Category Archives: Election 2023

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 13

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This race just has no good option, I’m sorry. I’m not sure there’s even a “least bad” option. There’s possibly a “least bad on [specific issue]” case to be made for Linea and maybe a similar case for Kate.

On the ballot:

Linea Palmisano (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Kate Mortenson (DFL)
Zach Metzger (DFL)
Bob “Again” Carney Jr (Republican)

Bob “Again” Carney Jr (Republican)

All you really need to know about BobAgain is that his website still says he’s running for governor, and when he participated in the Ward 13 LWV forum he said that if he won the election, he would refuse to take office, thus (according to his theories) allowing Linea to stay in office. If you want Linea to stay in office, vote for Linea, not Bob “Clown and Waste of Everyone’s Time” Carney.

Zach Metzger (DFL)

Zach Metzger presents himself as the most progressive option but has zero endorsements, which always gives me pause. When I asked about him on Twitter two weeks ago, I found out he’s also known as Lavish Mack and is a piece of work. (From a conversation I can no longer see all of: “He screamed at a Jewish girl in one of these meetings and called her a colonizer and some other antisemitic shit too. She was like 15.”) There was more, but in the intervening two weeks he participated in a protest and is now the focus of a right-wing-two-minutes-hate and you know what, he has no chance of winning anyway, so even if I can find it all again I’m probably not going to put it here. I’m just going to say, I wouldn’t vote for him even though the other options are also all terrible, because while his politics are more left-wing, what I heard indicates strongly that he’s a bad person.

Kate Mortenson and Linea Palmisano

It’s the face-off of centrist white ladies! How do you even begin to choose? Local DFL guy Mike Norton resigned from his DFL post so he could endorse Kate, and I talked to him about why; for him, it clearly came down to policing and accountability and the hope that Kate will be less terrible on this than Linea.

Linea, to be clear, is absolutely terrible on police accountability! Back in 2022, the City Council voted on creating a Police Oversight Committee, and you can read the minutes here. There was a proposal brought forward, and then a bunch of amendments proposed and voted on. Linea: voted against a proposal to make it so committee members can’t be removed at the pleasure of the mayor; voted against a proposal to make it a committee of citizens who are not police officers, vs. a makeup that includes police officers; voted against allowing the oversight committee to recommend discipline; voted against requiring the police department to act with reasonable promptness regarding discipline for misconduct; voted against whistleblower protections; voted against requiring that vacancies on the committee be promptly filled. That was all in one meeting.

But Kate, okay, on her website she talks about using police buyback to provide extra patrols in Ward 13 (I am really not convinced this is a great option) and about implemeningt a surveillance state. (“Flock Safety is a company that uses sophisticated software-camera technology to capture license plate data and make that available for investigatory purposes ONLY. As car crime moves through the neighborhood, Flock Safety can map and match plate data, supporting prosecutorial outcomes with facts and evidence.  I’m eager to fund a pilot for this program that a former Police Chief from Minneapolis has collaborated with and also endorses.”) (The ACLU is not a fan.)

I e-mailed both of them, to ask Kate to clarify her stance on buyback (she said, among other things, “Overall — my point is that we need new ideas and new approaches to address our pressing problems. If one doesn’t have ideas, I suppose they won’t ever have a bad idea, but they also won’t have any good ones. I have a track record of innovating for a better result,” which is not that far off from the case Mike made for her — she’ll at least have new bad ideas? maybe some of them will be less bad?) and to ask Linea if she had a stance on Flock Safety because for all I know, she thinks it’s a great idea, too. Linea did not reply. And, I mean, I am not one of her constituents — she’s under no obligation to reply to me.

Former Park Board guy Chris Meyer wrote a thoughtful thread making his case for Linea basically due to transit. Regarding policing, he thinks that it fundamentally won’t matter which one is elected — there will be zero cases where the Ward 13 rep is the deciding vote. And he thinks Linea is significantly better on transit, and that does matter because the council doesn’t like to overrule someone on transit routes in their ward: “the election could be very consequential for, say, the implementation of the E-line Bus Rapid Transit line, or whatever the next bike lane controversy is.” Kate’s website says she wants to “retain and restore parking” and does not mention transit anywhere on the site that I could find. The only comment I could find her making about transit anywhere was a reply to Chris on Twitter where she said “After 10 years with the representation we’ve had— and with the problems we have, monumentally bigger than: bike today, take the bus, walk or drive..c’mon. Try something new. We’ll get there, whole, not in parts. I got you.” Which, I will be honest: I have no idea what she’s trying to say here. Linea’s website, to give her credit where it’s due, talks about transit a fair amount, including BRT.

Ward 13 residents should absolutely be thinking about transit, because in addition to being wealthy, this ward is old. There’s this belief that you’ll see pretty regularly from the Senior DFL Caucus that the elderly require parking spaces, but in fact, one of the two things that I’ve most often seen force an older person into a move they didn’t want to make was the loss of the ability to drive, which can happen extremely suddenly. (The other one: stairs. But that’s actually a lot easier to solve in most houses than car dependency.) A robust public transit network that reaches every neighborhood in the city — paired with nice, clear, safe sidewalks — is one of the most crucial things to have if you want to age in place!

