Category Archives: Election 2024

Election 2024: the races I think I’m going to write about

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Welcome back, all the people here hunting for whatever I was able to dig up about the people running in judicial races!

In addition to the races everyone knows are happening (President, US Senate, US House, Minnesota House) there’s some interesting stuff happening downballot this year.

  1. There’s a State Constitutional Amendment that involves renewing the law that puts lottery proceeds towards environmental conservation. (It expires in 2025; we’re voting to renew this to 2050.)
  2. Minneapolis has a contested school-board at-large race and a contested school board race in District 6.
  3. Minneapolis has a school funding levy.
  4. St. Paul has two city constitutional amendments: one would shift city races to presidential years, and the other would impose a property tax levy to provide day care subsidies.
  5. There are a number of contested judicial races.

Josh Martin put together a document with a list of all the Minneapolis races, which I’m happily using to determine which city legislative districts even have a contested race in Minneapolis (if anyone knows of a similar list for St. Paul, please let me know!)

I’m going to prioritize writing about the stuff I’ve listed out here plus State House district 61A, since that’s a race between a DFLer and a Green — for every other legislative seat you can safely assume that if I get around to writing about it, I will tell you to vote for the Democrat and not the Republican. (And ditto US House and US Senate. And the Presidency, obviously, but I’ll definitely write about that one for my own amusement if nothing else.)

Primary Elections 2024: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

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There is one seat, and three people are running; two will advance to the general election in November.

Kim Ellison (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Elena Condos
Shayla Owodunni

Kim Ellison is almost certainly going to make it through to the general election (she’s DFL-endorsed and the incumbent) so rather than deciding which of these three I most want to see win, I’m going to decide which of the other two I most want to see advance. (I have a general bias towards Minneapolis school board incumbents, because it’s a hard job, very few people stick with it, and the lack of institutional memory is often a problem. However, I’m not a huge fan of Kim Ellison.)

Elena Condos ran in 2022 for the seat in District 5; her website this time is identical to her website last time, and she doesn’t have a campaign Facebook or Twitter or in general seem to be doing much. (She does seem to have a personal Facebook but she’s shared nothing about the race that I saw.)

Shayla Owodunni became interested in the job by volunteering in the schools, and got so engaged in it that she set up a YouTube channel where she reads picture books and then started digging into the district finances and concluded that her background in corporate finance and accountability could actually be really useful. She’s got a campaign Facebook up and held a meet-and-greet; a teacher on Twitter who went to meet her described her as “lovely” and “the real deal.”

Anyway, despite the corny running gardening joke on her website (she’s very into plants so she starts out with “seeds of change” and that theme never lets up!) I like her. For the primary, this is an easy choice: Shayla Owodunni.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraiser that I can then see fund. I may mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, please send some money to this young adult raising money for top surgery. (Ly is someone I know personally; they were a good friend of my kids when they were younger, and they were possibly the very first person I ever knew who used they/them pronouns. They grew up into an activist and work for TIGERRS, a support organization for trans and intersex young people.)

Primary Elections 2024: MN House 61A

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Every MN House district is up for vote this year in November, but most of them don’t have a primary happening right now. There’s exactly one contested DFL primary for a House seat in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, and it’s this one, 61A.

“How do I know if I’m in 61A?” I hear you ask. Go look up your ballot or your polling place to find out for sure. Or squint at this map:

A map of Legislative District like 61A that I find kind of difficult to read. You can see that it includes Lake of the Isles but ends north of Bde Mka Ska.

There are three candidates running to be the DFL candidate in November, and — important note — this is not an instant-runoff ballot because those aren’t a thing in state races, only city ones. Whoever gets the most votes wins.

The candidates:

Will Stancil
Katie Jones
Isabel Rolfes

There will be no Republican on the ballot for this seat in November, but there will be a Green party candidate, Toya López, so I will write about the race again after the primary. (When I wrote about the upcoming primaries back in June, she was not going to be on the ballot, but she appealed and got on.)

tl;dr I like both Katie and Isabel, but I would vote for Katie because I think she’s got a better shot at beating Will.

Will Stancil

Like a lot of very (or even moderately) online people, I know Will first as a very annoying person on Twitter. He decided at some point (two years ago? I’m not sure) to see whether being very very loud and persistent in defense of Biden’s economic successes could change the narrative. Will has accomplished something real here, which is that he’s managed to become one of those people who is so annoying on social media that I will want to argue against points I actually agree with.

I really dislike some of his favorite tactics, including endless endless quote-tweeting of utterly reprehensible stuff in order to dunk on it.

A Will Stancil quote-tweet. Will says "Interesting, tell us what you mean by that" while quote-tweeting someone named @HankShedwrecker saying "There is no magic amount of money that's going to make the young scholars at Malcolm X Baltimore Achievers Academy read at grade level, Billiam."

It’s not actually an own, in 2024, to quote something blatantly racist and suggest that the person should just own up to their blatant racism. At least, it’s not a particularly effective own, especially on Twitter.

Will has also used a lot of over-the-top violent rhetoric that’s common on Twitter and not particularly acceptable in most other contexts, like “someone should hold you underwater for five to ten minutes,” “go guzzle bleach,” and “you really are deranged. you really should consider the bleach option,” all of these to people who are operating on the same side of the political spectrum as Will and not one of the Nazis. (You can see a collection of these as screen shots here if you’re on Bluesky and here whether or not you’re signed in on Bluesky.)

