Leslie Davis thinks that COVID is a hoax, that EMF waves degrade oxygen in the atmosphere, and that both masks and vaccines are bad. When he ran in 2021 he at least had a few positions specific to local governance but I couldn’t find any this year.
Marvina Haynes has a website I would describe as “half-assed.” (For example, she used a website template with a “book online” link and the link is still active although if you click it it tells you that there’s nothing to book right now.) Her positions are as follows: she wants “stable rent and stable property taxes” (so I assume that means that unlike LaTrisha, she’s in favor of rent control, although honestly I’m not sure); she wants the city to fix potholes; and she “will advocate for the safety and security of all community members and their families.” That’s a thoroughly content-free statement: everyone running wants the “safety and security of all community members and their families,” what differs is what they think the solutions are that will provide that. (Leslie, for example, thinks that getting rid of vaccines is key. Don’t vote for Leslie.) In particular, there’s really no clarity here on whether she thinks the solution is spending more money on cops.
Which is weird, honestly, because when I looked her up on Facebook, I found a page devoted pretty single-mindedly to getting the conviction of her brother, Marvin Haynes, overturned. Unicorn Riot did a series on Marvin’s conviction, and it’s worth reading, but let me just note that much like the Innocence Project, I am convinced that he’s not the one who did the crime. Given that her brother’s false conviction, and prison reform more generally, are so central to her life, I find it really startling that there is nothing about this on her campaign website. (This was so odd I sent her an e-mail at her campaign address asking her if the FB page was her, or if there was another Marvina Haynes? She did not reply, but did link to her campaign page from her FB page a few days later.)
Anyway, I am on her side regarding her brother, and I hope that Mary Moriarty, someone I supported in part because of her commitment to reconsidering bad past convictions, steps up here. But nothing about her campaign web page makes me think she’s even spent much time thinking about what the job of City Council rep entails.
If I were worried about the antivax guy or the Republican beating LaTrisha I’d vote for her as a lesser evil, but since I’m not worried about that, I would probably either cast a protest vote for Marvina just to express an objection to LaTrisha or I’d stay home.
I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.
In the “Progress” section of his website, something went wrong with the display and the “Homelessness” section looked like this when I pulled it up:
This struck me as humorously ironic, since what it suggests is, “I want to make a vague statement of goodwill towards homeless people, while demonstrably not really giving much of a shit.” (Which, you know … maybe that’s not irony. Maybe that’s just accurate?) To be fair, though, I use Firefox, and it might look OK in Chrome, so I pulled it up in Chrome for another look….
FYI, when I selected the text in Chrome, the rest of it came along, so that sentence is supposed to finish, “typically been responsible for addressing homelessness. If we are going to continue this progress, we need to work together toward solutions in good faith.” Even with all the text there, this is a real nothing of a statement, and when you say that homeless encampments pose “serious public and individual health risks” without acknowledging that the biggest health risk homelessness poses is to the people who are living in Minneapolis without homes, you’re being pretty goddamn shameless about the extent to which you think you serve the wealthy people who view homeless people as the central problem, rather than a lack of housing.
Also, under public safety, there’s this: “Public safety reform should be guided by the lived experience of officers and citizens, not just ideology. That’s why I make frequent visits to the First Precinct and listen to officers discuss their experiences on the job. We must reckon with the fact that we are down over 300 officers from pre-2019 levels, and that recruiting more officers cannot be fixed immediately, even with additional funding. Rebuilding the force will help restore community policing, reduce response times, and improve police-community relations. But there is so much more that we must do.” When you say, “Public safety reform should be guided by the lived experience of officers and citizens” and then talk at length and in detail about how much time you’ve spent listening to officers and have zero examples of listening to the people who are policed by those officers and all the rest of your rhetoric is about how hard things are for police officers and there’s not even any lip service about stuff like accountability: you have made your position and priorities really, really clear! This is why I do not like or trust you, Michael Rainville.
Marcus Mills is endorsed by the Green party, former City Council representatives Cam Gordon and Jeremy Schroeder, and former Mayoral candidate Sheila Nezhad. He has reasonably substantial local policy experience (an energy advisory committee, a community engagement commission, chair of the neighborhood association land use and development committee). On his issues page he talks about wanting participatory budgeting, solar panels on schools, and tenant protections (among other things — basically, his goals suggest that he’d be more aligned with the progressive wing of the City Council than Michael Rainville is.)
