A constitutional lawyer and former candidate for state auditor, Ryan Wilson, joined Liz Collin on her podcast to share a last-minute pitch to suburban voters ahead of Election Day.
The GOP endorsed Wilson in 2022. He was nearly the first Republican candidate to win a statewide election in 20 years when he came within 8,000 votes of winning.
“I wanted to appeal to kind of core Minnesota values. And I saw a lot of those same values in the Trump-Vance ticket. And again, at the core of what they’re offering is really a pro-family agenda, a pro-family set of policies. And it’s a set of policies that are going to help the middle class by boosting the economy, by allowing people to be able to save more for retirement, save more for their college kids, be able to help their parents as their parents can retire and age, really help families have some breathing space so that they’re not under the pressure of inflation as much as they have been these last couple years and high prices, high taxes, and the kinds of things that keep families from really being successful.” Wilson said.
“Minnesota’s been starting to trend more Republican over the last couple of cycles. Especially if you look at outstate, it’s gone almost completely, as they say, red. It’s really that suburbs and the urban core that are still the main voters for the Democrats, with the suburban voters being the swing,” Wilson added.
He believes the policy plans from the Trump-Vance ticket will be much better for suburban families in Minnesota than anything that the Harris-Walz ticket has laid out.
“We’re going to set them up for success with their families, with their jobs, with their lives,” Wilson said.
Beyond that, Wilson points out how a lot is at stake in St. Paul at the Capitol as all 134 seats of the Minnesota House are up for grabs this year as well as one state Senate seat. Democrats have controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office for the past two years, passing a long list of “extreme” policies throughout the process, Wilson said.
“Minnesotans really want to return to normalcy. A lot of these policies, a lot of these laws that were pushed are too extreme for a lot of Minnesotans. So, I think what we’ll see is kind of a regression back to the middle. A lot of these races are suburban races, saying, ‘That’s too much, it’s enough. I don’t agree with these policies. They don’t fit my family. They don’t fit my values. They don’t help us.’ I would expect to see that the House turns back to Republican, and we see some of that,” he said.
Wilson also talked about jobs, prices, crime, illegal immigration, the fentanyl crisis and free speech with Liz Collin. Watch the entire conversation here.
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
