13 hours ago
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Aric Putnam jokes that he won by a “St. Cloud landslide” in 2022.
His 1,400-vote margin counted as resounding in a place known for photo finishes, which is exactly what the DFL senator had in his first election win two years earlier.
Putnam went to bed on election night 2020 thinking he’d narrowly lost the race for Senate District 14. He woke up the following morning still thinking he’d lost, albeit by a more respectable margin.
By the evening, however, mail-in ballots had swung in his favor. The professor of rhetoric at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University went to the Capitol on the back of a 300-vote win.
His victories came despite a recurring feature of St. Cloud-area races: a deluge of special interest money poured into the battleground district. This year is no different as Putnam tries to fend off attack ads aimed at vaulting a House Republican, Bernie Perryman, into the Mi...
