A NOTE REGARDING THIS WHOLE POST: I am going to do a Real Post about both the 61A primary and the 62B primary, but not until the filing deadline (June 4th). In the meantime, be aware that this information may be totally out of date — I put this together mainly to motivate people in 61A and 62B to become delegates to their Senate District convention, since DFL endorsement can play such a huge role in getting people elected.
I’m not going to worry about personally endorsing anyone or assembling a lot of in-depth information until we actually get into primary season (lots of people drop out after conventions, especially if there’s an endorsement, and other people get in late) but given the really short turnaround here I’m going to provide some basic info on the people running. I will try to update this page as I learn stuff / as people get in.
Caucuses are happening on Tuesday, February 27th. (The Presidential Primary, which thank goodness is no longer part of the caucus process, happens on March 5th, Super Tuesday.) If you would like to participate in the Senate District Convention to endorse a candidate, go to your caucus or submit a non-attendee form and ask to become a delegate (or alternate). I think all the Senate District Conventions are happening in person this year. For more information on how all this works, here’s a set of video guides.
The caucus/convention process determines who gets the DFL Endorsement. There is still a primary in the fall (and it may be contested, even if everyone on this page abides by endorsement). DFL Endorsement is a big boost, though — it comes with money and volunteer support and mailings and quite a few voters rely heavily on the DFL Endorsement to determine who to vote for.
If you’re wondering about other reps who might be retiring, there’s a list here. And here is a huge, comprehensive list of races and candidates!
Important note for the 61A and 62B people: you do not need to decide, before you go to the caucus, which candidate you’ll support. Just go (or send the form) and pick your favorite candidate at your leisure over the next month.
Also! If you go to your Senate District convention in Minneapolis, stick around to vote for delegates to the US House District 5 convention, in support of Ilhan Omar, not Don Samuels. (Or Tim Peterson.)
Minnesota House 62B
The current rep is Hodan Hassan; she’s announced she’s not running again. Currently hoping to replace her:
Londel French is a former Park Board commissioner. I’ve written about him in the past, when he first ran and after he’d served a term. Endorsed by Keith Ellison, Angela Conley, and some other high-profile people. [ETA 2/26]: Also Stonewall DFL, Sheigh Freeberg, State Rep Cedric Frazier, Samantha Pree-Stinson, and FYI if you want the full list for these, scrolling Twitter feeds is probably your best bet. (Editing 2/29 to add Nelson Inz and Robin Wonsley.)
Ira Jourdain is a Minneapolis School Board member who is not running for re-election. I missed his contested election in 2016 and didn’t write about him; when he ran for re-election he was unopposed. No endorsements yet (that I found); he did get an anti-endorsement from Ashley Fairbanks over on Bluesky. [3/18] Ira was endorsed by the DFL Senior Caucus.
Bill Emory is a Policy Aid and Director of Constituent Services at Hennepin County. He is endorsed by Amy Brendemoen (St. Paul City Council person) and Becky Alper (Park Board commissioner). [ETA 2/26] Also endorsed by Robin Garwood (long-time aid to former City Council rep Cam Gordon), former School Board member Kimberly Caprini,
Again, a reminder: you do not need to decide right now which of these people you support (and more people may get into the race). If you are a delegate to the convention, you should have the opportunity to talk to all of them and ask them about the issues you are most concerned about.
AK Hassan (added 2/24)
Announcement is here; there’s a website linked on his Facebook page, but it doesn’t seem to lead to anything helpful. AK Hassan spent a term on the Park Board; here’s what I wrote about him when he ran for re-election in 2021. (The summary is, he was not good at the job.) (update: he’s now suspended his campaign.)
Anquam Mahamoud (added 2/24)
Announcement is here. Describes herself as “a Black Muslim woman, a healthcare policy expert, and a leader in substance treatment and mental health clinics.” I’m guessing this is her LinkedIn. She has endorsements from AK Hassan and (current, retiring Rep) Hodan Hassan.
Minnesota House 61A
Update on this race: the DFL House District Convention was held on 3/23, and adjourned without an endorsement. Some of these people will probably drop out. You can read Josh Martins’ Twitter thread about the convention here and watch videos of the candidate speeches and Q&A taken by WedgeLive here.
The current rep is Frank Hornstein; he’s announced he’s not running for re-election. Currently hoping to replace him:
Katie Jones ran previously for the Ward 10 City Council seat (when Lisa Bender retired), losing to Aisha Chughtai; here’s what I wrote about her at the time. She works at an energy-related nonprofit and has been talking about “fifteen-minute cities” since before the right wing was scaremongering about them. She is endorsed by former Park Board commissioner Chris Meyer. She did an interview with Southwest Voices. She is the Ward 10 rep on the Capital Long Range Improvement Committee (CLIC) and several people spoke highly of her work there.
Isabel Rolfes is a Legislative Assistant in the Minnesota House, and has worked as state legislative staff in various capacities, and as a campaign manager. I couldn’t find any endorsements yet but I think she’s likely to have some soon. (I couldn’t find a ton of information about her generally beyond her website and her LinkedIn — she locked down her personal social media, reasonably, but it means there’s just not a ton out there that I could find.) [ETA 2/25] She is endorsed by Brad Tabke, the DFL State House Rep from 54A, which is Shakopee, and by Rep. Kaela Berg of 55B. She did an interview with Southwest Voices.
Dylan McMahon is a Finance Manager for UnitedHealth. He served on the City of Minneapolis Long-Range Improvements Committee and as his Senate District chair. His older Tweets are heavily about urbanist issues (more housing, less street space reserved for cars). When someone questioned the stuff he’s clicked “Like” on in the past, he took his account private for a bit, nuked absolutely all his likes, then re-opened his account. (I would probably do something similar, tbh, I am a profligate liker of things on Twitter, including some that are entirely by accident, it’s easy to do on a phone.) If he has any endorsements, I wasn’t able to find them.
