Category Archives: Special Elections

Special Election 2025, State House 64A

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“Where’s your gift guide?” It’s coming, I promise, but first and somewhat more urgently there is one more election this year. Saint Paul Mayor-Elect Kaohly Her was a State Rep, and resigned her seat when she won the mayoral race, and the primary for the special election to fill her seat is happening December 16th. This is a deeply blue district, and while a Republican is running (Dan Walsh, who also ran against Kaohly Her in 2024), the primary is the real contest. So if you live in District 64A (that link leads to a map but you can also look up your address here) you should figure out who you’re voting for, and go vote. (“What about the Special Election in 47A, are you going to write about that one?” No, because 47A is an entirely suburban district. No part of 47A is in St. Paul or Minneapolis. I only write about races that appear on the ballots of voters in St. Paul or Minneapolis.)

There are six people running in the DFL primary. The local DFL held an endorsing convention on December 7th, which I attended with the goal of watching the speeches and the Q&A. Everyone said they would continue to run regardless, which is honestly reasonable given that it’s too late to pull your name off the ballot, and also, this was a convention of 75 delegates re-called from the pool that volunteered to be delegates to the uncontested convention in 2024. I’m glad they ran the convention, because it gave me an opportunity to see most of the people running and get a sense of what they’re like. But I think it’s fine that no one’s dropping out.

There’s no instant runoff in this race; everyone needs to pick one.

In the race:

John Zwier
Matt Hill
Lois Quam
Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)
Beth Fraser
Dan McGrath

A note on this writeup. Ordinarily, I would send e-mails to all the candidates asking them a question or two. But this election is in one week. So I’m going to leave some stuff a little handwavy and if candidates see this and urgently want to explain whatever it was I threw up my hands over, they can e-mail me and/or leave a comment.

ETA: There was a LWV candidate forum last night. I haven’t watched it (yet) (and I may not, because I’ve got a bunch of other stuff I need to do.) Here’s the video. It looks like all six candidates were there.

John Zwier

John didn’t seek DFL endorsement, which means I didn’t see him speak. He works in the Attorney General’s office but his boss has endorsed in this race and he was not the pick (Keith Ellison endorsed Lois Quam.) He lists no endorsements on his site. His primary issue is gun control, and you can read his Star Tribune editorial for more information on his proposal (his main proposal is mandatory visible trigger locks on any gun carried in a public space; he has more proposals at https://www.mnfirearmlegislation.com/.)

Poking around social media I discovered that he does have an endorsement from Wes Burdine (owner of the Black Hart LGBTQ+ soccer bar) who knows him personally.

I would not vote for John; most of the other candidates seem to be making a better case for themselves. (Also, he doesn’t seem to have much momentum, and this is not a race with instant runoff. I think this is a race between Lois, Meg, Beth, and Dan.)

Matt Hill

Matt has worked as an advisor and aide to several Ramsey County Commissioners, but again, does not have any endorsements. He did seek DFL endorsement so I heard him speak and respond to Q&A today, and I was not impressed. He kept saying that he was uniquely qualified but was not successful at conveying what his unique qualifications were, in this field of incredibly qualified and accomplished people. He said “that’s my commitment to you!” at the end of most of his answers, after not actually giving us any specific commitments.

During Q&A, there were two responses that stood out to me, both bad. First, there was a question about AI (this really took all the candidates by surprise; none of them had an answer prepared, which was interesting in itself). Everyone else talked about the ways in which they would want to regulate AI and Matt’s response included the line “We need to get with it, if that is the will of what we decide to do.” (I assume he meant the will of the people.) Terrible response. At the very end, they got asked whether they would support higher taxes on the very rich. Everyone else said yes. He did not. He didn’t say no, either, but he used his minute to talk about living within our means and “as a small business owner” blah blah etc. He seemed out of his depth, and I would not vote for him.

Lois Quam

Lois honestly impressed me more than I’d expected her to when I saw that (a) she was the President and CEO of Blue Shield of California from January through April of this year and an executive at UnitedHealth from 1989-2007 (source) and (b) she’s endorsed by Hillary Clinton. Her endorsements also include Attorney General Keith Ellison, Ward 4 City Council Rep Molly Coleman, and Ward 3 City Council Rep Saura Jost. In addition to working for health insurers, she helped write the legislation that created MinnesotaCare, she was an advisor to then-first-lady Hillary when she was writing the health care plan that didn’t pass (hence the endorsement from Hillary), and spent a number of years as the CEO of a global health nonprofit.

Her four-month tenure at Blue Shield of California is sort of weird. I assumed that she got hired in an interim capacity, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case and it’s not clear why she left (and I can’t even read the article talking about how it’s mysterious as it’s behind a paywall I can’t get around with archive.is.)

Asked about single payer, she said she’s a supporter, but that it’s very hard to do it as a state on our own. She talked a ton about coalition building. She said that health care was an easier issue to work across the aisle on than you might expect because there’s not a single Republican representative that doesn’t have his or her own horror story about prior authorization fuckery. (Can I just say I find it wild to hear this from someone who has been a high-level executive at UnitedHealth and a CEO at another insurer. Yes, yes, we all contain multitudes, but, you know. Wild.)

She’s from Marshall, Minnesota originally, and she talked a lot about how she would do outreach to the southern part of the state to recruit people who would run as Democrats for the state legislature. Asked about what she’d hope to accomplish in her first year she talked about being a loyal team player and serving wherever caucus leadership thought she was needed. Finally, if you’re a fan of the Twin Cities Boulevard proposal, she was the one candidate who said she favored it when this got brought up during Q&A. (Everyone else talked about a land bridge.)

I’m going to talk about her answer to the AI question, too. (I found the responses to this really interesting because it was a topic no one had prepared for, and it meant we got a look at how they thought through something they don’t get asked about much.) She started out with the cheerful statement, “I like regulations.” She then acknowledged that it’s an uphill fight because the companies are powerful and it’s a hard problem to tackle as one state, but she supports Keith Ellison’s work in that area, and she suggested that one place to start would be within health care — there are good places to use it, but also really bad places. (She didn’t specify what she meant by this but I would cite “AI supported radiography” as an example of an appropriate use and “AIs used to deny coverage” as an example of a wildly inappropriate use and hopefully that’s more or less what she meant.)

