Bagley Resident Emily Thabes Enters Race for Minnesota House District 2B
BAGLEY, Minn. -- Emily Thabes, a Clearwater County resident since March 2020 and Executive Director of the Beltrami County Historical Society, announced today that she is running for the Minnesota House of Representatives in District 2B. She will challenge Republican incumbent Matt Bliss in November.
"This is about showing up, building trust, and honoring the obligations that already exist. Every community in this district has experienced elders, passionate youth, emboldened changemakers, strategic leaders, and everyday working moms and dads with problems that need solving. They deserve a representative who will pay attention, build relationships, remove roadblocks, and get work done to the benefit of the greater community and its future generations."
— Emily Thabes
Thabes has served as Executive Director of the Beltrami County Historical Society since 2021, managing day-to-day operations, staff, and a six-figure exhibition renovation while writing and administering state and federal grants. She has secured more than $500,000 in grants for the organization and oversees ongoing partnerships with the City of Bemidji, Beltrami County, tribal entities, schools, and regional community organizations. Before moving to northern Minnesota, she led adult services and programming across 42 Hennepin County Library branches. She has managed multi-million-dollar budgets and led teams of up to 35 people dispersed across six states.
District 2B spans portions of Becker, Beltrami, Cass, Clearwater, Hubbard, Itasca, and Mahnomen counties, with an unemployment rate nearly double the state average. A federal Superfund site at Cass Lake, the only one wholly within a reservation in EPA Region 5, has been spreading for 40 years while the EPA projects cleanup may extend well beyond 2051. Itasca County ranks among the highest in the state for property tax burden and among the lowest for median household income. Mahnomen County, home to the White Earth Nation, has a 37 percent poverty rate and the 47th-worst broadband coverage of any Minnesota county. Greater Minnesota is short 42,581 childcare slots. The December 2025 federal funding freeze cut access for an additional 23,000 Minnesota children statewide, in a region where northeast Minnesota already holds the highest job vacancy rate in the state.
Matt Bliss has held this seat for most of the past decade. In that time, district unemployment has stayed nearly double the state average, the Superfund site in Cass Lake has kept spreading, and a Mahnomen hospital and a Cass Lake fire station that Bliss introduced as bills are still sitting in committee. This district does not have a representation problem. It has a results problem. Thabes says the job is not to introduce legislation and move on. It is to build the relationships that make things possible, know what funding exists, and see the work through.
"I've spent my whole life showing up for the communities I'm part of. Filing for this race is a choice to demand our district's fair share. Neither families, farms, nor fish can survive on our current trajectory. Democracy starts locally, and this community needs someone to show up."
— Emily Thabes
The district includes the White Earth Nation and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Thabes says the treaties those nations signed with the United States are the supreme law of the land, and that meeting those obligations is not a political position. It is a legal requirement. She says tribal and non-tribal communities across the district face the same healthcare, housing, broadband, and workforce shortages, and that the solutions to those problems require working across jurisdictional lines, not around them. Her platform treats the district's economies, resort, agriculture, tribal enterprise, and outdoor recreation, as a system built on the same shared land and water.
Thabes is seeking the DFL endorsement for District 2B. The 2026 general election is November 3. The Minnesota House is currently tied 67-67, and every seat determines majority control. Candidate filing opens May 19 and closes June 2 with the Minnesota Secretary of State.