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Hagedorn claims victory in 1st Congressional District

Jim Hagedorn has claimed victory over Dan Feehan in Minnesota's hotly contested 1st Congressional District, representing a steal for the Republicans even as they lost their grip on the majority.
Jim Hagedorn has claimed victory over Dan Feehan in Minnesota's hotly contested 1st Congressional District.

MANKATO - Republican Jim Hagedorn claimed a narrow victory early Wednesday over Democrat Dan Feehan in Minnesota's highly competitive 1st Congressional District, salvaging at least one House of Representatives seat for the GOP as the party lost its grip on the majority in the midterm elections.

Hagedorn's campaign pronounced itself the winner around 4:30 a.m. after an excruciating night in Mankato, where both candidates held separate watch parties just a few blocks away from each other.

The few hundred attendees at both events scrutinized the election results for hours, and they remained on the edge of their seats until the very end. At one point, the margin was only 21 votes.

According to the Secretary of State's office, Hagedorn eventually defeated Feehan by 1,311 votes — a margin of .45 percent — after receiving final totals from Mower and Brown Counties deep into Wednesday morning. That margin of victory is large enough not to require a publicly funded automatic recount.

Just before 11 a.m., Hagedorn held a press conference and called the win "humbling," according to KARE's partner organization MPR News.

Feehan, however, has not conceded. In a statement, his campaign said it would not accept defeat until the official results are released.

"With a difference of just 1,311 (.45%) votes separating the two candidates, we believe that it's important to receive the official results that county canvass officers will release in the coming days," the campaign said. "As this race is approximately 500 votes away from triggering a recount, the campaigns owe it to voters in the first congressional district to wait until official results are in."

Hagedorn's victory would represent a major steal for the Republicans in the 1st Congressional District, which had been occupied by Democratic Governor-elect Tim Walz since 2006. This congressional race was among the most closely watched in the United States, with an enormous amount of money spent on advertising on both sides of the aisle. The campaign was often testy, with negative advertisements painting Feehan as a radical threat to conservative values and portraying Hagedorn as a Washington insider unfit for representing southern Minnesota.

Ultimately, voters appear to have settled on Hagedorn, who has a financial background and previous experience in the U.S. Department of Treasury.

He had also been unsuccessful in three previous attempts for this seat. Hagedorn most recently lost to Walz in 2014 and 2016, dropping the last election by fewer than one percentage point.

His victory the fourth time around, however, would further complete the 1st Congressional District's red-leaning tendencies. The district, which had once gone for President Obama, decisively voted for Donald Trump in 2016 despite electing Walz by a small margin in the same election cycle.

Feehan, who served two tours in Iraq and worked in the Pentagon under Obama, had said he would stand up to President Trump if elected to Congress but would work with the administration as needed. Feehan strongly opposed the president's trade policies, arguing they severely hampered southern Minnesota farmers.

Hagedorn, meanwhile, positioned himself as a staunch ally of President Trump and did not shy away from aligning with the administration. According to an MPR News reporter in Mankato on Wednesday, Hagedorn said he didn't think tariffs hurt his campaign at all.

According to MPR, Hagedorn also said he'd like to be on the agriculture committee in the House of Representatives when he is sworn in next year.

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