Why Isn't Anyone Covering This Race?

Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District is the largest in the state and the fastest growing. It has more people in it than any other district Minnesota sends to Washington. Its congressman is the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House.

Since Doug Chapin, the DFL nominee, entered the race in July 2025, eighteen news stories have appeared anywhere that name both him and Rep. Tom Emmer. Nine of those were triggered by a calendar event — an endorsement, a filing deadline, a fundraising report, or a primary night. Four were generated by the challenger's own events and four came from a day the congressman didn't show up somewhere. Two were columns.

Not one was prompted by the two candidates appearing together. They have never shared a stage.

Minnesota's Seventh District, which is eight points more Republican by Cook's measure and which no one considers competitive, produced the same number of articles. The Eighth district produced more. The First produced more than twice as many.

So the question is worth asking directly: why isn't anyone covering this race?

There are five plausible explanations for why it's not receiving coverage.

Explanation OneThe race isn't close enough to cover

This is the explanation most editors would offer.

Newsrooms in Minnesota are smaller than they were a decade ago. Every reporter assigned to a foregone conclusion is a reporter not assigned to something contested. Cook rates this district R+10 and the race Solid Republican. There is no independent public polling showing it close. The only poll that exists was commissioned by the challenger's own campaign; it showed the incumbent ahead by ten. Buried inside it: among voters who already knew who Chapin was, the race was tied. The subgroup is small and self-selecting, so it proves nothing about the outcome. It does suggest the race is unsettled in a way no one has independently tested.

Triage under those conditions isn't laziness. It's arithmetic, and the scholarship on congressional campaign coverage has found for decades that coverage volume tracks competitiveness. Editors who send their limited people to the races that might actually turn are doing their jobs, but that is a human decision and humans make errors.

The problem is that the pattern doesn't hold in Minnesota.

Minnesota's Seventh is R+18. By any competitiveness logic it should receive less attention than the Sixth, and it receives the same. The Eighth is R+7, three points closer than the Sixth, and receives only modestly more. Meanwhile the Star Tribune published a standalone profile of Trina Swanson, the Eighth District challenger to Rep. Pete Stauber, in August. MPR published a standalone profile of Jake Johnson, the First District challenger to Rep. Brad Finstad, in September. MinnPost published a full analysis of the Seventh District race between Rep. Michelle Fischbach and Erik Osberg in April.

Across eleven statewide outlets — the Star Tribune, MPR News, MinnPost, the Minnesota Reformer, the Pioneer Press, KARE 11, WCCO, KSTP, FOX 9, Axios Twin Cities and Bring Me The News — we could not locate a single standalone news story about the Sixth District race. Outside of four occasions, the statewide press has not named the challenger at all. Those four: a single day's coverage of the congressman's foot injury after Farmfest, which several outlets wrote at once; an opinion columnist's weekly roundup; a State Fair feature about long-shot candidates generally; and a listing in an election primer. None of the four is a story about this race.

Competitiveness explains a great deal about Minnesota's coverage map. It does not explain the lack of coverage the Sixth district gets.

Explanation TwoThe district lost its newspaper

In 2014 the St. Cloud Times had thirty-six people in its newsroom. By February 2023, under Gannett ownership, it had none. Not a reduced staff. Zero reporters.

Forum Communications launched St. Cloud LIVE that same month, hiring two of the survivors. That outlet is now doing much of the journalism about this congressional race. Five of the eighteen stories are theirs directly; two more are their work syndicated to the West Central Tribune and InForum. Close to forty percent of everything published about this race traces to one newsroom, and much of it to one reporter.

Compare what the neighboring districts have. The First District has the Rochester Post Bulletin, which has published at least nine pieces on its congressional race, including two separate analyses of whether the challenger can pull an upset. The Eighth has the Duluth News Tribune. Those are mid-sized daily newspapers with a reason to care about one congressional district in particular.

The Sixth still has community weeklies — the Monticello Times, the Elk River Star News and their sister papers under Adams Publishing Group have covered the endorsement, the filing deadline and the primary. This is not a vacuum. But a weekly covering a dozen towns is not a substitute for a daily covering a district, and a startup is now carrying 755,000 people.

Explanation ThreeThe district is in the wrong television market

The large majority of the Sixth District lives in the Minneapolis–St. Paul television market. The district takes in all of Carver, Sherburne and Wright counties, fifteen Anoka County communities including Blaine, its largest city, and two Hennepin County towns — all Twin Cities market. Its St. Cloud market share is Benton County, with about 41,600 people, plus twelve Stearns County communities including St. Cloud itself, together roughly 165,000. That is about a fifth of a district of 755,084.

Nearly all of the coverage comes from the St. Cloud area.

The Seventh District is covered by Fargo-market stations — KVRR, Valley News Live, WDAY, KFGO, Lakeland PBS. The Eighth is covered by Duluth-market outlets — WDIO, Northern News Now, FOX21, WTIP, KAXE, plus the News Tribune. Those districts are the dominant political story in their markets. A congressional race in Duluth is the congressional race.

