Compliance Officer Wins High-Profile Minnesota Race

Good news for compliance officers who believe our great and noble profession should be running the country: An ethics and compliance professional at Medtronic won a special election on Tuesday for state senate in Minnesota!

Doron Clark, senior director of ethics, training, and communications at Medtronic, cruised to victory, winning roughly 90 percent of the vote in a senate district that encompasses northeast Minneapolis. Clark ran as a candidate of the Democrat-Farm-Labor Party (Minnesota’s state version of the Democratic Party), and with his victory the state senate flipped to Democratic control.

Clark

Clark

“Thank you SD60! I am honored to be your Senator-elect and deliver the DFL majority back to the Minnesota Senate,” Clark said in a post on Bluesky late Tuesday night. “Thank you to everyone who knocked doors, made phone calls, and supported our campaign. I can’t wait to get to work for all Minnesotans!”

Clark has worked in ethics and compliance at Medtronic since 2015, and prior to that spent 14 years at Target in various process improvement roles. He is also chairman of the board of trustees at Hamline University, a school in St. Paul that he attended as an undergraduate.

Radical Compliance likes to keep tabs on ethics and compliance professionals elected to public office because, frankly, people like you should be running the country. Compliance officers have a set of skills sorely needed in the political realm — everything from running investigations, to policy management, to articulating ethical values that diverse groups of people should universally follow. The more of this crowd who get elected, the better. 

We first began tracking compliance professionals running for public office in 2018, when a few candidates for state and federal office (both Democrat and Republican) took their shot. Alas, none were victorious. There was also a chief compliance officer who ran for state senate in New Jersey in 2023 in a race crazy even by New Jersey political standards; he lost too. 

That makes Clark’s victory all the more notable: he is, to the best of Radical Compliance’s knowledge, the first ethics and compliance professional to win state or federal political office

Of course, if you know other compliance folks who have been elected to office, please let us know at mkelly@radicalcompliance.com; we would be eager to correct the record and give those people their due. 

Or if you’re running for public office — which you should, ethics and compliance officers are exactly who we need in office these days! — let us know and we’ll give you your due, too!

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.