Tag Archives: Democratic party

Minnesota Caucuses: What Actually Happens

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One of the reasons why caucuses are fundamentally such a bad way to pick presidential candidates in Minnesota of all places is that Minnesotans are kind of hypersensitive to embarrassment and find it horrifying to be somewhere that everyone else knows the rules, and they don’t.

There’s this little booklet in Episcopal churches about What to Expect if you come worship with Episcopalians and one of the points on which they reassure you is that they will not embarrass you. If you’ve ever been in a church where they made all the newcomers/visitors stand up so they could clap for you, you know exactly why the Episcopalians put that note in.

So, yeah, caucuses. They don’t make newcomers stand up so they can clap for you! Well, maybe there’s a caucus convener somewhere who does, but it is definitely not part of the agenda. Also, if you want to go to a caucus because you’re a passionate supporter of some candidate but the whole process seems sort of freaky, definitely get in touch with the campaign and tell them your precinct and ask if they can set you up with a buddy.

You can watch the DFL’s “What to Expect at your Precinct Caucus” video, or keep reading for my take.

Something everyone should know going in: caucuses are run by volunteers. Many of these volunteers have never done this before; they maybe went to a two-hour training on how to run a caucus. If you find yourself thinking, “omfg I could do this better than these losers,” you are probably correct, and if you’re willing, you can almost certainly have that opportunity!

Arriving

Your caucus will probably be held at a school. Most likely, everyone in your ward will be at the same school, with each precinct in a separate classroom.

In a presidential year with an interesting contest, attendance skyrockets. If you’ve ever been to a caucus before, you should have received a reminder card in the mail, and apparently if you bring that along it can speed things up a bit. (I predict that maybe 1 in 100 people who receive that card will think to bring it.) The thing you really want to be sure you know before you go is your ward and precinct. In fact, I checked out my Senate District Convention’s caucus page (find your own local unit here) and they had all the info down to which classroom at the school my precinct will be in. The more info like that you can track down before you head over, the more likely it is that you can skip past the long lines and head straight to the right spot. The long lines are probably not people waiting for ballots: they’re usually people who need to be told which precinct they live in.

If you can walk over to your caucus, you’ll be happy that you didn’t have to park. If you drive, leave plenty of time for parking.

(If you’re reading this in 2017 or 2018 instead of 2016, disregard that advice: off-year caucuses are a vastly smaller crowd.)

Signing In

Once you’ve gotten into the school and figured out where you’re going, you’ll probably wind up in another line to get into the classroom where your precinct is. You will sign in at the door, and usually they hand out ballots as people sign in.

You do not have to be a registered party member of anything in order to attend a precinct caucus. However, when you sign in, you’re affirming that you consider yourself generally a Democrat (if you’re at a DFL caucus) or a Republican (if you’re at a Republican caucus). You’re also affirming that you’ll be able to legitimately vote on November 8th, and that you live in the precinct.

If you’re planning to move before November 8th, that’s fine, you can caucus in your current precinct and vote at your new address in November.

How the Meetings Are Run

These meetings are run Robert’s Rules type procedures, so there are a bunch of somewhat goofy hoops that get jumped through.  The caucus convener calls the meeting to order and then the group as a whole gets to elect a person to run the meeting. In theory, this could be a hotly contested battle. In practice, people are usually happy to vote for the person who went to the training session on how you run a caucus.

There’s an agenda, which the meeting adopts. People make motions and second motions. If you’re one of the 16-year-olds at the meeting, you are allowed to participate in those parts of the meeting. (Edited to add: letting 16-year-olds participate in caucus business may be strictly a DFL thing.)

If you’re at a DFL caucus, you should turn your presidential preference ballot in before eight. If you don’t want to stay for the meeting, you can come, sign in, get your ballot, vote, hand it back to a volunteer, and leave.

If you’re at a Republican caucus, ballots will be distributed as the first order of business and then collected. (You are then free to leave, if that’s all you wanted to do.)

