On the ballot:
Amy Klobuchar and Ben Schierer (DFL)
Lisa Demuth and Ryan Wilson (Republican)
Steven Young and Jane Kirby (Green)
The tl;dr is that I’m going to vote for Amy Klobuchar, even though I find her chronically disappointing, and I think you should, too.
Lisa Demuth and Ryan Wilson (Republican)
Lisa Demuth is the Speaker of the House in the State House of Representatives. She’s trying to present herself as a moderate. She’s not. I’m going to go through her record and then talk about some of what’s on her website.
- Lisa’s record on reproductive rights. Lisa has a 100% rating from MCCL (the anti-abortion group). In 2023, she was the chief author of HF 1809, a bill that would introduce restrictions to make it harder for people to get abortions (the “licensure of abortion facilities” is something that’s passed in many states because it sounds reasonable on the surface but the purpose of the rule is to make it harder for abortion clinics to operate) and ban some abortions entirely. One thing I think is really important to note: her proposed law would have banned third-trimester abortions with no exception for lethal fetal anomalies. And to be clear, early induction (one of the very common options offered when a fetus is discovered to have a condition incompatible with life) would be considered an abortion under the definitions in Minnesota law (a lot of people assume that an early induction done after a tragic diagnosis is not legally an abortion and as many people have discovered, it is.)
- Lisa’s record on gun safety. After the Annunciation shooting, Lisa promised some of the parents that she would not block a floor vote on a bill to ban assault weapons; she broke her promise. Her own daughter Shelisa survived a school shooting in 2003 and has spoken publicly about this issue. Lisa talks on her website about providing “school safety funding” but with zero information on what she thinks schools will buy with this.
- Lisa’s record on trans rights. You know something Lisa didn’t block? A piece of legislation she did bring to the floor? A bill to kick all the trans girls in Minnesota out of sports. (Which would also have kicked out a lot of intersex girls — I think this bill‘s definitions would say that girls with CAIS are not girls, even though most are assigned female at birth.) She also opposed the Trans Refuge bill in 2023.
- Lisa is heavily responsible for Metro Surge. Lisa proudly took credit for steering right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley to Minnesota to gin up bullshit concerns about daycare fraud. This was Trump’s pretext for sending in thousands of poorly trained, heavily armed goons to harass, kidnap, and murder our neighbors.
- Lisa backed Trump’s cuts to health care. She mostly dodged questions about her take on Trump’s budget bill but issued a written statement defending it.
Regarding the things she’s campaigning on, I have some additional thoughts.
- Asked about private equity driving up housing costs at the State Fair, Lisa gave the most hilariously content-free response you can imagine. “I think our state needs to look very heavily at that. In how we want to move forward as a state. Not ready to make a definite plan or determination on it, but we have to look at what’s happening in other states. Is it driving up costs? We have to look at that piece.” She had been running for office for 10 months at this point, so “I’m not ready to make a definite plan” is sure a thing to say about housing costs.
- Her website has an “affordability” section but the only thing she says about housing costs is that she wants to cut property taxes. Mostly she wants to make things cheaper for vehicle owners, and there is, of course, absolutely nothing in that section about how she’d keep the roads paved if everyone’s tab fees are $100 or less and the gas tax is lowered. (All of that money goes to road maintenance, something most Republicans like to have.)
- She wants state funds to go to private schools (the “safety funding” I mentioned earlier). She also wants to cut the universal free lunches passed during the DFL trifecta a couple of years ago because “when a family is making six- and sometimes seven-figure incomes, their kids do not need free meals.” Honestly, if a school is charging $20,000 or $40,000 or even $73,000 tuition, they do not need money from the state. (There are a number of reasons that I support universal free lunches, including for kids from rich families, and at the top of the list: rich people can also be abusive and neglectful and having shitty rich parents does not mean that you don’t get hungry if your parents don’t give you lunch. I think it’s important that school is a refuge for ALL kids, and we can fund those lunches for the children of rich parents by taxing those parents more to pay for those lunches. If we don’t put people like Lisa “we should definitely cut taxes on the rich” Demuth in charge.)
- Lisa’s “education plan” includes a lot of stuff about reducing mandates, allowing schools to get waivers for mandates, etc., but she is not remotely forthcoming about the mandates she thinks we could save money by eliminating. Does she think we should stop educating disabled children? That we should stop requiring that teachers have training and licensure? That schools shouldn’t have to run school buses? That schools shouldn’t have to run background checks on staff? Seriously, which mandates, Lisa? (I sent her this question by e-mail, and I also asked which standards were “woke.” If I hear back — unlikely — I will update.)
- Like all the Republicans in Minnesota, Lisa is making fraud her centerpiece issue, though not in a way where she’s willing to comment on any of the fraud currently being committed by the President of the United States. Instead she makes promises like, “If you steal welfare from our state, you’re going to prison – with no exceptions. You’re paying it back and we’re seizing the assets. You’ll receive a lifetime ban from receiving benefits. You can go to another state but you’re not going to steal from Minnesota again.” She wants us to imagine a welfare queen being stripped of her fur coat and other ill-gotten gains and being forced to get a job. What this sort of law actually means: destitute people who fucked up some minor bit of paperwork and claimed an extra $14 of benefits they shouldn’t have gotten are kicked out of their subsidized housing and wind up living in a homeless encampment. Or, even more likely, destitute people who didn’t fuck anything up, who followed all the rules, who had some overworked office worker tick an incorrect box, will have their health care taken away and will die of diabetes while their equally confused sister is waiting on hold trying to find out why the letter says they have $84,000 in assets when they might have $4 in mixed change if you want to dig for it in the couch. You want to throw the book at the Feeding Our Future crowd? GREAT. They absolutely have it coming. But there’s no actual distinction made on her site between people who stole millions of dollars, and people who worked under the table while receiving benefits. No exceptions!