He also mentions playing D&D in his bio. I feel like there’s a whole set of jokes to be made here about the ways in which D&D does and doesn’t prepare you for serving on a City Council (on one hand: you’ve proved you’re capable of paying attention through long meetings. On the other hand: at a City Council meeting you don’t ever get to solve problems by casting Chain Lightning.)
His Facebook page has no new posts since June; his Events page turns up no events. So I am not sure how actively he’s campaigning. But he’ll be on the ballot, and I would absolutely vote for him.
I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.
She is unopposed. If you live in Ward 2, Robin Wonsley is going to continue to be your City Council representative. You still have an election, but the only person who will appear on your ballot is Robin. (I like her fine and would vote for her.)
(“Why are you even posting this, Naomi?” “Because when I don’t include the districts with only one candidate, people e-mail me and ask when I’m going to write about that district. Also, this took me five minutes and gave me a nice sense that I’m making fast progress on getting these up.”)
This is one of the very straightforward ones to write up, because Elliott Payne, the incumbent, has been a solid progressive on the City Council, and I like him a lot. He is endorsed by the DFL (and by lots of progressive groups, various local unions, etc.)
Edwin Fruit is running with the Socialist Worker party, and like all their candidates, he links to “The Militant” as his website, which means you can go there and read about their take on the Argentine elections but not about Edwin’s priorities for Minneapolis. Edwin has also run for office in Iowa (for US House in 2002) and in Seattle (for City Council in 2013, as a write-in). He was party to a lawsuit in Maryland in 1989 challenging filing fees for ballot access. I would not vote for him for anything he’s run for, but that’s fine, because Elliott is great.
I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.
Welcome to election season, and, as always, apologies to the people who followed me for my science fiction rather than my election blog (I feel less bad about inflicting science fiction on the people who follow me for election blogging).
Minneapolis and Saint Paul both have City Council races. Saint Paul also has a School Board At-Large race with four open seats.
In Minneapolis, there’s a race in every ward except Ward 2 — Robin Wonsley is running unopposed. There are open seats in Ward 7 and Ward 12. (Which is to say, the current incumbent is not running again.)
If you live in St. Paul and it feels like we just did this, well, we last had City Council races in 2019, you’re just suffering from the “what even is time?” problem where March of 2020 lasted for 847 days. Or else you’re remembering that we had a mayoral race in 2021. Our City Council and mayoral races have been out of sync either forever or for a good long time. The St. Paul candidates are all running for a four-year term.
Saint Paul also has a City Question regarding the implementation of a 1% sales tax to fund repairs to streets and parks. I don’t think Minneapolis has any City Questions this year.
I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.
Between 2012 and 2015, I had six linked stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about a teenage girl living on a near-future seastead. Seasteads are real-ish: there are people actually trying to make them happen, although so far the various attempts to do it have not gone particularly well. In the stories, Beck Garrison is the daughter of a powerful man, which offers her some limited protection as her curiosity and loyalty to friends lead her into discovering things about her home that were supposed to remain secret.
The novel version — the existing stories, plus one more — will be coming out this fall from Fairwood Press! (This is the publisher that published my short story collection.) No order link yet, but I’ll post again once there is one!
I think I started this on Black Friday (“As I type this, the annual obligatory shopping season has begun” was originally the first sentence) but of course I didn’t actually get it done, so HELLO FROM WELL INTO THE ANNUAL OBLIGATORY SHOPPING SEASON. Sorry about the procrastinating.
If you’re lucky, you don’t need this gift guide, because you’re only shopping for people you actually like, people you sincerely want to make happy with your gift. Stuck for what to get? There are gift idea articles all over the Internet for people looking for good ideas. My friends, that is not what I am providing here today! THIS shopping guide is different. THIS is a guide for all the people who are grudgingly buying an obligatory and hopefully inexpensive gift for someone they can’t stand. Given how popular this guide is, apparently it fills a need! And I live to serve.