Resolutions

One of the things that happens at caucuses are resolutions. If you want to bring a resolution, the DFL resolutions form is online. Print it out and fill in your action item. You can skip the bits that say “whereas” and if you insist on putting those in they’re supposed to go on the back and you’re not supposed to read them. (I support this change!)

The idea is that the resolutions from the caucuses are used to revise the DFL platform. You can find the DFL platform and the DFL Action Agenda online. Before proposing a resolution, I would encourage you to check to make sure it’s not already in the platform. If there’s time, you’ll get to present your resolution to your precinct caucus, speak briefly about why it’s needed, and everyone will vote on whether to adopt it. The resolutions that get adopted all get passed to a resolutions committee, which prepares them for the Senate District Convention. (More on that in another post.)

Republicans do this, too; I couldn’t find their resolution form online, though. (Edited to add: hey, they put it up! It’s here.)

If you’re in the DFL, this is one of the things you can do at sixteen! You can also vote for or against other people’s resolutions.

Speakers

Local politicians often pop in to speak at precinct caucuses. This includes both currently elected officials and people seeking office. Typically you’ll get visits from your state legislators and city council rep, if they’re members of your party. Occasionally you’ll get a bigger name, like your Congress person or Mayor. If you’ve got an open seat for something pending, you’ll almost certainly see candidates (or people speaking on behalf of candidates).

When someone pops in, they usually catch the eye of the person running the meeting, who will pause the proceedings and request that someone move to let your visitor speak. (You can say, “So moved!” to make the requested motion.)

Recruitment

Part of the purpose of a caucus is party-building, and there are lots of entry-level, truly grassroots volunteer positions that they will be recruiting for.

Sound like fun? Go for it. Seriously, if you hear, “we need a Precinct Associate Chair” and that sounds fun to you, you are exactly the sort of person the DFL hopes to recruit to do it. Don’t worry if you’ve never done anything like it before. There’s a whole elaborate party infrastructure for teaching you what you’re supposed to be doing.

On a more immediate level, they’ll recruit tellers — people to count those ballots everyone turned in.

Some of these volunteer positions are open to people who aren’t eighteen yet. If you’re interested, ask.

Electing Delegates to the Local Organizing Unit Convention

So the next-level political meeting is a convention. Typically things run like this:

  1. Precinct caucuses.
  2. Senate District or County Conventions
    (this is the Local Organizing Unit or LOU convention in the DFL; the Basic Political Organizing Unit or BPOU convention in the Republican party.)
  3. The State Convention
  4. The National Convention

At the precinct caucuses, you elect delegates to the next-level convention. This usually takes the form of the organizer requesting a show of hands, counting, and then passing around a list for people to sign up on.

If you don’t have enough slots, it gets more complicated. But that is actually pretty rare at this level. You do have to be 18 by November 8th in order to be a delegate to the local organizing unit convention.

If you’re a Republican, you may recall that four years ago, Rick Santorum appeared to win the Minnesota caucuses and yet we sent a whole bunch of Ron Paul delegates. This is because the Ron Paul people carefully organized to make sure they sent delegates to the BPOU conventions, and since their preferential ballot wasn’t binding and Santorum’s people didn’t show up … anyway, that seriously annoyed the Republican central committee and the ballot is now binding for both parties. You do not have to go to the Senate District convention (or whatever it is for you) to make sure your presidential candidate gets their due support. I’m going to write another post about what exactly this is and why you might want to go (or really prefer NOT to go) in another post.

Counting the Ballots

If you stick around, all the ballots from your precinct will get counted and they’ll announce the totals. That’s usually the last thing that happens before they adjourn the meeting and everyone goes home.

 

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Election 2014: MN Attorney General

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The Attorney General is the state’s chief legal officer, and represents the state in court on legal affairs that can range from defending against slip-and-fall lawsuits to appealing Supreme Court decisions that one of our laws is unconstitutional. The office is probably best known for its consumer protection and consumer advocacy.

