation, regain control of the U.S. border with Mexico, eliminate bureaucratic waste and fraud, and tackle out-of-control crime in many metropolitan areas.
“The cost of government and the federal funding it has squandered on projects like the Southwest Light Rail line and Feeding Our Future fraud,” Jude said, “you see these government programs that are just complete failures being mismanaged, that’s a concern for people. They want to know someone is going to D.C. to solve problems, not line up votes for a political party and push extreme views.”
Hank Long
Hank Long is a journalism and communications professional whose writing career includes coverage of the Minnesota legislature, city and county governments and the commercial real estate industry. Hank received his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, and his law degree at the University of St. Thomas. The Minnesota native lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and four children. His dream is to be around when the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
