Brandon King (Minnesota)
Brandon King (Democratic Party) is running for election to the Minnesota House of Representatives to represent District 20A. He declared candidacy for the 2026 election.[source]
King completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Brandon King was born in Merced, California. King earned a high school diploma from Atwater High School and attended Merced College. His career experience includes working as a laborer, trucker, and entrepreneur.[1]
Elections
2026
See also: Minnesota House of Representatives elections, 2026
General election
The general election will occur on November 3, 2026.
General election for Minnesota House of Representatives District 20A
Brandon King is running in the general election for Minnesota House of Representatives District 20A on November 3, 2026.
Candidate | ||
 | Brandon King (D)  | |
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Endorsements
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Campaign themes
2026
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Brandon King completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by King's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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That’s why my platform is built on Space and Time, two things working people are always robbed of. My Minnesota Housing Sovereignty Act will guarantee affordable, occupant-owned housing through Sovereign Homes, modern, 3D-printed, sustainable homes that take speculation out of shelter. My Minnesota Workweek Liberation Act will shorten the workweek as automation expands, freeing Minnesotans to spend more of their lives with family, community, and creativity instead of endless grind.
I’m not a career politician. I’m someone who understands firsthand what it feels like to be trapped by rent, debt, and overwork, and I believe we can build a Minnesota where every person has the freedom to thrive.- We stand at a crossroads between Enlightenment and Endarkenment. The Enlightenment gave us liberty, equality, and reason, values that empower people to live with dignity. But today, the ruling class pushes a feudal Endarkenment of fear, division, and authoritarian control dressed up as “normal.” I believe Minnesota can lead by reviving Enlightenment ideals for the 21st century. That means building systems rooted in liberty, justice, and solidarity instead of exploitation and despair. The choice is stark, a future where people are free to flourish, or one where they’re trapped by debt, overwork, and corporate domination. Our campaign is about choosing Enlightenment.
- Every Minnesotan deserves the security of a home, not the uncertainty of a landlord’s whim or Wall Street’s speculation. That’s why I’m fighting for Housing Sovereignty through the Minnesota Housing Sovereignty Act. This plan will build Sovereign Homes, modern, sustainable, 3D-printed houses that are publicly managed but individually owned by the people who live in them. These homes would take housing out of the speculative market and return it to its true purpose: shelter, stability, and freedom. When housing is secure, people can focus on living their lives, raising their families, and building their communities. Home is the foundation of liberty.
- For too long, working people have been told that endless grind is inevitable, even as technology creates more wealth than ever before. My Minnesota Workweek Liberation Act begins reversing that. We’ll cut the workweek to 32 hours by 2031, and to 16 hours by 2040, aligning labor with automation and productivity gains. This isn’t just about shorter hours, it’s about reclaiming life. Time to rest, to create, to be with family, to dream. A future of abundance is possible if we demand it. The wealth of automation must serve the people, not just the shareholders. Work should be a choice, not a life sentence. Time is freedom, and liberation means giving Minnesotans both.
From Thomas Paine, I take the spirit of the Enlightenment, the belief that reason, liberty, and equality can guide humanity toward a freer, more just society. He spoke truth to power in plain language, arming ordinary people with the conviction that they could shape their own destiny.
From Mikhail Bakunin, I take the lesson that liberty cannot survive without resistance to authoritarianism. He understood that freedom is not given, it is built and defended by the people themselves.
From Buckminster Fuller, I take the vision of design as a tool of liberation. He saw that technology and systems could be harnessed not for profit, but to make life better for everyone. He believed we could “do more with less” and design a world where scarcity was unnecessary.
From Jacque Fresco, I take the blueprint of a post-scarcity society, where technology and infrastructure create abundance as a baseline condition. His work showed me that politics should not only react to problems, but design solutions that make the problems obsolete.
And from Bernie Sanders, I take the example of persistence. For decades, he stood almost alone in Congress, telling the same truth that government must work for ordinary people, not billionaires. His consistency proves that integrity can withstand the tides of politics.
Another core principle is courage. It is easy to go along with the way things have always been done, to bow to the entrenched power structures that benefit from the status quo. But courage means standing up against those forces when they harm ordinary people. It means being willing to risk political comfort to defend justice, equality, and freedom.
Finally, I believe an elected official must embody the principle of stewardship. The choices we make today will shape not only our present but the inheritance of future generations. From the way we manage housing to how we respond to automation, we must think in terms of decades and centuries, not just the next election cycle. A true public servant is a steward of the future as much as of the present.
A legislator must act as both a representative of their district and a guardian of the larger public good. Representation means listening deeply to constituents, not only to those with the loudest voices or deepest pockets, but to the workers, renters, and families who often go unheard. Guardianship means resisting the influence of moneyed interests that treat government as a tool for profit rather than a vehicle for justice.
