There is a special election in Minnesota Senate District 60 (SD60), because the Senator there, Kari Dziedzic, tragically died of cancer in late December. It is happening extremely quickly — the primary is scheduled for January 14th, the general for January 28th. It’s a very blue district, so the primary is when the real contest will happen.
Here’s a map of the district:
If you’re not sure if you live in SD 60 or not, you can also check your address in the Polling Place Finder.
There are a couple of reasons the dates might shift: one of the candidates filed a complaint and requested the primary be delayed until U of M students are back on campus, since a lot of students live in the district. And, one of the other candidates appears to not be a resident of the district based on where he voted in November and there’s also a lawsuit to get him off the ballot. If you want to double check, here’s the page about the election which will get updated (probably much more promptly than my page will) if anything changes.
I am working on a full blog post about the SD60 special primary, which I should have up in another couple of days (fingers crossed). I am posting this post now because people are asking whether I’m going to write about it and I want to just answer that question (yes).
There is also a special election happening in parts of Ramsey County for a new County Commissioner and that is on February 11th. I already wrote about that one.
If you want to do your own research on the SD 60 race, you can find a list of candidates here; five of the DFLers filled out the questionnaire circulated by the SD 60 DFL and you can read their responses to learn more about their views on the SD 60 DFL website. I have been sort of live-blogging my candidate research on Bluesky and that thread starts here.
Once again, the holidays are upon us, and once again, people are telling me that in this trying time, the one thing I have to offer that they truly need is a hand-picked selection of the absolute worst possible gifts that they can give their brother-in-law. You know which brother-in-law.
If you’d like to push back on the idea that you’re socially obligated to give That Guy a gift, you one hundred percent have my permission to do that, especially given ::waves hands at the world in general:: and you also have permission from the excellent advice columnist Captain Awkward. But sometimes, you hate your brother-in-law but need to stay on good terms with him so you can be around for your sweet, sad-eyed nine-year-old nephew. Or you hate your brother-in-law but want to give the gift of “everyone together without drama” to your lovely mother-in-law who doesn’t have much time left. Or you hate your brother-in-law but just have better things to do with your energy than have a fight, and for $30 you can just not have that fight.
And that’s where I come in! Using my guide, you can carefully select a gift to present with wide-eyed faux sincerity while knowing he’ll take it home and think, “what the hell am I supposed to do with this?” (Bonus points if the nephew thinks it’s awesome.)
A couple of important caveats:
If I have ever given you a terrible gift, it wasn’t because I hate you (I don’t give gifts to anyone I don’t sincerely like and care about), it’s because like everyone else, I sometimes make a terrible call about what would be a good gift. (This is important. Those are the gifts that give deliberate passive-aggressive gifting the necessary camouflage.)
If you have ever given me a gift, I did not scrutinize it for signs that you hated me. I assume the best about people who give me presents. Actually I generally assume the best about anyone I’m on regular interaction terms with and I sail through life these days assuming that people like me and think I’m cool (this was not always true, but hey, being over 50 comes with certain benefits). If you hate me, I probably don’t even know it.
In the interests of official full disclosure, I have an Amazon Associates ID set up, so if you actually buy any of the Amazon items for someone using my links, I get a kickback.
On to the horrors!
Wildly Impractical Beverage Accessories
Helen Rosner (food writer for The New Yorker) (I love her work, for the record!) released a food-themed gift guide last week that’s, hmm, you know, very much the sort of food-themed gift guide you would expect from The New Yorker. For example, a lot of the ideas are very expensive, although she also suggested these $65 egg cups that are made out of actual somewhat-stale-by-the-time-they-get-to-you bread. (“Jen Monroe is a chef, artist, and food designer whose project, Bad Taste, is committed to exploring new ways of thinking about food and consumption, approaching food as fantasy and as a transportive medium.”) There’s probably someone out there who would be very excited to participate in this art project. They probably live in New York. I’m pretty sure there are also plenty of New Yorkers who would paste on a smile and say “oh! how lovely! They’re … they’re actual bread? Huh! Oh, the artist also did a dinner about the honey bee health crisis? How interesting. Let me just put these somewhere the dog won’t eat them…”
Also on her list: Neiman-Marcus’s lobster decanter. Alas, it is now already sold out. This is an impractical bad gift to buy unless you’re extremely rich, because it costs $450. But it’s kind of amazing in a “what the hell” kind of way so here’s a picture of it:
Also, last I checked, Neiman-Marcus did still have the pufferfish decanter available.