Mike Hatch was our AG for a while; he scored enormous political points by going after the local HMOs like a rabid pit bull. I specifically remember two things that he got exercised about that I thought were BS: (1) Allina had hired a masseuse to give chair massages to a bunch of employees as a random perk during a busy season. You know what, there are thousands of corporations that spend money on random little perks every now and then, ranging from chair massages to free turkeys. Of all the things you could complain about an HMO doing, if this is what you’re going after, you are really stretching. (2) They also paid for their doctors to go to medical conferences that were held outside the midwest. As it happens, most of the big medical conferences are held in states with better weather, and doctors hear about a lot of new research at these things, it’s not a vacation. As irritating as all that was, I also remember chatting with another parent at the playground years ago whose very small private ambulance business had been driven under by a lawsuit from the AG’s office claiming that he’d overbilled, or something. (I can’t remember the exact details.) He said that he would never ever ever vote for Hatch for anything, or for anyone associated with Hatch.

Lori Swanson was Hatch’s protege. I am pretty sure that the first time she ran, I didn’t vote for her. (Which means it’s possible I voted for our current gubernatorial candidate, Jeff Johnson! Or maybe I went for the Jessecrat, I’m not sure.)

That said, I’m mostly fine with the job she’s done. But, if you’re inclined to vote for a third-party candidate in one race, this would be the one I’d pick for you, I think.

Who’s running:

BRANDAN BORGOS – INDEPENDENCE
SCOTT NEWMAN – REPUBLICAN
LORI SWANSON – DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
ANDY DAWKINS – GREEN PARTY
MARY O’CONNOR – LIBERTARIAN PARTY
DAN R. VACEK – LEGAL MARIJUANA NOW

Brandan Borgos

Brandan has a JD from the University of St. Thomas. He doesn’t mention whether he works as a lawyer, or what exactly he does for a living, though he does mention he lives in Whittier, enjoys reading and martial arts, and does fundraising for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. I was curious whether he does work as a lawyer, so I looked on LinkedIn. Per LinkedIn, he graduated from UST in 2010 and works at “Borgos Law, PLLC,” which suggests to me that he’s in solo practice. Except you might think his solo practice would have a web page, which it does not (at least that I could find). The Chamber of Commerce website believes that Borgos Law, PLLC is at 898 Galtier St. in Saint Paul. I looked this up in Google Maps and from street view (which admittedly has its issues) this appears to be a vacant lot.

His platform, on his website, is unobjectionable. In the sense that there’s nothing in it that anyone from either the DFL or the Republican party would hesitate to put on their own website. He believes in evolving leadership; transparency; building community partnerships; and protecting civil rights. That said, just as an outsider I think he’s probably a bit more serious about protecting privacy and civil rights than the major party candidates. (On the other hand, as someone who may or may not have significant legal experience, I’m not sure he’d be at all successful in that goal.)

His Twitter actually has a bit more character than his campaign website: “Using the sword of justice on predatory lenders, student loans, polluters, & backroom government deals. Alter ego of @JutSao: fighter of cannabis prohibition.” His @JutSao page mentions that he’s the former Minnesota NORML chair. (NORML = National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, if you’re unfamiliar with it.) Maybe that’s what he was doing as his day job?

Not surprisingly for someone who used to work for NORML, he strongly supports legalizing pot. It would be interesting, you know, if an AG got elected who supported marijuana legalization but the governor did not. I am not sure he’d be able to do anything to undermine existing state laws, but he might be able to come up with something.

Scott Newman

Apparently the Republicans have decided to make themselves THE PARTY OF MINING because — like their auditor candidate — this guy has a whole bit dedicated to how awesome mining is. In fact, why don’t I quote it: “First, Northeastern Minnesota has experienced a lagging economy for too long. I lived on the Iron Range for many years. These hard working folks are not looking for a handout. They want a good job that provides for their families. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an arm of the federal government. For years it has been holding up permission to get non-ferrous mining operating on the Range. As your Attorney General, I will do all I can through the legal system to push back against the federal government and get our people back to work!”

DOWN WITH THE EPA. TO HELL WITH CLEAN WATER. YAY MINES.

Next!

