Amy Klobuchar is running for re-election this year and there are in fact a lot of people on the primary ballot, in both parties. This is a low-stakes primary because the only real question is whether Royce White (GOP-endorsed) or Joe Fraser (lost endorsement but is at least 25% less embarrassing than Royce White) will get to lose to Amy K in November, so if you mainly come to my blog to see me make fun of people, you’ll enjoy this post. If you’re hoping for a more-left-wing alternative to Amy K, I regret to tell you that you are once again SOL.
Inserting a cut because this got very long!
On the Democratic side of the ballot you have:
Ole Savior
Steve Carlson
Ahmad R. Hassan
George H. Kalberer
Amy Klobuchar (incumbent)
Ole Savior
Ole has been a perennial candidate since the mid-1980s. Probably the high point of his career was in 2010, when he was allowed to briefly address the 2010 DFL State Convention and made a pitch for changing the mascot from a donkey to a unicorn. If you really want to know more about this guy you can find a whole lot of random stuff here. Basically none of the random stuff involves actual political views on any topic. If you really want to cast a protest vote against Amy, Ole Savior is less offensive than the other people running.
Steve Carlson is an anti-gay anti-Muslim anti-abortion election-denying Republican and running in the DFL primary. He’s a perennial candidate and I’ve written about him several times before. New this year: he has blocked me on Twitter, so I feel less of an obligation to say anything about his current crop of bad stances other than “don’t vote for this guy, he’s an asshole.”
This dipshit STILL LIVES IN TEXAS. He also wrote a website URL that doesn’t exist on his campaign affidavit. Don’t vote for this guy, he’s a dipshit who doesn’t even live here (and hasn’t set up a website.)
George H. Kalberer
The only thing I found about George Kalberer’s beliefs is his Facebook page with posts from 2014 and 2015 in which he’s Islamophobic and homophobic. Do not vote for this guy, he’s a bigot.
Amy Klobuchar (incumbent)
I have my complaints about Amy (and probably so do my readers) but holy shit is she ever better than any of the people running against her.
On to the Republicans! For those who don’t know, in the non-Presidential primaries, you get a ballot that’s split by party. You have to pick a party and vote only in that party’s races. So you can vote in the DFL primaries, or the Republican primaries, but not both. If you live in Minneapolis, you should vote in the DFL primaries because the Don Samuels is challenging Ilhan Omar again and once again, I think you should vote for Ilhan Omar (more on that in a later post) but if you live in St. Paul (or somewhere else with no DFL primary or no competitive DFL primary) you could cross over and vote for a less-evil Republican (if you wish to encourage the less-evil Republican faction) or for a more-embarrassing Republican (if you think that will depress turnout).
On the Republican side of the ballot, six randos:
John Berman
Patrick D. Munro
Christopher Seymore Sr.
Raymond D. Petersen
Loner Blue
Alycia R. Gruenhagen
And the two people who might actually win:
Joe Fraser
Royce White
This really is a surprisingly long list of people eager to get their asses handed to them by Amy Klobuchar.
John Berman is convinced that all the problems in the world are caused by lawyers. (I mean, he straight up says this on his website: “Root Cause of ALL US DOMESTIC PROBLEMS: Levers of power are controlled by lawyers—directly or by their lackeys. Congress & Executive, virtually 100%. Courts 100%. The problem is the lawyers.”) The whole website has strong “meme of the guy gesturing wildly at wall of red string” vibes with a side of “there’s this one judge that he particularly hates and he’s not letting the fact that the guy retired in 2020 get in the way of his vendetta.” My favorite bit is where he compares this one judge to both Putin and Hitler.
I had forgotten this until I ran a search of my own site: if you remember a guy in 2020 who said he was a member of the Vulcan Farmer Party and claimed an endorsement from “Sarak of Vulcan” — same guy.
Patrick’s big thing on his website is “the MAMA movement,” where MAMA stands for “Make Americans Makers Again.” I wondered if this was an actual movement or something Patrick was trying to make happen, and as far as I can tell the movement here consists of just Patrick. He wants to “re-shore” manufacturing but has very little information on his website about how exactly he’d go about doing that. Other than that, his stance I found most interesting was a Facebook post about how Michelle Bachmann’s antigay bigotry did long-term damage to the Minnesota GOP — he’s not wrong, but his suggested cure is “hate the sin, love the sinner,” which I’m going to say kind of misses the point. He also thinks Mitch McConnell is insufficiently conservative.