This started me looking at decanters and I found some pretty amazing budget-friendly possibilities. Whiskey decanters, this time (I think the lobster is supposed to be a wine decanter but honestly, unless someone sends me photographic proof, I am going to assume that no one on this planet has ever actually put wine in that thing. Can you imagine trying to serve wine from something like that? Can you imagine washing it after?) Wine decanters serve an actual wine-related purpose, which is to aerate the wine. I was curious if I was correct about the main purpose of a whiskey decanter and Reddit more or less confirmed it: the main purpose of a whiskey decanter is so that your friends do not see that you buy the cheap whiskey. Whiskey decanters are actually not a good way to store whiskey unless you’re drinking it up very quickly because you actually want to protect whiskey from light; the whiskey bottle in a liquor cabinet will work just fine, while a decanter on your buffet, not so much.
So this one is actually kind of cool: it’s a whiskey decanter shaped like a Star Wars Storm Trooper’s head (with two glasses that are molded on the inside so that if you pour in whiskey or some other beverage that isn’t clear, it’ll look like you’re drinking your whiskey out of Storm Trooper heads. Like Ewoks.) However, you have to pour quite a lot of whiskey into the decanter to make it look cool (which means if you’re not drinking it quickly, and want to store it properly, you’ll have to pour it back into the bottle). It’s bulky to store and not dishwasher safe. It’s solidly in the sweet spot of “too nifty to just toss so it’ll take up cabinet space for years.”
There’s also this whiskey decanter, which looks like a gaming controller, and one that looks like a globe. (Also, I swear to god, dozens that look like different kinds of guns, which I decided not to link because guns are gross.) The thing is, again, that you’re supposed to be protecting your whiskey from light; these decanters are all designed to be filled with whiskey and then stored on a shelf to look cool, which is the worst possible way to store whiskey. So FYI, literally any of these is a particularly perfect bad gift to someone who’s actually into whiskey, like nice whiskeys, because people who are into whiskey generally know how it’s supposed to be stored (but as a non-whiskey-expert you can just say you saw it was a whiskey thing, you know they like whiskey, and you’ll look very thoughtful!)
All of these are alcohol-related gifts; if you’re buying a gift for someone who doesn’t drink (especially someone for whom that’s requiring a lot of effort) I would encourage you to buy off another section of this guide, even if that person is an asshole.
Dreadful Decor
If you’re stuck giving a gift to the sort of guy who uses images of white marble statuary for his Twitter profile, my suggestion is that you buy him a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Sadly, the larger-than-12-inch ones tend to go up in price really quickly (though if you need to buy someone an expensive gift you could get them a 20-inch-tall David lawn ornament for $109.) The main thing either way is that it’s a bjig knickknack that will take up space and gather dust and if the recipient has hang-ups about western art they’ll feel like a bad person if they just straight up get rid of it. Along the same lines you could get someone a set of ten mini statues or a poorly done replica of Winged Victory.
If you can’t bring yourself to give something that’s just truly useless, you could also give someone Marcus Aurelius’s bust as a headphone stand. (OK, this is one of those gifts that can be either a terrible gift or an awesome gift.) Somehow the 27th US President, William Taft, got turned into one of these as well and again: could be terrible, could be awesome, kinda depends on the recipient and their opinion of grumpy walrus mustaches. Or their opinions of tariffs.
For a somewhat broader range of people there’s this disembodied hand that you can install on a wall to hold flowers (or whatever fits in that little tubular vase). Or a giant eye sculpture. No, really, it’s just … an eye. Comes in blue, green, pink, or orange. Especially great if the person you’re gifting it to has an Elf on the Shelf (“now you can have surveillance decor year round!”)
Horrifying Housewares
A long-time reader mentioned this year that she bought a saltshaker for someone with holes too small for the salt to actually come out. I love this as a passive-aggressive gift idea and this sent me down the rabbit hole of novelty salt and pepper shaker sets. One of the weird things about housewares is that certain items, you can choose from this amazing array of novelty versions and others there just aren’t any. There are relatively few novelty sugar bowls but so many novelty salt and pepper shaker sets.
One of my favorites was this knight-and-dragon set. It’s cute, bulky (for salt and pepper shakers), annoying to use (the dragon wings stick out, shaking salt on anything requires maneuvering around those wings), and there’s no obvious coding for which is salt and which is pepper. There are actually a number of sets where there’s no coding at all for which is salt and which is pepper, like this set of identical “male and female” Bigfoot shakers. (The two genders: the one that has two holes in the head, and the one that has three.) Finally, from the department of Licensed Kitsch, you can get a Baby Yoda salt and pepper shaker set where one of the shakers is Baby Yoda and the other is his floating stroller.
