Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 3

Posted on by
Reply

Shannon Gibney is running unopposed. Shannon is great (she’s a local writer and I have met her various times in our capacity as Fellow Local Writers; I also love her books). I would almost certainly tell you to vote for her anyway, but also: no one’s running against her. I am posting this entirely because sometimes, when I don’t post about an unopposed candidate, I get confused, worried e-mails from people wondering when I’m going to write about the race. Here you go! Vote for Shannon!

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 5

Posted on by
1

There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Becca Dryden (DFL-endorsed)
Molly Chase

Some resources on the race worth looking at:

  • There’s a Voter Guide with a questionnaire that each candidate responded to. One of the questions was about “rightsizing” the school budget. (I hate that particular buzzword, it makes my skin crawl, but since it’s in the question I can’t really hold it against the candidates who used it in their answer.)
  • There was a LWV forum on October 5th that included all the people running for School Board Districts 1, 3, and 5. So Abdul and Ben for District 1; Shannon Gibney for District 3 (she is running unopposed); and Molly Chase and Becca Dryden for District 5.

Becca Dryden

Becca is an organizer with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools and was heavily involved in organizing her school community (to provide monitors, mutual aid, etc.) during Metro Surge. In addition to the DFL endorsement, she’s endorsed by a ton of individual elected officials. A couple of things I particularly appreciate on her website: she’s not as anti-tech as me but she’s in favor of a lot of limits and in particular barring contracts with “techno-fascist” companies. Her response to the school closure plan includes a demand that they actually call it what it is and drop the pretense that this is about “transformation.” She talks on her website about strengthening the Gender Inclusion policy, and training school staff to keep students safe from ICE.

Molly Chase

Molly Chase is a nonprofit consultant and has served on the boards of a number of arts organizations. She’s also the mother of a first grader. I appreciate that she’s vehemently anti-tech-in-schools and brings finance experience (in both the corporate and non-profit worlds).

(It’s interesting to me that so many people are running on a “GET TECHNOLOGY OUT OF THE CLASSROOMS” platform this year — it feels like a very abrupt shift, and I’m not sure what drove it. Was it having AI forced on us from every direction? studies on social media and kids? Molly, in her Voter Guide questionnaire response, comments that “an enrollment issue that deserves more attention is parental concern about the gamification of early learning. Momentum against big tech in the classroom is building fast among families, and I believe it’s already shaping enrollment decisions in ways MPS hasn’t caught up to yet.” This may be correct.)

Molly has no endorsements from politicians, although she has a funny page where she acknowledges that one purpose of endorsements is to make sure someone isn’t a secret Republican and says, “I’m a Warren variety of Democrat. I’ve voted Dem/DFL in every election since I first qualified to vote. […] I’m not financed by a corporation or a PAC. I’m not secretly a Republican. Or MAGA. Or a book-burner. Or someone who claims to love public schools but undermines them with voucher schemes and other nonsense.” All of which is good to know. She also has a number of enthusiastic community endorsements from people who’ve worked with her on nonprofit boards and so on.

I would vote for Becca. The thing I actually found most helpful in terms of making up my mind was the LWV forum. There were some questions where Molly seemed very out of her depth; at some point she talked about how a cheap thing to change would be school hours, which … no, that’s really not cheap, that’s incredibly complicated because of transportation factors. Later in a discussion of the achievement gap, she talked about wanting to lower class sizes to 13-18 kids and talked about how we needed “the financial will to make it happen,” and that just seemed divorced from the financial realities of the Minneapolis school district, honestly.

Looking at these school board races really does make me appreciate Minneapolis, though. Intra-party disagreements still matter, there are real differences among the candidates, and also: no one here is a secret Republican, no one’s trying to ban books, no one’s trying to terrorize our LGBTQ+ students or our immigrant students. I appreciate that so much.

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board, District 1

Posted on by
1

There wasn’t a primary in this race, because only two people filed. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Abdul Abdi (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Ben Lattimore

Some resources on the race worth looking at:

  • There’s a Voter Guide with a questionnaire that each candidate responded to. One of the questions was about “rightsizing” the school budget. (I hate that particular buzzword, it makes my skin crawl, but since it’s in the question I can’t really hold it against the candidates who used it in their answer.)
  • There was a LWV forum on October 5th that included all the people running for School Board Districts 1, 3, and 5. So Abdul and Ben for District 1; Shannon Gibney for District 3 (she is running unopposed); and Molly Chase and Becca Dryden for District 5.

Abdul Abdi

Abdul is running for re-election and I think has been on the board for just one term. (If someone has had opponents, I can look at my old posts, but I usually don’t write about people when they’re unopposed.) In addition to serving on the school board, he’s a software architect and a father. He has been the Treasurer on the current school board.

Ben Lattimore

Ben Lattimore is a Business Ed teacher. The issues he’s running on include more effective financial oversight (“It is clear MPS needs better finance and accounting processes and governance. The same district office that has been losing track of millions in special education expenses (that could have been reimbursed by the state), is saying there is no way to stabilize the district’s budget besides this school closure plan? I am not buying it” and less technology (“My primary tech-related initiatives are: (1) Transition away from ‘one-to-one’ student laptops in favor of shared laptop carts; (2) Stop the current policy of issuing iPads to students in PreK – 2nd grade; and (3) Adopt a stricter, phone-free school environment policy from bell-to-bell.”)

During the LWV forum, Ben said he was not opposed to school closings in principle but he was appalled by the plan that’s been presented; it contains no evidence and no data and is saturated in corporate jargon. His website has a long, detailed, passionate case against the plan that was presented. I will note that at one point he says, “We have ~55,000 school aged youth living in the MPS district boundaries. MPS currently enrolls ~55% of those students. Getting that number up to 78% (~43,000 students) would put MPS buildings at full capacity.” That would require 13,000 kids to move back to the Minneapolis Public Schools from charters, private schools, etc. During the Great Recession, a lot of kids did move back to MPS from private (because dropping your private school tuition and moving your kid over was an extremely easy expense to cut for many families) but I’m not sure how those numbers compare.