Will’s habit of picking fights with Nazis on Twitter rebounded partly on Will and partly on his opponents, Katie Jones and Isabel Rolfes. When Will declared his candidacy, some of the Nazis got a website up faster than Will did (it showed up if you searched for a website, and was just plausible enough that a lot of people thought it was real) and mobbed Katie’s Twitter with almost indescribable levels of vileness. (They framed this as “support” for Will.) Isabel did not get the Twitter backlash but got violent and specific threats that were so disturbing that her campaign hired security to protect Isabel’s safety. (This is not normally something people need in a legislative primary race in Minneapolis.)

At the candidate forum earlier this month, social media got brought up, along with how people would communicate with constituents. Will said he loved doorknocking and he was going to keep doorknocking and completely ignored the part of the question about social media. Katie Jones said, “What we say on social media has consequences and we have to take that responsibility seriously,” Isabel Rolfes cosigned this, and Will just … ignored the question. He has said (on Twitter) that if he gets elected he will have less time for Twitter, but he’s currently campaigning (and has legitimately knocked a ton of doors!) and somehow continues to find time for Twitter.

Some other notes on Will: he was endorsed early by Lisa Goodman (who I can’t stand) and the Senior DFL Caucus (still the most conservative politically viable group in Minneapolis), and his endorsements list is just a remarkable collection of elderly white people. Lisa Goodman retired last year, but his other political endorsements are people who retired in 2003, 1978, 1993, 1997, 1982, and 2000. Oh, plus (Republican donor!) Tom Hoch.

If Will had never used Twitter, I would look at his endorsements and still say that 61A should choose someone else. But I dislike his use of Twitter so much that I’m not sure a better set of endorsements would help him win me over. There are two good candidates in this race and I want one of them to win.

So: Katie or Isabel?

They both have their strengths and their weaknesses, and — crucially — this is not a race that has instant runoff. You don’t get a backup choice. And what I’ve been worrying about since the convention adjourned with no endorsement is that Katie and Isabel will split the progressive vote, Will will take the centrists, and he’ll win. So while I’m going to talk about the things that make Katie and Isabel distinctive, in the end, my focus is on who I think has a better shot at beating Will.

Katie Jones

Katie Jones previously ran for the Ward 10 City Council seat (and lost to Aisha Chughtai — who has now endorsed her for the legislative seat). John Edwards (WedgeLive) described her as “intellectually relentless, methodical, focused, and exactly the person I trust to attack a complicated problem.” She’s an engineer, and takes an engineer’s approach to policy writing and problem solving.

Her endorsements include Faith in Minnesota (the endorsements arm of ISAIAH). I’ll note that last year, when my City Council seat in St. Paul was open, I had two candidates running with a shot at winning, Saura Jost and Isaac Russell. Pre-DFL convention, they presented themselves as similarly progressive and I went to the convention planning to support Isaac. Faith in Minnesota endorsed Saura, giving her a first-ballot victory at the convention. Isaac did not drop out, and spent the rest of the campaign aligning himself with the most centrist-y centrists around. I went from being an Isaac supporter to a Saura doorknocker, and this left me with a lot of confidence in Faith in Minnesota’s ability to ferret out secret centrists.

Which is good, because her endorsements also include RT Rybak (ugh) and Ember Reichgott Junge (UGH) (addendum: Katie’s campaign wanted to let me know that Katie did not seek out Ember’s endorsement, this was just an e-mail from Ember to her neighbors about who she was planning to vote for). But she’s also endorsed by Keith Ellison; Aisha Chughtai and Katie Cashman from the City Council; Tom Olson and Becky Alper from the Park Board; and Irene Fernando and Marion Greene from the Hennepin County Board.

I watched the League of Women Voters’ Candidate Forum and noted down a couple of points that spoke well for Katie: in response to a question about fraud and waste, she said that we needed to bring it to light even when things go wrong within our own party. (She’s right. I know how much it sucks when it feels like we’re handing the Republicans one more stick to beat us with, but the alternative is Chicago.) She talked up multigenerational housing as a priority, and in a discussion of street safety, brought up the complete bullshit that is Metro Mobility. (I mean, it’s not bullshit that we have a system for providing rides to the disabled; it’s bullshit that you have to have a two-hour window for pickup and dropoff.)

I mentioned her comments about “responsibility” on social media but I also appreciated her observation (in the context of communication with constituents) that most people actually do not want to hear from their elected officials every day. When we have something to say to them, a problem we want them to solve or a policy we want them to change, we want to be able to reach them and feel heard and get a response (ideally, a solution! but if not, at least some sympathy) and the rest of the time we kind of want them to do their thing and not bug us.

Isabel Rolfes

Isabel has been a legislative assistant since 2022 and has a ton of support from the legislators she’s worked with — she’s endorsed by 19 House Reps and 2 State Senators. And they exemplify something I’ve noticed, which is that people who work with Isabel tend to speak very highly of her. Someone from Minneapolis Twitter commented, “I love Isabel and support her completely. She went out of her way to help me get a hearing for a bill I was working on because she believed in it. She also knows how to campaign in swing districts, something your legislators from safe districts do every 2 years. Seriously, I’ve seen how she activates and works like hell for things she believes in. That bill is a law now and without her quick advocacy it would have died in committee. Now ableism and disability justice training taught by a disabled trainer is a part of teacher licensure.”

Some moments in the forum that I wrote down from Isabel: when asked about streets, she immediately talked about pedestrian safety and about cleaning up after storms. Also, when Education came up, she brought up the legislature taking steps to fix our completely inadequate mandates around sex ed. On housing, she talked about wanting to pass tax credits for converting office space into apartments.