Novelty teapots are also abundant, and much like the whiskey decanters for a whiskey fan, you can say “I know how much you like tea!” and you get credit for having considered the person’s interests, but very few tea drinkers have much use for novelty teapots. For one thing, they tend to be impractical for actual use. (Most of them don’t have a steam hole and lots have a badly placed handle and/or don’t pour very well.) This one is a sort of spherical cow with a chicken riding on its back as a handle. Also — you know how the Uncanny Valley is the term for images of humans that just look slightly off — realistic and yet off just enough to be super creepy? Here’s a Schnauzer dog teapot that poses the question, “what if dogs, too, could come from the Uncanny Valley?” And here’s a teapot that looks like a Chihuahua that hates you. As a bonus, you could pair any of these with a gift of tea, but the wrong sort of tea,if your recipient has some well-established preference. For example, some people drink only unflavored black or green tea; you could gift that person fruity tea. Or chamomile in a fancy tin.
And some final odds and ends that I just kind of adored in that “yes! this is horrifying! this would be a hilarious gift!” kind of way (all of these are solidly in the “great gift for some, terrible for others” category):
Cat appetizer plates. These are genuinely very cute. The problem is, they’re a weird shape and they don’t stack neatly, which means they’d be incredibly annoying to store.
I mean this is like the perfect embodiment of “good gift for the right person, terrible gift for MANY OTHERS.” Even if you think it’s cool, it’s got pointy bits where you’d put your change. Eventually it will collect dust and it will be genuinely annoying to try to clean the dust off. It’s way too nifty to just dispose of, though. The epitome of a modern White Elephant! (Except you don’t have to feed it.)
Catastrophic Clothing
For that guy you know who thinks way too often about the Roman empire or maybe fancies himself a Spartan, how about a t-shirt with realistically printed armor on it? Bonus points if it’s someone who has actually done enough research on armor to know what’s totally wrong here (aside from it being, you know, a t-shirt, not actual armor). (Maybe it’s fine. I know almost nothing about armor. I get strong “Hollywood’s idea of what the Bronze Age looked like” vibes from the picture, though.)
Or perhaps you’d like a Three Wolf Moon variant that uses T-Rexes instead of wolves? (There’s something that looks horribly wrong with those T-Rexes but not in an “AI Generated” way, as far as I can tell.) Alternately someone did an edit with iguanas but apparently couldn’t find photos of them with open mouths, so it’s Three Iguanas Hanging Out Under a Full Moon (with a listing claiming that they’re howling).
Someone on Bluesky made the following observation about gift cards: “If you are thinking of taking the easy way out again this year for the hard-to-please people on your Xmas list, you might consider that there is an estimated $27 billion stored on unused gift cards in the U.S.” This is a really excellent point, and the lesson I think we should take from it is that hard-to-please people should be given gift cards not to Starbucks or Amazon, but to small local businesses and arts organizations that could make good use of whatever money you put on it. For example, in Minneapolis & St. Paul, Theater in the Round and the History Theater sell gift cards; so does the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. In the “lovely small local businesses” category, Mischief Toy in St. Paul sells gift cards (and FYI to locals, if you haven’t been there you should check it out, it’s one of the best geeky gift shops I’ve ever seen); so does I Like You, a gift shop that stocks a variety of items from local artists, and Moon Palace Books. Check the local area of your recipient and think small.
Books That Send a Covert Message
Books are amazing gifts! For example, you could give my books as gifts, and whether the recipient reads them or not, I’ve made a sale so it’s a win for me!
Anyway, a couple of targeted recommendations for books I read this year that can be presented innocently but might make your recipient feel deeply uncomfortable as they read. All of these are good books that would be excellent gifts if given sincerely, to be clear:
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Depending on who you’re gifting to, you can say that you heard it was a horror story about a monster OR that it was actually a very sweet romance without any explicit sex. It’s both of those things, and also a very queer story where the real monsters are shitty family members.
Dreadfulby Caitlin Rozakis. Gav wakes up with no memories of who he is or why he’s in an evil wizard’s lair. Turns out he is the evil wizard. This is a delightful setup and an easy sell as “I thought you’d enjoy it” to anyone who likes fantasy novels. However, as Gav tries to figure out why he turned evil the first place, the answer is strongly implied to be, “basically, he was an incel.”
