Jason Heaser is the DFL candidate running for Minnesota House District 34A. An army veteran and prosecutor, Heaser is hoping to flip 34A, which has been held by Republicans for over 15 years (article continues below).
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34A is a growth area encompassing Champlin, Dayton, and Rogers. According to Heaser, its population has been growing due to younger families looking for good school districts and to upgrade to a larger home.
Heaser recently spoke with a resident who said she had lived in Rogers since “it was just nothing but fields.”
She went on to tell Heaser, “It’s really nice that so many people want to live out here because it tells me that we have a good town and people want to keep living here.
For the army veteran that was a good sign. “She’s like, ‘Progress is progress and this is good.’ So it was fantastic,” Heaser said.
From Ramen Noodles to Active Duty to Prosecutor
Heaser first enlisted in the Army Reserve at 17. His first semester in college was not what he had expected.
“I found myself eating ramen almost every day. I was working third shift in a bottle factory,” he said. “We lived in an apartment where we kept track of how many mice we killed and I was like, ‘Hey, I need to figure something else out with my life here.'”
He chose to go active duty and the Army deployed him to Kuwait, where he was stationed on Sept. 11, 2001. To become a military officer, he earned an ROTC scholarship and then attended the University of Notre Dame law school. He returned to the Army to serve as a judge advocate. That included a deployment to Afghanistan, where he investigated and prosecuted allegations of detainee abuse at Bagram Airfield.
“It was my job to ensure that our service members over there were treating people humanely with dignity and respect,” he said.
When he returned to the U.S., he served as a criminal prosecutor in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office before joining the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office as a felony prosecutor.
“I have a lot of pride in what we can do as Americans, and I feel that service in wanting to be able to give that back,” Heaser said. “And so that’s my primary driver in why I’m running.”
Part of his ethos includes his own paraphrase of a quote attributed to NASA, “It will not fail because of me. Because of me, it will not fail.”
Heaser wants to bring his prosecutorial mindset to the Legislature. He believes that feelings and impressions don’t win cases — rather it’s evidence.
“We have to present evidence,” Heaser said. “We have to have experts come up and testify. I’m not going to be making decisions based on how I feel, [or] based on a couple of things that I’ve heard, but based upon the evidence that I have and the case that I can bring.”
Supporting Labor, Holding AI Accountable
We spoke with Heaser the day after Labor Day. He compared the economic situation facing workers today to the Gilded Age when it was unions that ensured worker protections and equitable compensation.
“They’re the reason that we have Labor Day. They’re the reason we don’t have 12-hour work days,” he said. “They’re the reason my kids are at school as opposed to working a job right now.”
He said collective power, as provided through unions, is needed to meet the moment.
“If you have a billion dollar corporation, 15 people aren’t going to be able to do much,” he said. “But if you can gather and bring parity into the relationship, that’s how you even things out.”
In the Attorney General’s office, Heaser teaches about law enforcement on the internet and crimes against children. He said that recent victories are only a first step because they are legal settlements, not law.
“We need to put those things into statute,” he said. “We need to expand that to include AI companies as well as other social media companies.”
Heaser said that he considers social media and AI as products and should legally be treated as such.
“If you’re driving your car down the road and a wheel falls off and you get hurt, you can sue that car company, right?” Heaser said. “If you follow the directions of an AI bot and you get hurt because they negligently created the AI bot and they didn’t put safety measures in place, you can’t sue them. What is that? You should absolutely be able to go after them.”
Heaser called out Elon Musk’s xAI which is fighting Minnesota’s recently passed ban on nudification technology. When Musk announced the lawsuit, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told AP News, “I know that using AI to generate nude images of people against their will is appalling. There are plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy. This is not one of them. AI nudification robs the target of their dignity and can cause immense harm on an emotional, personal, and professional level.”
Message To LGBTQ Voters in 34A
Heaser expects some voters may read his biography and then expect a conservative view point when it comes to LGBTQ rights.
“I’ve been a Catholic my entire life and some people think of that and they get concerned about that,” he said. “But I have been a pro-choice, pro-rights Catholic my entire life.”
He said that this was reflected when he attended Notre Dame as a pro-choice, pro-rights student. It “led to a lot of discussions” which he claims strengthened his positions.
“Our love and God’s love is for everyone,” Heaser said. “You can’t point it out to me where God would take that love away in any sense. So absolutely, I’m going to stand in the breach and protect all those rights as much as I can.”
To learn more about Heaser and his campaign, visit heaserforhouse.com.