The Sixth sits inside a market where four network affiliates — KARE 11, WCCO, KSTP and FOX 9 — plus the Star Tribune, MPR, MinnPost, the Reformer and the Pioneer Press all operate — and where five congressional districts compete for the same attention. Political scientists have a term for this: congruence, the fit between a media market's boundaries and a congressional district's. Writing in the Journal of Political Economy in 2010, James Snyder and David Strömberg found that when a paper's readers are spread across several districts rather than concentrated in one, it has less reason to cover any single representative — and that voters in low-congruence districts are measurably less able to recall their representative's name or rate his performance. Gregory Huber and Patrick Tucker found the same pattern in local television news in a 2024 study of broadcast transcripts. The Sixth District's share of the Twin Cities audience is one of five.

The Sixth District is too suburban for St. Cloud and too far out for the Twin Cities. It falls between two markets, and it has no newsroom of its own whose job is to tell 755,000 people what their congressman is doing.

Explanation FourThe race hasn't produced anything to cover

Campaign journalism runs on events. Two candidates in a room, disagreeing about something, in front of a reporter. That is the raw material to cover.

This race has not produced one because the two candidates have never appeared together, and because the incumbent has not appeared at a public, constituent-facing event in the district that we can document in months.

On August 4 at Farmfest, the congressional forums went ahead as they do every year. Rep. Michelle Fischbach appeared alongside her opponent and defended tariffs and the USDA reorganization while he pushed back. Agweek wrote it up as a policy story naming both candidates. That is an ordinary day in an ordinary congressional race.

Rep. Tom Emmer did not attend. He was listed on the program, and he had taken part in the same forum two years earlier. His absence was attributed to recovery from a series of foot surgeries. What followed was four stories in twenty-four hours — MPR, the Star Tribune, KSTP and Mediaite — about his health, prompted by Rep. Pete Stauber's remark that Emmer was "fighting for his damn life," which Stauber's office corrected within hours.

Comparing Fischbach and Emmer's decision to attend is the point. Same event. Same day. Same reporters. One incumbent showed up and generated a story about farm policy and their race. The other didn't, instead generating a story about his foot and not discussing the issues that matter to his district.

That is the clearest available evidence that engagement drives coverage, and it sits alongside a broader pattern. Stauber has agreed to a televised debate on WDIO on October 6 and a Duluth Chamber forum on September 29. Rep. Brad Finstad has agreed to a KAAL debate on October 13. Fischbach joined a candidate forum with her opponent in Wadena on August 27. In the Sixth District there is no scheduled debate and no joint appearance of any kind, and the congressman has not held an open in-person town hall in over a thousand days. The last was in Hamburg on August 16, 2023 — public, announced, open to any constituent who walked in. He held two telephone town halls in 2025, on April 2 and June 4, after constituents pressed for a public meeting; his own office called the June call his second of the Congress. We have found no telephone town hall announced in 2026. This count covers events his office publicizes, and does not claim he has never been in the district.

He was not immobile, and he was not unavailable. On September 3 he told talk host Jon Justice that he believed he would be at the Minnesota State Fair that weekend. The Fair drew 1,923,325 people and closed on Labor Day, September 7. We found no public record that he was one of them, after searching both of his X accounts, his campaign Facebook page, his press releases, the state party's Fair accounts, and Fair coverage from the Minnesota Reformer, Star Tribune, MPR News, KSTP, KARE 11, WCCO and FOX 9. Chapin was there for several days, and estimated he shook about a thousand hands a day. Emmer arrived in Dallas on September 8. On September 9 he spoke at the Republican midterm convention and gave three national television interviews. We documented that week in full here.

To be fair to him: the House was in session the week before Labor Day and held twelve recorded votes. No member of Congress is obligated to attend the State Fair, and an absence of record is not proof that he stayed away. But the State Fair is where Minnesota politicians go to meet voters. Nearly two million people pass through in twelve days, which is why candidates spend entire days there shaking hands. Emmer has worked it before, and posted about it — in August 2025 he wrote about a “fun day at the State Fair” with the EPA administrator. This year his opponent worked it and he did not.

What the Sixth District has not had is a venue — an announced event, open to constituents, where a reporter could ask both candidates the same question and print the difference.

Unfortunately, declining to debate is no longer unusual. FiveThirtyEight counted nineteen debates across fifteen of thirty-six Senate contests by October 18, 2022, meaning most races had held none. A Washington Examiner analysis found fewer than half of 2024 Senate races were scheduled for a general-election debate. Brookings tracked the five most competitive Senate races falling from seventeen debates in 2010 to six in 2022. Front-runners have concluded there is no penalty, and the evidence suggests they're right. A House Majority Whip's floor schedule is a genuine constraint that a rank-and-file member doesn't face. The foot surgeries were real. And this is not a partisan pattern: Reps. Betty McCollum, Ilhan Omar and Kelly Morrison have no scheduled general-election debates either. Whatever is happening here is happening across both parties.