Another responsibility is foresight. Laws are not just about today’s problems, they set the foundation for tomorrow’s possibilities. A responsible legislator must anticipate the pressures of automation, climate change, and demographic shifts, and act to shape outcomes in favor of the people rather than leaving them at the mercy of corporate or authoritarian power.
Finally, the office carries the responsibility of building trust. In an era where faith in government has been eroded, a legislator must demonstrate by action that public institutions can work for ordinary people. That trust is built through transparency, accessibility, and a commitment to outcomes that tangibly improve lives.
That means housing that cannot be taken away by speculation, workweeks designed to give people time to live rather than grind, and institutions that generate stability instead of crisis. Liberation Infrastructure would guarantee that tyranny never again finds fertile ground, because the structures of daily life themselves would resist it.
It was my first encounter with the reality that history is not just something you read about in books, it’s something that explodes into your life without warning. The world shifted that day, and even as a child, I could feel it. Suddenly there was a new atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and nationalism. Policies like the PATRIOT Act were rolled out, wars were launched, and civil liberties were quietly eroded, all under the justification of security.
I did that work for about two or three years. It left an impression that has never left me, the sheer human cost of treating housing as a commodity rather than a right. I carried furniture out of houses that had once held families’ dreams, scrubbed walls where children had grown up, and watched as empty homes were cycled back into the same broken system that had created the foreclosure crisis in the first place.
That job was not just work, it was an education. It showed me that the failures of policy are not abstract. They show up in the lives of ordinary people, in the stress lines on a parent’s face, in the displacement of communities, in the erosion of stability. It taught me that when politicians deregulate banks, or look the other way as speculation runs wild, the consequences fall hardest on those least able to absorb the blow.
What I love about the series is how it shows ordinary people rising to extraordinary challenges. The demons are terrifying, but the real battles are often within human society itself, between those who would exploit fear to consolidate control and those who would stand together to resist. That tension resonates with our own world, where authoritarianism and corporate power thrive on fear and division.
Over time, I learned that the reality did not match the image. The man I once admired revealed himself not as a liberator, but as another oligarch, someone who hoarded wealth and power rather than distributing them, someone who chose to use influence to undermine democracy instead of strengthen it. That disillusionment was painful, but it also clarified something important for me, the person I wanted Musk to be does not yet exist.
For me, precarity has taken many forms. As a trucker, it meant weeks away from home, living in fear that one accident or one health issue could end my livelihood. As a janitor, it means hard physical work for modest pay, knowing that the wealth I help maintain flows upward to corporations, not to the workers who keep everything running.
The governor is charged with leading the executive branch, setting a vision for the state, and ensuring the laws are faithfully carried out. The legislature is charged with representing the diverse voices of Minnesotans and crafting the laws that reflect their will. Ideally, this relationship should not be one of constant conflict, nor of blind deference, but of principled collaboration.
At times, the legislature must act as a check on the governor, preventing executive overreach and ensuring that policy reflects the will of the people rather than the preferences of one officeholder. At other times, the legislature must partner with the governor to move ambitious reforms forward, recognizing that real change requires both legislative action and executive leadership.
This balance depends on communication and transparency. The governor should not treat the legislature as an obstacle, and legislators should not treat the governor as an adversary. Instead, both should view each other as partners in the shared responsibility of stewarding Minnesota’s future. Disagreements are inevitable, but they must be rooted in principle rather than partisanship.
The Endarkenment is not just a political mood, it is a deliberate effort by the ruling class to roll back the gains of the Enlightenment. They want to normalize precarity, surveillance, and corporate domination as the natural order of things. Left unchecked, that will mean a generation of Minnesotans raised to believe that endless rent, endless debt, and endless grind are all they can hope for.
At the same time, automation is transforming the economy. Machines and algorithms are already producing enormous wealth, but instead of freeing people, that wealth is being hoarded by the few. If we don’t legislate proactively, Minnesotans will face rising unemployment, stagnant wages, and vanishing work hours without the compensating freedom that automation should deliver.
And of course, climate change is already reshaping our state, from flooding farmland to stressing our infrastructure. The question is whether we will respond with foresight and resilience, or whether we will let denial and short-term profit leave us unprepared.
I come from the working class. I was a trucker, and today I am a hotel janitor. My experience is not in navigating committees, it is in living the struggles most Minnesotans know all too well. Long hours, rising bills, and the constant pressure of precarity. That perspective is exactly what is missing from our legislature.
Of course, experience in governance can provide useful skills. But skills can be learned. What cannot be faked is authenticity. When a legislator has lived the reality of ordinary Minnesotans, they don’t need pollsters to tell them what matters. They don’t need lobbyists to explain how policy affects real lives. They know it because they’ve lived it.