Anyway. There are aspects of Lois’s platform I appreciate but I’m sorry, I can’t get past the fact that she spent almost 20 years as a UnitedHealth executive. It is possibly she has managed to buy back her soul in her years of working for nonprofits, and if so, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t mean I trust her. I would not vote for her in the primary.

Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)

Meg is a labor lawyer who works for Education Minnesota. She’s endorsed by SPPS school board chair Halla Henderson and 62A House Rep Aisha Gomez, and also by several unions. (ETA: post-convention, she was also endorsed by mayor-elect Kaohly Her, SD 64 Senator Erin Murphy, and 64B Rep Dave Pinto.)

In her speech, she highlighted fighting back against school boards that adopt homophobic and racist book censorship policies. She talked about the unprecedented corruption in the Republican party.

During Q&A she mentioned organizing in the suburbs; it’s nice to hear people talking about party building generally, like Lois’s comment about working in southern Minnesota. She stood out a little as being unsupportive of ranked choice. (They got asked about that during the Q&A.) On the AI question, she started out with, “I’m a luddite” and went on to say that she doesn’t really care about stuff like fake pictures of alien invasions but she is very concerned about deepfake videos of real people, and would support required identification when AI was being used. (Same! I don’t know how we enforce this but same.)

ETA: I got a note from Meg. She says she’s not against RCV, just not sold, and is going to be chatting with someone from FairVote ASAP (but probably not in the next week). Re AIs, she had this to add: “I am very concerned about the intellectual property aspect of AI and LLMs specifically. In my line of work, most of my writing is a work for hire and I can’t feel that protective of it. The notion that working authors are having their works fed into a digital Cuisinart and get neither compensation nor a right of refusal is a huge problem that we need a fix for, and I am all in for a state level solution if it’s workable.”

I poked around social media to see what other people were saying about various candidates and ran across a post from a local labor guy (with a book coming out) that said “Labor organizer’s greatest ire is reserved for timid labor lawyers who are too scared to support action. Meg Luger-Nikolai is THE exception to that rule, the best labor lawyer I know.”

She is one of my top three.

Beth Fraser

Beth is a former Deputy Secretary of State and founded the Voting Rights Alliance twenty years ago. She has a long career in policy, working both directly with the legislature (as a researcher) and with various nonprofits (the Main Street Alliance, OutFront Minnesota, and others). She is endorsed by former Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (Steve Simon’s predecessor), a bunch of State Senators, Ward 5 City Council Rep Hwa Jeong Kim, and Ward 1 City Council Rep Anika Bowie. And the owners of Moon Palace Books, one of my favorite local bookstores.

She helped to both pass and implement the Safe at Home act (which allows people whose safety is at risk, such as victims of stalking and domestic violence, to maintain a confidential address and still vote). She worked to end prison gerrymandering and to ensure that Tribal IDs were acceptable ID for voter registration. One of the things that impresses me about her history is that she had the foresight to write protections in the law before the GOP started trying to use certain specific loopholes to attack voting rights.

She started her speech by talking about a vicious homophobic note she received as a 14-year-old high school kid, and she ended it by talking about standing up to bullies (i.e., Trump). Two things from her speech particularly stood out to me. First, when she introduced herself, she gave her pronouns, which I don’t think anyone else did. Second, as she was talking about protecting all the people being targeted by the Republicans, she said that everyone had the right to respect and protection “regardless of how or if you worship.” Both of these things were brief and subtle and yet stood out to me as evidence that she’s someone who is not going to brush aside any of her constituents.

Policywise, some things that jumped out at me: she talked about empowering local governments to raise money in progressive ways (rather than property taxes.) She also talked about banning tear gas for crowd control.

On the AI question, she said she’s been working with experts in this area, trying to figure out what is and isn’t possible, in terms of regulatory approaches. She said she worked on Minnesota’s law against political deepfakes. She added that we also need strong environmental regulations on data centers.

She is one of my top three.

Dan McGrath

Dan McGrath was the founding executive director of Take Action MN, which is an organization I like a lot. (When I doorknock in election season I often head over to their office to pick up materials and a route.) He is endorsed by two County Commissioners and by State Senator Scott Dibble, who also endorsed Beth Fraser. Since leaving Take Action MN in 2018, he has worked as a consultant, and as a policy strategist for the Grassroots Power Project.

In talking about his history, he noted that in 2012, there was a statewide referendum on mandatory photo ID when voting, and that there was initially 80% support for it in polls, it was so popular that a whole lot of Democrats and progressive organizations said we couldn’t win and shouldn’t even try. As the Executive Director of Take Action, he decided they’d fight anyway, and we beat it. (We beat it along with the proposed constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, and we beat both so thoroughly we got a trifecta for the first time in a long time and passed marriage equality.)

Everyone (I think) said they were at least theoretically in favor of single-payer. Dan also brought up passing the Patient-Centered Health Care Act, which would change Minnesota Care so that payments were made directly from the government to the providers. (Currently, If you are enrolled in Minnesota Care, you get your services through one of the insurers.)

On the issue of property taxes, he mentioned wanting to be able to raise revenue from all the properties currently not on the tax rolls but was not specific about exactly which of the various nontaxable entities in St. Paul he wants to tax. (A bunch are owned by the government itself.)

A couple of things I particularly liked: there was a question about how people would work across the aisle while not compromising their values and he said that where the inherent worth and dignity of all people were at stake, there could be no exceptions; “I cannot yield on any question about the basic dignity of other people.” But also, he wouldn’t want to go to the legislature if he didn’t want to talk to people in the other party. The question you want to ask is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, and are we actually coming at it from different directions? (“No one likes insurance companies,” he added, which was echoed a minute later by Lois — I talked about her response above.) Also, on the question about climate change, he was the only person to talk about transit, which kind of blew my mind; he also talked about working with farmers to help them cut fertilizer usage, and bonding housing downtown that requires builders to minimize use of plastics. (This was a lot more specific plans than most of the other candidates offered in response to that question.)