I will note: I myself am lucky. I do not buy gifts for anyone I don’t like — although I’ve definitely given bad gifts on occasion out of clueless good intentions. For example, one time back in the late 1990s, I bought a Siberian husky angel ornament for my mother-in-law. (My in-laws trained and raced sled dogs.) My mother-in-law gave that ornament a deeply skeptical look and said “I’ve never met a husky who deserved that halo.” I mean. I tried. I thought, “huskies, oh, she likes husky stuff!” and that sort of well-intended swing-and-miss is sufficiently common that you can use it as camouflage for your own gift-wrapped calculated passive-aggressive gesture. I also do not scrutinize gifts I receive for hints that the person secretly hates me. (In general, I assume that everyone likes me, unless they block me on Twitter, and then I assume that I got caught in a blockchain because who would block me, I am delightful.)
On to the gifts!
Shall We Play A Game?
Giving games can be hazardous if you’re celebrating together. If you give a bad game in-person, especially on a long December day without a lot else going on, you run the risk of being roped in to playing it. So choose wisely.
If you’d like a game that’s fun to play (in case you’re roped in) but with a subtle “there’s a reason I picked this game for you” vibe, you could gift Guillotine (in which various figures from the French Revolution are sent to the guillotine) or Give Me the Brain (in which zombies attempt to fill fast food orders). (Both of these are good games, just to be clear: the passive-aggressiveness potential there is mainly in the titles.)
On the other hand, if you are absolutely sure you are not at any risk of getting stuck playing a round, there’s this “what if Hot Potato, but the potato gives you an electrical shock?” game: Lightning Reaction.
The Opposite of Fun
As a podcast listener, for a while I was constantly hearing ads for an electric toothbrush with the suggestion that an electric toothbrush would be a terrific gift. Electric toothbrushes are in fact the perfect passive-aggressive gift: it suggests that the person’s dental hygiene probably needs work, and let’s face it, tooth brushing is kind of the opposite of fun. (I brush my teeth every day — I feel like I need to be clear about this given the state of Hygiene Discourse on Twitter — and I in fact use an electric toothbrush. I bought it for myself, though, and I’m not going to pretend that it somehow made brushing my teeth fun.) If you do gift someone an electric toothbrush, the one that advertises on podcasts apparently has poor quality control and doesn’t work very well, and this one is cheap and breaks quickly. (Also, the weirder the off-brand, the harder it will be for people to get the replacement brush-heads.)
Anyway, if you want to go for something even less fun than a toothbrush here’s a toothbrush sanitizer, which has the added bonus of giving them a brand new thing to worry about.
Other “for the person who has everything!” completely unfun gadgetry: a sweater de-piller (per reviews, this actually works pretty well), a magnetic wristband that’s supposed to hold screws but doesn’t work, and for people in northern climates, a large, bulky, completely nonfunctional electric windshield scraper. If you want a cheaper dysfunctional windshield scraper here’s a heated one that has a review from someone saying they had better results using a spatula.
Terrible Kitchen Gadgets
I have been cooking for a really long time at this point so let me start with a short discussion of what makes something a good kitchen gadget. A good kitchen gadget needs to make some job easier. Ideally, it should make a frequent job easier. It needs to be comfortable to use and easy to clean. There should be a way to store it conveniently and safely. I’m not unalterably opposed to a cutesy design, but nearly everything I’ve ever tried that was cutesy was also much harder to use, clean, and/or store than the non-cutesy version.
But cutesy kitchen gadgets are, well, cute. And thus absolutely perfect bad gifts because the recipient will feel bad about getting rid of it.
For example, here’s a box grater that’s shaped like an adorable bear. Non-cute box graters have a handle on the top so you can hold down the grater while you’re using it. This one does not have that feature. Alternately, a pizza cutter that’s shaped like a circular saw! This is a little less frustrating to use, but you have to take it completely apart to get it clean and there’s no safe way to store it. (Pizza cutters frequently have that problem, but this one is also shaped in a way that makes it super awkward to put in a drawer.) From the same company that makes the bear grater, here’s a Vampire-shaped garlic press (this doesn’t look like it would actually be that much more annoying than any other garlic press — they’re basically all annoying) and a Ninja-shaped cutting board that holds a knife (so you can’t readily stash it with your other cutting boards).
