I’m going to take a break from the posts where I need to do a research deep dive and do the US Senate race, which no one actually needs my opinion on, because it will be entertaining.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, first elected to the US Senate in 2006, is up for re-election this year. In 2018, she got 60% of the vote. (In her four elections, she’s won with 58%, 65%, 60%, and 60%.) So if you hate her, you can probably vote for someone else and she’ll be fine, although I’m sufficiently superstitious about protest votes going awry that I will probably check the box for her.

I’ll tell you right now that there’s no one else running that you would want as US Senator. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Amy Klobuchar (DFL)
Royce White (Republican)
Rebecca Whiting (Libertarian Party)
Joyce Lynne Lacey (Independence-Alliance)

This got long! I’m inserting a cut.

Amy Klobuchar (DFL)

If you’re voting in Minnesota, presumably you live here and you already know whether you like Amy Klobuchar or not. I think the median reader of my blog kind of loathes her because she’s a centrist Democrat who tends to pick easy fights and backs the wrong stuff (for example, she’s a cosponsor of KOSA, and AIPAC loves her — they’re her literal top contributor.)

On the plus side for Amy, she’s a reliable Democratic vote, she’s very secure in her seat, and it’s nice to have some elected Democrats no one actually needs to worry about, especially in Minnesota, which is at least slightly purple. (Tina Smith’s victories were much narrower — she won with 49% in 2020. Probably would have been a higher percent if the Legal Marijuana Party hadn’t been on the ballot, they got 6% of the vote.)

She has a reputation for being very good at constituent service, and that’s part of why she’s so popular statewide. More elected officials should take the obvious lesson from that. (From what I hear, Tina is also very very good.)

Royce White (Republican)

This guy is the worst. I find it completely hilarious that the state Republicans endorsed this guy and then voted for him in the primary when this guy ran in the 5th Congressional District primary in 2022 and spent $1800 of his campaign money on strippers (and that was the tip of the iceberg!)

His website has a FAQ written by Royce where he attempts to debunk some of the claims circulating (including several I pointed at when writing about the primary.) Regarding his misspent campaign money, his defense is that it took him years to complete his campaign filings and once he did, only about $13,000 was unaccounted for. He does not address the “$1800 of campaign money spent in a strip club” thing.

In response to the observation that he’s said a bunch of wildly antisemitic stuff, he says he has lots of Jewish friends. He does make a reasonable case against the “owes six figures of child support” claim, which is that this was the result of having child support not modified after he left the NBA and was no longer making NBA money, but he doesn’t address the fact that 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.) He has previously claimed 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.)

He calls men he doesn’t like “fags” and “cucks”; he calls women he doesn’t like “cunts.” He manages to bring a truly amazing combination of “gross,” “ignorant,” and “unqualified” to the table — Trump’s GOP in final form.

After I started this post, two more stories came out about White. He has a podcast and on the latest episode he said that “the slave owners were the super minority and what they were fighting for [in the Civil War] was to protect the rights of the minority.” (transcript of that bit is in a screen shot here). Someone also dug up a tweet from 2022 where he said the bad guys won WWII. I do want to note that in the context of the full tweet, it’s not that he’s saying the Nazis were the good guys — he was saying that the Allies were just as bad.

I’m going to reiterate what I said in the primary: this guy is not the choice of a serious party.

Republicans who would like an alternative to Royce White have better options here than Democrats who would like an alternative to Amy Klobuchar.

Joyce Lynne Lacey (Independence-Alliance)

Joyce Lynne Lacey is literally a conservative Republican who loathes Royce White. She ran in the 2022 Republican Gubernatorial primary and lost to Scott Jensen and has presented herself as a conservative alternative for voters who don’t like Royce White. Though she’s almost as fond of conspiracy theories as Royce is (that’s a link to her campaign Facebook, where she shared a video claiming that Chinese people are covering their roofs in blue tarps because it will ward off the lasers that they claim caused the Maui wildfire. On her personal Facebook yesterday she shared a Reel from someone saying the floods from hurricane Helene in North Carolina were somehow caused by a mining corporation that wants their lithium.) She’s also an unabashed Trumper — I’m not sure why she thinks spending money on strippers is a problem but raping someone in a department store is nbd.