Anyway. I absolutely do not want Lisa Demuth as governor.
Steven Young and Jane Kirby (Green)
So, Steve Young. I want to start by acknowledging this is one of the most validating, tempting things I have ever seen on a campaign website:
This (or something similar) is what I want to hear from everyone running, honestly.
On the other hand, here’s his pinned tweet (from his @steventhebold account as opposed to his @steveformn account):
He is straightforwardly pro-Hamas. He’s enthusiastically pro-Hamas, even. I tried to do some digging to try to sort out his other views, and I’ll note he also seems to be a North Korea booster. (He’s also a Stalin defender but not of the “Stalin: Actually Awesome!” Tankie school of Stalin defense.) Mostly, though, he really fucking loves Hamas.
I am furious at Israel and disgusted with their actions and strongly in favor of ending America’s military and financial support of Israel. Also, I think that if your response to October 7th was cheering and pumping your fists, you’re a gross person and I will never vote for you for anything. October 7th killed hundreds of civilians; the entirely predictable, absolutely horrifying Israeli response killed tens of thousands more. If you were celebrating that day, I don’t want you as my political representative, even if you’re running to win, which he is not.
Over on Twitter, he’s doing the usual third-party thing of complaining that people aren’t paying attention to him, and pretending that he thinks he’s going to win. However, he’s not recruiting volunteers, and if he’s doing any campaigning (doorknocking, tabling with other Green Party people at festivals, marching in parades, distributing lit, putting up signs) he’s not mentioning them on his Twitter, which means that either he’s not doing them, or he’s unaware that posting that he’s doing this stuff is also part of campaigning.
The Green Party did send out an e-mail blast (which I got) on September 10th where they talk about their Get Out the Vote efforts:
We have six candidates that will be on the ballot and need your help. Below is a list of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts to support our candidates and to reach our goal to obtain Minor Party Status (1% of all MN votes) or even Major Party Status (8% of all MN votes).
GOTV efforts can include: Letters to the Editor (LTE), sidewalk chalking, flyering in your local area, sharing GPMN information on social media, call into talk radio, handmade window or lawn signs, phone banking, house parties, voter registration and donating to our party or to the candidates.
I think there are a couple of things worth noting here. They’re encouraging their supporters to do this stuff, but I haven’t found any sign of an organized effort. (Seth Kuhl-Stennes, the Green Secretary of State candidate, has an Events section on his site but it’s empty.) Steve did an interview on a small YouTube interviews show but I found no other indication of actual campaigning, despite checking his website, his LinkTree, and both of his Twitters. Also, his party is not pretending that anyone is running to win. The Green Party of Minnesota website has specific times to sign up to work on petitions to get people on the ballot but nothing specific about when and where you might do doorknocking to persuade people to vote for their candidates (that’s a link to their “Volunteer” page, which is a sign up sheet with no info.)
My point here: (a) as much as I agree with him about ICE, he kind of sucks, and (b) if you vote for him, that is 100% a protest vote. The actual choice here is between Lisa and Amy; there is no scenario where he wins. The absolute best-case scenario for him is that he draws off enough of the left-wing vote that we get Lisa Demuth as governor. At which point we’ll have Lisa Demuth as governor for four years.
Amy Klobuchar and Ben Schierer (DFL)
Amy Klobuchar is a deeply unsatisfying Democrat in a whole host of ways. She’s a cosponsor of KOSA. She’s voted for an embarrassing number of Trump’s judicial nominations. In the last two years (and during 2016-2020) it has consistently felt like we needed to hound Amy to get her to do the right thing.
However: she’s a Democrat. She’s reliably pro-choice. She’s been depressingly quiet on trans issues but also helped to block Senate passage of a law that would have prohibited school districts from allowing trans girls to play on girl’s teams. (Note: MSHSL, which sets policy for high school sport in Minnesota, has allowed trans girls to play on girls’ teams since 2015.) Would she veto an anti-trans law like the one Demuth tried to pass in 2023? If a Republican legislature passed such a law and send it to her desk, I would feel like I needed to call her up and yell at her, but I also think she would veto that law; Demuth would clearly sign it. Klobuchar is also a cosponsor of the pro-LGBTQ Equality Act, and cosponsored a law to legalize abortion nationally.
I will, and did, cast protest votes during primaries, but I do not fuck around with the general election, even if the polls say it’s a safe race. You just never know. Amy Klobuchar is unsatisfying; Lisa Demuth is terrible. I am going to vote for Amy Klobuchar, and would encourage my readers to vote for her as well. I think that a DFL legislature, if we can vote in another one of those, will pass good stuff, and when they do, she’ll sign it, just as the frequently unsatisfying, annoyingly moderate Tim Walz did.
This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.
I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.
