Tag Archives: Michael Baskins

Primary Election 2026: Minneapolis School Board (At-Large)

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There are two open seats, and this race is not done with Instant Runoff, you just vote for your two favorites. After the primary, four people will advance. Five are running, so only one is actually getting dropped before the general election. This is a nonpartisan race, but the DFL does do endorsements and has endorsed two of the candidates.

This race appears on all ballots in Minneapolis. There are also some seats that cover just part of the city that will be up for election in November, but I’m pretty sure none have primaries.

On the ballot:

Christin Crabtree (DFL-endorsed)
Stephanie Johnson
Clifton “CJ” Henderson
Collin Beachy (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Michael Baskins

There was a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters on July 16th; it was attended by Christin, Collin, and Stephanie, and you can watch it here. (You can also read a liveblog of it on Bluesky.)

Clifton “CJ” Henderson

CJ Henderson has no website, no Facebook, and did not reply to my e-mail asking if they had anything about their goals or campaign they wished to share (though possibly my e-mail went to spam). They do have a single Instagram post which I have linked to. The post says, “I’m running to bring fresh leadership, stronger student support, transparency, and real community engagement to MPS. This campaign is about students, families, educators, and the future of Minneapolis.” The complete lack of other communication with the public about the campaign gives me a lot of skepticism about this person’s commitment to transparency or real community engagement. I would not vote for CJ Henderson.

Michael Baskins

Michael Baskins is an engineer who previously ran for Minneapolis City Council in Ward 2. He was funded by We Love Minneapolis but not endorsed by All Of Minneapolis, possibly because he spent 20% of his campaign funds on clothing and wound up in court over it. His school board campaign website does not mention his City Council run and he’s not wearing a suit in any of the photos.

The fact that Baskins has made super questionable choices with campaign money seems kind of disqualifying for a school board position. (Also, the fact that he was supported in his campaign run by the Greater Frey Mayoral Campaign is a big strike against him.) I wouldn’t vote for him.

Stephanie Johnson

Stephanie Johnson came to the school board forum but does not have a website. When I e-mailed her last month she said she was working on getting one up. (I don’t think this has happened.) Here’s what she added regarding her background, goals, etc:

– I have been a MPS parent since 2017. [classroom volunteer, reading intervention support, yearbook committee, pta, and site council at both elementary and middle school (MPS)]

– I have been teaching since 1999. [primarily as a community college instructor [psychology, ELL, and reading & study skills, but also as a K-12 special education teacher and reading teacher; multiple faculty leadership roles and collegewide work, including shared governance]

As an at-large candidate, my goal is to strengthen the education experience for current MPS students. In other words, work to ensure what MPS says students experience and learn is happening for all students in all MPS schools. Much of this relies on the conditions of learning and teaching and as one of nine directors on the school board I will invest time in listening, asking questions, seeking answers, and considering all possible options in order to provide a more stable foundation from which to grow. 

For me, this run for office is an opportunity to serve my community. While I am an expert in my family’s experience with MPS, I know and want to know more about the experience of others because our children, those currently in school and those in each next generation deserve the very best we can do and to me, we are not yet there. 

I am not backed, financially or otherwise, by any group. I am a one-person campaign, my own manager.

I only watched part of the forum. What stood out was that she talked a lot about working conditions for staff (including administrative staff) and retention of teachers and administrators. She was also a slow talker who was frustrated by the time constraints of a forum.

Collin Beachy

Collin is a special education teacher who has served on the school board for four years and is running for another term. Everyone seems to genuinely like him. School Board member is a job that pays poorly, takes up a lot more time than it’s supposed to, involves getting yelled at a bunch, and is in general a factory for burnout, which means people rarely run for re-election and this creates real issues with institutional memory. So I approach Minneapolis school board races with a pro-incumbent bias when someone’s running again, and I definitely think Collin would continue to be an asset to the school board.

Christin Crabtree

Christin is someone I know through social media (Minneapolis Bluesky, mainly); she was heavily involved in organizing against ICE this winter. She’s the kind of person who years ago I’d say “have you ever thought about running for School Board?” and I’m excited that she’s running.

I would vote for Christin and Collin. I’ll note that I think Christin, Collin, Stephanie, and Michael are all going to make it through the primary because CJ doesn’t seem to actually be campaigning in any way. If you’re unhappy with Christin or Collin I would pick Stephanie over Michael despite her lack of a website. This is one of the years where I think the DFL endorsees are both good choices and the obvious people to vote for, though.

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 also have a new book! 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 in signed copies.

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 2

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One of the problems I have been running into is an increasing sense of perfectionism towards my posts, where I feel like I need to do a deep dive not only into the candidates but into every accomplishment they list. I’m going to just go ahead and write this up and post it despite the fact that I feel like I have slightly incomplete information. I got a Moderna COVID shot today and tomorrow the odds that I will feel like working on a blog post are 50% at best.

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Michael Baskins (DFL)
Shelley Madore (DFL)
Max Theroux (DFL)
Robin Wonsley (DSA, incumbent)

So before I get into this race I’m going to talk briefly about all the PACs because they have similar names and it’s frankly pretty confusing.