Anyway. I mentioned earlier that Linea Palmisano did not e-mail me back, and that she’s allowed to blow me off. If I were a constituent and I’d gotten no response to an e-mail: for that reason alone, I would vote for Kate Mortenson. But I have to figure that if she were not reasonably responsive to her constituents, Linea would have been voted out years ago. If you’re a constituent and have been blown off by Linea when you’ve reached out to her with questions or concerns, definitely vote for Kate.

If I lived in Ward 13 and had found Linea responsive when I’d had problems, I am still disgusted by her stance on policing so I would write in a friend who lived in Ward 13 as my #1, and probably grudgingly vote for Linea as my #2, because I agree with Chris, she’s very unlikely to be the decisive vote on a policing issue but could have a significant impact on transit. (Meanwhile, one of my friends commented on Chris’s thread that, and I quote, “I would personally eat my own uterus before I would vote for [either] candidate.” Which: also valid. As I said at the top: this is one of those frustrating races where your vote actually matters, and yet none of your choices are particularly good ones.

ETA: late last night, I got a long, detailed e-mail from Linea answering my questions about her stance on police buyback and Flock Safety. Regarding buyback, a couple of points she made: Buyback patrols “have a place, and reasonable minds can disagree about it’s philosophy, but they “make the most sense as a tactic to flood a certain area with police to suppress intense spurts of violent crime or to protect a particular place at a particular time, such as a sporting event or community event” — she thinks that Kate’s theory, that more cops should be in Ward 13 just because people like seeing cops, “would be the worst way to use our very limited law enforcement resources.” Since buyback depends on overtime work, and since MPD is “operating at a severe deficit of staffing,” the resources are just limited and Ward 13 is just not a sensible place to run extra patrols, based on the data.

She also doesn’t like Flock. First, because of privacy and surveillance concerns; second, because lots of other privacy-invading surveillance options are cheaper and better, so if people do want their privacy invaded, it’s still a bad option. (She noted Ring cameras and also something called FUSUS — “In an active situation, like a burglary in progress, [FUSUS] allows MPD to ‘see’ what is going on so that they can see firsthand and know what kind of first responders to send and what they are walking into, realtime. [Also, it’s intended for] more of a downtown nightlife kind of use.”)

Anyway, I appreciate her getting back to me on this.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students.

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 8

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Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Andrea Jenkins
Soren Stevenson
Bob Sullentrop
Terry White

Andrea Jenkins has been elected twice before, and this year, weirdly enough, is the first time she’s had meaningful opposition. (Bob Sullentrop ran against her last time. In 2017, when she was first elected, she wasn’t even opposed for endorsement, and her opponents on the ballot were all flakes. Yes, that includes Terry White, who’s running against her again this year.)

Let me quickly touch on Bob and Terry before I get into the real race, which is between Andrea and Soren.

Bob Sullentrop

Bob Sullentrop is a surly Republican who not only hates bike lanes, he actively wants to prioritize car convenience over really basic pedestrian safety: “Another issue that Bob is concerned about is the proliferation of bicycle lanes in the city, along with lower speed limits for cars and timing of signal lights such that motorists are stopped at almost every controlled intersection and in some cases forced to wait there for several minutes until given a green light.” Bob, you are not more important just because you’re driving a car, and your desire to speed through Minneapolis is not a higher priority than the desire of people moving through the city on foot to cross streets without being run over. During the Ward 8 forum he also talked repeatedly about “getting rid of” homeless people. Don’t vote for this guy.

Terry White

Terry White ran back in 2017 and it’s sort of hilarious to compare his stances then to his stances now. In 2017, he was running as a Green, a big fan of the city’s climate action plan and the Complete Streets policy, and talked about prioritizing transportation for pedestrians, bikers, and transit over cars. In 2023 he wants to defend the importance of parking spots and thinks that bike infrastructure is a waste of money. His housing takes aren’t terrible, but I am not impressed by him. Also, even if you think he’s awesome and want to list him first, it’s going to come down to Andrea vs. Soren, so you’ll want to pick a backup.

Andrea Jenkins

“Why don’t people like Andrea Jenkins? She sounds so cool.” –a friend of mine from another state, who mostly just knows that Andrea is a Black trans woman who’s also a poet and artist as well as serving on the Minneapolis City Council. On paper, she sounds amazingly cool, and one of my questions that I tried to really examine while researching this race was, are people harder on her because she’s Black and trans?

I do think she gets more abuse because she’s a Black woman (as does LaTrisha Vetaw, for that matter) — if you look up strong Black woman trope you’ll find a lot of discussion of the problem where Black women are expected to show emotional strength even in the face of really unreasonable and upsetting stuff, and yeah, I have seen people complain about Andrea Jenkins responding to physical intimidation with anything other than smiling courtesy (while also not subjecting Emily Koski, Lisa Goodman, or Linea Palmisano to either the same abuse or the same scrutiny).