(If you’re interested in seeing a curated set of highlights from the forum instead of watching the whole thing, WedgeLive put one together here: https://wedgelive.com/mn-house-district-61a-candidates-answer-questions-on-the-issues/ )

For me, it really comes down to who’s more likely to beat Will, and after checking and having friends check for yard signs (Katie was outdoing Isabel, but there just weren’t enough overall to make it remotely conclusive) and looking at their lists of campaign events (also inconclusive) I decided to hold off until campaign finance information rolled in this week. You can see a summary of it in this spreadsheet created by Josh Martin. Will has raised the most ($93,165) — given that he does have a substantial Twitter fanbase from outside the state, I don’t find that surprising (exasperating, but not surprising). Katie Jones raised $70,254, and Isabel Rolfes raised $42,109.

Money is an awkward proxy for campaign strength, but that doesn’t make it inaccurate and at this point, it’s the best I’ve got. (I’ll note that “Katie has a better shot at beating Will” is also something I’ve heard from several friends who live in the district and have a clearer sense of the politics there than I do.)

I really like both Isabel and Katie, but I would vote for Katie Jones.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraiser that I can then see fund. I may mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, please send some money to this young adult raising money for top surgery. (Ly is someone I know personally; they were a good friend of my kids when they were younger, and they were possibly the very first person I ever knew who used they/them pronouns. They grew up into an activist and work for TIGERRS, a support organization for trans and intersex young people.)

Election 2024: US House 05 Primary

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This is the Minneapolis (with some surrounding suburbs) seat currently held by Ilhan Omar. There is a primary on the DFL side, which you should plan to vote in if you live in this district. The Republican candidate (Dalia Al-Aqidi) is unopposed (not that it particularly matters. This is the bluest of blue districts. Although feel free to encourage your Republican relatives to donate heavily to Dalia’s campaign rather than anywhere their donations might matter.)

In the DFL primary, Don Samuels is once again challenging Ilhan Omar. (There are also two other candidates running but this is very definitely a race between Don and Ilhan. The tl;dr: vote for Ilhan.)

On the ballot:

Ilhan Omar
Don Samuels
Nate Schluter
Abena A. McKenzie

I’ll do Nate and Abena first, and you can feel free to scroll brusquely past as they both filed but neither is actually running.

Nate Schluter

Nate also ran in 2022, and had an actual website that year, with the impressive URL, “www.candidatenateschluter5thdistrictcandidateminneapolis.com.” My comment two years ago was that Nate liked football metaphors, was susceptible to scams, and expressed some gross anti-immigrant sentiments. That was all based on his website, which no longer exists. His campaign Facebook (linked above) has not been updated since 2022. Don’t vote for him.

Abena A. McKenzie

Literally the only information I found on Abena was a Facebook post from her cousin (“This beautiful lady is my big cousin Abena Mckenzie she is running for congress so people let’s give her our support vote for Abena Mckenzie Mn congress”) that linked to a Tiktok video in which someone (I assume Abena) smiles but says nothing. Like not just “nothing of substance,” nothing at all. The Tiktok account seems to have mainly vacation pictures. Her campaign affidavit lists no campaign address, so I’m honestly not sure how she even got on the ballot (you’re allowed to keep your residence address private but in that case, a campaign address is required.) Searching up her e-mail contact address got me to a business website in Yuma, California, and I’m honestly not sure she lives in Minnesota. It’s a mystery. Don’t vote for her.

Don Samuels

In a reasonable world, if you took a child on a bike outing and one of the children wound up drowning because you said “sure, you can go wading in the Mississippi River” even though you could not swim, you might not withdraw permanently from public life, but you certainly would not run for office again. But here we are.

When Don ran two years ago I made a list of his decades of buffoonery and I will recap here.

  • In 2005, he explained that his family (he’s from Jamaica) had a leg up on everyone else because they were descended from house slaves rather than field slaves. (“The reason that my family got a leg up on the people in our village in Jamaica is that we were in the big house. We saw homework done. They saw books read. They saw the piano lessons. And that’s why my wife and I say, ‘we want our house to be the big house on our block.’ And we’re going to open it up to every kid on our block.”)

He also sat for an interview with the late Sarah Janacek and in his discussion of Katrina’s aftermath he said the following: “Those were dark faces on those women, almost bizarrely unblended. They looked like they were from Haiti or Africa. This is part of the unspoken evolution of race. We cannot seem to talk about the reality that lighter- skinned black people are more likely to escape poverty.” The “unspoken evolution” line made me flinch because I don’t think he was just talking here about the damage done by colorism, especially given his comments, also in 2005, about being descended from mixed-race people. (Don’s actual quote emphasized that he was descended from “mulatto men.”)

  • In 2012, he had an op-ed published in which he described confronting someone for public urination, who then stole Don’s phone, only Don used the Find my IPhone feature plus the services of the cops to retrieve it and have the thief arrested, at which point he delivered a long lecture to the thief. (Two notes about this. First, I have known a ton of people who’ve had Apple products stolen, have known exactly where they are thanks to Find My iPhone, and usually have had zero luck getting cops to help them get their devices back. Second, there are multiple spots in this story that had a distinct “AND THEN EVERYONE CLAPPED” vibe.)
  • Don was a Vikings stadium supporter and after voting to approve it in 2013 (overriding the law that was supposed to require a municipal referendum) he had this comment about being surprised to be handed “an envelope with … a couple grand” from trade unions. This was at least less corrupt than his giddy comments made it sound. Overriding the will of the people to build a giant sports palace was, and remains, bullshit.
  • In 2014, he called the cops on a hot dog giveaway being run by a neighborhood organization trying to encourage people to vote. He said he thought they were selling the hot dogs illegally. They had a large sign saying “Free Hot Dogs” and were doing this right outside their organization’s office, which Don had been to. (There’s a video of the conversation between the organizers and the cop that includes the cop saying in a slightly confused tone, “I’m here … for the grilling of the food,” which clarifies that Don literally called 911 over this.) (In 2021, he claimed in a Facebook thread about this that there had been repeated grilling incidents and it was a fire hazard.)
  • The drowning happened in 2020 and the details are here. Don can’t swim. When two of the little boys lost their footing and were pulled away by the current, Don’s wife Sondra was the only one who could go after them, and one of the children drowned. This happened in the summer of 2020 and was a heartbreaking, awful accident.