[ETA 2/25] Some other notes on Dylan: according to multiple reports, he does not live in the district. (He lives in 61B, and is reportedly planning to move if he gets endorsed.) More problematically, as the former Senate District Chair, he planned the convention that’s going to endorse a candidate. Briana Rose Lee (Minneapolis DFL Chair) has questioned the ethics of this on Twitter. Multiple times. Dan Thomas (@DanTheRulesNerd on Twitter) chimed in to say that it’s explicitly against the rules, and tweeted a screenshot of the applicable bit.
The applicable bit reads as follows. (It’s in the DFL Constitution and Bylaws, which you can find here. Article III, Section 7, Subsection C: “Bylaw. Party officials, with the exception of the State DFL Chair and Vice Chairs, are allowed to run for public elected office as long as the party official has no direct involvement in the planning or execution of the relevant endorsing convention, except in the advisory role given any candidate. Under no
circumstance could a party official who has direct responsibility for an endorsing convention run for the office in which that convention is endorsing.” If he had direct involvement in the planning, it seems pretty clear to me that he cannot run for endorsement this cycle.
The other thing that’s pretty clear is that a lot of Dylan’s support is coming from the Senior Caucus / Operation Safety Now wing of the local DFL. Although rumor has it that Scott Graham is just about to get in.
Dylan did an interview with Southwest Voices. Over on his website, under “Why Now,” he says, “When Frank called me, my first thought wasn’t about myself. It was about how a transportation and environmental justice champion has made his imprint on the State of Minnesota. It was about how the Minnesota House would be losing a Jewish legislator right as we’re seeing a rise in antisemitism.” The “we’re losing a Jewish legislator” framing made me wonder if he was Jewish. His interview clarifies that he’s Catholic (or at least, he grew up in a Catholic family.)
On March 16th, the Minneapolis DFL Senior Caucus endorsed Dylan. (Note for those who don’t know this: the DFL Senior Caucus is currently one of the most conservative DFL groups — heavily in favor of parking minimums, more cops, etc.)
Scott Graham [added 2/25 based on rumors]
Scott Graham ran for the Ward 7 City Council seat in 2021 and I did not like him; you can read all the reasons why. (He did not try for endorsement.)
Jared Brewington [added 3/18 because he just hopped into the race]
(This is why I normally don’t write blog posts until primary season and just let other people worry about endorsement season: there’s an actual filing deadline, which makes it clear exactly who’s going to be on the ballot.)
Jared Brewington is a restaurateur who runs (ran? I think it might have closed) a fried chicken restaurant called Official Fried Chicken. The vibe of his website is “look what a great buddy of Jacob Frey I am,” which makes his timing here kind of startling (he seems like he’d have been the pick of the DFL Senior Caucus if he’d gotten in earlier!)
Trevor Turner
Trevor Turner jumped into the race on the morning of the convention. There is a screenshot of his e-mail here. Pretty sure this is his Twitter. I’m doing no further research on him since who knows if he’ll even stay in (I hope not, there are enough candidates already, most of whom had the forethought to get in the race earlier than the literal morning of the endorsing convention.) (I feel like getting into the race post-convention is less obnoxious than jumping in THE DAY OF and wasting everyone’s time.)
So yeah wow. If you’re familiar with Will, you probably (like me) should spend less time on Twitter. I was a little taken aback to find out he was local, because his Twitter focus has been primarily national. The best article I found to explain his whole deal was this Racket profile from earlier in the month.
I don’t follow Will, but his tweets constantly cross my feed anyway, either because one of my friends thinks he said something smart and retweeted it, or because one of my friends thinks he said something bad and quote-tweeted with a bunch of snark. I don’t actually want to go through his (enormous) (you cannot even fucking imagine how much this man tweets) Twitter archive to evaluate how often people get mad at him even though he’s right and how much of his own snark is normal for Twitter and so on and so forth, I will instead focus on this:
[eta: Will got his website up on 2/24]. I don’t have a link to a website here because Will doesn’t have a website up yet. There is a website circulating: it was created by right-wing trolls who scooped up the WillStancil dot com URL because Will didn’t fucking register it before initiating his campaign. (ETA: he says they scooped it up before he decided to run. It does not sound like they’ve had it for long, though.) The troll website has real links to his fundraiser to add veracity but also a “Volunteer” link connected to a Google Form that collects people’s personal information. (There’s also a “Kody Hurst” on Twitter claiming to be Will’s campaign manager. He is not. I don’t know who Will’s campaign manager is, but Kody Hurst is part of the overall disinformation campaign here.)
Will’s campaign has also caused this massive influx of right-wing trolls who are harassing Katie Jones with a degree of vitriol and threat you rarely see in a local race. (They are entirely focused on Katie, from what I can tell, because none of them have noticed there are other people also in the race.) These trolls are posing as Will Stancil supporters who are supporting him with racism, misogyny, and transphobia that Will does not in fact countenance or welcome, obviously, but it’s being directed at Katie Jones; her mentions are a horrifying sewer. It’s not great.
I do not think Will is handling anything about this situation with the trolls, the fake website, the fake campaign manager, etc., particularly well, but at least, as of 2/24, he now has a website: www.willstancil.org/.
On March 16th, the Minneapolis DFL Senior Caucus rated Will “acceptable.”. (Note for those who don’t know this: the DFL Senior Caucus is currently one of the most conservative DFL groups — heavily in favor of parking minimums, more cops, etc.)
Will Tell Stories For Food 