Ben has no endorsements and one of my concerns about candidates with no endorsements (especially when they’re running for School Board) is that they’re secret Republicans, but watching the LWV forum was very reassuring on that point. He was very clearly a DFLer.

As I mentioned on my post about the At-Large race, I generally have a pro-incumbency bias with the Minneapolis School Board because this is a terrible job, and decision-making has suffered over the years in part because of a lack of institutional memory.

I think my biggest question is whether it’s fair to blame Abdul Abdi, as Treasurer and person who’s served on the finance committee, for MPS’s worst financial fuckups in the last few years. (To name a couple: the district lost out on tens of millions of dollars of reimbursement from the state for special education expenses because they screwed up coding. They screwed up their taxes and had to pay a $5 million penalty to the IRS. Several Finance department employees were fired or forced to resign after diverting money from a health care trust fund to an investment account. This wasn’t embezzlement, to be clear, they thought that it made sense to temporarily invest that money, and they may have been correct, but this also looked shady enough that the district spent a bunch of money on a forensic audit.) The thing is, these were not errors made by the School Board; they were made by district staff. The Board does oversee stuff like whether the Finance department has adequate staff, so this reflects poorly on their past decisions, but there’s also tremendous pressure to cut “overhead” and “administrative stuff” and not all the things (teachers, counselors, etc.) that have direct contact with kids.

Fundamentally, part of why I approach school board races with a pro-incumbent bias is that it’s really easy to blame the Board for everything that went wrong and assume that replacing them will solve the problems, when in fact it removes the people who know why the stuff went wrong in the first place. I think I would vote for Abdul Abdi, but this is a hard one, because Ben Lattimore seems smart and knowledgeable, and I also like his anti-tech stance. ETA: one of my Bluesky friends lives by Abdul Abdi and says “Abdul Abdi is my neighbor, his kids all went to MPS schools, and he is against the current school transformation plans. He’s also just a really nice neighbor so I will be enthusiastically voting for him again.” (I thought that was worth adding.)

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote about this race in the primary and the tl;dr is that my opinion has not changed: I would vote for Christin Crabtree and Collin Beachy.

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Christin Crabtree (DFL-endorsed)
Stephanie Johnson
Collin Beachy (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Michael Baskins

In the months since the primary, we’ve gotten a new central issue in the race: the proposed “transformation plans” that would close 14 to 16 schools and were presented as a “well, obviously the board needs to pick one of these” set of options. Here’s the thing about school closures (and instability in general) — the district invariably loses students. (To open-enrollment in other districts, private schools, and charters.) Since the money follows the student, you don’t end up saving much. This has further been muddied by the insistance that the point of this plan is not to save money but to “provide a consistent experience” for students across the district.

Some resources on the race worth looking at:

  • There’s a Voter Guide with a questionnaire that each candidate responded to. One of the questions was about “rightsizing” the school budget. (I hate that particular buzzword, it makes my skin crawl, but since it’s in the question I can’t really hold it against the candidates who used it in their answer.)
  • There was a LWV forum on October 5th. Christin, Michael, and Collin were all there; Stephanie was not.

Stephanie Johnson

Stephanie Johnson still doesn’t have a website. I also can’t find her on social media. Given that she also didn’t come to the forum, I’m honestly not sure whether she’s actually still running.

In her response to the budget question on the Voter Guide questionnaire she said, “closing schools has to be on the table. We are years beyond the school board and superintendent mandating the CDD; since then, it seems district leaders have opted to look the other way rather than take on the truly tough decision to rightsize the district physically. We need to work together to avoid any more stalling of change.” Since she’s basically vanished from the race I’m not sure what her take is on the current specific proposals.

(She may have fully intended to come to the forum and had to miss for an entirely valid reason. But this is in fact why campaign websites, or campaign Facebooks, or campaign Bluesky or Instagram or Twitter accounts, or literally anything that lets you communicate with the voters you want support from, are such a good idea.)

Michael Baskins

Even if you like what Michael says on his website, I just want to note that he wound up in court for misusing campaign funds while running for City Council because he spent 20% of his campaign money on clothing. His website mentions no endorsements.

He is pro-school-closure. When he responded to the Voter Guide questionnaire he said, “To rightsize the MPS budget, the focus first needs to be on rightsizing the sprawling overcapacity that MPS has in school buildings. Nearly 40% of building capacity currently goes unused.” Which sure sounds like “we absolutely need to close schools.” At the LWV forum, the first question (12 minutes in) was about the transformation plan. He said that he’d been to some of the listening sessions and “frustration is valid due to the half-baked nature of the plan,” but his concerns were mostly with communication strategies: the district had not explained the advantages of the plan, or what district finances look like without the closures. Despite his rhetoric about transparency, he clearly didn’t want to say, on stage and out loud, that he wanted to close 14 to 16 schools in the district.

Collin Beachy

Here’s what I said during the primary: Collin is a special education teacher who has served on the school board for four years and is running for another term. Everyone seems to genuinely like him. School Board member is a job that pays poorly, takes up a lot more time than it’s supposed to, involves getting yelled at a bunch, and is in general a factory for burnout, which means people rarely run for re-election and this creates real issues with institutional memory. So I approach Minneapolis school board races with a pro-incumbent bias when someone’s running again, and I definitely think Collin would continue to be an asset to the school board.

