Joe Radinovich was a junior in high school when he came home from track practice and heard a gunshot.He found his little brother, who had attempted suicide, on the floor.
“I thought, for a long time, that was going to be the worst thing that happened,” Radinovich told a room full of farmers who’d assembled for a chicken-and-beef buffet sponsored by the Minnesota Farmers Union last week.
It wasn’t. Eleven months later, his step-grandfather killed his mother and himself.
This is a story that Radinovich, the 32-year-old Democratic-Farmer-Labor nominee in Minnesota’s 8th District, now tells on the campaign trail in the face of an onslaught of Republican attack ads. It’s even part of his latest TV spot.
Radinovich, who served a term in the Minnesota state House, is the fourth generation of his family to grow up on the Iron Range, the mining region in a northeastern Minnesota district that presents a test for Democrats hoping to win back white, blue-collar workers.
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04.30.2025