On the AI question, I transcribed while he was talking and I’m actually just going to quote: “I, too, feel strongly about regulating AI. But I want to say why. It is important that in public life that we emphasize and prioritize having a conscience. Having ethics. AI has none of what I’ve just said. It doesn’t have a moral compass. I think first – how do we try to lift up the idea that we are people, that we have values, that we yearn for connection to each other? We also have to look at infrastructure side so that our rural communities are not depleted of their resources for Google’s next behemoth.”

He is one of my top three.

So — okay, I have narrowed it down to Dan McGrath, Beth Fraser, and Meg Luger-Nikolai. And I’m not sure how to decide. All three seem fighty, in a way I think we need right now. Dan is a particularly good speaker, someone who can really eloquently defend our values. Beth is someone whose past work shows a lot of insight into shoring up the exact walls that Republicans are preparing to attack. Meg Luger-Nikolai is kind of the embodiment of the line “there is power in the union.” I think Dan would be the strongest on environmental issues, because he’d clearly spent more time thinking about them than the other candidates; he’s also someone who will stand and fight when no one thinks the ground is defensible. I think Meg Luger-Nikolai would be the strongest on education issues, because she’s spent 16 years working for the teacher’s union. Beth seems particularly well-prepared to defend democracy, both because of her decades of work on voting rights and because of things like, she’s been posting to her Facebook about banning the use of tear gas and requiring ICE agents to unmask.

I think I would vote for Beth. I think she’d be my pick. But honestly I’ve been swinging back and forth (mostly between Beth and Dan) since the convention, and I’m not sure. I am going to go ahead and post this because if you’re in 64A, you have one week to figure out how to vote, and hopefully this at least helps you narrow it down and gives you a starting place?

If you’d like to express your appreciation for my election blogging work in a monetary way, you can still donate to my fundraiser for YouthLink. You can also pre-order a copy of Obstetrix, my near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult. (It comes out in June!)

Special Elections 2025: Saint Paul City Council, Ward 4

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The former Ward 4 rep, Mitra Jalali, was originally elected in a special election in 2018, re-elected in 2019 and 2023, and resigned in January of this year. There are four people running in the special election to fill her seat. Election day is Tuesday, August 12th. If you’re not sure whether you live in Ward 4 or not, check the Secretary of State site. On the ballot:

Molly Coleman
Cole Hanson
Chauntyll Allen
Carolyn Will

The next normal St. Paul City Council election is in 2027 (although we have a mayoral election this year; unlike Minneapolis, we don’t try to keep them in sync.)

The SD 64 DFL has put together a great page of resources that includes questionnaire responses and a link to video of the League of Women Voter’s candidate forum. John Edwards of WedgeLIVE did interviews with all four candidates, which he’s posted on his YouTube channel or you can listen to as podcasts. There was also a climate-issues-focused forum and a housing-focused forum.

I also sent all the candidates a question by email. I’ll talk about that in a bit.

Chauntyll Allen

Chauntyll Allen is a school board rep and I have liked her reasonably well on the school board. However, there were a couple of things I hit during my research that gave me significant pause. First, during the LWV forum when the Summit Avenue bike trail project was brought up, she really sounded like this was the first she’d heard about the controversy, which suggests a weird amount of disconnection for someone running for City Council. (I mean, I’m sure that there are plenty of people in St. Paul who don’t care about the project one way or the other, but there are yard signs up about it, you know?) Second, also during that forum, she responded to a question about climate change by saying environmental work was not her jam and then saying she’d heard people talk about getting rid of gas stoves. There are a lot of decisions that effect the environment and are made by local government; I would like the people on the city council to be plugged into this issue.

But my biggest issue with her: during her WedgeLive interview, she went on a very weird tangent while talking about affordable housing. She started out talking about how a lot of the new buildings claimed to be affordable but really were not, charging $1100/month for a one bedroom apartment. (Fair complaint.) But then she went on to say, “Often, those are not the residents of the city that live in there, those are people who are from outside of the city, that are from rural parts of Minnesota or even from out of the country (…) but going to school at the University of Minnesota. (…) Who are we really building this housing for? (…) Are we building housing for people to come in and live for 5 to 7 years, find the love of their life, and then go buy property in Woodbury?”

So. OK. When she said “those are not residents of the city that live in there,” I initially thought she was going to say they were being used for Airbnbs (this is a major problem in some cities — less in St. Paul, I think?) because it would be valid to say that Airbnb rentals are being used for people other than the folks who live here. But then she went on to complain about people who have moved here. (I was so floored by this — I was working on dinner prep while listening to the podcast, and I put down the kitchen knife and grabbed a pen to transcribe.)

Students who live in St. Paul are residents of St. Paul. People who live here for five to seven years are residents of St. Paul for those five to seven years. If they go on to move to Woodbury, they stop being residents at that point but that doesn’t make them fake residents while they’re living here! Even if someone moves here with the explicit intention of moving somewhere else in the future, they’re still a resident while they’re living here. This is so basic.

I do not like this attitude. I would not rank Chauntyll for the City Council seat.

Carolyn Will

A major part of Carolyn Will’s political backstory is that she spent the last few years doing the communications strategy for “Save Our Street,” the group advocating against the Summit Regional Trail.

Honestly that was already disqualifying to me because this group’s communications have been so goddamn deceptive. So I didn’t spend a ton of time on Carolyn. However I will note that she brags in multiple locations about how she “forged a collaborative partnership with the Ohio State Retired Teachers Fund to display the 30th anniversary timeline of Circus Juventas costumes in their empty storefront windows (formerly Pottery Barn) on Grand Avenue.” “Yeah, I called up those people that have bought up a ton of property in our city and are now letting it sit empty and asked very nicely and they let us temporarily put some decorations in their windows” is just not a win that impresses me.

Here’s her WedgeLive interview, if you’d like to see her ride her bike on Summit herself. (Unlike some of the bike trail skeptics, she’s an actual biker, and one point I will concede to her is that we need a good north-south trail more urgently than an improved east-west trail. We have a number of east-west streets that are sufficiently low volume that I can ride on them without thinking I am going to die. This is not a very high bar so the fact that our north-south options don’t manage it is pretty bad.) Anyway, I would not rank Carolyn.

A Tangent About the Summit Regional Trail

This is once again one of the issues in the race, so let me just go down a couple of points.