In response to the Voter Guide questionnaire budget question, Collin said, “Our transformation work recognizes that increasing enrollment and improving the student experience go hand in hand. The Board has directed the administration to develop strategies not only to attract new students but also to retain the families who already choose MPS. […] At the same time, we must make responsible financial decisions based on today’s enrollment—not the enrollment we hope to have five years from now. Building long-term trust with families requires both educational excellence and financial sustainability.” I read this as an acknowledgment that they’re going to have to close some schools, but I don’t think he was expecting a plan that closes a minimum of 14. At the LWV forum he acknowledged the strengths of the plan (every student would have a “guaranteed experience” regardless of where they live in the city) but then said the plan was not what the Board expected.

He also gave an interview to a Fox9 streaming show where he said that on one hand, “no decision has been made” and the plans could change, and on the other hand, doing nothing would mean another round of cuts to teachers, staff, and programming.

Christin Crabtree

Here’s what I said about Christin during the primary: Christin is someone I know through social media (Minneapolis Bluesky, mainly); she was heavily involved in organizing against ICE this winter. She’s the kind of person who years ago I’d say “have you ever thought about running for School Board?” and I’m excited that she’s running.

In her Voter Guide questionnaire, she said, “Cuts and closures will not improve the health of Minneapolis; divestment is not a winning strategy for our future. […] MPS must use relational, data driven efforts to retain and attract families while partnering across jurisdictions to implement policies that keep families in Minneapolis. […] Funding from the state is a critical path toward budget stability in Minneapolis and public schools across Minnesota. Minnesota is currently ranked 26th in public education funding in the United States.”

In her response to the question about the closure plan at the LWV forum, she said that the district was being presented with a false choice and that her plan was to get the district’s internal house in order; to make sure there was transparency about school finance; and to empower the placement office and make sure they had multilingual staff. (The placement office is the administrative office that handles “which school, exactly, a kid is going to.” It was a basket case when my older kid was being placed at a school back in 2006 and it seems to be worse now. If you want kids to attend school in Minneapolis, a functional placement office is a key element.)

So. Speaking more broadly about this race: I will note that I don’t, personally, know what ought to be done to fix the Minneapolis Public Schools. “We should be getting more money from the State Legislature” is accurate, and might be possible with a DFL trifecta, but is not something that is actually under the control of the school board. (“We’ll make the legislature give us more money” is something I remember school board candidates saying over and over back during the GOP state trifecta in the early 2000s, and you can imagine how well it worked.) However, closing down fourteen schools and displacing over 3,000 students, around 15% of the MPS population, is going to result in losing a huge number of families. When the CDD was implemented back in 2021, about 14% of MPS students had to change schools, and over 2,000 students left the district. To be fair, a lot was going on in 2021. (This was pointed out to the school board in the spring of 2020 and they passed the CDD anyway.)

The thing about massive disruptions like this is that (a) They’re bad for students. Schools are not just buildings, they’re communities. Kids have friends, they know the teachers, etc. (b) They break trust. Sending your kid to school requires so many complicated layers of trust — in the teachers, in the staff, in the district as a whole. When you mess with that, you lose people. (c) They create a new decision point about where someone’s going to send their kids to school. You have to persuade people who chose MPS once to choose it again, and to choose it again in a situation where MPS has just screwed them and their kid over! At any given moment, a lot of Minneapolis parents are unhappy with MPS, but are disinclined to pull their kids out and send them somewhere else because changing schools is traumatic and difficult. If you’re already putting their kid through the trauma of changing schools, it gets a lot easier to just leave.

Also: the proposal is to close these schools and then let the buildings sit empty. It’s against either law or district policy (I forget which) to sell school buildings to charters (or, I think, private schools), and this creates the problem that there are relatively few groups other than schools that find a school building well-suited to their needs. This came up years ago with Howe school, which is once again on the block for closure. It got closed down in 2005. There was talk of selling the building. There was an arts group that wanted to buy it (this is how I got involved, actually), a developer who wanted the land for housing but wanted the district to pay the money to tear down the building, and a charter school that wanted the building. I went to the neighborhood meetings, which featured a man screaming “FUCK YOU” in my face with zero intervention from the facilitators. After a whole lot of money and time, the building continued to sit empty until in 2013, it was re-opened by the district as the upper campus of Hiawatha (Hiawatha School serves K-2, Howe serves 3-5.)

Something else that is a bad advertisement for MPS: empty buildings sitting indefinitely in a residential neighborhood. (The guy who screamed swear words in my face lived across the street from Howe. He didn’t send his kids to MPS. Also, he considered the two legitimate options for the building to be a school, or tearing it down to build houses. Had to be single-family houses, no multifamily. He was really mad that I thought an arts collective would be a pretty good use for it.)

Anyway. If you close 14 schools (or 15 or 16 schools), the district is going to lose thousands of kids immediately, and thousands more in the next couple of years because more parents will choose other options (private schools, charter schools, open-enrollment in other districts). A tremendous amount of the marketing that happens for MPS happens parent-to-parent. “Oh, your kid goes to [school]? What do you think of it?” When parents say, “We love our school” and says a lot of good things about it, you get more students. When parents say, “Well, we loved our old school but then MPS closed it down…” you get fewer.

So on one hand, I am a little frustrated that both Christin and Collin kind of dodged the question of whether Minneapolis should close any schools. And on the other, I am skeptical that the district can get out of its financial problems by closing schools because every time you close schools you lose so many students. And both Michael and Stephanie seem to treat closing schools as a central part of the solution.

(There’s a whole side thing where the district is now saying they’re not running a deficit, their budget is balanced and the purpose of this plan is not to save money but to use their resources better. But, OK. MPS has had a massive deficit crisis multiple years in a row, don’t try to pretend that’s not going to happen again, and also, if you don’t have a deficit because you’re understaffing a bunch of schools — that’s what the whole “everyone should have the same experience in every school” seems to be talking about, that a bunch of schools don’t have an art teacher, or don’t have a librarian — that’s still a deficit, IMO.)

