Mike Newcomb, with Minnesota’s Forward Independent Party, talked with MPR News host Clay Masters about his newly launched gubernatorial campaign. Newcome criticized the current political system, cited his father’s political career as a Minnesota state lawmaker, highlighted his personal investment into his campaign and spoke about his stance on gun control.

A shorter version of this interview aired on All Things Considered. The following transcript is the full interview and has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What made you want to run for governor as a third-party candidate?

The real issue, honestly, and I said it in that speech, is we no longer have a government that’s by the people and for the people. It’s by the party and for their special interests. And over the years, what I’ve seen is we’ve just continually had a degradation of representation, both here in Minnesota and especially in Washington D.C.

From somebody who has a political background, meaning my father served in the legislature, I was on every campaign as a kid you could think of from Sen. David Durenberger to Sen. Rudy Boschwitz to Gov. Wendell R. Anderson. So I had that in my blood. But back then, it seemed much more civil and things got done, especially here in the legislature.

I was a Senate page back in 1990 or 1991. All of that kind of set what I thought politics was going to be. Then I see it today, and I say ‘it’s broken.’ And it’s not broken because of the people, it’s broken because of these two machines. Once you get sucked in, your willpower leaves you, and you’re now part of the machine.

That is the main driver. And I think as Minnesotans, everyone should see what’s going on and say, ‘We need a change.’ And I can’t exact that change inside the Democratic Party or inside the Republican Party, because, as I was saying, it’s the political matrix.

Tell us about the Forward Independence Party.

This is an outcropping of the old Independence Party, which Jesse [Ventura] ran under, which then turned into the Reform Party, which got no traction. And Tom Horner ran in 2010 he got 13 percent running for governor, and then it’s kind of floundered.

Now there’s a national movement of the Forward Party. Andrew Yang, with Christine Todd Whitman, Tim Penny, where they’ve decided it’s time to create a national brand. These guys aligned with the Forward Party. That’s the new brand. That’s the new message, and their plan is [to] back candidates that only want to work on behalf of the people, not parties or their special interest. We can have our own platform and our own ideas.

Running the Forward Party, is that a way to kind of break into one of the major parties?

No, I don’t have any interest in breaking into either of these major parties. The major party that I’m going to represent is you and Minnesotans. That’s the difference. The party system is broken, and I think we’re going to see a house clearing on both of these parties over the next year, and I think there’s going to be a tectonic shift in this coming election.

Pop quiz: What is one thing you think that the Republicans get right?

Public safety and how they want to tax people.

And what is one thing that the Democrats get right?

I think how they view all people, and that’s why I’m in the center. I see people for who they are. I don’t judge people, and I think the Democrats are right on that. And by the way, I have no ill will against our sitting governor. I’m just disappointed. I’m disappointed in how he’s running our state. That’s it. Not as a person — disappointed.

What do you think they get wrong? It sounds like a lot of just the institutionalization of the parties is a lot of your messaging and trying to break away from that.

I’m going to use both of the parties as this example: We right now are confronted with massive fraud in our state. You’ve been around for a little bit. This has been around for a little bit. This has been around forever. It’s so magnified because the dollar amount is so large.

But this has been a problem, and these two parties have been in charge at one time or the other and never fixed it. Now, all of a sudden, we Minnesotans are going to sit back and say they’re now going to solve the problem they created. Not going to happen.

Both chambers in at the state Capitol have razor thin majorities for each party, what do you think that says about the state of Minnesota?

What it says about the state of Minnesota is those people who are in the center, they end up plugging their nose and voting and saying, ‘hopefully no one gets in charge, because every time they do something bad really happens.’ And look where we are in the state. We are razor thin on both sides.

I use this analogy: You always have that one friend who wants to use your pickup truck to move a couch, and you kind of reluctantly go, ‘Ah, okay…’ So he takes your truck, but instead of moving a couch, he goes out, gets hammered, runs over 500 mailboxes two days later, brings your truck back. And you ask him, what happened to my truck? And he says, a mailbox has got in the way. That’s how I equate. Whoever gets in charge, they go out and run over a bunch of mailboxes and then have no restitution for it.

The Minnesota House was divided evenly, and you had the late Speaker Emeritus Melissa Hortman, and Speaker of the House, Lisa Demuth, who disagreed on so many things, but they found common ground, which was such a difference from what you see in Congress, some might say that the major parties are actually working together.

I wouldn’t disagree on that assessment of that particular situation, but what Melissa Hortman did is she realized that if anything is going to get done, somebody has to stand up and take a stand and what I’ll tell you, and horribly, it cost her her life. And that’s what politics shouldn’t be.

Not to diverge, but I’m a was very apolitical on social media. I never gave opinions because I never felt people needed to hear me. But the first post I ever made, politically related, was after she was murdered, and after her husband. I just went online, and I said, ‘for God’s sakes, we need to turn down the temperature in this state and in this country. Please, leaders, words matter, stop it.’

That’s another thing that drove me to get into this race, is we don’t have leaders that are leading. They’re just right along throwing mashed potatoes at everybody. And there’s people out there who hear that message, who hear that dog whistle as a call to arms, and they take action. We can’t have people putting that message out there.

What would be the first thing that you would set your sights on if you were elected governor of Minnesota?

Well, and I’ve said this, public safety is the tent pole for everything, because every Minnesotan deserves access, and I put quotes over my head ‘to the good life.’ But that good life starts with being safe in your home, on your streets and in our cities.

So public safety number one, we’re going to put together a public safety summit within the first 60 days. It’s going to include law enforcement, it’s going to include judicial and it’s going to include policymakers. We’re going to go in there. It’s going to be a political free zone. We have to figure out a short term solution for the crime we have right now and then a framework for long term. [And] how do we now address juvenile crime?