  • The most non-negotiable part of this project is the road rebuild and the utility line replacements. There are a bunch of water and sewer lines under Summit that are over 100 years old and are in immediate danger of collapsing. The subsurface of the road is also crumbling. It is in everyone’s interest to replace these lines before they collapse; that really seems obvious. The risk to the Summit Ave boulevard trees is primarily (overwhelmingly!) from the work that has to be done on the utilities.
  • Carolyn Will, during the LWV forum, said that they should be using “horizontal directional drilling.” This is not actually something that would work in this case, according to Sean Kershaw, the City Engineer (sorry, misremembered that) Director of Public Works, who apparently gets openly boo’ed at “Save Our Street” meetings when he shows up to answer questions but is also someone with actual professional expertise on this stuff, unlike the people running SOS. Also, the road itself needs to be rebuilt. Doing mill-and-overlay over a crumbling roadbed is like painting a house covered in rotting siding without replacing the siding.
  • The city is taking advantage of the disruption and the rebuild to add the Summit Regional Trail. St. Paul doesn’t have nearly as good of a bike infrastructure as Minneapolis. Chauntyll, in her WedgeLive interview, said that we shouldn’t be putting a bike lane on Summit at all (she thinks bikers should use lower-volume side streets like Portland), which is just ridiculous. Summit is a gorgeous boulevard and we should absolutely be slowing the traffic, deprioritizing parking, and improving the infrastructure for bikers and walkers.
  • The city has not done a good job of communicating with the community about what they’re doing and why. SOS has repeated their claim about 900+ trees over and over and over. If you go to the Summit Avenue Regional Trail FAQ (provided by the city about the project), first of all it’s a PDF (I hate it when the information I’m looking for is available solely as a PDF), one of the questions is “How Many Trees Will Be Impacted?” and the answer is, “Greenspace and trees have been and continue to be a priority for the Regional Trail plan and a pillar of design concepts. The trees and green spaces on Summit are significant to the parkway, trail design concepts would look to support that existing recreational condition. The Regional Trail plan will make recommendations on best practices for future construction projects to avoid and minimize impacts to greenspace.” That’s not an answer to the question! The actual answer is on page 121 of a different 277-page-long PDF about the project. (If you have 277 pages of information I’m fine with PDFs. But this is part of why your FAQ should be just a web page, because I spent a very long time scrolling before I found what I was looking for.) There are 1,561 trees along the whole corridor. If they do the roadbed and utility stuff and do not add a bike trail, 132 trees are highly vulnerable. If they do add the bike trail, it’s 221 trees. It’s not actually clear to me that “highly vulnerable” means these trees will all be taken down, but if they do, we’d lose 89 trees to build the bike trail. Also worth noting: the boulevard has lost about 34 trees per year, on average, from 2009 through 2022.
  • The “950” figure from SOS came (sort of) from a study they commissioned from an arborist in 2022. “Giblin looked at 199 trees and speculated what would happen to them if a full street reconstruction were to be completed […] and concluded that, of the roughly 200 trees inspected, 48 would likely experience ‘significant’ impacts that could be mitigated with care after construction, and 83 would experience ‘severe’ impacts.” SOS added these two numbers together and then extrapolated to the whole boulevard. Even though (a) this number included trees that would be expected to recover just fine, and (b) the sections of Summit are really variable and you can’t just take a single section and extrapolate and get a useful number. (That streets.mn article has some really good information. Maybe the city could commission the authors to write a new FAQ?)

ANYWAY. Back to the actual race at hand. The two candidates who have significant money, endorsements, and backing are Cole Hanson and Molly Coleman.

Molly Coleman

Molly Coleman is the daughter of former St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman. I mention this right off because there are people who think she’s the daughter of former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, and that is emphatically not the case. I have loathed Norm for 30 years. Chris was fine. I think Molly stands on her own in any case, but I wanted to clear that up. She works for a national legal advocacy organization.

Molly has a ton of endorsements from people I respect, including Bill Lindeke, Dan Marshall (who owns Misfit Toys) and Wes Burdine (who owns the Black Hart), and organizations I like, such as Sustain St. Paul. All of them describe her as smart, committed, consistent, and a person with a ton of expertise, who sees the connections between stuff. And you can see this in her interview with WedgeLive, which is great.

The major concern I’ve seen raised about her is that her donors include people who range from “ugh” to “holy shit, that guy?”: the Kaplans (rich centrists who support the Jacob Frey wing of the Minneapolis DFL), a whole lot of very well-heeled developers, and Brian Rice, who has worked as a lobbyist for the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Fraternal Association. (Her comment on the Rice donation, in the Pioneer Press article: “That is not somebody that I’ve ever had a meeting with, that I’ve ever had a conversation with. I’m committed to police accountability, I’m committed to true public safety, and using pro-active steps, not using police as our first step toward public safety.”

The thing about developer and lobbyist money is that it’s (hopefully/usually) not anything as straightforward as a quid pro quo. In some cases they know from your public stances that your principles and their interests align, or maybe that your opponent’s principles and their interests conflict; in other cases it’s an investment in having your ear to make their case somewhere down the road. Some of Molly’s stances are very developer-friendly but this doesn’t make them bad: she wants a simplified zoning code that makes it easier to build housing. In the WedgeLive interview she talks about wanting to use administrative citations to arm-twist CVS into selling that empty building at University and Snelling; giving the empty-building-hoarders a compelling reason to sell at the price currently on offer is probably a plan a lot of developers favor (and so do I).

Here’s my personal concern about Molly. I have a close friend who lives in Ward 4, very close to University Ave (and not far from that CVS), and her biggest frustration with Mitra was that Mitra did not respond to her e-mail messages. These days, I tend to have good luck getting prompt responses from candidates because they mostly know who I am. I was curious how everyone would do at responding to a constituent, so I worked with the friend, and she sent e-mail messages to everyone (with what I thought would be a relatively softball question) and I sent e-mail messages to everyone a little after she did. She heard back immediately from Cole, promptly from Carolyn and Chauntyll, and never heard from Molly.

I thought this might be a fluke so I recruited someone else to send her a question. That person also never got an answer.

Honestly that’s not great! I was hoping I could do a wholehearted, unhesitating endorsement of Molly and also, I’ll be honest, I was hoping she would win over my friend, since she disliked Mitra and low-key blamed me for Mitra. No such luck.

