The new congressman from the 3rd District is Erik Paulsen, a Republican elected in 2008 to succeed his retiring former boss, Republican Rep. Jim Ramstad. Raised in the Twin City suburbs, Paulsen was the oldest of four children. He attended nearby St. Olaf College, where he met his wife, Kelly, in a math class. After graduation, Paulsen followed a lifelong dream to work a summer in Yellowstone National Park, then returned to the Twin Cities to begin a career in marketing. He later took a job in Ramstad’s Washington office, where he worked for a year and a half before returning to Minnesota as the director of Ramstad’s district office. In 1995, he was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, rising to majority leader in 2003. He was a leading supporter of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s no-new-taxes pledge. While in the Legislature, Paulsen also worked as a business analyst for the Minneapolis-based Target Corp.

Paulsen announced his candidacy for Ramstad’s seat in January 2008. He faced no competition for the nomination and got an early fundraising lead. Democratic newcomer Ashwin Madia, an Iraq war veteran, was his opponent in the general election. Madia had upset better-known state Sen. Terri Bonoff to secure the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party nomination, and he soon pulled even with Paulsen in the polls, making it a very competitive contest. At the Republican National Convention in September in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Paulsen was given a speaking role to help raise his profile. In his remarks, he emphasized fiscal discipline and called himself “one of a new generation of Republican reformers.” On the stump, he emphasized his differences with Madia on taxes, contrasting his support for making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent with Madia’s position allowing them to expire for people with annual incomes over $250,000.

The campaign was punctuated by negative ads. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invested heavily in the race, with ads that attempted to link Paulsen to a Republican fundraiser at a Las Vegas strip club. Madia disavowed those attacks, but Paulsen complained that Madia could have had them pulled but didn’t. Hitting back, Paulsen charged in his ads that Madia was lying about his own voting record and said Madia would vote for tax increases. The National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in the final days of the campaign that the Madia camp said deliberately depicted Madia’s skin tone as darker than it is. Madia is of Indian descent. The NRCC denied it. Groups supporting Madia outspent Paulsen’s backers nearly 4-to-1. The two candidates were neck and neck in fundraising, each raising $2.7 million. A third candidate, businessman David Dillon, ran as an independent. He raised little money but campaigned energetically.

Polls going into voting showed a tight race. Paulsen emerged the winner, with 48% to Madia’s 41%. Dillon picked up a respectable 11%, drawing support in areas where Madia needed to perform well. Even as Obama won the district by 6 percentage points, Paulsen got strong support in Bloomington and Coon Rapids to ward off the national Democratic wave.

Paulsen was appointed to the House Financial Services Committee, where the first bill he sponsored was a measure to recoup some of the big executive bonuses paid by AIG after the failing insurance giant was bailed out by the government.