But there’s a difference between “abuse that a city-level elected official shouldn’t have to expect as part of the job” and “having people vigorously object to your decisions in office” and that second one, no, I don’t think people are harder on her — I think that if anything, she got a lot of extra benefit of the doubt. She represents a very progressive ward and has not represented them in a way that reflects what her constituents have demonstrated that they want. On the City Council, there’s a progressive faction (Chavez, Chughtai, Wonsley, Payne, Ellison) and a centrist faction (Koski, Palmisano, Rainville, Vetaw, Goodman, and obviously the mayor); Johnson, Osman, and Jenkins have been the swing votes. You can see a visual illustration of where everyone swung on the divided votes here — Jenkins is in fact the most conservative of the swing votes. Ward 8 passed rent control by a margin of 61%-39%. And yet, rent control failed to move forward this session because it got brought to a vote on Eid. I don’t think this was a conspiracy (the date of Eid is not as predictable as you’d think) but Andrea Jenkins’s response was deeply unsatisfying. She is Council President and the idea that her hands were just tied and the vote had to go forward is patently absurd. At the time, she said that someone had to make a proposal to delay it and no one did; I’m sorry, I cannot even begin to list the number of DFL meetings I’ve been at where the person running the meeting has said, “I would like to entertain a motion to [do a thing the chair thinks ought to happen]” and gotten an immediate chorus of “so moved.” She was running the meeting. If she’d wanted to delay the vote, there were lots of options at her disposal.

When I looked back for people’s past frustrations (by searching Twitter) I found a good illustration of Andrea at her absolute worst from August of this year. After police shot Black motorist Ricky Cobb II, Andrea sent out an e-mail that (a) misspelled his name and (b) had a fundraising link at the bottom. This really does kind of sum up the frustrations I see with Andrea: she wants credit for symbolic gestures while siding with the centrists on the actual tangible stuff, like when she approved the police contract with no progress on accountability or transparency, or when she voted against a proposal to make the police oversight board entirely citizens rather than a mix of citizens and police. (Worth noting — she’s better than, say, Linea, who picked the “better for the cops, who cares about accountability” option with every single vote. But she was the deciding vote on the amendment in question, which you’ll find on page 10 of the linked PDF.)

Soren Stevenson

Soren Stevenson had an eye shot out by the Minneapolis Police during a protest after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd; on police accountability specifically, I trust him a lot. He’s worked for the North Country Cooperative Foundation and as a lobbyist for the Minnesota Justice Coalition.

As I was starting work on this post (weeks ago now) part of what sidetracked me was the Hamas attack on Israel. I do not usually discuss Israel or anything Israel-adjacent if I can possibly avoid it. (I mean, honestly: no one with decision-making power on anything remotely related to Middle East policy cares what I think.) But I was really upset by the statement released by the Twin Cities DSA at the time, and on October 11th I contacted Soren (and the other DSA-endorsed candidates) to see if they had a comment. Soren got back to me in under a half hour with the following:

I condemn cruelty and violence against civilians in all its forms. The acts of Hamas against civilians are horrifying and unacceptable. The decades of violent oppression against Palestinian civilians and the cutting off of food and water to Gaza are also horrifying and unacceptable. I am committed to fighting antisemitism and cruelty in all its forms and in every arena in which I have authority. 

I am running for the Minneapolis City Council in no small part to address the cruelty that our City is responsible for by failing to hold violent, racist police accountable and through the City’s treatment of our unsheltered neighbors. It is cruel that we allow the police federation to continue to set the terms of our contract with them at the expense of our neighbors and it is cruel that we evict our unhoused neighbors throughout the city and trash their belongings with no serious plan to house them. At the heart of my campaign is fighting for a kinder, safer City, and I am fueled by my own personal experience and the experiences of our communities in doing so. My commitment to opposing cruelty did not waiver after the Minneapolis Police shot me for standing up for George Floyd. And it will not waiver when I am elected to City Council.

I really appreciated this response for a couple of reasons. First, because it came so very quickly. Second, because it acknowledged both that Hamas’s violence was unacceptable and that Israel’s violence towards the Palestinians for decades has been unacceptable. Third, because he succinctly identified the common thread here, which is the acceptance of cruelty as policy. Bob Sullentrop talked about “getting rid of the homeless” not in the sense of offering people housing but simply forcing people out of sight. That’s what destroying encampments is about: forcing unhoused people to find places to camp where Bob doesn’t have to look at them, doesn’t have to reckon with the fact that people are living in tents because there isn’t enough affordable housing that everyone can live indoors, doesn’t have to actually try to solve the problem. (Andrea Jenkins also voted against a proposal to require the city to confirm that shelter beds were available before clearing an encampment.)

Anyway: I like Soren, and I think Ward 8 deserves someone who’s committed to progressive policies, who will vote for police accountability and humane treatment of unhoused people. I would vote for Soren Stevenson.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students.

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 12

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The tl;dr here is to vote for Aurin Chowdhury but this is going to be a pretty long post because one of her opponents is presenting himself on his website as a lot more progressive than he is in any other context.

On the ballot:

Aurin Chowdhury
Luther Ranheim
Nancy Ford

Nancy Ford

Nancy is on the ballot as a DFLer but was quoted in an ad for the utterly reprehensible Shawn Holster calling him a “pragmatist, not an activist.” (Holster ran against Zaynab Mohamed last year and is a 3%er with a Twitter feed full of transphobia.) Nancy ran in 2021 and when asked about rent control responded by talking about how much she resented having to pay the minimum wage: “I was a property owner. I wouldn’t want to have government come in and tell me how to manage my property. I’m unhappy enough with them telling me what I have to pay my employees and x, y and z.”