But also, part of choosing who to vote for involves choosing people. There are four people on the ballot. One never got around to setting up a campaign website or even a campaign Facebook; one is a doofus who spent 20% of his campaign funds on suits when he ran for City Council. I am not 100% satisfied with either Collin or Christin, but I am absolutely convinced that I trust their common sense and their approach more than I trust the other two.

I’ll wrap up by noting that in digging around for information on what candidates were saying about the transformation plan, I ran across a thread on Reddit where someone from a small group of parents shared an alternative transformation plan. It still closes a small number of schools but moves the communities intact to other sites, prioritizes keeping neighborhood schools, and — I actually thought this was the most interesting — has a detailed plan for recruiting and retaining students in MPS. (There are certain infuriatingly recurring themes to school board races and one is, “we need to attract and retain students.” There are suggestions, including really simple suggestions, that have been made over and over and over and never implemented.)

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: St. Paul City Question 1

Posted on by
Reply

There is a citywide referendum in St. Paul. This is the Right to Repair Initiative, which was placed on the ballot by petition. It was organized by the group Safe Homes St. Paul. It was at one point blocked from being on the ballot by the City Council on the grounds that the City Attorney doesn’t think it’s legal/enforceable, but this was overridden by a judge. Here’s the text on the ballot:

CITY QUESTION 1 (St. Paul)

Creating Chapter 34A of the Saint Paul Legislative Code

Should the City adopt the proposed Ordinance pertaining to a tenants right to repair? The ordinance would allow tenants to make repairs to their building after written notice to the landlord and deduct an amount not exceeding $500 or one-half month’s rent to pay for the repair. A “Yes” vote amends the City of Saint Paul’s Legislative Code to adopt the Proposed Ordinance pertaining to a tenant’s right to repair. A “No” vote will result in no changes to the City’s Legislative Code.

You can also find the full text of the proposed ordinance here.

On a fundamental level, I think it’s entirely reasonable to say that if you’re a tenant, and something breaks and your landlord doesn’t fix it, you should be able to just fix it yourself, or call a repair person and get it fixed, and deduct the expense from your rent. That feels entirely reasonable to me. Where I start to have concerns is in the details of how this would be implemented, exactly, and whether it would work the way I want it to work.

The initial concerns I had, along with the answers I got from Cole Hanson (of Safe Homes St. Paul) when I e-mailed:

1. What happens if a tenant tries to fix something, and breaks it worse?

Cole noted that Section 34A.05 says that all repairs must be made in a workmanlike manner, and if required by law, by persons who are licensed to perform the required work. He said that if you’re in doubt you should probably hire a professional. He also pointed out section 34A.07: “Nothing in this section shall abridge the liability of a contractor, servicer, vendor, or any other person who enters the premises to make repairs to the landlord for damage to property under the applicable principles of statutory and common law.” So — basically the answer is, if you’re a tenant doing the repair and you break it worse, you’re potentially on the hook for the cost of additional problems you might have caused.

2. What if landlords use this as an excuse to default on their responsibilities and tell tenants to fix stuff themselves? Repair is labor and for that matter so is scheduling a plumber. It shouldn’t be on tenants to repair things.

In Duluth, where this passed in 2025, the Right to Repair ordinance has apparently not yet been used. Per Cole, this is because the threat of tenants being able to call a repairman themself means that landlords are making repairs more promptly, because they absolutely want to be able to know it’s their own preferred plumber or whatever doing the work. St. Paul skeptics of this ordinance are less convinced that’s the case. I’ll note that there’s a Reddit thread in /r/Duluth looking for people who need help using the ordinance and the replies are mostly not people trying to figure out how to get something fixed.

3. How will it be handled if there’s a conflict between the landlord and the tenant about whether a problem is an actual problem that needs to be fixed, as opposed to something the tenant should just live with (or something the tenant is imagining?)

There’s an answer to this in the text of the ordinance! Section 34A.05, “Tenant contracting repairs; notice; eligible repairs,”(c) If the landlord disputes that a repair is required, they must send written notice to the tenant within 14 days of the tenant’s notice and arrange for the building official to inspect the property. If a landlord does not respond to the tenant’s notice within 14 days, the landlord waives their right to claim that a repair is not required. If the inspection confirms that the repair is required, or if an inspection does not occur within 30 days of the landlord’s written notice of dispute, the tenant retains the right to initiate the repair.“

4. Are there any protections for the tenant in situations where you call for what’s supposed to be a simple, under-the-limit repair, and then as the work is being done it balloons into something much more expensive?

Cole’s response: “What I see here is the classic leaky fixture actually caused by an old old pipe. In that case, a tenant would likely need to file again for the attached or other identified issues. This is why it would be worthwhile to use inclusive language when submitting notice to your landlord in case an issue is greater than anticipated. You can also file simultaneous requests for different violations, and possibly stack them month over month. Again, these are hypotheticals and have not been tested in court in Duluth, from which much of this language originated.” He also highlighted Section 34A.03: If the tenant’s rent is subsidized in whole or in part by a governmental agency, the deduction limitation of one month’s rent shall mean the fair market rent for the dwelling and not the rent that the tenant pays.

5. Is there any protection for the landlord against the following situation: a tenant has a broken doorknob, and after waiting out the 14 days, they hire their buddy Jo, who they then pay the full maximum amount allowed for 5 minutes of work, so their landlord winds up on the hook for $500 to Jo’s Expert Doorknob Repair?

I didn’t ask Cole this question but here’s my understanding: yes, the protection for the landlord is that they get two weeks to fix the doorknob themself. The ordinance requires that repairs be completed “in a workmanlike manner” and I don’t think that covers costs (however, I am not a lawyer.)

Other concerns I’ve heard:

1. The city enforcement infrastructure for this doesn’t exist, and won’t exist until sometime after this gets passed. Worth noting, in the case where a landlord disputes that a repair is needed, the landlord needs to arrange a visit from a building inspector. We do have those in St. Paul but I don’t know how many, and how busy they are. If the inspection does not occur within 30 days, the tenant gets to make the repair, even if the landlord has been trying to get someone to come out and take a look. That said, this has literally not come up at all in Duluth.