Lori Swanson

As noted up front, I am not a huge Lori Swanson fan but I actually think she’s done an OK job. Specifically on the health care front, rather than going after chair massages, she went after grotesquely inappropriate debt collection practices. She also opted not to defend a 101-year-old Minnesota law that could have caused me to be slapped with a large fine if the wrong person had taken issue with one of my statements about a ballot initiative. She’s sued fraudulent debt-collection companies and a patent troll.

Her website says, “Her industry-wide agreement stopped hospitals from charging uninsured patients up to four times more for the same services than insurance companies pay. (Minnesota is the only state with this agreement.)” — I had missed that! If she actually pulled that off, that is a HUGE deal, actually. It is consistently appalling how much uninsured patients get screwed over. She also went after two of the local for-profit colleges for deceptive practices. (Should’ve gone after all of them, IMO, but I’m not sure what sort of evidence she needs for that.)

On the other hand, I’m not sure she’s done anything about the collection agencies using law enforcement agencies to do their dirty work. A lot of the “Debtor’s Prison” articles that hit the media in 2010 and 2011 at least involved people who’d failed to pay fines. The Star Tribune found people arrested in Minnesota because they owed money to collection agencies. Also, the gun lobby likes her just fine.

I will probably vote for her this year because I like her better than the Republican. But if you want to vote for someone else, I’m not going to yell at you.

Andy Dawkins

Andy is my parents’ neighbor. They like him. He was a DFL legislator for 15 years and spent 35 years working as an attorney, so he has actual experience working in an office that isn’t a vacant lot.

He’s got about the positions you’d expect for someone running to the left of the Democratic incumbent: he’s pro-pot, pro-campaign donation limits, pro-privacy. He opposes pretty much all nonferrous mining. He wants to take action on climate change (which is mostly outside the domain of the AG, actually, but he wants to divest state pension funds from fossil fuel companies.)

He is the only Green running for a statewide race, and they’ve focused a lot of efforts on this one in the hopes of getting 5% of the vote and regaining major party status. This MPR piece explains some of what that means.

If you hate Lori Swanson, he’s a viable alternative, in the sense that he could do the job if elected. The risk is that you’ll get Scott “Yay Mines!” Newman instead. (The other risk is that with major-party status, the Greens will be empowered to act as a spoiler in the statewide races. The solution the Greens propose to this is instant runoff statewide — Andy has a whole bit about IRV on his website — but that’s unlikely to be implemented soon.)

Mary O’Connor

So here’s the question I have about Mary: is she actually an attorney? Does she have a JD? The state constitution does not actually require the AG to have a JD degree, but it seems like kind of a self-evidently good idea. I e-mailed Mary, left a question on the Libertarians of Minnesota facebook post about her, and Tweeted my question to the Libertarians of Minnesota. So far, radio silence. Oh, I also looked her up on LinkedIn but the Mary O’Connor in MN that I found did not look like her.

I did find some information about her on the Libertarian Party officers page. She’s the state party treasurer. According to her bio there (why on earth is there no bio on her candidacy page? they could just C&P this) she has been a Libertarian for five years, she served for three years on the Brooklyn Center City Council (05-08), and had run for “many offices over the last 11 years.” She worked for the U of M for almost 40 years and is now retired (which does not sound like a lawyer sort of job, but it’s possible she was doing that with a JD.) It also notes, “O’Connor wrote a paper on solving the healthcare problem in the United States and sent it to many elected officials. She has an interest in reducing government and rightsizing public education.” (“Rightsizing” is one of those euphemisms for “cutting” that particularly makes me twitch.)

On the issues page of her website she says that she’s anti-eminent domain (“Government should not be seizing the homes and property of Minnesotans for Light Rail Transit or other unnecessary projects”), pro-marijuana, anti-regulations of businesses (“A business owner has the right to make a living and the government should not deny this right by forcing unnecessary regulations and paperwork onto their business,”) and that as a member of the Pardon Board she’ll work to pardon offenders who’ve committed victimless crimes (I’m guessing mostly she means drug offenses here.)