I would not rank Nancy, and Luther’s willingness to actively campaign with her (Luther and Nancy are both encouraging their supporters to rank them 1 and 2) is at the top of a long list of reasons why his self-presentation on his website is disingenuous as hell.

Luther Ranheim

If you look just at Luther’s website, he seems less awful than you’d expect: he talks about alternatives to police response for nonviolent crimes, the People’s Climate Equity Plan (I assume he means The People’s Climate and Equity Plan from MN350), and some other progressive-sounding stuff. Here’s where the rubber meets the road, though, as Luther would say.

  1. He’s actively campaigning with Nancy Ford, friend to Republicans, and encouraging his supporters to rank her second.
  2. An April fundraiser for Luther was hosted by Jackie Cherryhomes, Steve Minn (more on Minn here), and Steve Cramer of the Downtown Council; the point of contact was (documented asshole and former campaign manager for liar Mickey Moore) Alex Minn. More recently he had a fundraiser hosted in part by Carol Becker. The people embracing Luther are among the absolute worst people in Minneapolis politics.
  3. When he thinks he’s among friends (by which I mean landlords), he will say that he thinks Minneapolis can solve its financial problems by cutting the budget for bike lanes, which ludicrous on multiple levels. The fact that he dramatically changes his stance depending on who he’s talking to should be a warning sign to literally everyone who thinks he’s an acceptable candidate.
  4. Luther is completely unambiguous on his call with the landlords that he will oppose any form of rent control or rent stabilization. Again, in other contexts, he’s all mealy-mouthed about bringing everyone together to figure out the right numbers blah blah etc. (To be fair, he was also blunt about this at the Ward 12 forum, saying that rent control is unnecessary in Minneapolis.)

Anyway, just to reiterate, Luther is conservative, his friends are terrible, and you cannot and should not trust his stance on any issue.

Aurin Chowdhury

In some wards Aurin would absolutely be the centrist option: she wants to bring up police staffing to meet the minimums required by the charter (rather than pointing out that this requirement is bullshit and should be removed from the charter), for example, and while she’s open to rent control it’s clearly with caveats (“Rent Stabilization is not the silver bullet for addressing the housing crisis but prevents predatory rent hikes which are happening now in our city and are displacing the most vulnerable in our community. I support new construction exemptions and creating a system to support small landlords in our city. I have not committed to any other feature because I want to ensure that Ward 12 residents have a voice in the policy-making process.” — I should note, I have a lot of doubts about rent control, especially as it was implemented in St. Paul, so I like her policy here more than a lot of the other people I’ve endorsed.)

Aurin’s endorsements are the polar opposite of Luther’s (the DFL, Take Action MN, and a bunch of elected officials I like). For that alone, I view her as the obvious choice. I would enthusiastically vote for Aurin Chowdhury if I lived in Ward 12. I would not rank either of the other two.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a Music teacher at North High trying to replace the drum heads of the drums used by the drumline students. Funded!)

Election 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 11

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This is another frustrating race but at least it’ll be quick to write up.

On the ballot:

Emily Koski (DFL-endorsed incumbent)
Gabrielle Prosser (Socialist Workers Party)

Emily Koski is a conservative lackey of the mayor — I really liked this take on her time in office, which observes how she centers and pays deference to the concerns of business owners but not poor and marginalized Minneapolis residents. Gabrielle Prosser is from the Socialist Worker’s Party, which offers zero actionable plans when they run for office. She and the other SWP candidate responded to the Star Trib’s candidate questionnaire together and you can read it on their site (they have exactly the same answers) and it’s full of responses like, “There is no solution to the crisis of homelessness under capitalism.” (Compare that to Democratic Socialist Robin Wonsley’s housing page.)

I have some good friends who live in Ward 11 so I’d probably write one of them in. What a depressing set of options. ETA: I would write in Theresa Dolata, who according to a friend who left a comment, is considering a run next time. (See comments section.)

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)

Election 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 10

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This one is so straightforward (there’s only one candidate I would consider voting for, and spoiler, it’s Aisha Chughtai) and yet so messy (there’s somehow a lot to say about several of her opponents, for all of those who want more than “omg just vote for Aisha Chughtai.”)

On the ballot:

Aisha Chughtai (DFL-endorsed, Incumbent)
Nasri Warsame (DFL, but he’s no longer allowed to even try to get endorsed by them)
Bruce Dachis (DFL)
Greg Kline (Abolish Bike Lanes) (not making that up, that’s what he listed as his party)

Again, the tl;dr here is that you should vote for Aisha Chughtai if you’re in Ward 10.

Greg Kline (Abolish Bike Lanes)

Greg doesn’t have a website. I did find his Facebook and his LinkedIn, and I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know that he’s a Boomer who shared an anti-masking meme back in 2021. Also, if you think bike lanes should be abolished, you’re a bad person.

Bruce Dachis (DFL)

Bruce was in the news in 2021 because, you remember that lawsuit complaining about how confusing the public safety city question was, filed by Don and Sondra Samuels along with some other dude? He was the other dude. There were some questions raised (on Twitter) at the time about whether he actually lived in Minneapolis; allegedly he lives in this weird little metal box on top of the building where his office is. (I’m just going to say, there is no way he actually lives in that weird little metal box with his wife and stepdaughter, but they may have some other residence that’s legitimately in the ward. He and his wife got married in April and I found their wedding registry, there is NO WAY all those towels would even fit in that weird little box.)