Which Don joked about when he ran in 2022. (In response to someone talking about the incident and the incredible hubris involved in running for office a a year and a half after a child died because of your poor judgment, Don tweeted, “Can’t swim but can govern.”)

When I first saw that tweet, I honestly just assumed that “donsamuels49” was a satirical troll with extremely bad taste. I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out this was actually Don joking about the death of a child who was in his care.

  • This year, while complaining on a podcast that Ilhan was unresponsive to her constituents, Don said, “you’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.” I kind of get what he was trying to say here (that she’s cute and attractive, but this doesn’t make up for what he sees as her failings) but even reframed the way I think he meant it, that’s a gross way to talk about a woman in politics. He also proceeded to deny having said any of this.
  • Don’s campaign put up “Missing” posters on utility poles with Ilhan’s photo. He’s been heavily criticized for trivializing the issue of missing and murdered BIPOC women. The thing that bugs me about these ads is the delivery, the fact that they are posted up in a way that makes them look like an actual “missing person” flyer, because that genuinely is a twist of the knife to anyone who’s ever looked at a flyer to see if maybe they’ve seen that person. (The “MISSING: your congressional representative” rhetoric is kind of standard. This approach to the advertisements absolutely isn’t.)

Ilhan Omar

You probably know at this point whether you like Ilhan Omar or not. In any given two-year period, there’s stuff she’s done that I really like, and stuff she’s done that really pisses me off. She had two major controversies recently, so I will talk about those.

  • The speech about Somali interests. Back in January, Ilhan delivered a speech in Somali to a group of Somali supporters. It got mistranslated and the mistranslation has been widely circulated by Republicans (because Republicans haaaaaaaaaaaate Ilhan). Here’s the Star Trib article with an accurate translation and the translation that was circulated. She basically said, “as Somalis in America you have the same rights as anyone else to ask your representatives to do stuff; I, your representative, am Somali, and will represent your concerns” (on, let me just add, a foreign policy issue that 99.9% of non-Somali Americans know nothing about and don’t care about — a port deal between Ethiopia and the breakaway republic Somaliland. Do I know anything about this topic? No. This is, in fact, part of what I value about having a representative democracy: I do not have to have a take on every single thing our government has to have a take on.) Anyway, if you’ve heard versions of the speech where she supposedly said “The U.S. government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do,” she literally did not say that.
  • The line about Jewish students. During the campus protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza, which Ilhan’s daughter participated in, Ilhan said, “all Jewish kids should be kept safe. […] We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” The fact that she suggested that some Jewish students were pro-genocide was viewed as super problematic and the Republicans tried to censure her (I can’t find anything saying they actually succeeded, just that a censure resolution was introduced). I am, once again, really not interested in having an extended discussion of Israel in my space and trying to parse out the exact lines one might draw between “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes but not actually genocide, just war crimes,” honestly. I’ll just say, I don’t actually have a problem with her framing here.

I would unhesitatingly vote for Ilhan to be re-elected.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraiser that I can then see fund. I may mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, please send some money to this young adult raising money for top surgery.

Election 2024: US Senate

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Amy Klobuchar is running for re-election this year and there are in fact a lot of people on the primary ballot, in both parties. This is a low-stakes primary because the only real question is whether Royce White (GOP-endorsed) or Joe Fraser (lost endorsement but is at least 25% less embarrassing than Royce White) will get to lose to Amy K in November, so if you mainly come to my blog to see me make fun of people, you’ll enjoy this post. If you’re hoping for a more-left-wing alternative to Amy K, I regret to tell you that you are once again SOL.

Inserting a cut because this got very long!

Continue reading →

Elections 2024: Primaries in Minneapolis and St. Paul

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Having consulted Josh Martin’s guide to elections in Minneapolis and the Star Trib’s guide to who’s running for St. Paul, my primary takeaway is that we just do not have very many contested primaries this year (but some of the primaries have A LOT of candidates). This post is largely for my own reference. If you live in Minneapolis or St. Paul and consult your own ballot (you can find it at the Secretary of State’s Find My Ballot site) and see a race I don’t list on your primary ballot, feel free to leave me a note in the comments.

US Senate

On all statewide ballots there’s a primary for US Senate.

DFL candidates:

Amy Klobuchar (incumbent)
Steve Carlson
Ahmad R. Hassan (the link is the URL that he listed in his campaign filing but it does not lead anywhere)
George H. Kalberer
Ole Savior

(Bad news for the people who hate Amy Klobuchar: I can tell you right now that there is no one here worth voting for. I mean, I’ll do my whole writeup, but you can find several of them in past posts and for real, absolutely none of them deserve your vote. If you hate Amy, you can write someone in, or, if you live in St. Paul, you can cross over and vote for whichever Republican would be least evil / most hilarious.)