Chris is a perennial candidate who previous ran (in 2018 and 2020) in the Democratic primary for Senate. The sample ballot provides a link to the URL he listed, but there’s no actual website there; I’ve linked to the website I found via his campaign Facebook.
My main takeaway from his website (especially this post) is that he thinks he’s Hari Seldon and I’m pretty sure he is not but to be fair, I have not in fact checked his math.
His Facebook is full of little videos of a fake talk show he makes while driving Uber. He runs a videocam as he drives and talks to his passengers. This strikes me as a bad idea from a road safety perspective, tbh. He also has a bunch of ranting about the Minneapolis Public Schools “inviting children” to the Pride Parade and it’s not clear to me whether he is upset because he thinks Pride Parades are bad for children, or because he’s under the impression than Minneapolis Public Schools pay for the Pride Parade out of the school budget.
He calls himself “Grandpa Ray” on his website, which goes well with the general “old man yells at cloud” vibe (which he shares with Loner Blue and Patrick Mundro). His positions on issues include a mix of “literally this isn’t possible” and “you want a constitutional amendment … good luck with that.” (Literally not possible: he wants citizens to be able to sue the Justice Department for damages when people who were “inadequately prosecuted” commit another crime.) He also has a Twitter account (that he pays for so he can have long Tweets, I assume) on which he has some coded homophobia and transphobia and rants about “wokeness.”
He doesn’t list a website but is campaigning via his personal Facebook and a Twitter where he posts screenshots of what he puts on Facebook. He wants to build a border wall and discriminate against trans people, and given that those are his two primary stances I’m not sure why he’s running instead of just voting for Royce White.
Alycia is the one woman who’s running in the Republican primary. Alycia ran in the DFL primary for Congressional District 7 in 2022 but she was clear MAGA even at the time (although her campaign materials apparently tried to hide it.) Her website tries very hard to say the quiet stuff quiet but she’s a bit more forthcoming on her Facebook: she’s anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-abortion-rights.
Her father Glenn is a Republican state legislator and a global warming denier. I found nothing about climate on Alycia’s website or Facebook page; hard to tell if that’s because she’s a global warming denier like her dad, and knows that’s not a popular stance, or if she’s not a global warming denier and doesn’t want to have to argue about it at Thanksgiving.
If you scroll far enough down her Facebook you’ll find out she had a “personal conviction” against masks in July 2020. (“Mine is in the area of natural health and so I have done my research. Decreasing oxygen is incredibly detrimental to ones health – worse if someone is already ill. I have a personal conviction against masks. I hope you can appreciate my conviction not to wear a mask just as I can appreciate yours. If your mask is effective you should not need to be worried about mine.”)
Anyway. None of those people are going to win the primary, which is possibly unfortunate for the Minnesota GOP since 4/5 of them are probably less embarrassing than their endorsed candidate:
Where to even start with Royce White? He ran in the Republican primary for the Minneapolis US House seat two years ago. He lost the primary, but raised a bunch of money. The $1800 of campaign funds that went to a strip club got some news coverage but it’s genuinely the tip of the iceberg:
The Daily Beast reviewed White’s 2022 primary campaign reports and found numerous items that boggled legal experts. The unusual expenses include a total of more than $100,000 in mysterious wire transfers and checks reported as paid to the campaign; hefty tabs at spicy nightspots; getaways at posh hotels in at least seven states; thousands of dollars in limousine services; unexplained cash withdrawals; eye-popping purchases from electronics, sporting goods, clothing, and musical instrument retailers; and the DribbleUp smart basketball training app that White himself admitted might be personal use.
He provided a defense of some of these purchases to Axios: “When asked about the purchases at clothing and department stores, White told Axios that he can buy apparel to print campaign slogans on as well as items to use as ‘props and materials for campaign ads or commercials.’ He also told Axios that the [$3200] Guitar Center purchases were for ‘audio equipment used for political functions’ and that the check and wire transfer payments ‘went to people who rendered services.'”