On his website, he describes himself as a small business owner. Whenever someone calls themself a small business owner I try to figure out what sort of business they own, exactly? When I found Bruce’s LinkedIn and saw that it listed him as President of “Asset Accumulation Corporation” from 1984 to the present, I thought, “oh, someone made a fake LinkedIn for him as a joke,” but I dug a little further, and no: the name of his company literally is Asset Accumulation Corporation. That feels like the sort of corporation the villain runs in a movie based on a DC comic? Anyway apparently he does real-estate-related stuff. On the plus side, while he’s been a landlord (and answered questions about it on Lifehacker a while back) I didn’t find any tenants on Twitter talking about what an absolutely godawful landlord he is, so either he’s better at being a landlord than Scott Graham in Ward 7, or his tenants aren’t on Twitter.

His campaign vision centers cops and policing, says he will “never defund” (for the record, the Minneapolis Police Department has not been defunded) and mentions law enforcement again under homelessness (“We must also give law enforcement the resources they need to stop the flow on fentanyl into our communities” — what resources does he imagine will do this? he doesn’t say). He doesn’t mention transit anywhere, although under small businesses he says “we must make it easier for small businesses to operate by […] listening to small business owners before making key decisions” which I assume means “we must provide parking, endless free parking, and never consider removing parking for any reason ever,” because he sure seems like a Save Our Parking sort of guy.

ETA: He went on a right-wing radio show hosted by the MyPillow guy’s lawyer. Do not be fooled into thinking this guy is a Democrat.

Nasri Warsame (DFL, but he’s no longer allowed to even try to get endorsed by them)

So this guy wants to be a cop but hired as his campaign manager someone who worked as a consultant for Feeding Our Future. He starts his website by saying “actions speak louder than words” but this was the guy whose supporters started a brawl during the DFL convention while Aisha Chughtai was trying to make her speech.

I’m going to start by talking about the convention incident. Back in 2016, I wrote a “political conventions for beginners” piece aimed at people who might consider going to theirs for the first time. Going to a convention normally means that in exchange for giving up a perfectly good Saturday to go to a meeting somewhere like a high school auditorium, you get a somewhat outsized piece of political influence (maybe). Normally, they’re meetings, they’re kind of tedious, and they operate by a set of rules as specific and formal as a sports tournament. If you want to compete in a sports tournament, you are expected to learn the rules, and follow them. If you show up at a tennis tournament and want to kick soccer balls into the net instead of playing tennis, you sure will disrupt the tournament, and then you’ll be ejected and banned.

Aisha Chughtai and her supporters did absolutely nothing wrong at the convention. They got up on the stage so Aisha could make a speech; bringing a bunch of supporters up to stand behind you during this speech is completely standard. She went first because of a coin flip, Nasri Warsame was going to get his turn shortly and could have brought all his supporters up if he wanted; everything she did here was totally normal.

The other thing about a convention is that it’s very common for delegates to show up not knowing what to do or how it works, and it’s totally on the candidates and their campaigns to help them understand what to do. My advice in my “conventions for beginners” essay is, if you’re new to this, put on your chosen candidate’s t-shirt (it’s how they find you!), identify the people running the floor (they’ll have clipboards), and just follow instructions. Warsame had no idea himself what was going on (according to his excuse-laden apology at an event last week) but at the bare minimum he could have gotten up and signaled to his supporters to sit back down and chill the hell out when people first started to get wound up. He knew perfectly well it was going to be his turn next to speak! In his pseudo-apology, he said that if he’d known he would be held responsible for the actions of his supporters, he’d have come prepared to take action. Dude, of course you will be held responsible for the actions of your supporters. Especially when you were standing right there and opted to just stand around! What the hell do you even think “leadership” means?

In and of itself this would be a reason to not support him. The fact that “wants to be a cop” is central to how he presents himself: another absolute dealbreaker. But I did a bunch of research on his campaign manager back in May, and I might as well share that, too. I think Warsame did fire Abshir Omar eventually, but he was still working for Warsame’s campaign in June, and the Reformer’s reporting on his involvement with Feeding Our Future was a year ago, it was publicly known before Warsame hired him.

Abshir consulted for Feeding Our Future; he participated in a protest when the state first tried to cut off funds to the organization; and he ran a nonprofit, Tasho, that had six sites where they allegedly fed 5,000 kids per day. When I went down this rabbit hole in May, I discovered that the Center for the American Experiment had gotten the addresses of the sites. (The CAE is the absolute goddamn worst but I’m guessing they did not make this information up.) There are a number of addresses that I’m frankly skeptical of but the most eyebrow-raising is 924 3rd Ave NE. This is the address of the office for an income-restricted affordable housing development for seniors or people with disabilities. There are 24 units. Abshir Omar claimed to be feeding 500 children per day from this location. And Nasri Warsame hired him to run his campaign.

Don’t vote for this guy!

Aisha Chughtai (DFL-endorsed, Incumbent)

I really like Aisha! She is a solid, reliable progressive voice and vote on the City Council. She has been a supporter of transit, an advocate for pedestrian and biker safety, and a voice for police accountability and tenants’ rights. I would absolutely vote to re-elect Aisha if I lived in Ward 10.

