Rudolph Ely "Rudy" Boschwitz (born November 7, 1930) is a former Independent-Republican United States Senator from Minnesota. He served in the Senate from December 1978 to January 1991, in the 96th, 97th, 98th, 99th, 100th, and 101st congresses. He was then defeated by Paul Wellstone.

Boschwitz was born in Berlin, Germany, November 7, 1930, the son of Lucy (née Dawidowicz) and Eli Boschwitz. In 1933, when he was three years old, his Jewish family fled from Nazi Germany to the United States, settling in New Rochelle, New York, where he grew up. A graduate of The Pennington School, he attended Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, graduated from the New York University Stern School of Business in 1950, and the New York University School of Law in 1953.

He was admitted to the New York State bar in 1954 and the Wisconsin bar in 1959. He served in the United States Army Signal Corps 1954–1955. He was the founder and chairman of a plywood and Home Improvement retailer, Plywood Minnesota, which later became Home Valu Interiors.^{[dead link]}

Rudolph George "Rudy" Perpich, Sr. (June 27, 1928 – September 21, 1995) was an American politician and the longest-serving governor of Minnesota. A member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he served as the 34th and 36th Governor of Minnesota from December 29, 1976 to January 4, 1979, and from January 3, 1983, to January 7, 1991. He was also the state's only Roman Catholic governor and the only one to serve non-consecutive terms. Before entering politics, he was a dentist.

Rudolph George Prpić was born in Carson Lake, Minnesota, which is now part of Hibbing, Minnesota. His father, Anton Prpić, was a miner who had immigrated from Croatia to the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, and his mother was an American of Croatian descent. Perpich did not learn to speak English until at least the first grade of elementary school. At 14, he began working for the Great Northern Railway. In 1946, he graduated from Hibbing High School (where he was inaugurated as governor in 1983) and went on to serve in the United States Army for two years. After Army service, he attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and graduated from the Marquette University Dental School in 1954. He returned to Hibbing to practice dentistry.

Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was a two-term U.S. Senator from the state of Minnesota and member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is affiliated with the national Democratic Party. Before being elected to the Senate in 1990, he was a professor of political science at Carleton College. Wellstone was a progressive and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash, 11 days before the 2002 U.S. Senate election in which he was running for a third term. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.

Wellstone was born in Washington D.C. to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Leon and Minnie Wellstone, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. Originally, his family name was Wexelstein, but his father changed the name to Wellstone in the 1930s when he encountered virulent anti-semitism. He attended Yorktown High School in Arlington. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) on a wrestling scholarship. He was an undefeated Atlantic Coast Conference wrestling champion. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a degree in political science in three years.

Michele Marie Bachmann (pronounced /ˈbɑːkmən/; née Amble; born April 6, 1956) is an American Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Minnesota's 6th congressional district, a post she has held since 2007. The district includes several of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, such as Woodbury, and Blaine as well as Stillwater and St. Cloud.

She was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, winning the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011 but dropping out in January 2012 after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. Bachmann previously served in the Minnesota State Senate and is the first Republican woman to represent the state in Congress. She is a supporter of the Tea Party movement and a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus.

Bachmann was born Michele Marie Amble in Waterloo, Iowa "into a family of Norwegian Lutheran Democrats"; her family moved from Iowa to Minnesota when she was 13 years old. After her parents divorced, Bachmann's father, David John Amble, moved to California, and Bachmann was raised by her mother, Arlene Jean (née Johnson), who worked at the First National Bank in Anoka, Minnesota. Her mother remarried when Bachmann was a teenager; the new marriage resulted in a family with nine children.