She’s endorsed by the “Independence-Alliance Party,” what’s left of the Jessecrats. (You know, the party that former Governor Jesse Ventura ran with.) (Note: Jesse has endorsed Kamala Harris.)

Her actual motivating issue is guardianship abuse. Her mother was put under guardianship and Lutheran Social Services was named as her guardian (despite Joyce hiring a lawyer and petitioning to be made her mother’s guardian); her mother was then moved to a skilled nursing facility in another part of the state, given a DNR, enrolled in Hospice, and heavily medicated, all over Joyce’s objections and in violation of June’s previously expressed health care wishes. Joyce tells the story in more detail here.

I dug up the court filings (if you want to see them, go to https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/CaseSearch, it’s case # 56-PR-18-2692) and quite honestly, while there’s stuff Joyce left out, she’s not leaving out that she was committing elder abuse or anything like that. Her mother was having trouble breathing so Joyce took her to the hospital. The hospital thought her mother (who was 89 and had Alzheimer’s, among other progressive diseases) needed to be discharged to a skilled nursing facility. Joyce wanted to take her home and care for her herself. There’d been a previous go-round where June went to the hospital, the hospital recommended a nursing home, Joyce said she wanted to take her home and agreed to arrange some in-home professional care. The hospital said she had not followed up on this; in one of the documents filed with the court, Joyce said she had gotten a carer, who had come twice before June went back to the hospital; she had a name and other specifics so I’m inclined to think she was not just making this up.

There were e-mail messages sent by June which the hospital said were probably written by Joyce because from what they could tell, June was mostly sleeping and nonresponsive. Joyce said her mother used Dragon Dictate to write e-mail messages. Honestly, I have no idea: there are people who would definitely fake e-mail messages in this situation, and there are also elderly people who will sleep all day if they’re in the hospital but are generally more alert and responsive when they’re at home.

Joyce is not alone in feeling like Minnesota’s guardianship system is awful. The Star Trib ran a story in August where they told the stories of several people who had a vulnerable loved one placed under guardianship, not by a family member, and then placed in care somewhere far away. You don’t even have to have Alzheimer’s to be placed in guardianship; being disabled can be enough. (The woman in that second story was eventually able to go home but honestly, I suspect that fact that she had reporters asking questions about the situation was a non-trivial factor.)

One of the things that really startled me, looking at the documents filed during the guardianship case for June, is that there seems to be no point in the process where the question is asked, “has this person ever expressed a preference for who should make decisions for them” and “is there a spouse, family member, or close friend who is willing and able to step in as guardian, and is there any compelling reason not to allow them to do that?” because those seem like really important questions to me. June had a health care directive that was disregarded. She’d signed a PoA and designated Joyce. (I’m not sure she’d signed a Medical Proxy, but based on everything else, I’m not sure that would have mattered.) Joyce would have taken June home and cared for her herself, and while this might have resulted in imperfect care, so did the nursing home. If I lose the ability to make my own decisions, I want them made by people who love me! Not a professional guardian appointed by the state, unless there’s a really compelling reason why my loved ones can’t do it.

Anyway. In the wake of all this, Joyce started something called the June Lynne Lacey Foundation which on one hand says it exists to uphold and protect the rights of vulnerable adults and children and on the other hand appears to exist to raise money to buy people groceries and Christmas gifts and stuff like that. She says she wants to pass something called the “June Lynne Lacey Bill” but it’s completely unclear to me what would be in the bill. (I looked for the text of the bill she was proposing and found nothing.)

I agree that there should be a law! Among other things, it seems like we could pass a law, as a state, saying that if a person is declared incompetent, guardianship defaults to the person in their PoA or Health Care Proxy, or spouse or next of kin, provided this person is available and willing. This would be a state law, though, and not something a US Senator would have much if anything to do with. I would not vote for Joyce for US Senate because I don’t think she understands the job, at all, or has any idea how to pass legislation or who’s responsible for what. I may write a letter to my state legislator asking for some work on guardianship reform in a coming session, though.

