This is a non-partisan primary; the top two vote-getters will advance to the November election. Parties are not listed on the ballot but the DFL did endorse a candidate (incumbent Marion Greene). Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Anthony Abousweid
Abdihakim Arabow Ibrahim
Kevin Chavis
Anthony Walsh
Josh Bassais
Marion Greene
Anthony Abousweid doesn’t have a campaign website but his Instagram has a post (which I linked) with an image of a campaign flyer type thing that has a bunch of slogans on it. One of them is “Local Focus / Real Results,” but I can’t find anything that would say what sorts of real results he’s gotten in the past, if any. He does have a LinkedIn, which says he’s the owner of Sweid’s Entertainment/Gaming, a trading card shop. He has a GoFundMe to raise money for his campaign which has received not one single donation.
Abdihakim is an immigrant who lives in St. Louis Park. He’s an engineer who served on the SLP school board. He also served on the St. Louis Park Police Advisory Commission and the 2020 Census Complete Count Committee. He mentions that he’s a professional engineer, but he doesn’t seem to have an updated LinkedIn so I’m not sure what sort of engineer.
If you are unhappy with Marion Greene, he’s absolutely the most qualified of the people currently running against her! I’m not sure how much he’d do that’s actually different; he talks about affordable housing and public safety (things she’s also a fan of) and under the Environmental Responsibility heading he talks about closing the garbage burner (HERC) “responsibly,” noting that just closing it without a plan would result in more waste going to landfills (which is exactly why the current board has not yet closed it.)
.Reading between the lines here, I think he feels like Marion doesn’t pay enough attention to St. Louis Park. (Might be true. I am not in a good position to suss that out.)
He has endorsements from two of his SLP school board colleagues.
Kevin Chavis pledged to abide by the DFL endorsement and is keeping his pledge. He’s still on the ballot because this year’s Hennepin County Convention was after the deadline to withdraw from the ballot, but he has suspended his campaign.
Anthony Walsh is a lawyer who works for the county as a Community Engagement Specialist. (I’m not sure what that actually involves.) His website has a video of him telling you about all the things he’s done in the last decade, and almost nothing about what he wants to do if he gets on the board, what his political principles are, etc. (He says he is pro youth and family; pro affordable housing; pro affordable child care; and pro employment. In contrast to all those politicians out there who are opposed to youth, families, affordable housing, affordable child care, and employment.)
Fortunately, he has a Wikipedia page with more information. (As an aside, it is hilarious to me that this guy has a Wikipedia page, which reads like it was written by one of his friends, and Kendall Qualls, the GOP-endorsed candidate for Minnesota Governor, still does not. Do you have zero friends, Kendall?) Via Anthony’s Wikipedia page I learned that he tried to run as a third-party (Legal Marijuana Party) candidate in CD 3 in 2024. Note that this was after Minnesota legalized weed. He was blocked from the ballot because the DFL took the Legal Marijuana Party’s “major party” status to court and the LMP lost (he then ran as a write-in.) If you ran for US Congress on the LMP ticket two years ago, you are not a serious person. (Link goes to a 2020 post where I tried to learn more about a LMP candidate and came away with a markedly lower opinion of the party as a whole.)
Josh Bassais was the conservative candidate for City Council in Ward 8 last year and I wrote about him extensively at the time. This time around, he was unable to find even one single delegate to nominate him for consideration at the County DFL convention in June and he also seems to have been much less successful at finding people to endorse him, in the sense that he does not have an endorsement sections on his website and I couldn’t find any on his Facebook page.
His website talks about how his career “began in the labor movement” but he’s been in the private sector since 2014. According to his LinkedIn, he’s now a marketing manager in tech. His civic engagement experience is as the president of his neighborhood association.
Marion Greene is the incumbent, and I generally think she’s doing a decent job. She needs to update her website so that instead of saying “we’re definitely going to write a zero-waste plan in 2022” it says that they wrote and adopted a zero-waste plan. In the last year, she has pushed back on writing blank checks to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, which resulted in a lot of ginned-up controversy about her but you know, I’m in favor of NOT writing blank checks to law enforcement, so I don’t see this as a negative.
I would vote for Marion Greene. If you don’t like Marion, though, Abdihakim seems vastly more qualified for the job than Josh Bassais!
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 