Republican candidates:

John Berman
Joe Fraser
Patrick D. Munro
Christopher Seymore Sr. (link from the URL that he listed in his campaign filing, doesn’t work)
Raymond D. Petersen
Loner Blue
Royce White (endorsed by the MN GOP but couldn’t be bothered to list a website when he filed his campaign form)
Alycia R. Gruenhagen

That is in fact an impressive list of people competing to get humiliated by Amy Klobuchar! I’ll probably start with this race, some of these people are clearly going to be hilarious to write about.

US House

In Minneapolis, there’s a DFL primary for Congressional District 5, which you definitely want to go vote in as two years ago it was genuinely competitive:

Ilhan Omar (incumbent)
Nate Schluter
Abena A. McKenzie
Don Samuels

The Republican primary is uncontested.

In St. Paul, there’s a Republican primary for CD 4:

May Lor Xiong
Gene Rechtzigel

No one is running against the DFL incumbent, Betty McCollum, in the primary.

MN House

There is one contested Minnesota House primary in Minneapolis, 61A, which is an open seat. Three people are running:

Will Stancil
Katie Jones
Isabel Rolfes

Fascinatingly, not only is there no Republican primary in 61A, there’s no Republican running, period. So all the people on Twitter who told me how electable or not-electable Will Stancil was going to be can relax. Whoever wins this primary will, barring something so bizarre it triggers an energetic write-in campaign, win the seat because no one will be running against them in the general. If you live in 61A, turn out for this one! You’re going to have to live with whoever wins probably until they decide to retire!

There is one contested Minnesota House primary in St. Paul, 67B, but it’s much less consequential. It’s on the Republican side and here are the candidates:

AJ Plehal
Sharon Anderson

Minneapolis School Board

There’s a primary for a Minneapolis school board at-large seat — the top two candidates will advance. On the ballot:

Kim Ellison (incumbent, since 2012) (DFL endorsed)
Elena Condos
Shayla Owodunni

And for the primaries, I think that’s it? The primary election will be held on August 13th, and early voting starts on June 28th. The one genuinely complicated post (as opposed to “lol CHECK OUT THESE CLOWNS” which is going to be the general tone of the GOP US Senate Primary post) is MN 61A. I will definitely post about that race but also probably not until July.

In personal/writing news, I won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for my (Minneapolis-centric) story, “The Year Without Sunshine,” which you can read online here if you’d like. And my newest book, Liberty’s Daughter, is available (signed!) at both Uncle Hugo’s and Dreamhaven.

Election 2024: Super Tuesday Presidential Primary (Minnesota Ballot)

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Usually when I’m blogging about an election, there’s a lot of stuff on the ballot. But this spring we have a primary — Minnesota votes on March 5th, Super Tuesday — and the primary is the only thing on the ballot.

Barring anything really surprising like, for example, someone literally dropping dead, the election this November is going to be Biden vs. Trump. But even if the primary results are basically a foregone conclusion, you can still go vote for someone. There are in fact three primaries. You will have to pick one, but you can pick whichever party you want, and you can vote for anyone you want, including the woman who did not consent to be on the ballot and would like you to please not vote for her.

That said: you have to ask for the ballot for the party you would like to vote in, and this gets recorded, and the names of people who voted in each party’s primary get passed along to the party, so if you are a Democrat who votes in the Republican primary, bear in mind that you will get a lot of calls and texts from Republicans, and if you run for office as a Democrat, the fact that you voted in the Republican primary might be brought up. (“I was hoping to encourage Nikki Haley to stay in the race and do damage to Trump” is probably a motive a lot of people will be fine with, just know it might come up.)

ETA: someone pointed out to me that there’s also an attestation in the oath you sign when you pick up a ballot in the Presidential Primary that goes, “I further certify that I am in general agreement with the principles of the party for whose candidate I intend to vote.” (Via the Election Day Manual for election workers, here).

Legal Marijuana Party

The LMP is a bunch of clowns which will hopefully drop from major party status in Minnesota soon and fade into obscurity. But they’re holding a primary and you can vote in it if you want.

Krystal Gabel

Krystal Gabel is the Colorado woman who is on the ballot and did not actually consent to be. In an e-mail to the Star Tribune, the LMP leadership said that they had been “posting about this in our leadership group of Facebook, which Krystal is a part of” — who among us has not just quit reading a Facebook group rather than leaving it, only to find out later that we are now running for an office we don’t want? The e-mail went on: “Krystal is a party leader and all indications were that she was ready to be in the MN primary. We thought this was all worked out but by her request she has been withdrawn the candidates are now Edward Forchion, Rudy Reyes, Dennis Schuller, Vermin Supreme.” (She is still on the ballot because the ballots had been printed, and I assume the run-on sentence was in the original e-mail.)

Anyway, Krystal has a Wikipedia page that lists all the many, many things she has unsuccessfully run for and zero other qualifications. She also doesn’t want the job. I would not vote for Krystal.

Dennis Schuller

Dennis Schuller used to do a radio show or podcast or something with fellow weirdo Mickey Moore; you can watch a video in which they make basically the same joke over and over about the phrase “dirty hoe.”

You know something about the LMP, they really seem bound and determined to embody every possible stoner stereotype. I would not vote for Dennis.

Edward Forchion

In 2020, Edward Forchion legally changed his name to “NJweedman.com” and yet has not maintained a website at the URL NJWeedman.com. I submit this is all you really need to know about Edward Forchion and his qualifications for presidential office.

(I want to note for the record that I started this post all the way back in January, with no idea that Noted Internet Personality Will Stancil would jump into the race for 61A and make a related error. At least in Will’s case he did not change his name to a URL that he then failed to maintain ownership of.)