Rebecca Whiting (Libertarian Party)

Rebecca is kind of a classic Libertarian candidate in a couple of ways, in that she manages to combine “vaguely tempting” with “oh my god, what?” She’s anti-corporation and anti-foreign intervention (vaguely tempting), but she takes the anti-foreign-intervention stuff all the way into isolationism. She’s also anti-tax and anti-regulation without any particular discussion of how society would function if we stopped taxing anything and whether her emphatic pro-deregulation stance includes the belief that it should be legal to sell chicken salad that’s been sitting out at room temperature for 8 hours, we can just run our own tests if we’d like to avoid food poisoning.

Do I think there are regulations that are annoying: absolutely. Do I want the government regulating the companies that produce the food, cosmetics, and drugs that I put in my body: also absolutely.

She has a lot of long Facebook posts on her campaign FB where she says things like “I keep getting asked what I will do when I get to DC. Bring back old fashioned common sense and values, of course” (with no unpacking of what she means) and “I keep getting asked what I’d do if I was in DC. I wouldn’t DO anything outside of UNDOING everything the federal government has created to consistently prop up an untenable, irrational, and immoral system meant to keep normal people incapable, enslaved, and ignorant” and “We have an obligation to fix broken systems, not capitalize off it every four years during election season” and lots of other things that probably sound very appealing to other Libertarians but definitely do not for me. There’s a lot of stuff the Federal government does that I want to keep. Would she get rid of NHTSA? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission? The National Parks?

And this is kind of what I mean by a classic Libertarian candidate: she’s at least a little bit of a cypher, in that she makes it easy for people to assume that she’d get rid of the Department of Education (always a safe target) but keep the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Would she? Who knows? She doesn’t say and gets openly impatient with being asked for specifics (“I keep getting asked…”) (And honestly: she’s a busy woman who isn’t going to win, so, fair enough.)

Anyway, if you’re a Republican looking for a candidate to vote for who doesn’t go on podcasts to ramble about how oppressed enslavers were or how the Allies in WWII were just as bad as the Nazis, you probably have one final pressing question: where does Rebecca stand on abortion?

She thinks it should be illegal. (“Murder already is illegal, and we should quit trying to redefine what a human is based on their stage of development.”) She further elaborates on her position here: “I want to see a pro-life movement that doesn’t just care about unborn babies, but our mothers as well, that supports pregnancy centers and makes help more accessible through churches, non profits, and charities.” Worth noting, she wants pregnant women supported through churches, non profits, and charities — not through WIC, food stamps, Medicaid, or any of the other supports provided by the government. (This has, in fact, been tried; it never goes well.)

There is one risk frustrated Republican voters should be aware of, though. If Rebecca gets 8% of the vote statewide (it used to be 5%, but the DFL raised the limit), the Libertarian Party will become a major party for — I think they would get four years? which means that in any election in the state, someone would be able to file for office as a Libertarian and appear on the ballot, no complicated petitions necessary. When the weed parties were major parties, this was used to run spoiler candidates in tight races to hurt the DFL candidates. Libertarians, however, generally take more votes from Republicans. It is in fact a lot harder to hit that 8% point than 5%, so I don’t know just how worried you should be. But given how profoundly and ludicrously awful Royce White is: probably at least a little!

ETA 10/28: I pulled up Rebecca’s Facebook page while I was writing my “Index to All the Races” post and found a post from her saying “People who get super offended over nonsense will never be an ally for liberty.” I thought maybe this was about people objecting to the “comedian” at the Trump rally calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” but no, this was apparently about someone on the MN Libertarian Facebook page sharing an antisemitic meme and Rebecca deciding to die on the hill of, “there is nothing antisemitic about the triple parenthesis.” So that’s fun. Love to discover that minor-party candidates are both sharing dogwhistle garbage and pretending that because they haven’t done a cursory google, they’re exempt from being criticized for it.

If you’re a Klobuchar hater and a Democrat: I don’t know what to tell you. Honestly, I personally have a superstitious fear of casting protest votes, and of the people on the ballot, I would pick her as my Senator. For those of you less constrained by paranoia, I think your best choice may be writing someone in. (Do I want the Libertarian party as a major party to hurt Republicans: I don’t think I do, honestly, it would also give them a large platform for their bad ideas and too many Libertarian parties are run by really awful people. I would find it hilarious, though, which would be some consolation.)

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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 books, math manipulatives, and social and emotional learning resources.)

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!