But two things survive that defense. Fischbach sits in a safer seat than Emmer and showed up anyway, which means seat safety does not by itself explain who engages. And an absence only stays invisible if newsrooms decline to write about it. When the format of a town hall became a dispute in the First District, KTTC made that the story on September 2. In the Sixth, with a longer and better-documented record of absence, no statewide outlet has brought that up.

That is a choice on both sides of the newspaper.

Explanation FiveThe money

Below is what the campaign finance record shows, but I want to be clear that we stop short of the conclusion some readers will want us to draw.

Among Minnesota media companies, almost no political money moves at all. Gannett employees filed 1,706 itemized federal contributions nationally this cycle and not one came from Minnesota. TEGNA, which owns KARE 11, had none from Minnesota. Audacy, none. iHeartMedia's thirty-eight Minnesota records total $3,440 in payroll-deduction giving to the company's own PAC, averaging about ninety dollars apiece. The largest contribution from anyone listing the Star Tribune as an employer came from a Texas-based chairman giving to the Forward Party.

The exception is Hubbard Broadcasting, which owns KSTP.

Members of the Hubbard family gave $7,800 to Emmer-affiliated committees in the 2022 cycle, $95,600 in 2024, and $148,500 in the current cycle — a nineteenfold increase across three cycles. Other Hubbard Broadcasting employees gave separately and in small amounts, roughly $16,000 to $19,000 per cycle across scores of transactions, a figure that has not moved. Most of the current-cycle figure went to Emmer Majority Builders, a joint fundraising committee that distributes money among participating committees — this cycle it has sent $4.8 million to the NRCC, $2.2 million to Emmer's campaign, and $1.2 million to his leadership PAC. The share of any individual contribution reaching Emmer's own campaign is set by the committee's allocation formula. Separately, the family gave $12,000 directly to Emmer for Congress and $10,000 to his leadership PAC. Stanley Hubbard also gave $25,500 to the NRCC and $10,000 to the Minnesota Republican Party. The National Association of Broadcasters' PAC, which Hubbard executives fund heavily, contributed $30,000 to the joint fundraising committee.

The challenger's campaign has reported 1,485 itemized contributions. None came from anyone employed by a media company.

Every transaction behind these figures is published here, with FEC transaction identifiers and filing image numbers.

Now the necessary qualifications.

These are contributions from individuals. Corporate money to federal candidates is illegal, and Hubbard Broadcasting the company has not given Tom Emmer anything. Stanley Hubbard's Republican giving is decades old and thoroughly documented; nobody is discovering it here. American newsrooms are supposed to operate independently of their owners' politics, and most do.

And KSTP is not protecting Emmer. The station has covered him dozens of times over the past two years, including a June story built around his telling immigrants to assimilate or "go the hell back." That is not the behavior of a newsroom shielding a benefactor.

What KSTP has not done is cover the race. The challenger appears in two KSTP items, both multi-race roundups. The station also conducts its own polling with SurveyUSA — it has polled the governor's race, the Senate primaries, and in December it polled Tom Emmer's statewide job approval. It has not polled the contest Tom Emmer is standing in.

We have no evidence that the ownership's contributions influenced any editorial decision, and we are not asserting that they did. We are reporting that both facts are true at once. We put these questions to KSTP chief political reporter Tom Hauser by email on September 14 and asked for a response by September 16. We had not received one by publication. We will add any response we receive, in full.

ConclusionWhat's left

Four of the five explanations hold up. The district lost its newspaper. It sits between television markets meaning the district doesn't get a dedicated newsroom to cover it. Its incumbent has not appeared beside his opponent once. And the competitiveness logic that would justify all of it collapses the moment you notice that a district eight points safer gets the same attention.

Which leaves something more uncomfortable than any of them individually.

A race with no coverage attracts no independent polling. With no polling, the national handicappers have nothing to move. With no ratings change, editors have no reason to reassign anyone. And so the race stays uncovered. When Cook moved the First District from Solid to Likely Republican in June, coverage followed within weeks — CBS, Fox News, the Guardian, a scheduled televised debate. The system works when something jostles it.

Zooming out, what this means is that the editorial decisions may be a self-fulfilling reason that it seems like there's nothing to cover. Nobody has independently tested whether this race is close. The only person who has tried was the challenger's own pollster, and the answer was ambiguous enough to justify a second look that no one has taken. If the thing holding this race back from being competitive is the same reason that the race isn't being covered, someone needs to break the stasis.

Seven hundred fifty-five thousand people live in this district, more than in any other in Minnesota. It has grown faster than any other since the lines were drawn. Its congressman holds one of the most powerful positions in the House. In seven weeks its voters will decide whether to return him.

If a race this large can go this quiet, the question isn't really about one district. It's about what has to happen before a congressional election is considered worth covering — and who is supposed to decide.