  • There was We Love Minneapolis. Presumably called that because so many of them love Minneapolis, but don’t live there. (Obligatory note: neither do I, but at least I live in St. Paul and not, say, Wayzata.) Taylor Dahlin wrote about We Love Minneapolis in June. She noted that it’s chaired by (GOP donor) Andrea Corbin, and run by Joe Radinovich and Nico Woods. (Two of the most conservative people in the Minnesota DFL.) The money overwhelmingly came from landlords with large holdings; progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many noted that 68% of their money came from landlords responsible for hundreds of property violations.
  • There is Thrive Minneapolis. In July, We Love Minneapolis shut down and Thrive Minneapolis seems to be the replacement. Taylor wrote about this group in July. She noted that it’s chaired by Martha Holton Dimick (the very conservative prosecutor who ran against Mary Moriarty in 2022), and again heavily funded by landlords and developers, many of whom do not live in Minneapolis.
  • There is All of Mpls, which is doing endorsements. Legally I am sure they are not actually the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat but if you click on the website you might be forgiven for thinking they basically look like the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat, especially since they have a link to “Thank Mayor Frey” (with a canned, adulatory e-mail). They have endorsed Becka Thompson in Ward 12, which is frankly inexcusable, and if I were Shelley Madore, I’d be pretty annoyed about that. I described them two years ago as “a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.” In retrospect I’m not sure that’s harsh enough. What they want is for Mayor Frey, who is frankly incompetent even if you like his politics, to have a rubber-stamp City Council.
  • On the other side there is the progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many. I like Minneapolis for the Many! They also do endorsements.

One final note about some of the people involved in Love/Thrive/All Of Mpls. On September 9th there was a Zoom meeting of the DFL Feminist Caucus where the people in charge and their friends engaged in some really gross treatment of trans Democrats who showed up and ran for offices. (There’s an open letter about what happened at that meeting here.) Joe Radinovich was there and voting with the hostile majority. Martha Holton Dimick nominated Latonya Reeves, who was one of the people huffing and eye-rolling over the concept of respecting someone’s pronouns. These people are out of step with things I consider to be core DFL values. If someone has sought and accepted these endorsements, I do not trust them. (Also, the reason the old guard of the DFL Feminist Caucus closed ranks was to defend the right of their friend to continue to hold party office despite her involvement in a fatal crash that has been charged as vehicular homicide. I’ve seen this sort of “how dare you show up in our clubhouse and make trouble” gatekeeping in other contexts and it’s toxic and awful.)

So! Now that you know all that, let’s move on.

Michael Baskins

Michael Baskins was funded by We Love Minneapolis but then not endorsed by All Of Mpls. I wondered why this was and did a little digging. I’m not sure but possibly it’s because he’s being taken to campaign finance court for spending $1758 on designer suits and clothing? Also his website was not proofread, to the point that his “Endorsements” page has a stock photo and what I think is stock text (“Personal data is only stored when voluntarily given by you for a determined purpose e.g. in context of a registration, a survey, a contest, or in performance of a contract….”) I would absolutely not vote for him.

Shelley Madore

Shelley Madore was a suburban state legislator for one term, and moved to Minneapolis in 2018. Her website tries hard to put a progressive spin on her beliefs but she also answered the All of Mpls screening questionnaire and you can see her responses here. One response that caught my eye was about the Labor Standards Board that Mayor Frey vetoed: she wants the 50/50 composition (half workers, half business owners) that Frey and Vetaw advocated for (the version that passed the council was a 3-way split with community stakeholders also included). (Mayoral Candidate DeWayne Davis had a good comment on what that board would have meant: he said that business owners already have the ear of the mayor. A Labor Standards Board should exist to give workers the opportunity to be heard.)

Madore’s answers to that questionnaire are overwhelmingly in line with what the landlords and downtown council and so on would want from her. She centers their problems, opposes any form of rent control, treats “Public Safety” as a thing that is provided entirely by cops, and is pro-shotspotter.

Also she’s backed by All of Mpls and We Love/Thrive Minneapolis and for all the reasons given above, that’s reason enough not to vote for her.

Max Theroux

Max Theroux’s website didn’t show up on Google but after I initially posted that he didn’t have a website, his campaign manager contacted me with the link. He is a U of M student and his major issues are affordable housing, policing (he wants lots, lots more of it) and street repairs. He has experience as a legislative intern and thinks that a district that’s half students should have a student representing them at City Hall. I would not rank him.

Robin Wonsley

Robin Wonsley was first elected in 2021 (defeating Cam Gordon) and I am happy with a lot of the stuff Robin has done. She spearheaded a sidewalk plowing pilot. (I love the idea of public sidewalk plowing and would happily pay for that. Of course, here in St. Paul we’d probably want to start with public alley plowing.) She was one of the authors of a new policy to charge a fee that goes to the city when someone wants to hire an off-duty police officer. (This entirely makes sense to me: off-duty cops use city property in off-duty work; and it makes them significantly less available for overtime work for the city while also wearing them out. The police officer who shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk had worked a seven-hour security gig immediately before starting his ten-hour policing shift.) Robin also championed a new city policy to charge our largest carbon emitters a fee, which Frey vetoed but the Council overrode. (Here’s the thing I hit a wall on researching: this apparently was supposed to start being charged in July. Was it? Someone on Bluesky said yes but I couldn’t find any news articles about it, possibly because Google wanted to surface all the stories about the veto and the veto override. But you know what, it’s fine, I do not need to actually know this, I can give Robin the credit for pushing it through and just put the post up, it’s fine.)

And needless to say, not only is she NOT endorsed by All of Mpls or We Heart/Thrive Minneapolis, Thrive Minneapolis treats her as PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE in the slide show someone leaked.

I would totally vote for Robin Wonsley, and not rank anyone else in Ward 2.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)