Cole Hanson

Cole Hanson works in public health at the U of M. He’s endorsed by the DSA. I have been struggling to write this because people have several unrelated issues with him, and organizing all this into a nice coherent summary has been a challenge.

First: he is the former Board President of the Hamline Midway Coalition, and launched his campaign before resigning. It got messy in a couple of different ways. I think the biggest point of concern is that he may have downloaded internal data (donor information, event sign-in sheets, and community contact lists) to use on his campaign. Honestly, I read the articles about this and was left completely uncertain how much of the dust-up over this was seriously problematic and how much was basically nonprofit drama. It does seem like Cole didn’t know where the rules around being a nonprofit (and nonpartisan) neighborhood board chair, and being a political candidate, intersected. That’s not ideal. It’s a good idea to figure that out before you declare your candidacy.

Second: while Molly Coleman was straightforwardly in favor of the Summit Bike Trail, and Carolyn Will is straightforwardly against it, Cole gave a lot of vague responses, both at the LWV forum and when he was interviewed by WedgeLive. I think he’s overall for it, but he repeats a lot of SOS talking points (like the “over 900 trees” thing which as I noted above, is not an accurate assessment of the risk to the trees). (This is part of why Bill Lindeke described him as a “random policy generator and maddeningly inconsistent.”) Cole has been inconsistent on enough issues that there’s a whole Reddit subthread debating what his position on rent control is.

He’s a big fan of a municipal grocery store (that sets him apart — I don’t think anyone else thinks that’s workable) and PILOT (Payments In Lieu of Taxes from nonprofits.) (Molly Coleman also likes PILOT. (I do too. It’s not clear to me if there’s a way to actually get nonprofits to pay this money. My idea, holding all their zoning variances hostage, is probably not actually legal.)

Anyway, I have gone back and forth on Cole multiple times. Fundamentally, I don’t think he’s ready to do this job, and here’s what brought this into focus for me. In his interview with WedgeLive, John brought up zoning reform. Here’s that conversation, transcribed:

John: Are you a zoning reform guy?
Cole: To what extent? We already just did a whole bunch of it. […] The question for me is, what more reform? Because we’ve already re-adjusted our whole zoning code a few years ago.
John: So you think we’re in a good place?
Cole: I think we’re in a good place. I think there’s some spots to touch and adjust, but I don’t think we’re in a revolutionary, change-everything phase.
John: And you think the changes that were made, were good ones?
Cole: Broadly speaking. The thing I’m a fan of is the Traditional Zoning category. I like that it’s framed as Traditional, meaning this is how things used to be, which is — you would have corner stores. You have corner grocery.

So, St. Paul’s zoning situation is a complicated and kind of terrible in a “things people thought were a good idea in the 1970s” kind of way. There is a terrific three-part series (1, 2, 3) talking about this, how there are a bunch of extremely retrograde rules that make corner stores illegal, sometimes even in a commercial building that’s right next to a commercial corridor. Cole, in the WedgeLive interview, talks about being a fan of “Traditional Neighborhood Zoning,” which is a zoning category that allows mixed use. (It’s explained in some detail in the third part of that series.) But in fact there are a ton of sections of St. Paul that are still zoned for housing only.

I e-mailed Cole to get some clarification on his thoughts on zoning. He replied quickly, and talked about his support for upzoning to allow higher-density housing, and his support for social housing. Then he said: “At the end of the day, when I talk to my Ward 4 neighbors, they’re most concerned about rising rents and property taxes, the loss of Cub Foods on University and how we can support our unhoused neighbors forced to live in tents because they can’t afford a place to stay. Zoning hasn’t been a priority in any conversation I’ve had with Ward 4 residents and until we’re meeting everyone’s basic needs, I doubt it will be.”

So here is the thing. I absolutely believe that people are saying “my property taxes are horrifying and I’m worried I will lose my house” and not “Cole, we need to fix the zoning code.” But these two things are related. The St. Paul zoning code as it exists makes it harder to open a business, harder to repurpose an empty building or parcel of land. (And harder to open a corner grocery store!) Development is part of how we lower property taxes. We want businesses that can shoulder part of the burden of keeping the streets plowed and the libraries open. The empty office buildings and empty store fronts are part of why our property taxes are going up.

It’s really important for City Council reps to listen to constituents. But it’s also really important for them to see and understand the connections between problems, to recognize that people are unlikely to call you up and say “we need massive zoning reform!” but that zoning reform is connected to a lot of the issues they are calling you about. (And this applies to a bunch of issues, to be clear! Not just zoning!) I saw Molly making these connections in her conversation with John; she talked about how people had repeatedly brought up the problems around Kimball Court and that it was critical to recognize that some of what people are blaming on the residents of Kimball Court is being attracted and fostered by the presence of that empty CVS building a block away.

I don’t think Cole is seeing those connections — at least, not yet. And in the end this matters enough to me that while I have concerns about Molly, I would rank her first. Cities are complicated, and I want the people on the City Council to have a deep and nuanced understanding of the way problems are connected. I would rank Cole second.

(I am pretty sure my friend in the ward will be ranking Cole first and Molly not at all, though, and I don’t blame her. What she wants the most is someone who gets back to her, period. She lives in a neighborhood within Ward 4 that takes the brunt of many citywide problems, and the way her neighborhood is treated vs. the way the wealthier neighborhoods are treated shows some stark differences. Her desire to have a city council rep who responds to her problems is not unreasonable.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. If this post was useful to you, consider donating to this teacher’s fundraiser to buy books for her students (young adults who are past the usual high school graduation age, but have unmet special needs and are still receiving education and services from Saint Paul Public Schools.) — OK, that funded already, here’s another one, also St. Paul. Help a Kindergarten teacher turn her students’ writing into simple bound books.

(Also, you know who does have a Patreon? WedgeLive! And damn those interviews were REALLY USEFUL.)

Special Election 2025: Senate District 60

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If you live in Minnesota Senate District 60, there is a Special Election happening this month. There is a PRIMARY ELECTION on January 14th, and a general election on January 28th. This is a deeply blue district; the real election is the primary.

There’s also a special election happening in 40B on January 28th. That’s outside the area I write about, so I’ll just say, I sure hope the person running lives in the district this time, and please go vote for the DFLer on January 28th. This post is about SD 60, which is open because Senator Kari Dziedzic died really tragically of cancer at the end of December.