(I am feeling bad about providing such a brief case for the incumbents I like, but I need to get through a lot of stuff and I’m feeling really, really behind right now.)

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 9

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I’m going to do Ward 8, but they have a LWV-sponsored forum coming up really soon and I want to watch it, so for now I’m skipping it to do 9.

There are two candidates on the ballot:

Jason Chavez (DFL, incumbent)
Daniel Orban (Independent)

Daniel Orban (Independent)

Daniel put his campaign website on Github, presumably because he already had a website there (he’s a programmer and CS teacher). He has no social media that I could find, campaign or otherwise, and lists no endorsements.

As far as I could determine, he also has no experience with policy or city issues beyond living in the city (part time since March, when his family bought a “20 acre off-grid Amish hobby farm” in Lanesboro) — I found no evidence that he has ever served on a committee or a task force or gone to a neighborhood group meeting. On his website he describes his involvement with the city as follows: “In Ward 9, my family and I eat, sleep, work, play, ride bikes, attend church, and go to school.”

His website is both rambling and vague: he’ll say things like “Let’s bring back the ancient virtues of good will, courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to empower those in need” but it’s not even clear if he’s trying to talk there about the office he’s running for, or policing. (It’s under the heading “Restore Trust in Public Servants.”) Things I was able to suss out: he opposes rent control; he wants to crack down on drug dealing (“we need to stop the flow of drugs at every step of the distribution chain all the way back to the source”) and force addicted people into treatment (“Key to the solution is to invest in and incentivize and/or mandate drug treatment.”) When he talks about protecting the environment, he means a city beautification program, painting over graffiti and picking up trash; he does not mention the climate.

Anyway: I get a conservative vibe, but even aside from that, he has no experience around city policy and it shows (in that his website is incredibly vague about actual policies he thinks the city should enact).

Jason Chavez (DFL, incumbent)

I like Jason. He’s been a reliable progressive voice and vote on the City Council and has an impressive list of accomplishments. I would absolutely vote to re-elect Jason if I lived in Ward 9.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)

Elections 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 7

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OK: I’m going to level with you. I am not going to research this one anywhere near as thoroughly as I researched Ward 6, because this one, thank goodness, is frankly pretty straightforward and honestly, anyone who is willing to spend two minutes looking at the candidate websites doesn’t need my advice on this race anyway.

The candidates:

Scott Graham
Katie Cashman
Kenneth Foxworth

Kenneth Foxworth

Kenneth Foxworth is on the ballot and has a website, but it’s the kind of website where the “latest news” link takes you to a page that says “blog” and has nothing else. He is on the ballot but he’s not really in the race.

Scott Graham

Scott Graham is endorsed by an amazing selection of groups and individuals I don’t like, including retiring Council Member Lisa Goodman herself but also Martha Holton Dimick, Tom Hoch, and Mark Globus; he’s also the All of Mpls pick (All of Mpls is a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.) He also made a campaign ad all about how he’s a former Eagle Scout. This guy is in his 60s: if your campaign ad highlights an achievement from the 1970s, it suggests your more recent achievements wouldn’t play well, and given that he’s a landlord with unhappy tenants, he might be right about that. (Link goes to Twitter; @happyifydesign says, “He was my extremely incompetent and delinquent landlord and if his ability to responsibly manage properties is any indication…”)

OK, honestly, it’s probably worth highlighting some of the other stuff happifydesign has mentioned about Scott. From that tweet (posted in November 2021, well before he decided to run for office): “One triplex I lived, the downstairs neighbors moved out because their toilet froze solid. We spent multiple winters trying to get the heat fixed, but the landlord did nothing until we went to the City–then he fixed it (+ other violations) and sold the building and kicked us out.” Further down the thread: “Two of us ended up needing stitches due to injuries from his poorly kept unit (things not affixed safely). He wouldn’t remove the dead squirrel from inside the wall, nor did he care about the rapidly increasing population of carpenter ants, nor the ice dams leaking into the house.” And an even earlier thread: “Housing inspections had a long list of things for him to fix. He did so in a way that was absolutely punitive to us–like tearing down our three season porch with no notice whatsoever one day while I was working from home, with teens who hooked a jeep up to it with chains. Then rebuilt it EXTREMELY slowly with our wall a gaping hole with a tarp the whole time. I think it was open from April to October? I remember light snow blowing in at the end. He was just spectacularly unfit to be a landlord, based on his (lack of) respect for the structural integrity of buildings and his extreme defensiveness triggered by any requests from tenants. … We ran into a neighbor we’d never met at a party who was shocked to hear people lived in our building–they thought it had been condemned. We also found a note with phone number on the door from a handyman offering to help finish tearing the house down. … He mixed concrete in my roommate’s vintage catherine holm bowls–and left them dirty with concrete in the sink, which is how she figured it out. The three different units of the building were instructed to send our rent to three different entities.”

Maybe you live in Ward 7 and like Lisa Goodman because of her constituent services. I don’t think you’re going to get this level of service from Scott.

ETA: John Edwards of WedgeLive followed up on this and interviewed the tenant. You can watch that interview here, or you can listen to it as a podcast here. He also has some additional information on his website, including an article Scott wrote back in 2001 about buying “derelict properties in prime neighborhoods” and rehabbing them.