But at the end of the day, my mission is not to be liked by colleagues at the Capitol, it is to liberate the working class. If building relationships means compromising away the core of that mission, then I am prepared to stand alone. I have no problem going to the mattresses if that’s what it takes. When I push for Sovereign Homes or for a shorter workweek, and another legislator tells me we can’t afford it, my response will be to put the onus back on them. Why should Minnesotans pay half a million dollars over a lifetime to parasites in the landlord and banking class, when we can provide actual material freedom for under $100,000 through publicly managed, occupant-owned housing? Why should families sacrifice their lives to endless labor, when automation makes abundance possible?
Bernie Sanders embodies that same spirit in our own time. For decades he was dismissed as a fringe voice, and yet by sticking to his values, he shifted the political landscape of an entire generation. He has shown that consistency, honesty, and a refusal to play by the shallow rules of political branding can move millions of people.
What I take from both men is not just policy inspiration, but a way of doing politics. They remind us that the measure of a leader is not how many friends they have in the halls of power, but how faithfully they represent those who have been denied power. They remind us that politics at its best is not a career, but an act of service and struggle.
In that spirit, I intend to throw my hat in the ring for the Presidency of the United States in 2036. That may sound audacious, but to me it is simply a continuation of the same mission I am beginning here in Minnesota: to build Liberation Infrastructure that secures housing, time, and freedom for every person. The Presidency offers a platform to put those ideas into practice at a national level, and to lead the country toward a post-scarcity future rooted in Enlightenment principles.
Between now and then, my focus is on serving Minnesotans faithfully, proving that bold ideas can be turned into concrete policy, and demonstrating that politics can be about more than crisis management, it can be about creating the conditions of liberty. If the people trust me with higher office in the years ahead, I will accept that responsibility with humility and determination.
I believe the governor should have the authority to act quickly in the opening hours or days of a crisis, whether it’s a natural disaster, a pandemic, or a security threat, but continued use of extraordinary powers should require legislative approval. That ensures that no single officeholder can unilaterally decide the fate of millions without oversight.
The legislature, as the body closest to the people, must be a co-equal partner in determining how long emergency powers are maintained, how broadly they are applied, and when they are lifted. This doesn’t mean hamstringing the executive branch. It means reinforcing that liberty and security are not opposites, they must be pursued together.
The Housing Sovereignty Act would establish Sovereign Homes, publicly managed, occupant-owned, 3D-printed, Earthship inspired sustainable off-grid capable housing designed to end the cycle of speculation and precarity. These homes would not be rentals in the traditional sense. They would belong to the people who live in them, secured against displacement, and insulated from the distortions of Wall Street investment firms and absentee landlords.
By removing housing from the speculative market, we would slash lifetime housing costs. Instead of families paying half a million dollars over decades to private parasites, they would pay under $100,000 total for actual material freedom. This is not just about affordability, it’s about sovereignty. It’s about ensuring every Minnesotan has a stable foundation on which to build their lives.
Minnesotans deserve more than a government that listens selectively; they deserve one that allows their collective voice to directly shape the law. Ballot initiatives provide a check on the legislature, ensuring that deeply popular reforms cannot be permanently blocked by partisan gridlock, corporate influence, or entrenched interests.
Critics often argue that initiatives can be hijacked by special interests with money to spend. That risk is real, but it already exists in our current system, where lobbyists and donors hold enormous sway over legislators. The solution is not to deny the people a voice, but to build transparency and fairness into the process, clear rules for signatures, campaign finance limits, and accessible ballot language.
A ballot initiative process empowers citizens to put urgent issues, like housing, healthcare, or climate action, directly before voters. It keeps democracy alive by making sure the legislature is not the sole gatekeeper of change.
If elected, I would push for legislation that guarantees universal access to the ballot. That means automatic voter registration at age 18, same-day registration, and no-excuse absentee voting as a permanent right. It also means ensuring every community, urban, rural, and tribal, has polling places that are accessible, adequately staffed, and open long enough to serve every voter without forcing them to wait in hours-long lines.
I would also support secure, publicly funded upgrades to our voting systems to guarantee both integrity and trust. Democracy cannot be outsourced to private contractors with opaque software; Minnesotans deserve a voting system that is transparent, verifiable, and accountable to the public.
Finally, I would back legislation that makes Election Day a state holiday, paid if possible, because no one should have to choose between earning a paycheck and exercising their most basic democratic right.
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Campaign finance summary
Campaign finance information for this candidate is not yet available from OpenSecrets. That information will be published here once it is available.
See also
2026 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 3, 2025