Despite raising all that money, he did not even cast a vote for himself (he appears to have voted only once, in 2020.)
Also in 2020 he pled guilty to violating an order of protection. (You can see the petition here: his wife describes physical, emotional, and financial abuse. The petition was from some years earlier than 2020.) Royce responded that orders of protection are common in divorce cases (they are not) and that he and his wife have since reconciled (yikes, I really hope she’s OK.)
Royce White is an Alex Jones fan and a conspiracy theorist. He complains about women being “mouthy” and has been explicitly (as well as dog-whistley) antisemitic. He flings antigay and misogynistic slurs. (More of that here.)
He owes over $100K in child support to the mother of one of his kids. (Not the one who had the order of protection against him.)
…And I think there’s actually more out there? This is just what I could round up quickly.
Joe Fraser is the other serious candidate in the primary race, and if the Minnesota Republicans were more concerned about embarrassment, they’d have endorsed him. He’s a Navy veteran whose website avoids mentioning abortion or Trump’s big lie and instead offers up a bunch of one-sentence policy statements like “We must focus on reducing government obstacles to job creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” just the most utterly banal stuff you can imagine. (That’s his entire issues statement on the Economy.)
He’s endorsed by a lot of the remaining establishment Republicans, including people that made me think “wait, he’s still alive?” (Rudy Boschwitz endorsed him! If you’d asked me if Rudy Boschwitz was still alive I’d absolutely have guessed that he’d died years ago. Dude’s in his mid-90s! …and apparently still issuing endorsements!) (“Who’s Rudy Boschwitz?” I can hear people asking. He was the Republican incumbent that Paul Wellstone beat in 1990. And then beat again in 1996.)
Anyway. I am torn about who to root for here. Joe is a normie Republican who would 100% vote for every evil shitty thing the Republicans would put to a vote, but he’s also not platforming conspiracy theories and antisemitism like Royce White. Royce White is awful, but he’s so awful that he might be a liability to the Republicans as a whole. On the other other hand, I don’t think anyone’s going to look at Royce White and think, “that person totally has a shot at winning if only I write him a check!” so I’m not sure he’d be as good of a sink for pointless donations. On the other other other hand, Joe Fraser would probably spend any campaign donations on staff and ads that would potentially help other Republicans win, whereas Royce White will probably spend it at Bed Bath & Beyond, Nike, Lululemon, Nordstrom, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and strip clubs.
I am not actually worried that either one will beat Amy Klobuchar, the most popular politician in the state.
Anyway: Amy Klobuchar has my endorsement (not that she needs it!). If you’re an old-school normie Republican … you know, you should seriously rethink your party allegiance, guys, because the GOP has become the party of “we think the president should be a King, we will enshrine minority rule to force unpopular policies on the entire country, down with democracy.” It’s not great!
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Will Tell Stories For Food 
Loner Blue is actually an even more disturbing individual than even Royce White. There’s a very good reason why he keeps a relatively low profile on social media.
Formerly known as Scott G. Kendall, he legally changed his name sometime in the 1990s, presumably to distance himself from his 1991 conviction for molesting his own daughter (who was then aged 11). He subsequently filed numerous lawsuits trying to get the conviction overturned, to no avail.
These lawsuits are in the public record, and doing a Google search for “Loner Blue” yields quite a few of them in the top few pages of results, so it’s not all that hard to find. One of the more recent lawsuits is from 2010 and indicates he was still incarcerated at that time. Presumably he has since been released, though I don’t know when that happened.
I could imagine some people voting for Loner Blue just because his name “sounds cool”, particularly disaffected Republicans who aren’t fond of either White or Fraser.
If he does end up the GOP nominee (which is admittedly a very long shot), it’d be even more embarrassing for the party than a Royce White victory would be. If the party that embraces QAnon supporters and fearmongers about LGBTQ people being “groomers” were to nominate a CONVICTED CHILD MOLESTER for U.S. Senate, it’d be awkward to say the least. Even if said child molester is also a self-proclaimed Christian American patriot. (The last refuge of a scoundrel, indeed!)
The polls open in about eight hours, so let’s see what happens.