Thuba Nguyen, 36, is running for mayor of Coon Rapids, one of the largest cities in Anoka County. If Nguyen wins, she would be the second woman to be mayor of the city and first person of color to have that seat.
Nguyen is running against City Council Member Pat Carlson, a retired Coon Rapids police officer who also serves as the city’s mayor pro tem. On his website, Carlson says his priorities include public safety, fiscal responsibility, business growth and community outreach.
Nguyen is running on issues of economic development in the city, growing public safety concerns, housing instability and youth engagement.
In the August primary, Carlson received 60% of the vote. According to campaign finance reports, Carlson reported $3,755 cash on hand at the end of July. Nguyen told Sahan Journal in September that she had raised $3,565 since filing for office in June, primarily from individual small donations.
From early childhood education to politics
Nguyen was born in Vietnam. Her maternal grandfather was an African American soldier in the Vietnam war, and she came to the United States with her family in 1991 under the U.S. Amerasian Homecoming Act. Nguyen’s family moved to Sioux Falls, S.D., where she lived until she was 19.
Nguyen moved to Coon Rapids in 2019, and soon got involved in local government by serving on the city’s Arts Commission. She says that experience was short-lived because the commission didn’t seem ready for new perspectives.
Her decision to run for office was spurred by disappointment and concern over what she called an unsupportive and offensive response by the City Council and Mayor Jerry Koch to the worries of residents during Operation Metro Surge.
In an interview with the New York Times in January, Koch said, “I get emails that say, ‘ICE has been spotted three times in town today, here at this house, at this house, that house. ’It’s like, ‘Oh, come on, get off whatever tracking site you’re on and put the whistles away.’”
Koch is not running for re-election.
Nguyen’s professional background spans education, communications, public policy and politics. She is also a children’s book author. Her work in early education was centered on increasing children’s literacy, particularly in multilingual homes. Nguyen has also been a daycare center director and curriculum designer for culturally inclusive learning.
Nguyen now serves as a communications specialist for the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) at the Minnesota House of Representatives, where she works on behalf of the People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus, the Minnesota Queer Legislators Caucus, and the United Black Legislators Caucus, in addition to nine members of the DFL House Caucus.
She finds that many of those who come to the Capitol advocating for change are there “because something devastating and heartbreaking has happened and affected their lives, and this is their opportunity to turn their pain into purpose. It is our absolute obligation to ensure that we are listening with intent, and deliver on policies that improve their lives,” Nguyen said.
DFL state Rep. Esther Agbaje, who represents a district covering parts of downtown and north Minneapolis, said Nguyen is talented at “taking a lot of different perspectives to come up with a way forward, especially with a caucus as huge as ours. She was getting input from a lot of different people at a lot of different times. I hope that she can take some of those skills, in addition to skills that she has as an author [and] as speaker, to her role as the future mayor of Coon Rapids.”
Agbaje said that Nguyen’s broad community connections have been an asset to the members and caucuses she works for.
“If people are looking for a mayor that will help move things forward, if there’s been a project that Coon Rapids has been waiting on doing and hasn’t found someone who has the energy to do it yet, I think Thuba is going to be the candidate for them,” she said.
Shortly after filing to run for office in June, Nguyen took a leave of absence from the Legislature to focus on campaigning. To make ends meet, Nguyen picked up work at the Wayzata Bar and Grill, a city-owned restaurant where she’s worked on and off since 2016.
Politics started early
Nguyen’s resilience was often tested throughout her childhood and early adulthood. During her earliest days in college at Rasmussen University, “My sister and I were homeless, and we had to couch-surf from this house to that house. I had to make very tough decisions for my survival at a very young age. I have a full understanding of how housing insecurity can happen so quickly,” she said.
Nguyen received her associate’s degree with a focus on special needs, and a bachelor’s degree in leadership from the early childhood education program at Rasmussen.
As a child, Nguyen saw her father start work at 5 a.m. at a meat-packing company and her mother work overnight shifts at a local newspaper company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She remembers relying on free and reduced lunch and school supply giveaways, and realizing early that her classmates in English as a second language classes would be future translators for their parents.
“My whole life has just been very political,” she said.
Writing and understanding language has been the throughline for Nguyen, a skill that is fueling new connections in her campaign across Coon Rapids.
“I think it’s a reclamation and a powerful tool. It’s been so influential to my life and the work that I do, because language connects us all,” she said.
Nguyen’s campaign issues
Nguyen says her candidacy represents a growing diversity in Coon Rapids that includes people from East Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.
She wants to address the lack of affordable housing and new housing for residents on fixed incomes, and she sees a need for an equitable approach to hiring police officers who more closely match the city’s demographics.
She said the city must be fiscally responsible so that it can invest in the needs of the community, including “mental health, housing, transportation and connectivity, and spaces and places to go, particularly for our youth. If we are not truly being responsible with the purse, we are not going to be able to invest and develop in any of these projects to give back to our community.”
Nguyen also wants to foster policies that allow residents to participate in building the local economy. She said there are more “for lease” signs than “open” signs in the city’s busiest corridor.
“You see the economic development resiliency from the cities around us, but yet we don’t see the same here in Coon Rapids. If you don’t have what you need in your community, you leave it and you go spend your money elsewhere,” she said.
As she knocks on doors throughout the city, Nguyen says, residents have expressed concern about Flock cameras, civil liberties, and the city’s role in immigration enforcement.
Campaign strategy
To win, Nguyen says, “We are going to try to get to at least 16,000 doors.”
Amanda Jones, 46, a longtime friend of Nguyen’s, is the director of alternative and online programming in the Southwest Metro Intermediate School District. She has previously taught in the Anoka-Hennepin district and has watched diversity grow.
“Coon Rapids High School is one of the most diverse high schools in the Anoka-Hennepin district right now. I think that would be huge for that community if Thuba won,” Jones said. “She’s not running with a campaign team; she has people that love her and support her that are doing that. … It’s pretty incredible the work that she’s put into this.”
Overcoming harassment
In September, the City Council had a proposal before them to discuss combining two charter schools and a mosque in part of the former Family Center Mall.
Nguyen recounts being accosted as she went to the City Council meeting where the conditional-use proposal would be discussed. She said her account of the conflict in a now deleted video, was shared on a heckler’s social media platforms, along with false claims about her. “From there, fake accounts were created in my name on X, I received aggressive direct messages, my comments were spammed with hateful messages, and one woman even said she would confront me at the next City Council meeting,” Nguyen said. “It stole my joy and instilled fear in me.”
Nguyen says only one City Council member has addressed the situation; she said Carlson, her opponent for mayor, has not commented on the matter even though he was at the meeting.
To those who use such tactics, she says: “You want to just attack who I am and what I look like. But that’s not making your gas less expensive. That’s not putting more food on your table. That’s not helping you pay your rent.”
Nguyen remains determined to focus not on the wider political narrative, but on issues that matter to residents: “I still care if you can keep your roof over your head and if you’re thriving in the city.”