2. This could raise rent, because it raises the costs for landlords. I kinda think this is a bogus argument because landlords are supposed to fix stuff. This should already be part of what you’re paying for, even if you’re paying very low rent.

3. There are various additional legal issues with the way the ordinance was written. For example, if work requires a permit, the tenant can’t pull a permit, that still requires the landlord. The permit issue specifically got brought up by the City Attorney who wanted it knocked off the ballot, and it could, in a few cases, be an issue, but given the limits on costs you can charge back to your landlord, I think in general the stuff that requires a permit will still need the landlord’s participation anyway. Average rent in St. Paul is about $1500/month, which would cap costs at $750. Thinking back to the things we’ve done on our house that required a permit, all of them cost significantly more than that.

3. But because parts of the law are unenforceable (according to the City Attorney), the whole thing may just not go on the books until the City Council can revise it, and that won’t happen for a full year (because if something passes in a referendum the City isn’t allowed to tweak it for a year). The City Council could pass their own Right to Repair ordinance that would take effect much more quickly. This is a fair point, but I am concerned that if a Right to Repair ordinance fails, the interpretation will be, “our citizenry opposes this ordinance,” and not, “our citizenry would like us to immediately pass a version of this that has been vetted by our city attorney to cover problems like ‘what about permits that the tenant can’t get.'” It’s a shame that passage may mean it sits in limbo for a year, but I think passing it now makes it more likely that we get some version of it eventually.

Anyway, the upshot is this: there are absolutely issues with this ordinance as written, and I think that is one of the reasons that it has yet to be used in Duluth. (I think the theory by its proponents, that landlords don’t want their tenants hiring Jo’s Expert Doorknob Repair or going at things with a wrench themselves, is also a factor. I think there’s probably a final issue of lack of trust, that people are wary of assuming that if they hire their own plumber, and their landlord pushes back, and it all winds up in court, that this won’t leave them screwed.)

I’m going to vote for this because I do want some version of this to be the law, and I think we’re a lot more likely to get some version of this in the end if we pass it than if we don’t.

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Constitutional Amendment 1

Posted on by
Reply

This is a statewide vote, and there’s only one constitutional amendment on the ballot despite the number. Here’s the question as it appears:

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT 1

Increasing funding to school districts

Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to increase the funding going to all school districts from the permanent school fund, which is a fund that supports school districts without raising individual income or property taxes, effective July 1, 2027?

You can vote yes or no. Non-votes will be counted as a no. This needs a simple majority to pass, but it needs a simple majority of all voters.

The permanent school fund was created when Minnesota became a state; it was originally 8.6 million acres of land (that I assume were stolen from the Dakota and Anishinaabe). Over time, a lot of the land in the southern part of the state has been sold off. The fund includes 2.5 million acres of land, 1 million acres in mineral rights, and a very large pile of money ($2.4 billion) in a whole lot of investments, managed by the State Board of Investments. Right now, constitutionally, the dividends of the fund can be distributed to schools, but capital gains can’t. The legislature would like to be able to distribute a small percentage of the capital gains, as well.

To be clear, they are not proposing to spend the fund down to zero. What they want to do is basically what every college with an endowment does: manage the investments, distribute the dividends, and distribute some of the money, so that the fund is available to support students today as well as in a decade.

There are several websites that are in favor of this amendment, two of which you can find here and here. I couldn’t find an organized “vote no” effort. The two sites kind of focus on the “more money for schools without raising taxes!” argument, which, fair, I guess! But here are the reasons to support the amendment that I found most compelling:

  1. The legislature appointed a committee (of utterly wonkish, thoroughly obscure investment experts, as far as I could tell from googling them) to discuss whether to make this change. This was their recommendation.
  2. This really is what private universities with endowments do. The amount they’re proposing to spend is very conservative. They’re not going to spend this fund dry. They’re not going to even come close to spending this fund dry. This fund went from $1.3 billion to $2.4 billion in the last nine years; they can, in fact, spend some of this money right now on the kids we’re currently educating as a state.
  3. This passed the MN House unanimously.

I am going to vote yes and I hope this passes. Remember: not voting is the same as voting “no.”

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Minnesota State Auditor

Posted on by
1

This is a statewide race and there are three people running. Incumbent Julie Blaha is not running for re-election. On the ballot:

Zack Filipovich (DFL)
Scott Jensen (Republican)
Jay Reeves (Forward Independence)

I spent more time than I thought I would on this one because Jay Reeves is running a fairly serious campaign and I wanted to treat him seriously. The tl;dr is that I am going to vote for Zach Filipovich, who’s well qualified for the job; I do think Jay Reeves is both more qualified and less of a creep than Scott Jensen, but I think Zach is the best candidate and also, that Jay Reeves is going to come in third.

All three candidates have appeared in two debates together: Almanac on PBS, and on The Sunday Take at the State Fair. I watched (well, listened to) both of these debates.

Scott Jensen (Republican)

When we last saw Scott Jensen, he was losing the 2022 Governor’s race by 8 percentage points. He manages to embody the Republican party at its worst in a whole range of ways; back in 2022 I noted that he’d gone around spreading the “kids have LITTERBOXES now” urban legend, and this year in the State Fair debate (in his closing statement, you can find it 37 minutes in) he brought up Zach’s endorsement from OutFront in order to showcase his own transphobia. You really have to be committed to transphobia to make your transphobic garbage an issue in the race for state auditor. He also seized several opportunities to brag about his COVID denialism. He’s also just not particularly qualified in this race compared to either of his opponents.

