This is the South Minneapolis seat currently held by Mohamud Noor. On the ballot:

Mohamud Noor (Incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Abdurrahman Mahmud

I’ll note that Mohamud Noor’s challenger is is on the ballot as Abdurrahman Mahmud, but commonly goes by Abdu Rahman and that’s how his website and social media refer to him; I’m going to call him Abdu in this post.

Mohamud Noor

Mohamud Noor was elected in 2018 after the cascade of vacancies set off by Lori Swanson deciding during the state DFL convention to run for governor. (Matt Pelikan challenged her for endorsement and successfully blocked her from getting a first-ballot endorsement. Lori Swanson, in a snit, dropped out of the race for Attorney General and ran for governor, instead. Keith Ellison ran for Attorney General, freeing up the House seat, Ilhan ran for the House seat, freeing up the legislative seat, and Mohamud Noor ran for and won the legislative seat.) Prior to being elected, he worked for the county in Human Services, and has continued work on human services-related stuff in the legislature, and the bills he was Chief Author of include a lot of health care and housing provisions. (Most recently, a bill introduced in May: “Partnerships for dental services provided in correctional facilities authorized, commissioner of corrections required to improve correctional facilities’ dental services, report required, and money appropriated.” I think that died in committee.)

My impression of him is that he’s hard working but relatively low profile. When I went looking for news articles where he was mentioned, I got lots of hits on the news releases from the Minnesota State House (“Session Daily,” you can find it here) and just a few hits on the local news outlets, like an interview he did with MPR about ICE last December. When I asked about the race on Bluesky, someone told me that his opponent challenged him for endorsement but “bombed the Q&A with bizarre answers” and Mohamud won endorsement on the first ballot 136-3.

Abdurrahman Mahmud (aka Abdu Rahman)

Abdu is a filmmaker who self-identifies as a Democratic Socialist, but his website doesn’t actually mention anything that’s all that different from what Mohamud wants to do. (Also, he is not endorsed by the local DSA.) I sent him an e-mail and got a prompt response that was AI-written (I’ve actually encountered a lot of stuff in this cycle that I suspected was AI-written but this one was particularly clear) and promised a more detailed response shortly. The more detailed response did arrive and had less of the “Written by ChatGPT” flavor to it.

He said he wanted to hold predatory landlords accountable (and specifically complained about Sherman Associates: “Tenants in the Cedar-Riverside high-rises face frequent water and electricity outages, annual rent hikes, and immediate eviction threats for minor delays, while the landlord fails to invest in basic repairs.”) He said that the Brian Coyle Center is managed by Pillsbury United Communities, which charges excessively high fees for the hall and basketball courts; he wants the center managed by the Park Board, instead. He objects to the development plans for Lot A in Cedar Riverside: “I will challenge the city and county’s decision to award “LOT A” to Sherman Associates for housing development. We are organising to reject suppressing our input and force the city to hear our voices … I will use my office if elected to shift the power dynamics.”

(Lot A is a parking lot at 1500 4th Street that I think of as “that parking lot by Mixed Blood Theater.” The city did an RFP process for it in 2019, and as I understand it, the plan is for Sherman Associates to build a rec center to replace the Brian Coyle center (the new rec center to be managed by the Park Board) with housing above it. This will mean losing the parking, and area businesses are not happy with the plan.)

Anyway, I’m totally willing to buy that Sherman sucks (are there big landlords in Minneapolis who don’t suck?) but it’s not clear to me how Abdu would be more successful than Mohamud at holding them accountable. (He noted that he was a renter and Mohamud is a homeowner, which: fair, but that doesn’t really answer the question.)

One other odd thing: he held a fundraiser in Seattle. When someone’s running for US Senate and holds an out-of-state fundraiser this is one of those things I basically expect. There are probably Seattleites who are invested in the Angie vs. Peggy race, just as there are people here invested in the Senate race in Michigan. A state legislative primary? Weird.

Fundamentally, this is one of the cases where I trust the neighbors who came together for what sounds like a completely uncomplicated endorsing convention. I would vote for Mohamud Noor.

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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.