The line about business owners having the right to make a living free from regulations and paperwork is pretty fascinating. How far does she extend this? Should restaurants be free from inspections of whether they’re following food safety guidelines? Should food manufacturers be free from burdensome regulations requiring that they accurately label their products? Are we including minimum wage laws here? Restrictions on child labor? The requirement to pay overtime if you make someone work more than 40 hours in a week?

I would suggest that if you’re tempted to vote for her, you cast your vote instead for Brandan Borgos, instead, since the Independence party shares many of her values, and he actually has a JD.

EDITED TO ADD: I heard back from Mary. She does not, in fact, have a JD, “but justice is not hard to understand.” She added, “As Attorney General I will work to defend the rights and freedoms of Minnesotans. Government, not businesses or nonprofits, is the main entity taking away our rights and freedoms. Are any of the other candidates for Minnesota Attorney General talking about defending our rights and freedoms? Is our current Attorney General working to protect our rights and freedoms that are taken away by government? We Minnesotans can choose not to do business with fraudulent businesses or nonprofits but we risk being arrested if we choose to not obey an unconstitutional law that government imposes on us.”

I’m going to upgrade her to full-on weirdo.

Don R. Vacek

I was expecting to get to make a joke about the People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean People’s Front (because, what, we need a Grassroots Party AND a Legal Marijuana Now party?) but as far as I can tell, Don’s not actually running. If you look at his web page, it says, “Because Minnesota does not allow citizen initiated voter referendums. Every vote represents a voice of the cannabis community.” I suppose if you really truly do not care who’s the Attorney General of MN you could try to use this, as suggested, as a referendum in favor of legalizing marijuana, except this is not going to crack 1%, so it’s kind of self-defeating.

Since he’s not actually running to try to serve as AG, I’m not sure how much it really matters whether he’s qualified or not. His Facebook page mentions a few things about him (he works for Ramsey County, he studied social work, and he lives in St. Paul). It doesn’t appear that he has a JD or any particular legal experience, which may be why he figures that the AG race is a good one to use for a symbolic “vote yes for weed” campaign.

Election 2014: MN Secretary of State

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The Secretary of State, in Minnesota, oversees elections. In fact, to pull up the ballot that I'm looking at, I go to the SoS website's My Ballot site, which lets me pull up a list of candidates complete with links to their web pages (that was implemented in the last few years — when I started doing this, I always had to Google) and a PDF of a sample ballot.

There is other stuff they do, but I think the big job is the elections. Visiting the main SoS web page it looks like they also handle business filings (okay, that's probably a pretty significant job), notary publics, the Safe At Home program (which an address confidentiality program for people like victims of stalking or domestic violence), a bunch of forms, and some truly random miscellaneous stuff like the state symbols.

Do I really need to persuade anyone reading that it matters quite a lot who's counting the votes? Six years ago, we had a massive hand recount in the U.S. Senate race, in which among other things they had to try to decide what to do with ballots like these: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98272423 ("Lizard People," heh. I'd forgotten about that ballot. There was also someone who just randomly doodled over the whole thing, and a guy who voted for Norm Coleman for Senate, but wrote in Al Franken for Soil & Water.) Some of this stuff gets decided in court, but not all of it.

Mark Ritchie, the DFL Secretary of State, is not running again, so this is an open seat.

Our choices, courtesy of the above-mentioned website:

BOB HELLAND – INDEPENDENCE
DAN SEVERSON – REPUBLICAN
STEVE SIMON – DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
BOB ODDEN – LIBERTARIAN PARTY

Bob Helland

Bob Helland is the Jessecrat. He pushes the point that someone who isn't either a Democrat or a Republican might be a bit more impartial, but he sort of buries that under his primary hobbyhorse, which is that the SoS should focus more on business life cycle management. Having looked at his page, though, I'm not really clear on what it is he wants to do, other than putting out proposals for how we should be adding stuff about this to the high school curriculum. He also talks about working to keep private information confidential and making public information available; is this actually in the job description for SoS or is it just something he's very concerned about? Especially with third-party candidates I don't entirely trust them to be running for the right office (and it's not just third-party candidates; see Matt Entenza.)