There are seven DFLers running in the primary (and a bonus person who remains on the ballot because it was too late to pull him off, more on that in a minute). Two people are running as Republicans. Residents of the district can vote in either primary, but only one of them.

Democrats running:
Doron Clark
Peter Wagenius
Iris Grace Altamirano
Monica Meyer
Joshua Preston
Amal Karim
Emilio César Rodríguez
* and still on the ballot but votes for him will not be counted: Mohamed Jama

Republicans:
Abigail Wolters
Christopher Robin Zimmerman

So I’ll tackle the Republican race first because it’s much more straightforward. Last fall, I e-mailed every Republican running in a Minneapolis or St. Paul district to ask who they thought had won the Presidential election of 2020. Abigail Wolters, who was running in 60B, didn’t respond. I e-mailed her again this time, and once again, she did not respond. CRZ, by contrast, promptly replied to my question on his Facebook to say that Biden won in 2020. It’s a low bar but it’s amazing how many Republicans don’t clear it! (I’m not sure CRZ even qualifies as a RINO — he’s a Republican only for the purpose of running — but he’d definitely be my pick for the Republican candidate in this race.)

On to the DFL. There are eight people on the ballot, seven in the race, and three who I think are genuinely viable candidates with enough support and momentum to potentially win. The three people I think are legitimately viable candidates are Doron, Peter, and Monica, if you want to skip straight to them (I’m going to talk about the others first, because I have less to say.)

The DFL Central Committee for SD60 sent out a questionnaire to all the DFLers who filed, and five of them returned it. You can find links to their questionnaires on the SD60 website. Doron, Peter, Monica, Amal, and Emilio filled it out; Iris, Joshua, and Mohamed did not. The League of Women Voters invited everyone to send in a three-minute video and posted the videos up on their website; Iris, Doron, Joshua, and Peter sent in videos. (Also CRZ and Abigail.) Finally, WedgeLive interviewed Doron, Monica, and Peter, and you can watch those interviews on YouTube (which I linked to) or download them as podcasts.

What’s Up With that Guy On the Ballot Who Isn’t Running

Mohamed Jama

I started this whole post last week and here’s what I noted about Mohamed Jama at the time: he’s a cofounder of the Cedar Riverside Youth Council and is a board member of various neighborhood organizations. He’s been involved in DFL politics for long enough to have been one of the people involved in a brawl at a caucus in 2014. That plus a lack of endorsements and an unimpressive website was a pretty big strike against him, but then former 60A candidate Sonia Neculescu turned up the fact that Mohamed had voted in another district on election day in November, thus attesting to being a resident of an entirely different district and thus ineligible to run in this one. To remind anyone who’s confused: according to Minnesota state law, you need to be a resident of a district for six months before you run to represent it. “Where do I live, really” can be a legitimately fuzzy question, but if you voted at a particular address you are legally attesting to the fact that you live at that address on that election day (which was less than six months ago). Anyway, he opted not to contest the residency challenge. Since it’s too late to reprint all the ballots, votes for Jama will not be counted. Do not vote for him.

Running But Unlikely to Win

Joshua Preston

Joshua Preston has a website, which I linked to, but it’s his personal website and makes no reference to his campaign. He also has a website of giraffe pictures drawn by people who probably shouldn’t be drawing giraffes (most of them public figures) which is very amusing.

He attended the SD 60 Central Committee meeting where they endorsed Doron Clark, where he gave a speech that talked about his reason for running. He thinks it’s problematic that with a single day for people to file, and a two-week campaign, the district is going to pick a State Senator who could hold that seat for decades, so he’s running on the promise that he will serve out the remainder of Kari’s term and not run for re-election in two years, and his focus will be on housing and homelessness (and in particular Native homelessness.) You can watch his speech on Twitter and also an exchange he had with Doron Clark where he made the rousing declaration, “the sidewalk doesn’t close! Third space exists wherever we are!” (I liked him.)

Emilio César Rodríguez

Emilio is running for Ward 3 City Council, and their website still says they are running for Ward 3 City Council. They filed a complaint asking to delay the State Senate election because the U of M students living in the district won’t be back yet when the primary happens; their social media commented that the complaint “hasn’t progressed.” They did fill out the SD60 questionnaire.

I will be really interested in reading about their campaign for Ward 3 City Council in a few months.

Iris Grace Altamirano

Iris ran for Minneapolis School Board in 2014 and was one of the DFL-endorsed candidates but opted to campaign with Don Samuels rather than the other DFL-endorsed candidate, Rebecca Gagnon. This created a huge stink at the time (I maintain it’s pretty weird that the DFL threw an absolute shit fit about her doing this and has now completely stopped caring about it, but whatever.) She has no endorsements and the main chitchat about her I’ve found on social media is someone retelling the saga of that school board race. She did not fill out the SD 60 questionnaire, but she did do a video for the LWV. Her website and her video focus overwhelmingly on her bio, pretty much nothing about policies or priorities.

Amal Karim

Amal has one endorsement (Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura, 63A). If it seems like I’m putting a lot of emphasis on endorsements, it’s because they make a very straightforward proxy for so many other things that make you a contender in a (very, very short) race like this: allies, organizing capacity, fundraising capacity (most of the people in SD 60 do not know an election is happening and the ability to send people mailers saying “GUESS WHAT: YOU NEED TO GO TO THE POLLS AGAIN” is kind of irreplaceable).

Amal has served on the Hennepin County Library Board. Her most interesting biographical detail is that she’s been a Jeopardy! contestant.

When everyone initially filed and lots of people didn’t have any website up yet, I pulled up her LinkedIn. She worked for five years for the Constellation Fund, which provides philanthropic grants to a bunch of mostly very worthwhile community organizations. Prior to that, she worked for Educators for Excellence (an organization I feel deep suspicion towards) and she now works for the ECMC Foundation. Given her history with EfE I’d have questions about what she’d bring to education policy if I were considering voting for her (but I also don’t think she’s a real contender — my friends in Northeast have gotten mailers from Doron, Peter, and Monica, not from Amal.) She did fill out the SD60 Questionnaire.