Here’s my favorite bit from that interview.

John: Tell me, how did the missing wall come about?
Julia: When we were trying to get heat in the apartment, Scott was just evasive and saying things that weren’t turning into action, and it was really unclear if we would get any heat. The other roommates who’d been there longer had suggestions, like maybe if we can’t get the heat replaced the landlord [could] cover part of the electric so that we can run space heaters. We’d done things like putting the plastic — this is the long answer — putting the plastic over all the windows. Scott was not responsive and we ended up trying to figure out what else we could do. We talked to the city and found out that one option to really put pressure on was to look into putting rent into escrow or starting an inspection process. […] So the city did an inspection which revealed additional violations. Including the three-season porch on the front which led to the wall coming off.
John: So the thing you didn’t even complain about — the city shows up to inspect the thing you were complaining about, finds more problems, and that turns into a big repair job.
Julia: I mean repair would really be an understatement. It was a demolition job. […]
John: So you had a big gaping hole in the side of the house, is that accurate?
Julia: There were tarps.

You know, the thing that really strikes me about the whole story is how much Scott’s tenants tried to work with him. How much they didn’t want to go to the city. How much they put up with. And this is so! common! among renters! And she goes on to say that she thinks Scott mistreated them because they’d been “the squeaky wheel” because they pushed him repeatedly on not having any heat and squirrels living in the walls and the roof leaking and being left with a tarp covering the front of the house for multiple months.

Katie Cashman

Katie Cashman is endorsed by Faith in Minnesota (a left-wing progressive group, if you’re unfamiliar with them), OutFront, some environmental groups, and then also a whole bunch of people I like a lot, including Jim Davnie, Tom Olsen, and Becky Alper. She’s also the Minneapolis for the Many candidate (Minneapolis for the Many is a PAC created to support candidates who support things like police accountability and tenant’s rights.)

She comes at housing questions from the perspective of a renter, rather than a landlord. While both Katie and Scott talk about building more affordable housing, Katie talks about funding free legal counsel for tenants facing evictions. She also offers up specifics for dealing with homelessness like housing-first approaches and offering co-ed and gender-neutral shelter spaces.

She commits to a bunch of very specific goals for constituent service (forums before budget meetings, office hours for constituents, neighborhood association visits, newsletters…) (Scott just says he’ll provide “the highest level of service,” he doesn’t say what that means. Someone should ask him whether he believes he provides the highest level of service to his tenants.)

Fundamentally, though, this is one of those races where the endorsements make it really easy. I would absolutely vote for Katie Cashman if i lived in Ward 7.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)

Election 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 6

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This is always the ward I find the hardest to sort out, and it’s because there’s always a bunch of stuff happening in Somali, which I do not speak. I do my best, but even more than in other wards, there is stuff happening in the race that I just do not know about.

And even just on the English-language side, this is also an incredibly messy race. The tl;dr is that I think people should vote for Kayseh Magan.

Edited 2/2024: Hello, MN District 49A voters searching for information on Tiger Worku! Apparently he moved to Minnetonka and is s now running for legislature in your district. You can absolutely do better. I do not recommend supporting him for DFL endorsement, or in the primary. Details below!

On the ballot:

Jamal Osman (DFL, incumbent)
Tiger Worku (DFL)
Kayseh Magan (DFL)
Guy T. Gaskin (Republican)

Putting in a break because this post is long.

Continue reading →

Election 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 5

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Hey Naomi where are you, early voting is about to start, hello?

I had proofs to review (for my book that’s coming out in November) and then just as I was thinking “I really need to get focused on the election guide” I had a really nasty fall during which I did not hit my head but may have mildly concussed myself anyway so I limited screen time for a few days. Anyway, I’m going to give myself permission not to watch the Ward 5 candidate forum given that I knew even before I sat down to research this who I was going to endorse (Jeremiah Ellison) and frankly my post from two years ago gives a detailed rundown on why Victor Martinez is a nightmare of a candidate that no one should vote for.

On the ballot in Ward 5:

Jeremiah Ellison (DFL, incumbent)
Victor Martinez (claims on the ballot to be DFL, is absolutely full of shit, he is a fucking Republican and a Trump supporter, goddammit)https://phillip4the5thorg.godaddysites.com/
Phillip “OMac” Peterson (DFL)

Phillip “OMac” Peterson

Finding Phillip’s website was kind of a journey: he didn’t put it on his form, it didn’t show up when I googled, but when I found his Instagram there was an image of some of his lit with a QR code, which I used to bring up his website on my phone. Hilariously, the title of the website is phillip4the5th.org, and that showed up on my phone, but when I typed it in on my laptop, that brings up nothing because his actual URL is phillip4the5thorg.godaddysites.com.

His proposals include evicting the farmer’s market to replace it with a neighborhood of tiny homes built in shipping containers that people can rent with an option to buy. (Look, if you’re going to put up a bunch of tiny homes, just freaking use single-wide trailers, because at least they have plumbing. Most of the ultra-cheap tiny homes do not. Single wide trailer homes are also significantly more accessible to anyone with mobility issues because they don’t do things like put your bed at the top of a ladder to make space for your fridge, and they cost about the same as he thinks we’d spend on shipping container homes.) He also wants to heat all highway entrances and exits to make winter driving safer. Rather than going down the rabbit hole of trying to provide you all with a cost estimate, let me just say: this would be very expensive. His solution to policing is to sit down and talk (“we’re going to sit down, and we’re going to figure it completely out there will be no cutting corners.”)

