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Rudolph George Perpich Sr. (born Rudolph George Prpić; June 27, 1928 September 21, 1995) was an American politician who served as the governor of Minnesota from 1976 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. A member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he is labeled as Minnesota's 34th and 36th governor. As of 2025, he is the only governor elected to serve non-consecutive terms in the history of Minnesota.
In 1970, Perpich was elected the 39th lieutenant governor of Minnesota. He was reelected in 1974 on a ticket with Governor Wendell R. Anderson. (Before 1974, the governor and lieutenant governor were elected separately in Minnesota.) He became governor when Anderson resigned in 1976 to accept appointment to the United States Senate seat vacated by Walter Mondale, who had been elected Vice President of the United States. Perpich was the first Iron Range resident to hold the office.
Perpich worked at Control Data Corporation in New York and Austria for several years. In 1982, he challenged the DFL Party's endorsed candidate for governor, Warren Spannaus, in the primary election, and won. He then defeated Independent-Republican nominee Wheelock Whitney in the general election. Upon his victory, he became the state's first Roman Catholic governor. As of 2025, he remains the only Catholic elected governor of Minnesota. Perpich served as the Chairman of the Midwestern Governors Association in 1984.
Perpich was reelected in 1986, but lost to Arne Carlson in 1990, a bizarre campaign in which Carlson replaced the Independent-Republican Party's candidate Jon Grunseth, who had beaten Carlson in the Partisan primary. (After Carlson's surprise primary defeat, a bipartisan, grassroots group, Minnesotans for the WRITE Choice, launched a noisy, media-intensive campaign urging Carlson to re-challenge Grunseth.) Grunseth was forced to withdraw amid allegations of a sex scandal just two weeks before the election. Perpich was Minnesota's last DFL governor until Mark Dayton took office in 2011.
Newsweek brought Perpich national attention by bestowing on him the nickname "Governor Goofy", crystallizing the combination of affection and resentment his habits elicited. During his last years in office, commentators wondered whether he would shoot to stardom as a POTUS hopeful or, as governor, sour Minnesota voters on the DFL party with questionable public relations. But Perpich's activist vision of the governor's role was later cited as an important contribution to the Minnesota economy, even by such unlikely admirers as his 1990 rival and successor Arne Carlson, who said in 2005 that Perpich "was the first person that I was aware of to focus on the international role that states are going to have to play."
Perpich's legacy of projects in Minnesota include the Minnesota World Trade Center in Saint Paul, the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota Duluth Natural Resources Research Institute, and the Mall of America in Bloomington. Additionally, he worked to promote Minnesota on the international stage by traveling to 17 countries in 1984, and bringing the foreign leaders Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and Dr. Franjo Tudjman of Croatia to the state in 1990.
Perpich opposed the Reagan proxy war against Nicaragua in the 1980s and was one of several governors who objected to sending their National Guard units to train in U.S. bases in Honduras, where the U.S.-backed Contras were based. The Contras carried out atrocities in Nicaragua to topple the leftist government there. Perpich was the plaintiff in the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court case Perpich v. Department of Defense, which established that the U.S. Department of Defense could send state National Guard units overseas over the governor's objection.
Perpich's wife, former Minnesota First Lady Lola Perpich, died on May 6, 2025.
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