This is the seat currently held by Ilhan Omar. There are five people running as Democrats (including Ilhan) and also four Republicans running for the opportunity to be crushed like bugs (Ilhan got 74% of the vote in 2024.)
On the DFL ballot:
Ilhan Omar
Nate Schluter
Latonya T. Reeves
Abena A. McKenzie
Julie Trang Le
If you live in Minneapolis, you probably know whether you like Ilhan Omar or not. In any given two-year period, there’s usually stuff she’s done that I was very happy with, and stuff that annoyed me.
My biggest recent irritation with her was the financial disclosure screwup. thing. Ilhan’s husband Tim Mynett owns a “winery and venture capital management firm” and she filed a disclosure statement valuing his share at $6M-$30M, only to revise that down to $0 a few months later. Ilhan’s statement on this: “The original filing was based on incomplete information from Mr. Mynett’s businesses’ accountants in good faith and deference to professional judgement. It listed assets without liabilities, and it significantly overstated her husband’s net worth. The accounting error created a misleading picture of far greater wealth. The Congresswoman amended her disclosures voluntarily as soon as the discrepancy was identified.” The whole thing is weird. However, given Trump’s unconscionable politicization of the justice system and his petty personal hatred of Ilhan, I’m pretty sure that if there were anything illegal (rather than weird) to dig up, his pet justice department would have filed charges by now.
What I’ve liked about her: Ilhan Omar is one of a handful of Democrats who actually seem like she’s meeting the moment in the fight against fascism. She continues to make Republicans frothingly angry just by existing. When she got assaulted at a Town Hall she was ready to fight the guy herself. I would absolutely vote for her on her own merits, although also, her primary opponents are all terrible in one way or another.
Nate Schluter
Nate is a perennial candidate who no longer bothers to maintain a site (back when he had one, the URL was “candidatenateschluter5thdistrictcandidateminneapolis.com.”) He has a Facebook page that he hasn’t updated since 2022. My post about him from back when he had a website said that it included some gross anti-immigrant sentiments. Don’t vote for him.
Abena ran last time but there was almost zero information about her. She now has a website up and a campaign Facebook that continue to be utterly devoid of substance. Don’t vote for her.
Julie Trang Le is the former ICE attorney who lost her shit during a court hearing and said to the judge, “The system sucks. This job sucks. I wish you would hold me in contempt so I would have a full 24 hours sleep.” She then got fired from her job. She seems to have mistaken “notoriety” as “qualification for elected office.”
Her website says that “before Julie served as a federal prosecutor, she was a realtor, an insurance agent, and a restaurant owner,” and I’m very curious about the timeline here but she doesn’t offer one (despite having a “Career Timeline” sidebar) and I couldn’t find her on LinkedIn. She has served on some civic boards, which is fine. But her main qualification, the thing that made her decide to jump into the race, is that she took a legal job doing the work on the side of the fascists, did it badly, melted down in court, and got fired. I am not impressed and would not vote for her.
Latonya Reeves is a probation officer and centrist Democrat who is pals with large numbers of my least favorite people in local politics. My reasons for opposing her are so wide-ranging I’m going to have to do bullet points.
- Last September, she was one of the main offenders at the disastrous Zoom meeting of the DFL Feminist Caucus. She both went to the mat to defend her buddy who killed a guy with her car, and made fun of the idea that people should respect folks’ pronouns at a meeting where several trans people were repeatedly misgendered. Here’s my writeup from when it was recent. Here’s Dex Anderson’s writeup (Dex does not call Latonya out by name, but various people have confirmed that Latonya is the person who put “Black Queen” as her pronouns.) Here’s an article from May about Cyndy Martin pleading guilty to criminal vehicular homicide. (Even prior to the plea, the fact that she hit the guy with her car was not in question, despite her buddies acting like bringing this up was mean.)
- At the CD 5 DFL convention, she chose Tim Peterson to nominate her. Tim Peterson is an awful person who uses violent rhetoric towards DSA members (example here.) Also at the 2025 Minneapolis City convention he reportedly shoved a woman volunteer. Having him nominate her was a choice: a really, really gross choice.