I do not think he’d be particularly good at the job, although he’d be less of a disaster than Victor because that bar is somewhere underground.

Victor Martinez

Victor Martinez is a Trumpy Republican who puts on a nice-guy face while running in Minneapolis and pretending to be a DFLer. Do not vote for this guy. If you want to know what he actually thinks (vs. what he finds it politic to share with Minneapolis voters), his Twitter troll account is still up (here’s my thread with screenshots of him admitting it’s him): he uses it to complain about the universal student lunch program, student debt relief, affirmative action, and trans people. He particularly likes harassing State Rep Leigh Finke.

There were a couple of people this year who pretty blatantly tried to set up fraudulent delegates for the endorsing conventions. Victor had an enormous number of delegates who had all registered from the same IP address, and he had “accidentally” thrown out the paper forms so he could not provide stuff like their signatures. After the DFL disqualified those delegates, Martinez posted the home address and phone number of the local party chair; after getting literal death threats from his supporters, she was granted a restraining order against Martinez. One of the people Martinez sent after the DFL chair was a man with a history of violence against women. (Apologies for the links to Twitter. I’m trying to strike a balance between “providing documentation” and “not filling up my page with upsetting screenshots of stuff like Victor harassing a trans woman.”)

What else. Well, he also puts down renters by saying they’re irresponsible and uninvolved in their communities. He was established as a prolifer back in 2021 but if you’re wondering, he’s also a prolifer. He’s proud to be endorsed by the Police Federation. And (this is hilarious, honestly) he blocked me on Facebook from his campaign website. He would be absolutely terrible in this job and under no circumstances should he be given any more power than he already has.

Jeremiah Ellison

I like Jeremiah and I think he’s done a good job. He’s a reliable progressive vote on the council, which in the last two years has meant a lot of stuff like “helped pass the minimum wage for Uber/Lyft drivers, only to have that vetoed by Jacob.”

Jeremiah has pushed for police accountability and worked to implement and expand stuff like mental health teams to respond to mental health crises (instead of cops). He’s gotten money invested in affordable housing. He holds open office hours and town halls. I would unhesitatingly vote for Jeremiah Ellison if I lived in Ward 5.

This was a very close race last time. If you live in Ward 5, please please vote.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)

Election 2023: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 4

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Picture me, at my desk, heaving a deep, resigned sigh.

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

LaTrisha Vetaw (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Angela Williams (Republican)
Marvina Haynes (DFL)
Leslie Davis (No Vax. That’s what he put for his party: NO VAX.)

So yeah, I’m not a fan of LaTrisha Vetaw; she loves cops and landlords and is solidly one of Jacob Frey’s besties on the City Council.

Angela Williams is a Republican. Her Facebook page includes a bitter complaint about kids in the US learning Spanish as well as a lot of transphobia. Her main site is mostly about how LaTrisha doesn’t love cops enough.

Leslie Davis thinks that COVID is a hoax, that EMF waves degrade oxygen in the atmosphere, and that both masks and vaccines are bad. When he ran in 2021 he at least had a few positions specific to local governance but I couldn’t find any this year.

Marvina Haynes has a website I would describe as “half-assed.” (For example, she used a website template with a “book online” link and the link is still active although if you click it it tells you that there’s nothing to book right now.) Her positions are as follows: she wants “stable rent and stable property taxes” (so I assume that means that unlike LaTrisha, she’s in favor of rent control, although honestly I’m not sure); she wants the city to fix potholes; and she “will advocate for the safety and security of all community members and their families.” That’s a thoroughly content-free statement: everyone running wants the “safety and security of all community members and their families,” what differs is what they think the solutions are that will provide that. (Leslie, for example, thinks that getting rid of vaccines is key. Don’t vote for Leslie.) In particular, there’s really no clarity here on whether she thinks the solution is spending more money on cops.

Which is weird, honestly, because when I looked her up on Facebook, I found a page devoted pretty single-mindedly to getting the conviction of her brother, Marvin Haynes, overturned. Unicorn Riot did a series on Marvin’s conviction, and it’s worth reading, but let me just note that much like the Innocence Project, I am convinced that he’s not the one who did the crime. Given that her brother’s false conviction, and prison reform more generally, are so central to her life, I find it really startling that there is nothing about this on her campaign website. (This was so odd I sent her an e-mail at her campaign address asking her if the FB page was her, or if there was another Marvina Haynes? She did not reply, but did link to her campaign page from her FB page a few days later.)

Anyway, I am on her side regarding her brother, and I hope that Mary Moriarty, someone I supported in part because of her commitment to reconsidering bad past convictions, steps up here. But nothing about her campaign web page makes me think she’s even spent much time thinking about what the job of City Council rep entails.

If I were worried about the antivax guy or the Republican beating LaTrisha I’d vote for her as a lesser evil, but since I’m not worried about that, I would probably either cast a protest vote for Marvina just to express an objection to LaTrisha or I’d stay home.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, check out this first-year art teacher at Lucy Laney who is raising money to provide easels, drying racks, and art materials for her students. (Previously: a new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies — funded!)