If you’re Christmas shopping for a cooking enthusiast who’s less than a foot tall, these miniature (yet usably sharp) kitchen knives will be a terrific choice! … they’re cute and completely pointless for everyone else. (I mean, yes, in theory someone could use them as letter openers. No one will actually do that more than once: they will grab something larger and easier to handle.) For an even more useless item, the same people also make a tiny folding knife. I’m not sure how you unfold it but I’m guessing maybe you use the same tool you use to pop out your cell phone’s SIM card, if you can find it.
Books and Book-Related Novelties
Books are, as a general rule, excellent gifts, but they’re much better gifts if you choose them with the person’s interests in mind. For example, Meg Elison’s Number One Fan is a genuinely good gift for anyone who likes thrillers and doesn’t mind some body horror (I read it in two sittings, after tearing myself away at 1 a.m. because I really needed some sleep) but it’s also the perfect gift for your misogynistic brother-in-law who doesn’t need to know anything beyond “it’s like Steven King’s Misery in the era of social media!” H. Clarke’s books (Scapegracersand Scratch Daughters) would both be a genuinely excellent gift for someone who likes queer, witchy YA fantasy about teenage girls and a passive-aggressive gift for anyone who dislikes queerness, witches, or teenage girls. If you know anyone from the “we’ll just all move to Mars with Elon Musk!” school of global warming solutions, Ruthanna Emrys’s Half-Built Garden would be a highly personalized “get it together, bucko” message (but it’s also a good gift for people who are interested in hopeful science fiction and plausible utopias.)
There are also some interesting book-related novelties you could give someone headaches with. Like bookends. The thing about a bookend is, if you’re storing your books on bookcases, a bookend is only useful if you don’t have enough books to fully fill a shelf — which is a situation that most people I know handle by buying more books. A bookend masquerades as something useful, but is only going to get in the way.
You can gift one that looks like two halves of a cute vintage bicycle and according to the reviews, is too light to actually hold up books — so it’s also not useful for the person who’s storing their books on open shelves rather than a bookcase and actually needs an effective bookend to keep them on the shelf. This one incorporates a bud vase, because sure, you definitely want to keep a little test tube of water right next to your books. Here’s a set of oversized elephants that again, according to reviewers, will still slide to the side if you try to use it to hold books up that don’t want to stand on their own. Or maybe you’d like some slightly creepy disembodied hands!
If you truly want something they will have to find a spot for, there’s this one:
Part of why it took me so long to write this piece this year is that I got a little hung up on this one. Apparently one path to de-radicalizing family members lost down a rabbit hole of horror that occasionally works is to find them a better hobby. So I started thinking, maybe I should suggest good hobby kits for people? Which turned into a lot of unnecessary pressure because as it happens, I do not know what sort of hobby your aunt might actually find absorbing enough to pursue, and also, “if I just pick the right hobby for my aunt, maybe it will restore her to the person I used to know” is a lot of pressure to pack into a holiday gift. Anyway: hobbies are actually great, but these kits are not.
Gardening!These tools look fairly terrible, a bunch of them are really not useful, and they come in a case. You don’t actually want a case for garden tools; you want a basket or something. The case means you’ll have to clean them carefully after each use just to put them away. Pair this gift with a bunch of seeds that would have to be started indoors to be useful (for example, tomatoes if they live in Minnesota.)
Latch hook! Remember latch hook? If you were a kid in the 1980s you probably remember latch hook. This kit is tiny, so they might actually finish it (unlike 99% of latch hook kits sold in the 1980s) but it also just does not look very good.
Birdwatching! Here we have a pair of absolutely terrible binoculars. Pair it with a bird identification book for the wrong part of the country. This series is fantastic. (I mean, it’s genuinely fantastic. But it’s also regional, so you could get someone the wrong region. “I didn’t see one for Michigan, so I bought you the one for Minnesota since both states are in the midwest.”)
This probably happened a while ago and I just failed to notice, but we crossed some threshold with solar power where they can just make things light up that did not used to light up at all. Like wind chimes, available in both light-up hummingbirds and light-up cardinals. (Wind chimes are one of those things a lot of people hate anyway. Random tinkling noises are pleasant to some people, super grating to others.)
For some indoorsy items, here’s a cute little tabletop fountain with a motor that within a month or two will make a grinding noise that drowns out the soothing sound of trickling water. Alternately, remember the joys of “some assembly required” children’s toys? Here’s a lamp that comes as a “puzzle” (but you can plausibly claim it just looked like a lamp on its Amazon page.) Finally, here is a novelty computer mouse that looks like a car. I bet it is a lot more annoying to use than the boring sort of computer mouse.
Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts
I was thinking a few weeks ago about how symbolic animal adoptions tend to focus on cute animals with wholesome reputations and wondered if there were any insect-focused zoos that might offer virtual adoptions of bugs. A google search for “insect zoo” quickly turned up the St. Louis Zoo’s Insectarium. I got all excited, checked out the website – you can, of course, adopt any animal at the zoo – went looking for a list of the insects at the Insectarium and turned up nothing.
No problem, I thought, I will simply send an e-mail!
In retrospect, I think my mistake was in providing context (including a link to last year’s gift guide) rather than just asking for a list, because no one has replied to my e-mail even though I was very very clear that what I wished to do was send them donors. (I mean, to be fair to them: it’s also possible that the person who would normally have replied to my e-mail is out with Long COVID. But I sort of suspect that’s not it.)
Anyway: I’m going to direct you this year to the Minnesota Zoo, which allows you to adopt any animal at the zoo and has hissing cockroaches, although it does not list them on its page of animals. If a cockroach (even a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach) would be just a little bit too on the nose, I’ll note that they also have wolverines (which have cool associations thanks to sports teams and Red Dawn but are in fact stinky and mean); trumpeter swans (loud, decorative assholes); and sea dragons (like their less-badass-sounding cousins the sea horses, the males are the ones who get pregnant). Oh, and fruit bats. I think fruit bats are adorable but mileage definitely varies on that. You can do a virtual adoption of any animal at the zoo.
For years, my suggested fallback charitable option was charitable gifts through Oxfam Unwrapped, which let you give someone crabs, worms, or *cough* manure. Imagine my dismay when I went to check on the links and discovered that the entire Oxfam Unwrapped program has been discontinued.
“Have them give malaria nets,” my kid suggested. “If you give someone a malaria net and say ‘this made me think of you,’ and they weren’t already interested in malaria prevention, there is basically no way to interpret this that isn’t insulting. Are you saying they remind you of mosquitoes? Of malaria? Either one is bad.” A friend suggested the Biogas Stoves from Heifer Project (or shares of them), since that’s symbolically representing coal or possibly suggesting “you are simultaneously full of both hot air, and burning animal feces.” One of my personal favorite charities is the International Medical Corps, which in fact has a gift catalog but most of their gifts are just nice things that people need and don’t have any particular double meaning like “crabs,” alas. (Maybe I should write in and suggest they offer some options like that for next year.)
You can usually find signed copies of my books from Dreamhaven Books or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which do mail order. When Amal El-Mohtar tweeted about Catfishing on CatNet she said, “Do you know a queer teen? Are you a queer teen? Are you an adult who misses an internet that felt kinder & purer? Did you love the Hugo-winning short story ‘Cat Pictures Please’? PLEASE do your heart the gift of acquiring & reading this beautiful book.”
So if you want a good gift you could totally give someone a copy of my book. And just from Amal’s description you can probably figure out exactly which of your relatives this would be a bad gift for. I’ll note that there’s nothing on the book jacket that will give away, for example, the scene where the main character and her friends hack an instructional robot to provide accurate sex ed, so if you want to pretend ignorance later, your plausible deniability is covered. You could also buy any or all of these for yourself — if you’ll be spending time this holiday season around highly stressful family members, there’s no escape like a good book. And if supply chain issues have made print copies difficult to find, I am just as happy when people read my books on their e-reader as when they read print copies.
Happy holidays!
Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:
Hello to a bunch of people looking up this site on their phone from a voting booth! Here are links to (hopefully) all my posts about this year’s races. (If you scroll and don’t find what you want, try a search, but remember, I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I did write a post about how to research a race, though.)
ETA: Someone was inspired to do similar research for city races in Lakeville, Credit River, Apple Valley, Eagan, Burnsville, Chaska, Eden Prairie, and Bloomington, with a bit of miscellany for St. Cloud, Maplewood, Robbinsdale, Maple Grove, Osseo, and Wayzata — find those writeups (not mine, but using a similar approach) at https://candidatenotes.com/
School Board Member at Large (SSD #1) (elect two): Collin Beachy and Sonya Emerick, but if you haven’t been following this race you should probably read my post to see if you agree with me; Sonya was my most controversial endorsement this year by far.