- This one is just weird. She was listed as the Chair for something called the Minnesota Civilian Public Safety Commission. This is not the Minneapolis Community Commission on Police Oversight, which she lists on her LinkedIn and is an actual public board; the Minnesota Civilian Public Safety Commission was a fraudulent nonprofit run by someone who started nonprofits and gave them deceptive names that made them sound like they had government affiliations, for the purpose of funneling people to his legal consulting business. AG Keith Ellison sued the CEO, David Singleton, in 2025, and the groups Singleton ran were dissolved. I would love an explanation for why she was on the board of this group and have sent her an e-mail asking about it (we’ll see if I hear back.) (Honestly I’m including this one because she’s been using “fraud” as a talking point. I don’t know why we should believe that she’d be better at rooting out fraud than Ilhan Omar, when she doesn’t appear to have been aware that she was Board Chair at a fully fraudulent organization.)
As a general rule, I have a lot of tolerance for centrists in swing districts but Minneapolis deserves a progressive who will fight. I would 100% vote for Ilhan Omar.
Now for a quick tour of the Republicans, for those who are curious. On the ballot:
Abbey Zieska
John Nagel
Angie Windhauser
Dalia Al-Aqidi
Abbey Zieska
She has no website. Hunting around I turned up a couple of people who might be her. Here’s a Tiktok account of an Abbey Zieska who lives in Minneapolis (so, probably her?) but the most recent videos on there are from 2021. And here’s a Backstage listing (Backstage is like actor LinkedIn, basically) where she says she can play characters ranging from 16-30 and lists her skills as Singing, Witchcraft, and Latin American Spanish. I didn’t turn her up on regular LinkedIn.
John Nagel is a retired State Trooper. His website is sort of generic Republican talking points (law and order, “we’re going to lock down the border,” he hates gay and trans people, etc.) He claims to be a “moderate conservative” but scrolling down his Twitter makes it clear there is nothing moderate about his views (posts from the last day and a half included a lot of grotesque anti-immigrant sentiments, including of people who came legally, a bunch of homophobia and transphobia, etc.) Gross.
Angie is the weirdo who endorsed Bill Gates because God told her to do so and her website is about what you’d probably expect from that endorsement. It starts with “MAKE MINNESOTA FOR JESUS AGAIN!” and continues about as you’d probably expect, almost entirely in all capital letters. She has a Twitter account and posts to that also mostly in all-caps. (Yesterday she seemed to C&P the same post over and over, threatening Minnesota with fire and brimstone if we don’t vote for her. On her YouTube page she has a video of herself delivering a speech somewhere like a public park; she manages to distinguish herself as particularly unhinged by saying abortion is not OK even when the woman’s life is in danger (because she herself had pre-eclampsia and went into cardiac arrest during labor, and if you die your children and husband will carry on your legacy.)
Dalia is endorsed by the GOP; she was also the Republican candidate two years ago. Like John, she tries to make herself look very moderate on her website, and she does a somewhat better job of keeping her Twitter focused on stuff that polls well for Republicans (mainly fraud). I sent her an e-mail asking her if her commitment to ending fraud would include passing laws like HR 7852 (the “No Getting Rich in Congress Act”) which bans insider trading etc. for members of congress, and HR 8309 (the House version of Elizabeth Warren’s “Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act.”) It’s extremely rare that Republicans answer my e-mail messages but I’ll update if I’m wrong.
She probably learned some caution around Twitter when two years ago she had to fire her campaign manager at the time for tweeting that Israel should “carpet bomb” the area in Lebanon that Irish peacekeepers were refusing to leave “and then drop napalm on it.” Her Tweet saying that abortion should be illegal with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother is still out there, though.
She herself is Muslim and an immigrant, but she’s very willing to stand up for the rights of her fellow Republicans to be racist, nativist, and Islamophobic. (From her “Meet Dalia” page: “We must be free to express ourselves without the fear of online bullying; reprisals against our businesses or employment; or unjust accusations of racism, ‘Islamophobia,’ xenophobia, or misogyny.” Yes, she put scare-quotes around Islamophobia. I’m curious how she’d describe the experience of the Muslim Republicans in Texas who got told to their faces that they didn’t belong in the US.)
This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.)
I also have a new book! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven all (probably) have signed copies. (I also signed copies at Next Chapter, and will be making my way to other bookstores as time allows!)
Will Tell Stories For Food 
In somewhat of a defense for Julie Le, the transcript made it seem like her position as an ICE attorney involved trying to get ICE to follow judicial orders to release people. In the transcript of her courtroom incident, she says she wanted to quit but decided to stay in the hope of getting more people out of detention. This American Life included a story about her in an episode recently with some explanatory details: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/882/transcript
Maybe that’s a generous interpretation of what her job was, though, and one could argue that working for ICE in literally any capacity is collaboration with fascists. Also, as you noted, it doesn’t make her qualified for public office.