The Three I Think Are Real Contenders

There are three people I think could actually win this seat: Doron Clark, Peter Wagenius, and Monica Meyer. They’ve all got a bunch of substantial big-name endorsements, and enough donations to print and send out mailers telling people in SD60 that an election is happening. (None of this is to say that you shouldn’t vote for one of the candidates I don’t think is likely to win. The only candidate you really shouldn’t vote for is Mohamed Jama, because he doesn’t live in the district and your vote won’t be counted.)

The good news is that I think all three of these people are genuinely pretty cool! What you’re choosing here is the person whose style and emphasis best aligns with what you want for your representative.

A note about the DFL endorsement: in a normal race, this is done at the Senate District Convention, and to some degree, what it’s measuring is the candidate’s ability to organize early enough to get supporters out to the caucuses, and to win over undecided convention delegates between the caucuses and the convention. Obviously there was not time to do this, this year, so instead the DFL Central Committee for Senate District (32 people, instead of a couple hundred) considered the candidates and endorsed one of them. Peter Wagenius unsuccessfully pushed for the committee to hold off on endorsement until the 15th (at which point they would presumably endorse the person who won the primary).

I have massive reservations about this endorsement process and I think anyone who hears “DFL endorsed” in this race should mentally append a little asterisk because 32 people is not what we normally mean by endorsement.

Doron Clark

Doron Clark is the former Senate District Chair for the SD 60 DFL. If you’re curious what the Senate District Chair does, the DFL actually has a nifty little manual that talks about it. Fundamentally what this says to me is that Doron is willing to do a time-consuming, unglamorous volunteer job that keeps the grassroots-level Democratic party work in Minnesota humming along.

Since he was endorsed by the SD 60 Central Committee (overwhelmingly, FYI — 23 out of 32 votes) I think it’s worth noting that all of these people saw him up close and saw how he worked. There are kind of two ways to spin this. You could say, “oh, of course they endorsed him; they’re his buddies.” Or you could say, “the people who have worked with him in a political context overwhelmingly think he’d be great at this.”

He has a lot of endorsements, including City Council reps Elliot Payne, Jason Chavez, Emily Koski, and Jamal Osman. (Looking at the Minneapolis Ward Map vs. the map of SD 60, I think SD 60 overlaps with parts of Ward 1 (Elliot Payne), Ward 3 (Michael Rainville), Ward 6 (Jamal Osman), and Ward 2 (Robin Wonsley). Elliot Payne was one of his very first endorsements, and one of the things that was striking early was how much enthusiastic and immediate support he got from within the district.

You can read his questionnaire here, watch his LWV video here, and watch his WedgeLive interview here. I sent him a question asking what he would want to try to make progress on this session, when the DFL does not have a trifecta. He replied to say that in general, he rejects a scarcity mindset (“and yet I know that the government is divided and that things will be difficult this year.”) He said he would start by pushing to eliminate or simplify the paperwork requirement for schools to get reimbursement for free lunches, which would bring a bunch of money to Minneapolis schools. He also noted that there were no Minneapolis Senators on the Education Finance or Policy committees; he wants to serve on Education Finance if he’s elected.

What strikes me about Doron: he’s ambitious (in the sense of wanting to pursue big sweeping changes), hard working, and well-liked by the people who work with him. The people endorsing him tend to highlight his connections to the district and the fact that he shows up; “he shows up” is a line that appears over and over in a range of contexts. He shows up to volunteer; he shows up to organize; he shows up to be supportive.

The two issues he hammers on the most are education and housing. One other note — he is still doing meet-and-greets (you can find the schedule here, interspersed with events where you can volunteer.)

Peter Wagenius

I have known Peter since college, and I reconnected with him the first time that Ed and I went to a Senate District Convention, in 2000, when our State Senator retired and there was a fairly intense endorsement fight. Peter was working for Julie Sabo’s campaign and talked me into supporting her, and then talked me into sticking around until after ten that night (we straight up do not do Senate District conventions like this any more) (thank GOD).

So honestly, if I lived in this district, I would absolutely vote for Peter, because he’s a long-time friend and one of the people who got me into local politics to begin with. I’ve also personally experienced his energy, organization, and ability to talk people into stuff (did I mention that when he talked me into staying at this convention until 10 p.m., I was pregnant?) all of which are great traits in politicians.

Peter currently works for the Sierra Club, but has done policy stuff for the legislature and the city in the past. He worked for Betsy Hodges, and before her, he worked for RT Rybak. He has a ton of noteworthy accomplishments in transit and environmental policy.

He is endorsed by Keith Ellison, Rep. Katie Jones, and (Ward 7) Council Rep Katie Cashman, among others. (I will note, he’s endorsed by a bunch of elected people I like, but I’m not sure any of them are from SD 60; I think Doron and Monica split the council reps who overlap the district, unless I’m reading the maps wrong, which is a possibility. The 60A rep endorsed Monica, and I think the 60B rep hasn’t endorsed anyone.) The people endorsing Peter tend to talk about his work, accomplishments (especially around transit), and effectiveness. The two issues he hammers on the most are education and the environment.

You can read his questionnaire here, watch his LWV video here, and watch his WedgeLive interview here.

I sent him a question asking what he would want to try to make progress on this session, when the DFL does not have a trifecta. He listed two things. First, the bonding bill: he would like to use it for solar on schools, electric school buses, and energy efficiency upgrades. “The second highest expense for our schools after teacher salaries is utility bills. The state can play a role in making sure we are sending less money to utilities and more money into the classroom.” Second is building more housing. He noted that this is one of three elements needed for affordable housing (the others being renter protections and government investments in affordable housing); he’s been working on land use reform with the Sierra Club, notes that this has been bipartisan in other states, and points to progress last year “including with the bill that I personally championed to protect cities from misinformed anti-housing litigation.”

The thing that really struck me about his style is that he is willing to be very blunt when talking about Republicans. In his WedgeLive interview he commented that when you’re on the Senate floor, there are decorum rules against questioning people’s motives, and that’s all very well and good when you’re actually on the Senate floor but Democrats should not feel remotely bound to pretend they think Republicans have good intentions when they’re anywhere else. A lot of policies that Republicans push, it’s straight up because they hate Minneapolis and want to do harm to Minneapolis residents, and it’s true and we should say it and not pretend they just have a lot of true and sincere concerns about whatever bullshit they’re pretending to be concerned about that day.