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. “Military SF that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year!” It’s about radicalization (and deradicalization) and how sometimes, you realize that you’re one of the bad guys.
Jane Steele by Lindsay Faye. This is kinda a retelling of Jane Eyre but the Jane in this book deals with the assholes she encounters by murdering them. Would be a fun gift to someone who lives in blissful ignorance of how many people have fantasized about disposing of his body on a pig farm.
Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts
Good news: the Minnesota Zoo still lets you sponsor any animal they have at the zoo. They still don’t list their cockroaches on the big list of all the animals they have, but they do list prairie dogs (cute but carry bubonic plague), Great Horned Owls (owls are associated in US culture with wisdom and intelligence, but are in general some of the dumbest large birds flapping around), pigs, chickens, and sheep.
Also, in my usual hunt to find charities with interesting symbolic gifts, I discovered that Habitat for Humanity has a gift catalog. You can symbolically gift someone with a doorbell set if you wish to symbolically call them a ding dong; a box of hammers if you’d like to symbolic compare their understanding of the world to that possessed by such a box; and if you’d like to give them symbolic coal, I actually think furnace filters come pretty close. (Oh, and hard hats! I feel like the “hard headed” symbology there is pretty clear. But still subtle enough to get away with it.)
Both Uncle Hugo’s and Dreamhaven have signed copies of most of my books, which you can order (or stop in to buy, if you’re local). But maybe you want a personalized signed book? (A regular signed copy, I sign the title page but don’t write anything else. A personalized signed book, you tell me who it should be dedicated to — i.e., your name or the person you’re giving it to — and I write something like, “To Frida, with best wishes” and then sign it.) I am planning a trip to Uncle Hugo’s on December 11th to sign, and if you would like a personalized book, here’s how to get one:
On their checkout page, in the order comments box, say that you want a personalized signed copy and say who you’d like it signed to (and any other information you want me to have, like if we know each other on the Internet or we went to grade school together or if you have some request.)
And that’s it! I will sign it when I come in on the 11th, and Uncle Hugo’s will then ship to you. I’m signing on the 11th because the USPS suggests 10 days if you’re having something sent by Media Mail, and this provides a little bit of padding (including if the weather on the 11th is so ghastly I don’t want to go out in it.) (And Media Mail is an amazing bargain if you want books shipped from some other city.)
(Yes, I’m going to do my “gift ideas for the worst people in your life” blog post, it’s about 3/4 done.)
Greetings to everyone coming to my site on their phone from a voting booth! For your convenience I’ve put links to (hopefully) all of this year’s races. If you scroll and don’t find what you’re looking for, try searching a candidate name, but remember, I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I am fundraising for 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 bad 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!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I was wrong, this election isn’t happening in November. It’s happening next February (February 11, 2025). It says so right on Garrison’s “vote for me!” site and I managed to miss it. I’ll try to revisit this sometime in January in case there’s any interesting new information about the candidates. (I think it’s possible there would have been a primary election in November if there’d been more than two candidates running? but then only two candidates ran? I don’t know.)
I held off on creating a master elections post in part because I thought this might happen, and sure enough: I had missed a race. Ramsey County Commissioners 1, 2, 3, and 7 are up for election this year, but 1, 2, and 7 are all fully suburban districts from what I can tell (and I generally stick to city races, which is to say, races that appear on ballots in either the City of Minneapolis or the City of St. Paul.)
Garrison is endorsed by the DFL (and a long list of people and organizations) and has an extensive government and policy background: he currently works for Angie Craig, has previously worked for Amy Klobuchar, served as the Chair of the St. Paul DFL and was on the St. Paul Planning Commission.
Joshua works for a nonprofit (Merrick Community Services, where he runs the food shelf). His website doesn’t list any endorsements. I couldn’t find much of an online footprint otherwise.
There’s a forum that you can watch online here. I watched it (slightly distractedly) and my take-away was that Joshua is a committed progressive (I was a little worried he was a Republican — he’s definitely not) but without a ton of governance or policy experience. He’s sincere but unpolished. He had some insightful stuff to say about homelessness (an area he works in directly for his job), less about managing the county budget.
I would vote for Garrison, but if you came to this page wondering if either person was just terrible or anything, the answer is no, they both seem like excellent people. I would vote for Garrison mainly because I think he’s better prepared for this particular job.
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!
