I am writing about this House race in detail and will be giving minimal attention to the rest because in this race, it’s a DFLer vs. a Green instead of a DFLer vs. a Republican. (DFLer vs. Republican: just vote for the DFLer.) The two candidates:

Katie Jones (DFL)
Toya Lopez (Green)

The good news is that both of these candidates are pretty great. Also, there are two of them. So if you have a preference and came here wondering if I would validate your preference, it kind of doesn’t matter. I think they’re both fine (neither candidate has some horrifying skeleton in the closet that I turned up while researching) and you run absolutely no risk of accidentally getting a Republican if you vote your preference, as there is no Republican in this race. (Even if there were, I would not be worried. There’s a reason you don’t have a Republican in this race, which is, the local Republicans are aware they’d be wasting their time.) If you prefer Katie, vote Katie. If you prefer Toya, vote Toya. That’s my general advice. I usually do tell you who I would vote for, in part just because that’s how I started out doing this blog (twenty years ago) and in part because I feel like that offers useful context because (for example) the way I look at someone’s experience is often affected by the way I feel about their opinions.

In mulling over the differences between Katie and Toya, I watched the forum, I read the Five Questions series from Southwest Journal with Toya and with Katie, and I read the MPR guide questionnaire. I read both their websites and I looked up their resumes on LinkedIn. After I started this post, Toya’s interview with WedgeLive ran and I listened to that (as a podcast — I’m linking to a YouTube video but I just listened, I didn’t watch.)

Katie has an Engineering degree and works for the Center for Energy and Environment. She’s worked on energy policy as part of her job and has also been on stuff like the Sustainable Transportation Advisory Committee at MNDOT and the Capital Long Range Improvement Committee. She likes to raise the point that there are a lot of lawyers in the legislature and not a lot of engineers. Toya has a degree in Public Health and most recently worked for Cooperative Energy Futures. She was on Minneapolis’s Community Environmental Advisory Committee and on the board of MN 350. I’m not sure if she’s pointed out that there are a lot of lawyers in the legislature and not a lot of people who’ve worked in public health, but she could.

I found the forum interesting to watch (if you’d prefer excerpts, this WedgeLive Twitter thread does a highlights reel.) Things that particularly struck me: Toya quoted a line you sometimes hear from left-NIMBYs, “we don’t have a housing crisis, we have an affordable housing crisis.” (We have both. The affordable housing crisis is inextricably linked to a shortage of units, and rent control — she mentioned legalizing rent control being the thing she most wanted to do at the legislature — without also a massive increase in supply will just lead to a massive housing crunch.) Katie gave a vehement YIMBY “we need to build more units” answer but she did not sound like a fan of rent control. Asked what they’d tax and what they’d give up (to afford stuff on their agenda), Toya said she’d tax mansions and give up things like massive loans to Lockheed Martin; Katie said she’d tax pollution and give up being the state with the 4th highest number of lane miles. On transit, Toya brought up sidewalk accessibility (“how do people get to bus stops?”) and Katie talked about hearing people in the district talk about feeling unsafe on light rail (she thinks the Ambassador program is helping.)

On a question about schools, Toya brought up ESL accessibility and how many of her neighbors were pulling their kids out of the district because their kids were not getting the ESL services they needed. Katie wanted to pause the opening of new charter schools until the state could come up with ways to ensure accountability (she referenced the Star Tribune investigation on some of the charter school disaster stories.)

They both have done meaningful work on climate in the past and would bring a lot of concern about climate to the legislature. When they talk, Katie tends to emphasize her background being “a family of small business owners” before swinging into stuff like “we should build fewer roads and less parking.” Toya sounds more like a leftist. (“Everything is built on the bones of oppression and extraction. I recognize this, and decide to wield the privilege I have for justice, to the best of my ability.” — that’s from the MPR voter guide.) The thing that strikes me about this is that the “family of business owners” framing is how she sells climate-friendly policies to people who might actually like to have the third highest miles of paved road lanes. I appreciate this, but I do recognize that there are people who visit my blog who’d prefer the leftist framing over the build-a-coalition-with-the-centrists framing.

One of the issues that Toya raised on the WedgeLive podcast that differentiates her from Katie is that Toya supports divestment from Israel. This is in the category of things that really should not be a local issue, but as it happens, back in 2017, the legislature passed an anti-BDS bill saying that the State of Minnesota could not use any vendors that “discriminate against” the State of Israel. This is total bullshit; this is not something that the State of Minnesota should be requiring of vendors. Toya wants to undo this bill. Katie has not commented on it, so far as I could find.

Toya pointed at the Biden administration policies on Israel as a reason she decided to run as a Green Party candidate. I’m fine with that decision. A third-party candidate in a solid blue district would not tilt it red even if there were a Republican in the race.

But she also said on the WedgeLive podcast that she was probably going to vote for Jill Stein, and here we hit one of my personal dealbreakers. Jill Stein is a blatant grifter who has palled around with Putin and is openly trying to get Trump elected. She has said that she sees no lesser evil between Trump and Harris. Trump had to be dissuaded from using nuclear weapons during his presidency, just to mention one of the many reasons why he’s the “greater evil” in any context. If your memory of the Trump years is so poor that you’re OK with him winning again: no, you absolutely do not get my vote. Nope. You can vote however you want! But so can other people.

Especially since Katie is a terrific candidate and I think she’d also get a lot more done than Toya. (Here’s what I wrote about the DFL primary, which includes other stuff about Katie I didn’t recap here.)

I would vote for Katie Jones.

---

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!