“Where’s your gift guide?” It’s coming, I promise, but first and somewhat more urgently there is one more election this year. Saint Paul Mayor-Elect Kaohly Her was a State Rep, and resigned her seat when she won the mayoral race, and the primary for the special election to fill her seat is happening December 16th. This is a deeply blue district, and while a Republican is running (Dan Walsh, who also ran against Kaohly Her in 2024), the primary is the real contest. So if you live in District 64A (that link leads to a map but you can also look up your address here) you should figure out who you’re voting for, and go vote. (“What about the Special Election in 47A, are you going to write about that one?” No, because 47A is an entirely suburban district. No part of 47A is in St. Paul or Minneapolis. I only write about races that appear on the ballots of voters in St. Paul or Minneapolis.)

There are six people running in the DFL primary. The local DFL held an endorsing convention on December 7th, which I attended with the goal of watching the speeches and the Q&A. Everyone said they would continue to run regardless, which is honestly reasonable given that it’s too late to pull your name off the ballot, and also, this was a convention of 75 delegates re-called from the pool that volunteered to be delegates to the uncontested convention in 2024. I’m glad they ran the convention, because it gave me an opportunity to see most of the people running and get a sense of what they’re like. But I think it’s fine that no one’s dropping out.

There’s no instant runoff in this race; everyone needs to pick one.

In the race:

John Zwier
Matt Hill
Lois Quam
Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)
Beth Fraser
Dan McGrath

A note on this writeup. Ordinarily, I would send e-mails to all the candidates asking them a question or two. But this election is in one week. So I’m going to leave some stuff a little handwavy and if candidates see this and urgently want to explain whatever it was I threw up my hands over, they can e-mail me and/or leave a comment.

ETA: There was a LWV candidate forum last night. I haven’t watched it (yet) (and I may not, because I’ve got a bunch of other stuff I need to do.) Here’s the video. It looks like all six candidates were there.

John Zwier

John didn’t seek DFL endorsement, which means I didn’t see him speak. He works in the Attorney General’s office but his boss has endorsed in this race and he was not the pick (Keith Ellison endorsed Lois Quam.) He lists no endorsements on his site. His primary issue is gun control, and you can read his Star Tribune editorial for more information on his proposal (his main proposal is mandatory visible trigger locks on any gun carried in a public space; he has more proposals at https://www.mnfirearmlegislation.com/.)

Poking around social media I discovered that he does have an endorsement from Wes Burdine (owner of the Black Hart LGBTQ+ soccer bar) who knows him personally.

I would not vote for John; most of the other candidates seem to be making a better case for themselves. (Also, he doesn’t seem to have much momentum, and this is not a race with instant runoff. I think this is a race between Lois, Meg, Beth, and Dan.)

Matt Hill

Matt has worked as an advisor and aide to several Ramsey County Commissioners, but again, does not have any endorsements. He did seek DFL endorsement so I heard him speak and respond to Q&A today, and I was not impressed. He kept saying that he was uniquely qualified but was not successful at conveying what his unique qualifications were, in this field of incredibly qualified and accomplished people. He said “that’s my commitment to you!” at the end of most of his answers, after not actually giving us any specific commitments.

During Q&A, there were two responses that stood out to me, both bad. First, there was a question about AI (this really took all the candidates by surprise; none of them had an answer prepared, which was interesting in itself). Everyone else talked about the ways in which they would want to regulate AI and Matt’s response included the line “We need to get with it, if that is the will of what we decide to do.” (I assume he meant the will of the people.) Terrible response. At the very end, they got asked whether they would support higher taxes on the very rich. Everyone else said yes. He did not. He didn’t say no, either, but he used his minute to talk about living within our means and “as a small business owner” blah blah etc. He seemed out of his depth, and I would not vote for him.

Lois Quam

Lois honestly impressed me more than I’d expected her to when I saw that (a) she was the President and CEO of Blue Shield of California from January through April of this year and an executive at UnitedHealth from 1989-2007 (source) and (b) she’s endorsed by Hillary Clinton. Her endorsements also include Attorney General Keith Ellison, Ward 4 City Council Rep Molly Coleman, and Ward 3 City Council Rep Saura Jost. In addition to working for health insurers, she helped write the legislation that created MinnesotaCare, she was an advisor to then-first-lady Hillary when she was writing the health care plan that didn’t pass (hence the endorsement from Hillary), and spent a number of years as the CEO of a global health nonprofit.

Her four-month tenure at Blue Shield of California is sort of weird. I assumed that she got hired in an interim capacity, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case and it’s not clear why she left (and I can’t even read the article talking about how it’s mysterious as it’s behind a paywall I can’t get around with archive.is.)