School Board Member District 1 (SSD #1): Abdul Abdi, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.
School Board Member District 3 (SSD #1): Fathia Feerayarre, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.
School Board Member District 5 (SSD #1): Lori Norvelle
County Attorney: John Choi, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested
County Sheriff: I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and the NOW REOPENED Uncle Hugo’s (it’s at 2716 E 31st St in Minneapolis, in the former Glass Endeavors.)
Back in 2014, I wrote a post with the title “Methodology” that talked some about how I research races with an eye towards helping people trying to figure out where to dig and what questions to ask. I think it’s probably time to update that post, so below you will find my advice (hopefully suitable for people all over the country) on how to figure out who you want to vote for in a local election.
Local races are incredibly important. People tend to focus on national races, and while those sure are important, your local representatives often affect your day-to-day quality of life in much more tangible ways. Local elected officials make decisions that affect library hours, school curricula, snowplowing, zoning rules, pothole repair. Pay attention to these races! Learn about who’s running, vote all the way down the ballot, and encourage your friends to do the same.
1. Get a list of the races and candidates who will be on the ballot.
In Minnesota, you can do this via the Secretary of State’s “Find My Ballot” page. If you don’t live in Minnesota, try searching “find my ballot” and your state to see if you have something similar.
2. Look up candidate websites.
When MN candidates file, they have the option of writing down a URL, and if they do that, there may be a link right on the page that comes up on the Secretary of State’s site. If there’s no link, or the link leads to a nonexistent website, try searching the candidate name + the office, or the candidate name + your town. Sometimes people running for a minor office will use a Facebook page as their campaign page.
Take a look at the websites you find. In particular, look for the following:
Endorsements. If one’s endorsed by the Republicans and one by the Democrats, that may be all you need to know.
Experience. Not always required for a low-level office, but I like candidates who’ve at least shown some interest in local governance before running — maybe by serving on a city or county committee, fundraising for the library, etc.
Accomplishments, if this is someone running for re-election. Do you like the things they claim credit for? Do you think they’ve done good work?
Big red flags. Racist and antisemitic dogwhistles, repeating gross urban legends, a school board candidate who puts a lot of emphasis on “parental rights,” anti-vax stuff.
Small red flags. Candidates who just don’t seem to know anything about the issues. Candidates who repeatedly say “WE THE PEOPLE” in all-capital letters or use a lot of patriotic stock art.
Other useful things you’ll often find on candidate websites: a bio (which will give you information about past experiences that might be applicable to them serving in the job); links to their social media; some information on contacting the candidate (very useful if you have follow-up questions)
3. Look at other information online.
If you search online for both candidate names, sometimes you’ll find questionnaires from newspapers or organizations. These can provide you with a bunch of side-by-side information to compare.
Searching for the candidate name + location sometimes turns up other details about a candidate, from old news articles to lawsuits. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes it’s useless.
If you go to your library’s public information databases, you can often use your library card to search your local newspaper. This can turn up information about all kinds of things — old letters to the editor, news articles about scandals from years past, arrests.
If you look on Facebook, sometimes you can find a candidate’s personal Facebook page. Some candidates lock those down or sanitize them heavily, but if they don’t, you can learn a lot about a person from the memes they re-share.
If you look on LinkedIn, often you can find someone’s professional resume, and that can be extremely helpful to sort out what some of the stuff in their bio means. Lots of people will call themselves “educators” and sometimes that means they worked as a professional teacher in a public school and other times it means something that is absolutely not that.
4. Look for candidate forums.
There may be community forums where the candidates are invited to show up and answer questions. Sometimes you have to actually go, but usually these days forums are recorded and posted online later for people to view.
5. Talk to door-knockers.
Depending on the size of the race, you might get door-knocked by the candidate and be able to ask whatever questions you have. More often door-knockers are volunteers. My standard questions for people who volunteer on behalf of a candidate is, “can you tell me what you like about [candidate]? You are giving up your free time to do work for them — what about them inspired you to do that?” This is a question almost everyone can answer, and the answers can be revealing.