Monica Meyer

Monica Meyer was indirectly the person who first got me to become the sort of campaign volunteer that talked to voters: she was one of the two people who started Minnesotans United for All Families, in 2012, to fight against the Republican-sponsored ballot amendment that would have enshrined discrimination against same-sex marriage in our state constitution. I had dropped lit in prior years but I’d never doorknocked or phone banked prior to that campaign.

Monica’s background is in work for LGBTQ+ rights: she was the director of OutFront for decades, and more recently has worked for Gender Justice.

She is endorsed by Ilhan Omar, Rep. Sydney Jordan (60A), and Council Reps Robin Wonsley (Ward 2), Jeremiah Ellison (Ward 5), and Michael Rainville (Ward 3), among others. The Kari Dziedzic campaign did not explicitly endorse, but rolled over their campaign fund to Monica.

There was a fair amount of discussion on social media of the fact that she’s also endorsed by Jacob Frey. (A joint endorsement from Jacob Frey and Ilhan Omar, no less.) Does this make her the All of Mpls candidate, or does this indicate that she’s really good at building coalitions? (All of Mpls, to be clear, is the centrist “we love cops and parking” wing of the local DFL; I’m not a fan.) Having looked at what she’s said, who else she’s endorsed by (Take Action MN, for example), and a thread on Bluesky from a local politically-engaged person I follow, I think it is primarily that she’s someone who has, in her decades of public life, made a lot of connections from all over the DFL. There may also be a least a little bit of, she has less of a long-standing anti-car-culture track record than Peter or Doran. (It’s not that she has a pro-car-culture track record, either; she’s been working on other stuff.)

She’s also gotten some big donations from people I’m not wild about. (You can look at the large donations here — not just to her but to several other people running.) There was some speculation that some of this money is anti-Wagenius money from someone who hates Peter for bad reasons and thinks she’s a better bet than Doron. It is still a legitimate point of concern; there’s always pressure to dance with them what brung ya, as the saying goes.

You can read her responses to the SD60 DFL questionnaire here, and watch her WedgeLive interview here.

The people endorsing her talk about her compassion, her voice, and her vision. She’s someone who builds really big coalitions. (This article from 2012 about how Minnesotans United defeated the anti-marriage amendment goes into a ton of detail about the people that Monica brought in to that fight.)

In response to my question about what she’d work on this coming session (where a lot of bold progressive ambitions are just going to get stymied by the Republicans) she said, “I want to work on data privacy issues this session, which often have bipartisan support,” and went on to talk about how we needed to be sure that people’s information (especially people receiving gender-affirming care or getting abortions, as well as immigrant communities who had data collected for our Driver’s Licenses for All program) was not weaponized by the Trump administration.

So.

So yeah, honestly, I think all three of these people are great, and they’re great in different ways: style, experience, and focus. I would personally vote for Peter! but the reason that’s an easy call for me is because he’s a long-time friend. If I were coming into this cold, not knowing any of the candidates personally, I’d be torn. I like Peter’s track record of accomplishments and his effectiveness on transit and the environment; I also appreciate how confrontational he is about Republican bullshit. I like Doron for being the person that is almost universally described as someone who “shows up,” and I am struck by how much quick, enthusiastic support he got from people who’d worked with him in local politics. I like Monica for being someone who knows how to build big coalitions and who doesn’t write off anyone who might be willing to work with you on something you care about, and I am struck by the fact that she demonstrated that by getting a joint endorsement letter from Ilhan Omar and Jacob Frey.

They’re all progressive Democrats who agree on most issues of substance, but I think that Doron would bring more focus to education issues; I think Peter would bring more focus to transit and the environment; and I think Monica would bring more focus to LGBTQ+ civil rights and reproductive rights issues, including stuff that might slip by other representatives because it’s not something they’ve dealt with. (And to be clear, I think they would all vote the same way on any bills on any of these issues but I think they have different areas where they’d be showing leadership, authoring bills, and pushing for things to happen.)

Anyway. The primary is on Tuesday the 14th and you can find your polling place here. I know it’s frustrating when there isn’t an obvious choice, but “all these people are good in different ways” is a really good problem to have.

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Special Election Blogging 2025

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There is a special election in Minnesota Senate District 60 (SD60), because the Senator there, Kari Dziedzic, tragically died of cancer in late December. It is happening extremely quickly — the primary is scheduled for January 14th, the general for January 28th. It’s a very blue district, so the primary is when the real contest will happen.

Here’s a map of the district:

If you’re not sure if you live in SD 60 or not, you can also check your address in the Polling Place Finder.

There are a couple of reasons the dates might shift: one of the candidates filed a complaint and requested the primary be delayed until U of M students are back on campus, since a lot of students live in the district. And, one of the other candidates appears to not be a resident of the district based on where he voted in November and there’s also a lawsuit to get him off the ballot. If you want to double check, here’s the page about the election which will get updated (probably much more promptly than my page will) if anything changes.

I am working on a full blog post about the SD60 special primary, which I should have up in another couple of days (fingers crossed). I am posting this post now because people are asking whether I’m going to write about it and I want to just answer that question (yes).

There is also a special election happening (same schedule, 14th and 28th) in House District 40B because the guy who won that race in November turned out not to be a resident of the district. (Which makes me even more irate with Mohamed Jama. There are eight Democrats on the ballot for SD60; do not vote for Mohamed Jama.) I will not be writing about 40B because no part of it is in either Minneapolis or St. Paul. If you live in 40B, my heartfelt advice is to elect a Democrat who lives in the district. (ETA: 40B is not holding a primary due to a lack of primary challengers, and will be going straight to a general election on the 28th.)

There is also a special election happening in parts of Ramsey County for a new County Commissioner and that is on February 11th. I already wrote about that one.

If you want to do your own research on the SD 60 race, you can find a list of candidates here; five of the DFLers filled out the questionnaire circulated by the SD 60 DFL and you can read their responses to learn more about their views on the SD 60 DFL website. I have been sort of live-blogging my candidate research on Bluesky and that thread starts here.

If you want to make a donation to encourage my election writing, consider making a donation to Sanctuary Supply Depot.