But we can’t address that when these two parties come together, because they, always have, don’t want to give a win to anybody. I want everyone to win. So we’re going to come out with some solutions and some people say, ‘I don’t agree,’ and other people say, ‘I agree.’ Well then we won, because the Minnesotans will win.

Is there anybody in politics that you look up to or that you see as a positive influence?

I’m less overall attuned to modern day politicians, simply because, like most people, we ended up tuning out. People I looked up to number one was my dad. My dad served in the legislature, and when he ran, there was no party designation. He ran as Tom Newcome from the north side of town. But when he came [in], he had to caucus, and he chose the conservative caucus and in that, but they all got along. So my first political hero would be my dad, because he was a true independent and he got out of office when Wendell Anderson changed the rules in 1973 that moving forward, you now had to have a party designator.

I liked Governor Rudy Perpich. You know why? He loved Minnesota, and he helped formulate Voyageurs National Park, and my dad was a big part of that.

I liked Sen. Rudy Boschwitz. Sen. Boschwitz was a Minnesotan, I mean, today they’d call him a independent probably. Gov. Wendell Anderson was a great Minnesotan, and here’s why: he loved hockey. And most Minnesotans don’t know this, [if] you go to any ice rink in the cities, like Biff Adams Arena or White Bear Arena, that’s Wendell Anderson. He got the money, and he got the legislature to fund it so that inner city people could play hockey.

I’m an old President Ronald Reagan guy, and you know why? Because he had great wit and he had great quotes. Did I agree with all of his politics today? Probably not. But those are the people I liked, and he was civil.

We noticed your graphic that shows you in a superhero pose. That’s not lost on us that Jesse Ventura made action figures a big feature of his 1998 campaign, are you taking some cues from that?

Yes, and no. That was me pretending to be Neo from The Matrix. That was the kind of thing there. And because, as an independent candidate, I’m not taking any zero special interest money or PAC money. We’re probably not going to have money to make action figures, unless Minnesotans want to throw money my direction for me to make the action figures.

Unlike the other parties, who may be spending between ten and $15 million each, most of the money is going to come from everyday Minnesotans. And I’m putting skin in the game.

What is that skin in the game going to look like between now and November of 2026?

I say this humbly, because I don’t want to be tone deaf, and I want people to understand I worked hard. I used to own a cleaning company. I’m not some high flying Wall Street executive. I’ve already invested $100,000 into the campaign, and I’ve committed next year, I’m gonna drop in another $100,000.

And I’ll tell you, that came out on these articles, and people said, ‘well, another rich, tone deaf idiot.’ I’m like, you don’t even know me. I cleaned toilets. I stayed up till two in the morning picking up wire nuts in commercial buildings that your mom and dad worked in. When my wife grew up, her dad died at 16, they couldn’t even afford the funeral.

So I’m not out of touch. I’m exactly in touch. I just have been lucky, and I built a successful business, and I earned some money, and now I’m willing to invest it back in Minnesota and in the people. So my goal is, that I’ll put in my money and I sure hope Minnesotans say that guy’s ‘got skin in the game. I like his message. Seems like a nice guy can’t do any worse than what we have’ and they throw me a buck.

Tell me a story about yourself that speaks to your personality.

So I have a personality. I think you can get that from here. I talk loud and I tend to talk fast, but one thing about me is, I don’t and I’ve never sought credit for stuff. I’ve always done things behind the scenes, which is hard because now you’re running for public office, and everyone asks me, ‘what do you do in the community? What have you done?’ I could think of a thousand things I did, and no one knows, and I never told a soul.

When I owned my company, we would give away probably 150 to 250 cleanings a year for cancer patients, for people who had a family member die. There was a sad situation where a young couple lost their son, and a group of people put money together and said, ‘hey, we want to buy them a month’s worth of cleaning.’ I cleaned their house for five years for free.

So that should tell you, and I don’t even want to have to say it, but that should tell you a little bit about my personality. We support our school and no one knows. We support the STEM program and no one knows. I support people who can’t afford their groceries and no one knows.

I don’t care if you tell them this or not. It doesn’t matter to me, but that’s what should speak to my character.

Where do you come down on the issue of guns as this is something that is obviously being talked a lot about here in the halls of the Capitol?

When the governor called for that session, that was political theater. He fully knew nothing was going to come of that, but he can now use it in his campaign ads. I think common sense Minnesotans are open to a discussion on and I’m again quotes over my head, “assault type rifles”, rifles with high-capacity magazines.

And I use this as an analogy, we require truck drivers who are going to drive 18 wheelers to go out and take a course and get training and get a CDL — commercial driver’s license — because everyone knows that’s a large, dangerous piece of equipment that could cause carnage on our roads. Why wouldn’t common sense Minnesotans say these particular types of weaponry are dangerous and in the wrong hands could car could cause carnage in our cities?

Why wouldn’t we have tougher backgrounds? I talked to hunters, I talked to Second Amendment people who are rabid, and they say, ‘makes sense to me. Mike, no one needs to walk in and get a gun 20 seconds later and walk out the door.’ These are Second Amendment hardcore people, and they say that’s a common sense solution.

I believe that we shouldn’t restrict law abiding, hard working people to be able to possess a firearm. But there’s a common sense way to ensure we can do it safely without impeding on their Second Amendment.

What am I missing here in my line of questioning that you feel it’s important to bring up about your campaign or the work that you have in front of you between now and next November.

The one thing I want people to know is, and I would ask is that the media give us the same access they give to the Democrats and to the Republicans. If I’m a valid candidate, and I have a good messaging, and I’m not a crackpot — because there’s been a lot of independent people out there that are go off the rails — allow me the opportunity to give my message to the people.

I need equal access because my message is clear and good Minnesotans want to hear this.