Rudy Reyes

There are multiple Rudy Reyeses but I’m guessing it’s this one that’s running. If he has a website, it was buried under stuff about the more-famous Rudy Reyes and I couldn’t find it. (I don’t think he has a website.) I did find his Twitter but he hasn’t posted to it since 2020.

Vermin Supreme

Say what you will about his “mandatory toothbrushing” proposals, Vermin Supreme is a man who understands how to be a crackpot candidate. Over on Twitter you can find some great videos of him being a little weirdo and freaking the hell out of one of the Trumps.

I can understand being tempted by Vermin Supreme. (Weirdly, he was on the Democratic primary ballot in New Hampshire. I’m curious if he’s on the Republican ballot in any states, but not curious enough to try to figure that out.)

Republican Party

Donald Trump

Noted piece of shit Donald Trump is running again. There are probably people voting for him in the primary on the grounds that he’ll be easier for Joe Biden to beat than any of the people running against him, and I mean, I guess. If you’d consider voting for him in the general, get the fuck out of here, I don’t write my blog for you.

Vivek Ramaswamy

No longer actually running, he attempted to run as the Trumpiest guy in the race who wasn’t actually Trump. He not only has no prior elective office or civic experience, he didn’t even vote until 2020. He’s an “entrepreneur” which in this case means he runs a fucking hedge fund.

Ron DeSantis

Also no longer running. You know who Ron DeSantis reminded me of kind of intensely? Norm Coleman at his smarmiest. Except somehow even less likeable.

Chris Christie

Dropped out even before Iowa, he’d probably have been my pick of this group of assholes because while he’s unquestionably an asshole, he was at least aggressively running against Trump.

Back in 2016 I remember joking about that thousand-mile stare we saw on Christie at some point after he endorsed Trump — specifically I joked that he’d run into a time traveler in the bathroom right before this happened, who handed him a knife and said “YOU GOTTA DO IT CHRIS IT’S OUR ONLY CHANCE.” I’m still not entirely convinced that didn’t happen.

Nikki Haley

Still running as I type this (it’s now February 26th). I was basically expecting her to drop out after losing South Carolina, but she’s stayed in, and … good for her, I guess. The nicest thing I have to say about Nikki Haley is that she’s not Donald Trump. She’s the closest option around to a “normal Republican” in the sense that she hates trans people and wants to make abortion illegal, but she is not opposed to democracy as a concept and doesn’t say she wants to be a dictator. “In favor of democracy” really seems to me to be a lot lower than the lowest possible bar one might set for a potential president, but here we are.

Nikki Haley would be significantly harder for Joe Biden to beat, and yet I would have liked to see her win because that would suggest that a majority of Republican primary voters support democracy as a concept, which would mean better things for this country than a Trump victory. She is not going to win in 2024. Anyway, if you want to go to the polls on March 5th and fuck around with the Republican race, the useful feature of a vote for Nikki Haley is that it reinforces the story that Trump is an incredibly weak candidate, so weak that even at a point when he’s obviously winning, a huge number of people are turning out to vote for his last primary opponent standing.

The risk of voting for Nikki is, I guess, the slim potential of a come-from-behind victory and also setting her up for a run in 2028. I’m not great at gaming this stuff out. I guess I’ll leave you with: Nikki Haley, unlike most of her party, supports democracy; I would like to see the democracy-supporting minority of Republicans regain control of their party. But I would not like to see her as president. (Also, see above about how you will have to ask for a Republican primary ballot, this will get recorded, and you’ll get calls from Republicans asking for money.)

Democratic Party

A note before I get into this: I do not usually discuss anything Israel or Israel-adjacent on this blog, but at the moment, it’s the biggest reason that people who usually vote Democratic are furious at Biden.

There’s no obvious alternative candidate (Dean Phillips signed a ceasefire letter last week with a bunch of other congressional reps but this was after dodging the issue for months) but as a tactic for expressing anger over this, activists in Michigan organized people to vote “Uncommitted” (this is a vote to send uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention) as a protest specifically of Biden’s handling of Israel. This is a valid tactic: it gives you a visible measure of numbers, and it also, if it spreads as a tactic, has the potential to cause problems because the national Democratic party absolutely does not want a contested convention. (Editing to add a link to Sahan journal, which talks about the local movement with the same suggestion.)

Anyway, I think withholding your vote in the primary from a candidate who’s doing something you profoundly object to is a totally reasonable way to do a protest vote and is also far and away the most likely to keep the coverage on message. (Whereas a sudden bump for, say, Marianne Williamson would be, “so are people pro-Gazan, or anti-vax?” And Dean would be “is his message on Biden’s age resonating?”)

Anyway, on to the Democrats on the ballot.

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

I have in many ways been pleasantly surprised by Biden. For example, his SAVE income-based student loan repayment plan is actually pretty great and demonstrates a lot about how he’s approached being stonewalled by Republicans; he comes up with another route to what he’s trying to do.

I’m less happy with his handling of Israel’s war on Gaza, although I’d be even less happy with Trump. (Trump has been largely avoiding taking a meaningful stance in the hopes of getting votes from leftists, apparently. I hope no one considering their options in November thinks that the trigger-happy virulent Islamophobe being in office would have improved this situation.)

Eban Cambridge

Eban Cambridge does not have a campaign website, but digging around I found some odds and ends. He has a LinkedIn where he says, “I’m seeking a position as a Full Stack Web Developer. As a person who loves to learn new things, I think it started when I earned merit badges working towards becoming an Eagle Scout.” I also found a “Lesser-Known Candidates Forum” where he also starts out by talking about how he was an Eagle Scout. My dude, you are at least 35 years old; you are too old to brag about having been an Eagle Scout. If you want to see him talk, skip to 25:22 (the thing about that forum is, there are a bunch of people in it who are not on the ballot in MN, so you need to skip over a lot.)

