Third-party candidate Mike Newcome enters Minnesota governor’s race

A business veteran with a family history in Minnesota politics is making a $100,000 bet that voters will be ready to embrace a political independent in the 2026 race for governor.

Mike Newcome of Lake Elmo is running for governor with the endorsement of the Forward Independence Party, the political descendant of the organization that endorsed former Gov. Jesse Ventura during his surprise win in 1998.

Newcome is hoping a similar wave of frustration with Republicans and Democrats among voters will carry him to victory in 2026.

“My job over the next 12 months is to show them that this is a viable alternative,” Newcome said of his candidacy.

He‘s infused his campaign with an initial donation of $100,000 of his own money and has a fundraising goal of $500,000 by the years’ end. Even if he meets that goal it will almost certainly be dwarfed by fundraising and spending by DFL Gov. Tim Walz, who is running for a third term, and his slate of Republican challengers.

The Forward Independence Party also endorsed Jay Reeves for state auditor and Kelly Doss, a small business owner, for the Sixth District in Congress.

Newcome’s father served in the Minnesota Legislature as a Republican in the 1960s and 1970s and held other elected offices, while his mother worked on several campaigns over the years. He earned a political science degree from the University of St. Thomas before pursuing business, at his father’s suggestion.

“Take a moonshot or go home, I guess,” he said.

Third-party gubernatorial candidates have had a tough road since Ventura left office in 2002 and especially since 2010, when Tom Horner, who ran under the Independence Party banner, managed to win nearly 12% of the vote. They’ve struggled to capture at least 5% of the vote in recent years, the threshold to hold major party status in the state.

The Independence Party of Minnesota, which lost its major party status more than a decade ago, recently merged with the Forward Party. As a minor party, candidates must gather 2,000 signatures in order to qualify for the ballot.

That won’t be a problem for him, said Newcome. He now positions himself, much like Ventura before him, as being fiscally conservative and relatively liberal on social issues.

“I identify as a common-sense Minnesotan,” he said. “And I’m not left of center or right of center. I’m center.”

He’s also supportive of same-sex marriage and believes abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” He would not, however, support the kind of sweeping bans on assault-style weapons that many Democrats favor, instead saying he’d favor requiring training classes for would-be buyers of such guns.