Asked about single payer, she said she’s a supporter, but that it’s very hard to do it as a state on our own. She talked a ton about coalition building. She said that health care was an easier issue to work across the aisle on than you might expect because there’s not a single Republican representative that doesn’t have his or her own horror story about prior authorization fuckery. (Can I just say I find it wild to hear this from someone who has been a high-level executive at UnitedHealth and a CEO at another insurer. Yes, yes, we all contain multitudes, but, you know. Wild.)

She’s from Marshall, Minnesota originally, and she talked a lot about how she would do outreach to the southern part of the state to recruit people who would run as Democrats for the state legislature. Asked about what she’d hope to accomplish in her first year she talked about being a loyal team player and serving wherever caucus leadership thought she was needed. Finally, if you’re a fan of the Twin Cities Boulevard proposal, she was the one candidate who said she favored it when this got brought up during Q&A. (Everyone else talked about a land bridge.)

I’m going to talk about her answer to the AI question, too. (I found the responses to this really interesting because it was a topic no one had prepared for, and it meant we got a look at how they thought through something they don’t get asked about much.) She started out with the cheerful statement, “I like regulations.” She then acknowledged that it’s an uphill fight because the companies are powerful and it’s a hard problem to tackle as one state, but she supports Keith Ellison’s work in that area, and she suggested that one place to start would be within health care — there are good places to use it, but also really bad places. (She didn’t specify what she meant by this but I would cite “AI supported radiography” as an example of an appropriate use and “AIs used to deny coverage” as an example of a wildly inappropriate use and hopefully that’s more or less what she meant.)

Anyway. There are aspects of Lois’s platform I appreciate but I’m sorry, I can’t get past the fact that she spent almost 20 years as a UnitedHealth executive. It is possibly she has managed to buy back her soul in her years of working for nonprofits, and if so, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t mean I trust her. I would not vote for her in the primary.

Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)

Meg is a labor lawyer who works for Education Minnesota. She’s endorsed by SPPS school board chair Halla Henderson and 62A House Rep Aisha Gomez, and also by several unions. (ETA: post-convention, she was also endorsed by mayor-elect Kaohly Her, SD 64 Senator Erin Murphy, and 64B Rep Dave Pinto.)

In her speech, she highlighted fighting back against school boards that adopt homophobic and racist book censorship policies. She talked about the unprecedented corruption in the Republican party.

During Q&A she mentioned organizing in the suburbs; it’s nice to hear people talking about party building generally, like Lois’s comment about working in southern Minnesota. She stood out a little as being unsupportive of ranked choice. (They got asked about that during the Q&A.) On the AI question, she started out with, “I’m a luddite” and went on to say that she doesn’t really care about stuff like fake pictures of alien invasions but she is very concerned about deepfake videos of real people, and would support required identification when AI was being used. (Same! I don’t know how we enforce this but same.)

ETA: I got a note from Meg. She says she’s not against RCV, just not sold, and is going to be chatting with someone from FairVote ASAP (but probably not in the next week). Re AIs, she had this to add: “I am very concerned about the intellectual property aspect of AI and LLMs specifically. In my line of work, most of my writing is a work for hire and I can’t feel that protective of it. The notion that working authors are having their works fed into a digital Cuisinart and get neither compensation nor a right of refusal is a huge problem that we need a fix for, and I am all in for a state level solution if it’s workable.”

I poked around social media to see what other people were saying about various candidates and ran across a post from a local labor guy (with a book coming out) that said “Labor organizer’s greatest ire is reserved for timid labor lawyers who are too scared to support action. Meg Luger-Nikolai is THE exception to that rule, the best labor lawyer I know.”

She is one of my top three.

Beth Fraser

Beth is a former Deputy Secretary of State and founded the Voting Rights Alliance twenty years ago. She has a long career in policy, working both directly with the legislature (as a researcher) and with various nonprofits (the Main Street Alliance, OutFront Minnesota, and others). She is endorsed by former Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (Steve Simon’s predecessor), a bunch of State Senators, Ward 5 City Council Rep Hwa Jeong Kim, and Ward 1 City Council Rep Anika Bowie. And the owners of Moon Palace Books, one of my favorite local bookstores.

She helped to both pass and implement the Safe at Home act (which allows people whose safety is at risk, such as victims of stalking and domestic violence, to maintain a confidential address and still vote). She worked to end prison gerrymandering and to ensure that Tribal IDs were acceptable ID for voter registration. One of the things that impresses me about her history is that she had the foresight to write protections in the law before the GOP started trying to use certain specific loopholes to attack voting rights.

