This is a judgeship in Hennepin County. Voters in Hennepin County will see this race on their ballots. On the ballot:
Matthew Frank (Incumbent)
Christopher Leckrone
Judge Matthew Frank was appointed by Governor Walz in 2023. There are basically two really straightforward reasons to vote for Judge Frank and not his opponent.
- One of the foundational experiences lawyers should have if they want to become a judge is to spend time in court — you can be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or litigator, but you really do need to be going to court. According to his resume, Christopher Leckrone has worked for many years primarily in compliance, a job done entirely outside of courtrooms. (He does list pro bono work with foster kids that might involve going into the courtroom, but that is very clearly not what he’s spending most of his time doing.) (ETA: his website says he worked as a prosecutor, so I checked his resume again. From 2010-2010 he worked for the DA’s office in Middlesex, MA. I stand by my assessment that this is not someone bringing a wealth of courtroom experiment to the table.)
- Matthew Frank was one of the lead prosecutors in the state’s case against Derek Chauvin. And of the 19 judges in Hennepin County up for election this year, that’s the guy Leckrone decided to run against. Leckrone has a completely hidden or sanitized social media presence and I found no indication of his political views except that he opted to run against this particular judge. (It’s not just that Frank is new — a cursory check quickly turned up several judges appointed in 2022 or 2023. There’s some other reason Leckrone decided to run against him, and this seems by far the most likely.)
Anyway — Frank is well-qualified and Leckrone is not. I would vote for Judge Frank. I think all the other 4th District Court judges are running unopposed.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).
But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.
Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)
Will Tell Stories For Food 
Natalie – I appreciate the research and recommendations you make on the judicial races so much! Thank you. Right after I type this, I will make a donation to Camp Northern Lights.
Question: do you have an opinion on 2nd District Court Judge 3 which is Timothy Carey vs Paul Yang?
Thanks,
KH
Still researching that one. I have not at this point found any reason not to vote for (incumbent) Judge Carey, though.
Thanks for the fast reply!
Thanks for this resource. I got my absentee ballot today, and am generally clueless on the non-partisan races.
A suggestion: surface your RSS feed on the site; somewhere in the right column would be dandy. I can, and did, dig it out of the page source, but that’s a bit of a PITA, and not everyone is going to bother.
I straight up have no idea how to do this.
Not knowing how you interact with WordPress, I don’t know how to pitch an answer. The low-level answer is to add an RSS block to the righthand column, or ask WordPress.com support, or whoever you use for that kind of thing, to do it for you.
As the world of ExTwitter fragments, the ancient and honorable RSS has become the most reliable way for many of us to follow blogs. In the case of yours, I’ve solved the problem for myself, but it’d be a real convenience for others.
WordPress gets worse to use every year, I have generally found their support completely useless, and since I have never figured out how to use an RSS feed as an end-user I’m finding the page you linked to completely baffling. In my page setup I found something that claimed to be an RSS Feed Widget and I tried to add it and it just seems to be linking to posts from my site, and also it’s literally just not showing up when I reload. (I have about ten minutes of “fucking around with WordPress” in me on any given day before I want to smash something. I hate WordPress. I hate it SO MUCH. However everything else seems to be both even worse to use, and more expensive.)
Well, thanks for trying; I appreciate that. I self-host a couple of WP sites, so have not dealt with support. Some time back, WP moved to a “block editor”, which you probably mess with routinely. Seems like they’ve made an RSS block type, which would obviate the need for a widget, the older solution. But … all that depends I’m sure on your theme and what-not, so please don’t spend more time on it on my account. I’d rather you spent it researching judges, anyway.
Yeah — I hate the block editor SO MUCH I cannot even tell you. It’s a pain in every possible way that something can possibly be a pain — on a very basic level it’s simply not well-designed for *blogging* in the sense of “posting multiple paragraphs of writing.”
This was the last one on the list for me. I really appreciate your thoughts. It can be tough to find information on these lesser name candidates and the insight you provide is super valuable for those of us without the time to deep dive. Thanks for your work!!!
I’ve been using your website as a resource for the last 3 elections. I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to research and report your findings! I’ve found it very helpful!
Christopher Leckrone’s site states he does have prosecution experience. Did you miss this?
I did! … probably because he worked as a prosecutor for *less than a year.* His resume (on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-m-leckrone-a592b18/details/experience/ ) says that he worked in the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office from 2010-2010.
Thank you so much for doing the research and giving us insight. I am going with all your recommendations. Very helpful and much appreciated.!!!