He actually kind of grew on me as I watched, because he’s so sincere about his heartfelt belief that his ideas (a tax cut on overtime pay specifically, and a new tax on corporations that buy up housing) are very ordinary common sense and should be obvious to implement (“these things would pass without a filibuster,” he assures us, then says we should blow up the filibuster anyway). He also said to look him up at “votecambridge24” on Instagram. It’s actually votecambridge2024 and at the time I first looked there was nothing in the account. He has since added a video clip (from the forum, above).

When they got asked about Gaza at the minor candidate event, he said we should end Apartheid in Palestine. He may in fact be the most straightforwardly anti-our-current-Israel-policy candidate of the Democratic primary candidates. Unfortunately, he is so obscure that if you’re trying to send a message with your primary ballot, no one will know that’s why you voted for him.

Jason Palmer

Jason Palmer has an actual campaign website, complete with posed publicity shots of himself and a campaign ad (which had been viewed 327 times when I first looked it up and, about a month later, has now been viewed 704 times). (The ad starts out with his voice saying “We started with a beautiful vision of what we could be” over video of a group of football players praying in a locker room, which I’ll be honest, that does not fill me with conviction that he’s the sort of progressive leader he wants us to imagine him.)

His central idea is “conscious capitalism,” which he doesn’t explain very well. (He was in the same Obscure Candidates Forum as Eban and he didn’t explain it particularly well there, either.) His background involves being some sort of tech exec (I guess) and working for an investment firm (he says he “has served in executive and leadership positions at multiple organizations, including Microsoft, Kaplan Education, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” — here’s his LinkedIn, which shows him as a Board Member for 8 gazillion places plus having actual jobs at a few.)

Per his website, he’s pro-choice, pro-gun-control, pro-reparations for descendants of slavery (though he’s kind of vague about what form that might take) and yet his overall vibe is “what if Mitt Romney ran as a Democrat.” (Possibly because he’s a rich white middle aged guy?) There is almost no information on his foreign policy ideas, but when I asked him about that on Twitter he directed me to a video interview he did. He starts talking about Israel about 13 minutes in: says he agrees with Bernie Sanders, and the US should stop funding Netanyahu’s government unless they declares a ceasefire and support a two-state solution. However, he doesn’t want to say this is genocide and he opposes South Africa’s case in the International Court (“I am not actually a huge fan of the International Court”). At 31:33 he gets asked for more details about his Ukraine solution. He wants to start with a ceasefire, then negotiations, and if Putin will end the war in exchange for Crimea he thinks Ukraine should go for that (and we should pressure them to do so).

Anyway: he’s better organized and more coherent than a lot of the other fringe candidates, to the point that I feel like, he could run for the Maryland state legislature from a suburban district and have a genuine shot at a seat. The weirdest thing about him is that he’s instead pouring a fair amount of money into a completely quixotic run for the presidency. It’s not like he’s got some grand singular thing he’s running on, like … whichever bland white guy it was in 2020 who ran on All Global Warming All The Time (who had held elected office before, unlike this guy). He’s a middle-aged white guy and a business-friendly centrist Democrat. If that’s what you want, Dean Phillips has some actual political experience.

Marianne Williamson

Here’s the nicest thing I have to say about Marianne Williamson: in a sea of completely unqualified dudes, it’s nice to see that at least one completely unqualified woman is putting herself forward as well. I also like what she has to say about Israel. (“I understand Israel’s need to slay the monster. But this military action is only feeding it. There was never a military solution here. And there is not a military solution now.”)

Marianne Williamson is an author of several New Agey books and an enthusiastic seller of New Agey ideas. She insists she’s not an antivaxxer (but she has absolutely promoted the garbage theory that vaccines cause autism and described mandatory vaccination as “Orwellian”) and people who talk negatively about her online tend to get swarmed by aggressive Marianne stans who want to insist that everything you’ve ever heard (about her AIDS charity telling people that they were dying because they didn’t love themselves enough, about her saying that people get cancer because of negative thoughts, etc.) is just cherry-picked out-of-context quotes being used to keep a good woman down, or whatever.

What I would recommend, if you want a better grounding on her weird ideas with more context, is the Maintenance Phase podcast episode on her diet book (and on her, more generally). At that link you can find both an hour-long episode you can listen to, or if you’d prefer, a transcript.

Marianne’s weird ideas boil down to a somewhat incoherent rendition of a set of philosophies that circulate and recirculate under various labels, but which I first encountered when I did a college term paper on Christian Science (which is one iteration of them): all people exist as perfect children of God (or perfect manifestations of the universal consciousness or whatever), and all illness (or pain or misfortune) is an illusion. Some versions take a more absolutist line on this, where you’re discouraged from seeking medical care (because that simply reinforced the illusion you should be shedding) and that’s honestly more coherent than Marianne’s philosophies, which try to keep the “all suffering is an illusion” idea but also embrace the idea that of course you shouldn’t depend on that if you get cancer, you should go ahead and get cancer treatment while also trying to say that you probably got cancer because of negative thoughts (“Cancer and AIDS and other serious illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream”).

One of the other iterations of this set of ideas is the “Law of Attraction” garbage. At its heart, this philosophy is really gross, victim-blaming bullshit. It’s saying, if you’re poor, it’s because you thought the wrong thoughts, and if you’re sick, it’s because you brought it on yourself. People sometimes boil it down to, “we’d all be healthier if we were under less stress,” which is true, not problematic, and not what she’s saying.

