According to Mother Jones, the blog made Native Americans a "favorite punching bag" and commented on female Supreme Court justices and Barack Obama's ancestry "in ways many voters won't appreciate.

[10] Hagedorn's blogging history led the conservative newspaper the Washington Examiner to run an editorial calling him "the worst midterm candidate in America" in 2018.

[22] In the general election, with Walz giving up the seat to run for governor of Minnesota, Hagedorn defeated Democratic nominee Daniel Feehan, a former Department of Defense official, in a very close race.

[24] According to the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, Hagedorn held a Bipartisan Index Score of -0.0 in the 116th United States Congress for 2019, placing him 190th out of 435 members.

[28] In 2020, in response to activist Shaun King saying that depictions of Jesus as white should be destroyed, Hagedorn wrote that the Democratic Party and Black Lives Matter movement "are at war with our country, our beliefs and western culture."

[33] Hagedorn initiated an internal review of his office's spending and reported the findings to the House Ethics Committee, which declined to pursue the matter.

[34] As a result of the internal review, Hagedorn dismissed his chief of staff and said, "I acknowledge responsibility for the oversight of my office and will continue to make any necessary management improvements.

[37] In December 2020, Hagedorn was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated[38] Donald Trump.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on the basis that Texas lacked standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of an election held by another state.