He’s also old. I mean, he’s not Trump levels of old, but he’s 71, and since he made an issue of it in the debate (“I will not hold my opponents’ youth and inexperience against them, heh heh”) I feel like I can point this out. He’s 71 and if you watch the debate and then look at his website it’s clear his staff has filtered and photoshopped the heck out of his photos to make him look younger (while still leaving sufficient wrinkles and gray hair that it’s not super obviously filtered.)

The main reason not to vote for him, though, is his record (as a creepy, transphobic, COVID-denying Trumpist). Plus he loves AI and wants to use it more in the Auditor’s office, which sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Jay Reeves (Forward Independence)

Jay enlisted in the Army in 2006 and stayed in until 2023, retiring as a Major (I am very inexpert on this, but my sense is that it’s fairly unusual to make the leap from enlisted man to commissioned officer.) I think he took a medical retirement because he developed cancer in 2022, which he has now recovered from. He talks a lot about his experience with “data analytics” and one of my frustrations in researching him is that it’s hard to figure out what he’s saying he did, exactly. Here’s his LinkedIn. It says he spent 15 years as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist; got a Master’s in Health Informatics from the U of M in 2019; worked as a “Capability Manager (Data Analyst)” in Virginia from 2019-22; and was a laboratory manager for one year at the end. He retired when he did because he had cancer, which I think he’s since recovered from. In 2023, he had a Data Analyst internship at a place called DivvyDose, after which he was a Business Analyst there for three months. Basically, his data analytics experience was presumably while he was in the military so it’s hard to know if he only talks about one thing (making a database to track something COVID-related in the early stages of the pandemic) because that’s the big data analytical thing he did, or because some of what he did, he’s not allowed to talk about. And this matters, because that’s really his major case for qualification, that he does data analysis well. (Or, “data analytics,” a phrase he loves so much you could turn it into a drinking game while watching the debates.)

The Forward Independence party is basically what’s left of the Jessecrats. I used to stop by their booth at the State Fair and pick up their literature to see what they had for a platform, if anything; I remember one year it was a long list of extremely random complaints, like if you had Andy Rooney write you a political platform, and at this point I’m not sure they have a unifying idea beyond “we aren’t Republicans and we also aren’t Democrats.” Jay apparently tried to get endorsed by the DFL to run for the CD 6 seat (against Tom Emmer) and didn’t get endorsed; this came up in one of the debates because Scott brought it up, and Jay’s explanation of why he was trying to run as a DFLer while also still an Independent and also they wouldn’t let him get endorsed because he refused to sign off on some of their beliefs, you know, it was confusing. I was confused. He sounded confused, like it made me wonder if he understood what endorsement was, how it worked, what it means to ask for a party’s endorsement.

Especially since he’s pretty conservative! Over on his Facebook, he has a long post whining about Keith Ellison calling (some) Republicans bigots and racists. Here’s a fun fact: a whole lot of Republicans are bigots and racists. Jay’s post links to a piece on Townhall (a conservative site, I’m not sure if it’s technically pretending to be news or just commentary) that linked to a Twitter post from noted local asshole Dustin Grage who was retweeting some garbage from Alpha News. Garbage all the way down, in other words.

He’s less loudly enthusiastic about AI tools in the auditor’s office (that I found! I may have missed something) (also, he talks a lot about “modernizing” the technology, and probably that means AI) but he is definitely using them in this race. Some post of his mentioned he’d used ChatGPT to write a summary, and this post in particular has the distinct cadence of ChatGPT’s writing style. I don’t love it! It’s already enough work to research candidates without having to wade through piles of crap they couldn’t even be bothered to write, you know?

Finally, even if you love the idea of a third-party guy in this role I will note that he shared a poll that shows Scott with 43% support, Zach with 36%, Jay with 4%, and Undecided at 17%, which means that even if every single Undecided voter breaks for Jay, he would still come in third. Also, Scott Jensen would win.

Zack Filipovich (DFL)

Zach is an uncommonly qualified candidate in that he’s an actual accountant who has worked in local government finance, the thing the Minnesota State Auditor actually oversees. He’s also served on the Duluth City Council.

I do want to acknowledge that it’s been many decades since there was an actual accountant serving in this role. In 2018, the Republican candidate was a CPA which might have been tempting (that’s a link to my post where I acknowledge that an actual accountant in this job might be a good thing) if Pam Myrha hadn’t been so generally loathesome. Anyway, this year I can vote for an accountant who’s also a Democrat, and while this is in fact a job where party should not matter, it’s clear from listening to Scott that it does.

Zach also understands what this job is and he’s energetic, thoughtful, and (I thought this was interesting) aware that in addition to fraud, part of the job of the auditor is to catch mistakes, which are in fact way more common than fraud. I am absolutely going to vote for Zach, and would encourage other people to do the same.

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Governor & Lieutenant Governor of MN

Posted on by
Reply

On the ballot:

Amy Klobuchar and Ben Schierer (DFL)
Lisa Demuth and Ryan Wilson (Republican)
Steven Young and Jane Kirby (Green)

The tl;dr is that I’m going to vote for Amy Klobuchar, even though I find her chronically disappointing, and I think you should, too.

Lisa Demuth and Ryan Wilson (Republican)

Lisa Demuth is the Speaker of the House in the State House of Representatives. She’s trying to present herself as a moderate. She’s not. I’m going to go through her record and then talk about some of what’s on her website.

  • Lisa’s record on reproductive rights. Lisa has a 100% rating from MCCL (the anti-abortion group). In 2023, she was the chief author of HF 1809, a bill that would introduce restrictions to make it harder for people to get abortions (the “licensure of abortion facilities” is something that’s passed in many states because it sounds reasonable on the surface but the purpose of the rule is to make it harder for abortion clinics to operate) and ban some abortions entirely. One thing I think is really important to note: her proposed law would have banned third-trimester abortions with no exception for lethal fetal anomalies. And to be clear, early induction (one of the very common options offered when a fetus is discovered to have a condition incompatible with life) would be considered an abortion under the definitions in Minnesota law (a lot of people assume that an early induction done after a tragic diagnosis is not legally an abortion and as many people have discovered, it is.)
  • Lisa is heavily responsible for Metro Surge. Lisa proudly took credit for steering right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley to Minnesota to gin up bullshit concerns about daycare fraud. This was Trump’s pretext for sending in thousands of poorly trained, heavily armed goons to harass, kidnap, and murder our neighbors.

