Peterson said he offers a very different approach than Cornish.

“My values and bipartisan thinking leads my decision-making, and I think that’s important to the voters of this district,” Peterson said.

Cornish is too focused on being a loyal Republican to be a strong representative, Peterson said.

“I don’t believe that he takes a bipartisan approach at all,” he said. “There are some issues. But when it comes to the straight and narrow, he’ll go party line 100 percent.”

Peterson talks about his experience as a major asset. Six years on a school board. Nine years on a township board. Ten years on a county board.

“I’ve got a lot of background on a lot of issues we should talk about,” he said.

As for Cornish’s pride in his work in St. Paul, Peterson said he was taught at a young age that the people performing the best don’t need to talk about it.

“That should be something that should be there for people to see,” Peterson said.

Challenges ahead

Looking ahead to the upcoming session of the Legislature, Cornish doesn’t so much lay out a list of proposals as he does identify serious problems that need to be addressed.

“I’m just running completely and totally on my record rather than promises,” he said.

The state needs to solve the ongoing dilemma of who should pay for schools — both operating costs and building construction, Cornish said.

“From the Minnesota Miracle on, it’s been passed back and forth,” he said of the yo-yo course of school funding from locally levied property taxes to state funding and back.

The state also needs to figure out a better way to fund school construction in rural Minnesota, Cornish said. Construction costs are simply more than property owners in rural districts — especially farmers — can bear.

“The only way you’re really going to fix it is you have to look at what schools are going to survive at the state level and then put some money into it,” he said.