6. Contact the candidates.
Most candidates provide information on how to contact them — either an e-mail address or a phone number. If you contact a candidate, I would strongly encourage you to pick one question to focus on. If it’s a list of a dozen questions, they will think, “I don’t have time to do this right now — I’ll set it aside for later” and then they’ll forget. If it’s a complicated question and you send an e-mail, you may also have better luck if you tell them you’d be happy to talk on the phone.
Regardless of the question, if you send an e-mail, many candidates will ask if they can call you. Partly this is because they want to start by asking you a little about yourself. There are some good reasons for this: a lot of issues provoke related but varying concerns and they want to know where to focus their answer. They also want to demonstrate to you that they are a good listener and that they empathize with your struggles.
7. Talk to your friends and neighbors.
One of the things about local races is that a lot of people struggle to find information about them. So if you have done some research, reaching out to other people voting in your area is not pushing your politics on people, it is a generous public service. “It can be hard to find information on the Dogcatcher race, so since I did a bunch of digging, I wanted to share what I found!”
You can also reach out for information. Ask your neighbors if they know anything about the people running. (If they don’t, you can circle back with information you find.)
8. Do not feel like you need to research every possible aspect of every candidate on your ballot.
There are a lot of options here and I cannot emphasize enough that you do not need to go dig up everyone’s LinkedIn resume to be an informed voter! My first step is always to look at party endorsements. If there’s a Republican and a Democrat, that’s all I really need to know. If there’s an incumbent candidate who hasn’t been at the center of a scandal, who’s endorsed by people you like, and their opponent on the ballot has no website? You have done your due diligence! It’s fine! You can vote for the person who sounds OK vs. the person who doesn’t care enough about the race to make information easy for voters to find. Life is short: if Candidate A has a well-organized website that describes sensible goals you approve of and Candidate B’s website has a giant animated gif of a waving US flag and zero policy ideas, you do not have to watch the forum unless you want to.
It’s good to be an informed voter. But all of us make these choices with incomplete information and that is also okay. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is good advice in a lot of situations — including voting using the information you have to select the best candidate.
My name is Naomi Kritzer and I’m a SF/F writer and an opinionated person with a blog. Since sometime in the early 2000s, I’ve been researching local races (first in Minneapolis, later in both Minneapolis and St. Paul) and sharing the information I find with my community. If you do the same in your own community, you may find this very time consuming but people really do find it super useful! You can find more about my novels here.
I’m just going to put these in one post. I think these are the last contested races I hadn’t written about? (Note: I only write about races that appear on the ballots in Minneapolis and St. Paul, so if you’re trying to find information on the congressional races in 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, or 8, you won’t find details here other than “obviously you should VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRAT.” I also don’t write about uncontested races.) If I’ve forgotten a race, you can leave a comment and I’ll try to get to it. In the meantime — I’m going to try to do some doorknocking this weekend and would strongly encourage my fellow DFL voters to find a way to volunteer, whether that’s doorknocking, text-banking, phone-banking, or GOTV catfishing (look, I’m not going to judge).
Ilhan Omar is hardworking, fiery, and a member of “the Squad.” Cicely David has a website that manages to be both frequently illegible and mostly content-free, and she spends a lot of time trying to present herself as super moderate while ignoring all questions about her position on abortion. Vote for Ilhan Omar.
Betty McCollum is hardworking, reliable, and from what Paul Wellstone used to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” May Lor Xiong scaremongers on her website about “open borders.” Per a comment to MPR, she apparently thinks the Mexican border should be closed to immigrants. She’s also opposed to the Green New Deal and the ACA and has scrupulously avoided all public comment on abortion but she’s endorsed by the MCCL. May Lor Xiong is not even doing a very good job at the “pretending not to be a right-wing extremist” thing, and I am absolutely voting for Betty McCollum.
So a week or two back, it looked like WordPress had deleted most of my subscribers? But now it’s back to saying I have 10,143 instead of 473. But if you rely on e-mail to notify you I’ve posted, and this is the first post you’ve seen this year, you should know I’ve posted a bunch of other posts! Also, if you’re not a subscriber, plugging in your e-mail in the subscriber box (you may have to do this on desktop rather than phone) will get you an e-mail every time I post. That might not sound appealing, but if it does, now you know.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and the NOW REOPENED Uncle Hugo’s (it’s at 2716 E 31st St in Minneapolis, in the former Glass Endeavors.)
Will Tell Stories For Food 