Regarding the things she’s campaigning on, I have some additional thoughts.

  • Asked about private equity driving up housing costs at the State Fair, Lisa gave the most hilariously content-free response you can imagine. “I think our state needs to look very heavily at that. In how we want to move forward as a state. Not ready to make a definite plan or determination on it, but we have to look at what’s happening in other states. Is it driving up costs? We have to look at that piece.” She had been running for office for 10 months at this point, so “I’m not ready to make a definite plan” is sure a thing to say about housing costs.
  • Her website has an “affordability” section but the only thing she says about housing costs is that she wants to cut property taxes. Mostly she wants to make things cheaper for vehicle owners, and there is, of course, absolutely nothing in that section about how she’d keep the roads paved if everyone’s tab fees are $100 or less and the gas tax is lowered. (All of that money goes to road maintenance, something most Republicans like to have.)
  • She wants state funds to go to private schools (the “safety funding” I mentioned earlier). She also wants to cut the universal free lunches passed during the DFL trifecta a couple of years ago because “when a family is making six- and sometimes seven-figure incomes, their kids do not need free meals.” Honestly, if a school is charging $20,000 or $40,000 or even $73,000 tuition, they do not need money from the state. (There are a number of reasons that I support universal free lunches, including for kids from rich families, and at the top of the list: rich people can also be abusive and neglectful and having shitty rich parents does not mean that you don’t get hungry if your parents don’t give you lunch. I think it’s important that school is a refuge for ALL kids, and we can fund those lunches for the children of rich parents by taxing those parents more to pay for those lunches. If we don’t put people like Lisa “we should definitely cut taxes on the rich” Demuth in charge.)
  • Lisa’s “education plan” includes a lot of stuff about reducing mandates, allowing schools to get waivers for mandates, etc., but she is not remotely forthcoming about the mandates she thinks we could save money by eliminating. Does she think we should stop educating disabled children? That we should stop requiring that teachers have training and licensure? That schools shouldn’t have to run school buses? That schools shouldn’t have to run background checks on staff? Seriously, which mandates, Lisa? (I sent her this question by e-mail, and I also asked which standards were “woke.” If I hear back — unlikely — I will update.)
  • Like all the Republicans in Minnesota, Lisa is making fraud her centerpiece issue, though not in a way where she’s willing to comment on any of the fraud currently being committed by the President of the United States. Instead she makes promises like, “If you steal welfare from our state, you’re going to prison – with no exceptions. You’re paying it back and we’re seizing the assets. You’ll receive a lifetime ban from receiving benefits. You can go to another state but you’re not going to steal from Minnesota again.” She wants us to imagine a welfare queen being stripped of her fur coat and other ill-gotten gains and being forced to get a job. What this sort of law actually means: destitute people who fucked up some minor bit of paperwork and claimed an extra $14 of benefits they shouldn’t have gotten are kicked out of their subsidized housing and wind up living in a homeless encampment. Or, even more likely, destitute people who didn’t fuck anything up, who followed all the rules, who had some overworked office worker tick an incorrect box, will have their health care taken away and will die of diabetes while their equally confused sister is waiting on hold trying to find out why the letter says they have $84,000 in assets when they might have $4 in mixed change if you want to dig for it in the couch. You want to throw the book at the Feeding Our Future crowd? GREAT. They absolutely have it coming. But there’s no actual distinction made on her site between people who stole millions of dollars, and people who worked under the table while receiving benefits. No exceptions!

Anyway. I absolutely do not want Lisa Demuth as governor.

Steven Young and Jane Kirby (Green)

So, Steve Young. I want to start by acknowledging this is one of the most validating, tempting things I have ever seen on a campaign website:

This (or something similar) is what I want to hear from everyone running, honestly.

On the other hand, here’s his pinned tweet (from his @steventhebold account as opposed to his @steveformn account):

A pinned Tweet from steven young: running 4 MN guv'nr @steventhebold, posted October 17, 2024 Every time I see some idiot say "well what about what happened on Oct. 7th?!" I remember my initial reaction (which I still stand by) I saw the paraglider commandos and I stood up and cheered and pumped my fists and shouted 'they did it! They're fucking doing it!"

He is straightforwardly pro-Hamas. He’s enthusiastically pro-Hamas, even. I tried to do some digging to try to sort out his other views, and I’ll note he also seems to be a North Korea booster. (He’s also a Stalin defender but not of the “Stalin: Actually Awesome!” Tankie school of Stalin defense.) Mostly, though, he really fucking loves Hamas.

I am furious at Israel and disgusted with their actions and strongly in favor of ending America’s military and financial support of Israel. Also, I think that if your response to October 7th was cheering and pumping your fists, you’re a gross person and I will never vote for you for anything. October 7th killed hundreds of civilians; the entirely predictable, absolutely horrifying Israeli response killed tens of thousands more. If you were celebrating that day, I don’t want you as my political representative, even if you’re running to win, which he is not.

Over on Twitter, he’s doing the usual third-party thing of complaining that people aren’t paying attention to him, and pretending that he thinks he’s going to win. However, he’s not recruiting volunteers, and if he’s doing any campaigning (doorknocking, tabling with other Green Party people at festivals, marching in parades, distributing lit, putting up signs) he’s not mentioning them on his Twitter, which means that either he’s not doing them, or he’s unaware that posting that he’s doing this stuff is also part of campaigning.