I think that some of Marianne’s weirdness rolls off people because we all know people like her, most of whom are similarly inconsistent because if they weren’t, they’d lose all their friends. You know? If you have a friend who read The Secret but would never in a million years say to you, “your misfortunes are because you thought the wrong thoughts,” if their spouting of the bullshit from that book is kept to relatively innocuous stuff, it’s easy to get kind of inured to it.

But we’re talking about a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

Marianne has also never held elected office. I have long believed that the US Presidency is not an appropriate entry-level elective job, and nothing about Donald Trump’s presidency made me rethink my beliefs about this.

Dean Phillips

Dean has held elected office! (Unlike literally everyone else presenting themselves as an alternative to Biden.)

Unfortunately, he’s basically a more conservative version of Biden.

Also younger — which is good — but has much less name recognition.

Look, if you’re reading this, you probably live in Minnesota, you’re literally from Dean’s state, so either you know what he stands for, or you should think about the fact that you don’t and consider that maybe that demonstrates part of the problem here.

In early January, I specifically went looking for any statements he’s made on Israel and Gaza and here’s what I found: a fairly anodyne statement from November, calling for the release of hostages, followed by a ceasefire with UN peacekeepers, and a Tweet saying “the mutual bloodshed must end.” He has since signed a ceasefire letter, but realistically: he would not be any better on this than Biden. (Also, if you vote for him, the message that will get through is, “Biden is old.”)

Frankie Lozada

In that obscure candidate forum, he was reasonably well-spoken and used the tag line “Make America dream again,” and mostly pulled it off with the power of sincerity.

His website does not mention abortion rights at all, which is an odd omission for a Democratic candidate. I asked him on Twitter what his stance was, and he said, “in short, I am a pro-choice advocate” and linked me to a candidate questionnaire he’d completed. In the actual questionnaire, he starts his response on abortion with “I believe in striking a balance that respects both the rights of women and the value of life.” He goes on to talk about providing contraception (great) and support for women who would prefer to keep their pregnancy but don’t have resources they need (great) but also says “I also recognize the importance of safeguarding the sanctity of life, particularly as pregnancy progresses” and really does not unpack what he means there. (He has since written a longer statement, which he provided to someone else who asked him on Twitter about his position.)

But, I have to admit the most eye-catching bit of his platform came from his Facebook page, where he says he supports nuclear power and explains, “If nuclear power is deemed safe enough for destructive purposes, then it’s safe enough for GOOD!”

I am actually a supporter of nuclear power (is it ideal, no, but is climate change more urgent than someone disregarding the “THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR” sign in a couple of centuries, yes) but that … that is hilarious. I’m sorry, Frankie. “If we can use it to annihilate cities than it’s safe enough to use for good purposes” is not a good argument.

Gabriel Cornejo

When I searched for the candidate, I found a news story from 2017 about a Gabriel Cornejo who wound up on the hook for $65,000 in child support for a kid that was not actually his and that he had no relationship with. I am fairly certain that this is a different Gabriel Cornejo. (He doesn’t look like the other one and also lives in Nevada, not Texas.)

Gabriel’s most interesting policy position is that he’s pro-UBI (everyone should get a $1000/month “freedom dividend.”) His website had basically nothing about foreign policy, so I asked him on Twitter, and he said, “Yes, I’ll be posting soon. FYI, this attack on the post in Jordan with 3 affects me directly. I’m not running for fun, these are real world ramifications for myself and the average Americans 🇺🇸 like me.” (Hopefully that flag emoji comes through on WordPress.) That was on January 30th. It took him several weeks but he did get a statement up, which you can read here: https://www.gabe2024.com/policies (under Israel and Palestine).

Cenk Uygur

Cenk is one of the “Young Turks,” which I am only vaguely familiar with and associate heavily with misogynistic bullshit. (I couldn’t remember why. Maybe this was it?) Anyway, this is all beside the point because Cenk is literally constitutionally ineligible to serve as US President; he’s an immigrant.

I disagree with this particular constitutional clause, but it’s going to require an amendment to change, it is absolutely in there. Cenk was blocked from a bunch of ballots on the grounds he’s ineligible to serve, but Minnesota’s supreme court has ruled (on a case about Trump, not Cenk) that there’s no law requiring primary candidates to be eligible for office, and that applies to Cenk as well. So he’s on our primary ballot.

Armando “Mando” Perez-Serrato

This guy is just fucking awful.

If you want, you can go peruse this page. (He pulled it down, but it’s archived here.) It includes: gross ableist ranting; open antisemitism against Dean Phillips, Kamala Harris, and Marianne WIlliamson; racism and misogyny against Nikki Haley; misogyny against Kamala Harris; the claim that Kamala Harris is Biden’s house slave; and gross, aggressive Nativist sentiments. And that’s ALL ON ONE PAGE. Further digging around his site turned up a deep hatred for homeless people and a plan to build a water pipeline down from Canada (curious why he thinks Canada would go along with this, but not curious enough to e-mail him.)

Uncommitted

“Uncommitted” is not a candidate per se, but an option you can vote for on each party’s primary ballot. What it’s actually saying is, “send someone to the national convention, which officially picks a candidate, who is not committed to support one of these specific candidates.” Since Joe Biden will definitely get enough national convention delegates to become the nominee, this is a symbolic vote, but it’s a symbolic vote that this year has a really clear and well-understood meaning.

And that’s it! Now, when you look at the ballot and think “who the hell are these people?” you’ll have an answer.

As of 2/29, I am planning to vote for Uncommitted.