She started her speech by talking about a vicious homophobic note she received as a 14-year-old high school kid, and she ended it by talking about standing up to bullies (i.e., Trump). Two things from her speech particularly stood out to me. First, when she introduced herself, she gave her pronouns, which I don’t think anyone else did. Second, as she was talking about protecting all the people being targeted by the Republicans, she said that everyone had the right to respect and protection “regardless of how or if you worship.” Both of these things were brief and subtle and yet stood out to me as evidence that she’s someone who is not going to brush aside any of her constituents.

Policywise, some things that jumped out at me: she talked about empowering local governments to raise money in progressive ways (rather than property taxes.) She also talked about banning tear gas for crowd control.

On the AI question, she said she’s been working with experts in this area, trying to figure out what is and isn’t possible, in terms of regulatory approaches. She said she worked on Minnesota’s law against political deepfakes. She added that we also need strong environmental regulations on data centers.

She is one of my top three.

Dan McGrath

Dan McGrath was the founding executive director of Take Action MN, which is an organization I like a lot. (When I doorknock in election season I often head over to their office to pick up materials and a route.) He is endorsed by two County Commissioners and by State Senator Scott Dibble, who also endorsed Beth Fraser. Since leaving Take Action MN in 2018, he has worked as a consultant, and as a policy strategist for the Grassroots Power Project.

In talking about his history, he noted that in 2012, there was a statewide referendum on mandatory photo ID when voting, and that there was initially 80% support for it in polls, it was so popular that a whole lot of Democrats and progressive organizations said we couldn’t win and shouldn’t even try. As the Executive Director of Take Action, he decided they’d fight anyway, and we beat it. (We beat it along with the proposed constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, and we beat both so thoroughly we got a trifecta for the first time in a long time and passed marriage equality.)

Everyone (I think) said they were at least theoretically in favor of single-payer. Dan also brought up passing the Patient-Centered Health Care Act, which would change Minnesota Care so that payments were made directly from the government to the providers. (Currently, If you are enrolled in Minnesota Care, you get your services through one of the insurers.)

On the issue of property taxes, he mentioned wanting to be able to raise revenue from all the properties currently not on the tax rolls but was not specific about exactly which of the various nontaxable entities in St. Paul he wants to tax. (A bunch are owned by the government itself.)

A couple of things I particularly liked: there was a question about how people would work across the aisle while not compromising their values and he said that where the inherent worth and dignity of all people were at stake, there could be no exceptions; “I cannot yield on any question about the basic dignity of other people.” But also, he wouldn’t want to go to the legislature if he didn’t want to talk to people in the other party. The question you want to ask is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, and are we actually coming at it from different directions? (“No one likes insurance companies,” he added, which was echoed a minute later by Lois — I talked about her response above.) Also, on the question about climate change, he was the only person to talk about transit, which kind of blew my mind; he also talked about working with farmers to help them cut fertilizer usage, and bonding housing downtown that requires builders to minimize use of plastics. (This was a lot more specific plans than most of the other candidates offered in response to that question.)

On the AI question, I transcribed while he was talking and I’m actually just going to quote: “I, too, feel strongly about regulating AI. But I want to say why. It is important that in public life that we emphasize and prioritize having a conscience. Having ethics. AI has none of what I’ve just said. It doesn’t have a moral compass. I think first – how do we try to lift up the idea that we are people, that we have values, that we yearn for connection to each other? We also have to look at infrastructure side so that our rural communities are not depleted of their resources for Google’s next behemoth.”

He is one of my top three.

So — okay, I have narrowed it down to Dan McGrath, Beth Fraser, and Meg Luger-Nikolai. And I’m not sure how to decide. All three seem fighty, in a way I think we need right now. Dan is a particularly good speaker, someone who can really eloquently defend our values. Beth is someone whose past work shows a lot of insight into shoring up the exact walls that Republicans are preparing to attack. Meg Luger-Nikolai is kind of the embodiment of the line “there is power in the union.” I think Dan would be the strongest on environmental issues, because he’d clearly spent more time thinking about them than the other candidates; he’s also someone who will stand and fight when no one thinks the ground is defensible. I think Meg Luger-Nikolai would be the strongest on education issues, because she’s spent 16 years working for the teacher’s union. Beth seems particularly well-prepared to defend democracy, both because of her decades of work on voting rights and because of things like, she’s been posting to her Facebook about banning the use of tear gas and requiring ICE agents to unmask.

I think I would vote for Beth. I think she’d be my pick. But honestly I’ve been swinging back and forth (mostly between Beth and Dan) since the convention, and I’m not sure. I am going to go ahead and post this because if you’re in 64A, you have one week to figure out how to vote, and hopefully this at least helps you narrow it down and gives you a starting place?

If you’d like to express your appreciation for my election blogging work in a monetary way, you can still donate to my fundraiser for YouthLink. You can also pre-order a copy of Obstetrix, my near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult. (It comes out in June!)