Anyway, he does at least have some relevant work experience; he's worked for the MN Department of Revenue and he's done computer stuff, which is a point in his favor.

Dan Severson

Here's something I was not expecting: a Republican for a major statewide office who comes across as more of a flake than the Independence guy. Instead of Issues or Positions his link is to "Causes," except it's only one: Count Military Votes First Petition.

I'll just C&P his explanation of the issue. "In the 2010 election in Minnesota less than 5% of Minnesota’s active duty military members votes were counted. Current state policy is to count those votes last after all others. We believe that our active duty military vote should be counted first and in its entirety. If you agree, please sign the petition below. This petition will be delivered on 9/11 to Mark Ritchie, current Minnesota Secretary of State and Rep. Steve Simon, Chair of the Minnesota House of Representatives Elections Committee."

So here's the thing. Absentee votes are counted last. But I'm pretty sure they're all counted; even if they won't swing the big race, you aren't going to know until you look at them whether they'll swing the downticket races, plus you need to get 5% of the votes in a statewide race to qualify as a "major party," which is a pretty big deal for Grassroots, Independence, etc. I was looking to see whether the SoS website confirms that they're all counted (the Iowa SoS does) and I didn't find that but I did find out that I totally could have voted in the primary election because we effectively have early voting now — I could've gone to my county election office and applied in person for an absentee ballot, filled it out, and given it back to them. (Given that statewide turnout was something like 2% of eligible voters I could have felt such a smug sense of moral superiority, too! Dammit.)

Anyway, it's true that a lot of military voters wind up disenfranchised. But it's not because absentee ballots get counted last; the problem is that there are a lot of ways for absentee ballots to get screwed up. The requests get lost, or the ballots get lost, or they arrive too late. As it happens, Minnesota does a lot of stuff right. You can request your absentee ballot via Internet. There's a web form to let you check the status of your absentee ballot. There are states that apparently fail miserably to get the ballots to service members the required 45 days before an election, and there are some U.S. Senators who have pushed for a law saying that if a state drops the ball, they need to foot the bill to express-mail the ballots out (and if things are really late, to express-mail the ballot back, as well). I'm not sure whether Minnesota has had issues with this, but in any case, he's not actually talking about any of the practical steps that we could be taking to ensure that service members overseas are not disenfranchised! Changing the order in which we count the ballots is both symbolic and obstructive (don't the machines actually count the ballots as they go in? at the very least, they put them all in a nice neat stack that can be run through quickly. Ballots get counted by hand for the instant-runoff races and when there's a recount; most of the time, we use machine counts.)

He does have a marginally more substantive set of policy statements tucked under his news posts: http://danseverson.com/severson-solutions-the-first-100-days/

But seriously, this guy is a crank. And yet not only did the Republicans endorse him, he ran unopposed in the primary. What the HECK, guys. You’re a major party. I expect real candidates with whom I passionately disagree, not people who sound like they’re running on the Cranky Old Fart party ticket.

Steve Simon

Steve is the DFL candidate. Not surprisingly, he prioritizes voting rights and will resist any attempt to get rid of same-day registration (seriously, same-day registration is so important, and there is zero reason not to have it — it's a crucial protection against stuff like the purging of the ballot rolls that happened in Florida in 2000). He wants to expand early voting. He was a leader in the fight against the Voter ID amendment that got voted down in 2012.

Yeah, this is the guy I want running the next election. No question. And honestly, if my top priority were ensuring that active-duty military people overseas were not disenfranchised, this is also the guy I would pick, given his commitment to making absentee ballots available.

Bob Odden

So right now, if you go to Bob Odden's website, you'll see his name and picture and a flag and then, if you read down the page, you see:

Sun Oct 26, 2014
MN Weapons Collectors Ass Gun Show
9:00 am
State Fair Grounds Coliseum
Falcon Heights, MN
I am a member of the MWCA and I will be manning a table for the Libertarian Party of MN.

I blinked at that in baffled disbelief and then googled and realized that (obviously) it is the Minnesota Weapons Collectors ASSOCIATION Gun Show. Not a show that specializes in Ass Guns, whatever those are.

