Collin Peterson, Agriculture: Committee Chairs pt.1
Hello everyone, and welcome to the first installment of my Committee Chairs series, where I will be taking a deep dive into each of the chairs of the 20 standing committees in the House of Representatives. I’ll be looking at the personal and political histories of each chair, as well as their main policy initiatives that they’ve put forward in their positions. Hopefully this will be an interesting and illuminating series for whoever comes across it!
I’ll be going through the committees alphabetically, so we we begin with Collin Peterson, who chairs the Committee on Agriculture.
Collin Peterson has represented the western third of Minnesota since 1991. Born June 29th, 1944, he grew up in a small town just across the river from Fargo, North Dakota, and was a public accountant before he began his political career in the Minnesota Senate in 1976. While Peterson is now well-known for his electoral durability in a very red district (more on that later), he lost four successive House elections (in the primaries in 1982 and 1988, in the generals in 1984 and 1986) before finally winning the seat on his fifth try. Since then, he’s had a mixed record of close calls and landslide victories, ranging from a bare majority win in 1992 to racking up 72% of the vote in 1998 and 2008.
Peterson represents Minnesota’s 7th congressional district for his entire career. Originally focused on the northwestern corner of the state, the district now stretches from the Canadian border nearly to the Iowa state line. Only a bit more than a third of the district’s residents live in an urban area. About half of Minnesota’s entire agricultural output comes from the 7th district, so Peterson’s position as chair of the Agriculture Committee is of extreme relevance to his constituents. Peterson is a relic of a bygone era when Democrats were competitive in rural prairie districts. With a PVI of R+12, this is the second-most Republican-leaning district held by a Democrat after Utah’s 4th district.
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Peterson has sat on the Agriculture Committee since he was a freshman representative in 1991. He first chaired the committee from 2007 to 2011, during that brief period of Democratic control of the House. During his initial tenure, he went toe-to-toe with the Bush administration and fought for expanding subsidy payments, higher debt ceilings for farmers, and the creation of a permanent disaster fund so that farmers in distress could more quickly get relief. In the minority, there was often friction between Peterson’s proposals for more government management of the agriculture sector and the free-market ideals of John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Since retaking the chairmanship in 2019, Peterson’s focus has been on mitigating the damage to soybean farmers from Donald Trump’s trade wars with China.
Although Peterson is manifestly in favor of big government solutions for the agriculture sector, his views on nearly every other policy matter are more in line with his conservative constituency than the Democratic establishment. He opposes abortion and gun control and is one of the few remaining Democratic House members to have voted against the Affordable Care Act. He supports many of Donald Trump’s proposals, including the construction of a wall along the southern border. He is the only Democrat to have voted against the impeachment of Trump (Jeff Van Drew, who was a Democrat at the time and voted against impeachment, has since switched to the Republican Party).
Above are the precinct margin maps for Peterson’s last four elections. In 2012, Peterson performed well across nearly every part of the district, and ended up winning with about 60% of the vote. Six years later, Peterson was held to close margins in many precincts and only won 52% of the vote. In these maps, one can see that Peterson performs better in the precincts along the Red River and the portions of Beltrami County where the Red Lake Band of the Chippewa reside.
The general consensus is that once Peterson retires, he will certainly be succeeded by a Republican. His district is only growing more Republican, with Trump improving on Romney’s margin by 20 points in the 2016 presidential election. Even absent his retirement, Republicans have a decent shot at flipping this district in November. Peterson’s margins of victory have fallen each cycle since 2012, and he faces a strong challenger in former Minnesota Senate President Michelle Fischbach.
I will try and publish one of these every few days or so — there shouldn’t be many delays given that I am currently unemployed! Stay tuned.
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