The Green Party did send out an e-mail blast (which I got) on September 10th where they talk about their Get Out the Vote efforts:

We have six candidates that will be on the ballot and need your help. Below is a list of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts to support our candidates and to reach our goal to obtain Minor Party Status (1% of all MN votes) or even Major Party Status (8% of all MN votes).

GOTV efforts can include: Letters to the Editor (LTE), sidewalk chalking, flyering in your local area, sharing GPMN information on social media, call into talk radio, handmade window or lawn signs, phone banking, house parties, voter registration and donating to our party or to the candidates.

I think there are a couple of things worth noting here. They’re encouraging their supporters to do this stuff, but I haven’t found any sign of an organized effort. (Seth Kuhl-Stennes, the Green Secretary of State candidate, has an Events section on his site but it’s empty.) Steve did an interview on a small YouTube interviews show but I found no other indication of actual campaigning, despite checking his website, his LinkTree, and both of his Twitters. Also, his party is not pretending that anyone is running to win. The Green Party of Minnesota website has specific times to sign up to work on petitions to get people on the ballot but nothing specific about when and where you might do doorknocking to persuade people to vote for their candidates (that’s a link to their “Volunteer” page, which is a sign up sheet with no info.)

My point here: (a) as much as I agree with him about ICE, he kind of sucks, and (b) if you vote for him, that is 100% a protest vote. The actual choice here is between Lisa and Amy; there is no scenario where he wins. The absolute best-case scenario for him is that he draws off enough of the left-wing vote that we get Lisa Demuth as governor. At which point we’ll have Lisa Demuth as governor for four years.

Amy Klobuchar and Ben Schierer (DFL)

Amy Klobuchar is a deeply unsatisfying Democrat in a whole host of ways. She’s a cosponsor of KOSA. She’s voted for an embarrassing number of Trump’s judicial nominations. In the last two years (and during 2016-2020) it has consistently felt like we needed to hound Amy to get her to do the right thing.

However: she’s a Democrat. She’s reliably pro-choice. She’s been depressingly quiet on trans issues but also helped to block Senate passage of a law that would have prohibited school districts from allowing trans girls to play on girl’s teams. (Note: MSHSL, which sets policy for high school sport in Minnesota, has allowed trans girls to play on girls’ teams since 2015.) Would she veto an anti-trans law like the one Demuth tried to pass in 2023? If a Republican legislature passed such a law and send it to her desk, I would feel like I needed to call her up and yell at her, but I also think she would veto that law; Demuth would clearly sign it. Klobuchar is also a cosponsor of the pro-LGBTQ Equality Act, and cosponsored a law to legalize abortion nationally.

I will, and did, cast protest votes during primaries, but I do not fuck around with the general election, even if the polls say it’s a safe race. You just never know. Amy Klobuchar is unsatisfying; Lisa Demuth is terrible. I am going to vote for Amy Klobuchar, and would encourage my readers to vote for her as well. I think that a DFL legislature, if we can vote in another one of those, will pass good stuff, and when they do, she’ll sign it, just as the frequently unsatisfying, annoyingly moderate Tim Walz did.

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Ramsey County Commissioner, District 3

Posted on by
Reply

Another easy one. On the ballot:

Garrison McMurtrey (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Greg Copeland

Garrison McMurtrey was elected in a special election in 2025. He hasn’t updated his website yet to talk about accomplishments rather than goals, but he hasn’t had a lot of time. But he seems like a perfectly nice normal Democrat.

Greg Copeland is a Republican and a perennial candidate who ran for the wrong County Board seat in 2022, City Council in 2019, St. Paul School Board in 2017, and 2016, and 2015, and 2013. Two minutes of browsing through his blog found a post about the “Plandemic” and a post where he misgenders Rep. Leigh Finke.

Absolutely vote for Garrison McMurtrey!

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.

Election 2026: Hennepin County Sheriff

Posted on by
Reply

This is just THE WORST race. On the ballot:

Dawanna Witt (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Joseph Banks (Republican-endorsed)

During Metro Surge, Dawanna Witt’s deputies repeatedly collaborated with ICE to physically abuse protesters and legal observers. I’m not going to link to video because I’d have to watch it again, and I’m just not up for it. I will give her some credit based on the fact that Trump’s administration threatened to arrest her because she was not handing over jail inmates to ICE without a warrant from a judge. But she and her staff failed to protect Minnesotans in a whole range of ways last winner.

However, Joseph Banks sought (and received) endorsement from the Republicans. His Facebook page includes an endorsement of Kendall Qualls as well as re-posts of sentiments like “let’s turn MN red in 2026!” He has largely avoided sharing any actual stances on anything, and did not reply to my e-mail, but his Facebook has a bot set up to give you information if you message them questions:

ME: Do you think the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office should be cooperating more, or less, with ICE and the Border Patrol?

JOSEPH BANKS’S CAMPAIGN BOT: Joseph Banks believes in working closely with federal partners like ICE and Border Patrol to keep everyone safe and informed. He supports transparency, coordination, and ensuring the community receives accurate information, while also respecting human dignity and due process.

(I experimented to see if I could get the bot to say anything really shocking but it’s fairly locked down.)

I’ll note that Joseph Banks ran in 2022 and I did a deep dive into his qualifications at the time. Even if he were not ideologically aligned with the fascists, he’s completely unqualified for the job.

So here’s where we’re at: the alternative to Dawanna Witt is someone who thinks the Sheriff’s office should be cooperating more with ICE, is endorsed by the Republican party, and whose prior relevant experience was overseeing law enforcement in two towns with populations of under 500 people, almost 20 years ago. (It’s really interesting that the experience thing was not remotely a dealbreaker for the Republicans, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.)

There’s simply no good option here. If I lived in Hennepin County I would either vote for Witt or leave that line blank.

This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.

I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.