Under issues, he notes that as Secretary of State he intends to carry a gun around and he’s going to encourage his staff to carry one as well. I was thinking that having armed people who are not, like, actual police officers wandering around the building might light a fire under the ass of our State Legislature when considering gun control but it looks from the map like the office of the Secretary of State has its own separate building.

He also has a suggestion for judicial elections: “If a judge quits before their term ends and a judge is appointed to fill that position, that judge can’t run in the next election. That seat must be open to encourage multiple candidates to run for that office. Remove ‘incumbent’ for judges on the ballot. Allow judges to inform the public on their positions and all issues that might come before them as judges.”

That is pretty much the opposite of what I think is a good idea, sooooo yeah, this guy is a big old NOPE.

tl;dr vote for Democrat Steve Simon. (And vote in this race, guys. IT MATTERS WHO THE SECRETARY OF STATE IS.)

Election 2014: Governor’s Race: Democrat Mark Dayton

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Governor Dayton’s turn!

The gubernatorial options, just to remind you:

HANNAH NICOLLET AND TIM GIESEKE – INDEPENDENCE
JEFF JOHNSON AND BILL KUISLE – REPUBLICAN
MARK DAYTON AND TINA SMITH – DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
CHRIS HOLBROOK AND CHRIS DOCK – LIBERTARIAN PARTY
CHRIS WRIGHT AND DAVID DANIELS – GRASSROOTS – LEGALIZE CANNABIS

Mark Dayton

In addition to the usual social networking options (Facebook, Twitter), Mark Dayton’s campaign has a Tumblr: http://govdayton.tumblr.com/ (I’m really curious how many tumblr followers he has but I don’t see a way to find out). Tumblr skews really young, so that’s definitely a gesture of electronic outreach toward the youth vote. (It’s a low-volume tumblr but hopefully as they get close to Election Day there’ll be a bunch of stuff about how you should remember to vote! and make sure your friends remember to vote! and drag your friends bodily to the polls! and so on. Young people are overwhelmingly liberal but also have a tendency to not vote.)

In a fundamental sense, Dayton’s in a good position with this campaign, because the question, “are you better off than you were four years ago?” is going to be an emphatic yes for a lot of people. The recovery’s been kind of rocky and has varied a lot around the country, but in Minnesota we’re doing pretty well. I started seeing “help wanted” signs all over about two years ago. The housing market has largely recovered. The tax base has recovered and we can pay for schools again.

His website glosses over the MNSure rollout, which was a serious mess. We get our health care through the exchange; Ed is the one who dealt with it. By the time he signed up, he was able to get it to work, but I had friends who were NEVER able to sign up online (they had to go in via phone, which had its own set of issues). This wasn’t a Minnesota problem so much as a national problem, but it sure as hell was frustrating. (And the Minnesota website is really poorly designed; when I tried to look at plans, I wanted to be able to right-click the various options and pull them up in separate windows. But they’d used scripting instead of linking so I couldn’t do that; I had to look one at a time, and then it crashed when I’d try to back up, so I kept having to start over from the beginning. It was reminiscent of the classic “make them have to reboot after every typo” Dilbert strip.)

But on the other hand, having Democrats in charge meant that Minnesota fully participated in the Medicaid expansion. And that has been terrific for a number of people I know. Friends of mine who had not seen a doctor or a dentist in years are now getting the care they’ve needed. (I would be a fan of single-payer health care, but given all the screaming over how the ACA was SOCIALISM and we were LOSING OUR FREEDOMS I am not going to hold my breath.)

Dayton’s website also doesn’t mention one of the other great things that happened under his watch: marriage equality. I have other friends who are finally able to see doctors and dentists because they can now be covered under their spouse’s insurance policy because they were able to legally marry.

Anyway, I am not a huge Dayton fan in some respects. I find him affable but a little bland. I think he was too much in the pocket of the law enforcement lobby when making the call on the medical marijuana law. But in general, I’m happy with how he’s governed in the last four years (and I’m certainly a lot happier than I was with Pawlenty). He’s got my vote.