I don’t actually expect that anyone reading this needs me to help them make up their mind. This is a pretty existential election: Donald Trump has not been saying the quiet part quiet. Even in Minnesota, which has been a consistently blue state for decades, I think people need to vote for Kamala Harris to provide the most energetic repudiation to Trumpism possible.
But there are nine sets of candidates on the ballot and you might be wondering who they are. So: a roundup of the US Presidential race. (Cut for length.)
The tl;dr is “vote for the DFLer” but I e-mailed every Republican running in a city district to ask who they think won the Presidential race in 2020 and now I need a post to share the results.
A note — for the incumbents, I pulled up the list of bills where they were the principal author. To find this, pull up the legislator at https://www.house.mn.gov/ and under member links you’ll see one to “Bills Chief Authored.” It shows what they chief authored in the last session. You can also see what they co-authored.
These are the congressional seats in Minneapolis (05) and St. Paul (04). FYI, I sent e-mail messages to both May Lor Xiong and Delia al-Aqidi to ask who they think won the Presidential race in 2020 (this is such a hilariously low bar and yet JD Vance slithered under it!) and if either responds after I post this, I’ll update. (I kinda think they’ll both ignore my e-mail, but who knows!)
In St. Paul / Congressional District 04, we have two candidates on the ballot:
Betty is a perfectly fine Congressional rep from what Paul Wellstone called “the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”
May Lor Xiong’s website has a thing about “women’s rights!” but what she means is not the right to bodily autonomy (in 2024 as in 2022, she is scrupulously silent on the topic of abortion) but that we should be more transphobic, as a society. She also wants the Fed to raise interest rates. (That’s not what she says. She says, “To tackle inflation, we must stop excessive money printing.” Most of the money in circulation these days is not printed currency. The way the Fed reduces the amount of money in circulation is, it raises interest rates. The “do we raise interest rates to reduce inflation or lower them to avoid a recession” question is always a little tricky but I think their recent decision to start lowering them again is more to the benefit of most Americans than keeping them high.) She also wants school vouchers and to close the border. (Note: she is herself an immigrant.)
The most interesting detail about May I found is that she self-published a book in September called Memoir of a Kidnapped Bride. I can’t find any reviews of it and the press release and her Amazon info page don’t give you a ton of context of what she actually says happened to her. (Instead, they say things like, “It may defy description in the declarative sense, but its reality and truth will mesmerize you with the intricacies of the human condition and spirit, revealing in the most broad sense, what things are most important in life. No need to embellish or fabricate anything in this book, for its story will both enrapture and enrich your mind and heart. It just may be one of the great tales of survival and success.”) This kidnapping would have happened in the US, since she immigrated here at the age of 8, and the title at least sounds incredibly dramatic (not sure about the rest of it, since it apparently defies description in the declarative sense). Why would you not include even a brief mention of it in your campaign bio? (Also, why would you not let people download an excerpt of the book?)
I am going to vote for Betty, obviously.
ETA: I got a reply from May in response to my question about who she thinks won the 2020 election. She picked the Vance-style “long response that does not in any way remotely answer the question that was asked” option. I replied and reiterated my question. No further response. Obviously I am not going to vote for May, but she also does not even get the “Republican Who Actually Respects Democracy And Takes A Courageous Stand Saying So” participation ribbon.
In Minneapolis / Congressional District 05, there are also two candidates on the ballot:
Dalia’s website doesn’t mention abortion but she’s tweeted that she wants to make abortion illegal (with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother). When I looked her up on Twitter I found that she had just fired her campaign manager, Matthew Brodsky, for tweeting that Israel should “carpet bomb” the area in Lebanon that Irish peacekeepers were refusing to leave “and then drop napalm on it.” (His Twitter account is now gone, but lots of screen shots are circulating. Also, back in May he tweeted, “the mass rape of Ireland, Spain, and Norway would clarify things for them and their populace,” and that time she didn’t fire him. The resulting Twitter-based clusterfuck is really something. Dear Irish Readers, if I have any: Dalia is absolutely not going to win this race, if that’s any consolation!)
Ilhan, I wrote about in some detail back in August. You probably know whether you like her or not. Even during weeks when I’m fully exasperated with her, I would take her over any Republican (and definitely over a Republican who hires as a campaign manager a guy who’s doesn’t hesitate to call for Israel to murder UN peacekeepers.) I would vote for Ilhan if I lived in her district.
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!
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:
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.)
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!
Will Tell Stories For Food 