This is the Minneapolis (with some surrounding suburbs) seat currently held by Ilhan Omar. There is a primary on the DFL side, which you should plan to vote in if you live in this district. The Republican candidate (Dalia Al-Aqidi) is unopposed (not that it particularly matters. This is the bluest of blue districts. Although feel free to encourage your Republican relatives to donate heavily to Dalia’s campaign rather than anywhere their donations might matter.)

In the DFL primary, Don Samuels is once again challenging Ilhan Omar. (There are also two other candidates running but this is very definitely a race between Don and Ilhan. The tl;dr: vote for Ilhan.)

On the ballot:

Ilhan Omar
Don Samuels
Nate Schluter
Abena A. McKenzie

I’ll do Nate and Abena first, and you can feel free to scroll brusquely past as they both filed but neither is actually running.

Nate Schluter

Nate also ran in 2022, and had an actual website that year, with the impressive URL, “www.candidatenateschluter5thdistrictcandidateminneapolis.com.” My comment two years ago was that Nate liked football metaphors, was susceptible to scams, and expressed some gross anti-immigrant sentiments. That was all based on his website, which no longer exists. His campaign Facebook (linked above) has not been updated since 2022. Don’t vote for him.

Abena A. McKenzie

Literally the only information I found on Abena was a Facebook post from her cousin (“This beautiful lady is my big cousin Abena Mckenzie she is running for congress so people let’s give her our support vote for Abena Mckenzie Mn congress”) that linked to a Tiktok video in which someone (I assume Abena) smiles but says nothing. Like not just “nothing of substance,” nothing at all. The Tiktok account seems to have mainly vacation pictures. Her campaign affidavit lists no campaign address, so I’m honestly not sure how she even got on the ballot (you’re allowed to keep your residence address private but in that case, a campaign address is required.) Searching up her e-mail contact address got me to a business website in Yuma, California, and I’m honestly not sure she lives in Minnesota. It’s a mystery. Don’t vote for her.

Don Samuels

In a reasonable world, if you took a child on a bike outing and one of the children wound up drowning because you said “sure, you can go wading in the Mississippi River” even though you could not swim, you might not withdraw permanently from public life, but you certainly would not run for office again. But here we are.

When Don ran two years ago I made a list of his decades of buffoonery and I will recap here.

• In 2005, he explained that his family (he’s from Jamaica) had a leg up on everyone else because they were descended from house slaves rather than field slaves. (“The reason that my family got a leg up on the people in our village in Jamaica is that we were in the big house. We saw homework done. They saw books read. They saw the piano lessons. And that’s why my wife and I say, ‘we want our house to be the big house on our block.’ And we’re going to open it up to every kid on our block.”)

He also sat for an interview with the late Sarah Janacek and in his discussion of Katrina’s aftermath he said the following: “Those were dark faces on those women, almost bizarrely unblended. They looked like they were from Haiti or Africa. This is part of the unspoken evolution of race. We cannot seem to talk about the reality that lighter- skinned black people are more likely to escape poverty.” The “unspoken evolution” line made me flinch because I don’t think he was just talking here about the damage done by colorism, especially given his comments, also in 2005, about being descended from mixed-race people. (Don’s actual quote emphasized that he was descended from “mulatto men.”)

• In 2007, while a City Council member, he said that he thought North High should be burned down. Worth noting that this hyperbole was part of a push for vouchers.

• In 2012, he had an op-ed published in which he described confronting someone for public urination, who then stole Don’s phone, only Don used the Find my IPhone feature plus the services of the cops to retrieve it and have the thief arrested, at which point he delivered a long lecture to the thief. (Two notes about this. First, I have known a ton of people who’ve had Apple products stolen, have known exactly where they are thanks to Find My iPhone, and usually have had zero luck getting cops to help them get their devices back. Second, there are multiple spots in this story that had a distinct “AND THEN EVERYONE CLAPPED” vibe.)

• Don was a Vikings stadium supporter and after voting to approve it in 2013 (overriding the law that was supposed to require a municipal referendum) he had this comment about being surprised to be handed “an envelope with … a couple grand” from trade unions. This was at least less corrupt than his giddy comments made it sound. Overriding the will of the people to build a giant sports palace was, and remains, bullshit.

• In 2014, he called the cops on a hot dog giveaway being run by a neighborhood organization trying to encourage people to vote. He said he thought they were selling the hot dogs illegally. They had a large sign saying “Free Hot Dogs” and were doing this right outside their organization’s office, which Don had been to. (There’s a video of the conversation between the organizers and the cop that includes the cop saying in a slightly confused tone, “I’m here … for the grilling of the food,” which clarifies that Don literally called 911 over this.) (In 2021, he claimed in a Facebook thread about this that there had been repeated grilling incidents and it was a fire hazard.)

• In 2021, he endorsed fake Democrat and shameless grifter Mickey Moore and only retracted his endorsement because it turned out Mickey didn’t live in the district. He also went driving around in his underwear to pursue a guy who was rifling his car for change. And having sued in 2020 to force Minneapolis to hire more police, he sued in 2021 to have the public safety charter amendment tossed off the ballot. This was in cooperation with the (right-wing) Center for the American Experiment; additional friendly ties to CAE are documented here (or see this Twitter thread).

• The drowning happened in 2020 and the details are here. Don can’t swim. When two of the little boys lost their footing and were pulled away by the current, Don’s wife Sondra was the only one who could go after them, and one of the children drowned. This happened in the summer of 2020 and was a heartbreaking, awful accident.

Which Don joked about when he ran in 2022. (In response to someone talking about the incident and the incredible hubris involved in running for office a a year and a half after a child died because of your poor judgment, Don tweeted, “Can’t swim but can govern.”)

When I first saw that tweet, I honestly just assumed that “donsamuels49” was a satirical troll with extremely bad taste. I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out this was actually Don joking about the death of a child who was in his care.

• This year, while complaining on a podcast that Ilhan was unresponsive to her constituents, Don said, “you’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.” I kind of get what he was trying to say here (that she’s cute and attractive, but this doesn’t make up for what he sees as her failings) but even reframed the way I think he meant it, that’s a gross way to talk about a woman in politics. He also proceeded to deny having said any of this.
  
• Don’s campaign put up “Missing” posters on utility poles with Ilhan’s photo. He’s been heavily criticized for trivializing the issue of missing and murdered BIPOC women. The thing that bugs me about these ads is the delivery, the fact that they are posted up in a way that makes them look like an actual “missing person” flyer, because that genuinely is a twist of the knife to anyone who’s ever looked at a flyer to see if maybe they’ve seen that person. (The “MISSING: your congressional representative” rhetoric is kind of standard. This approach to the advertisements absolutely isn’t.)

Ilhan Omar

You probably know at this point whether you like Ilhan Omar or not. In any given two-year period, there’s stuff she’s done that I really like, and stuff she’s done that really pisses me off. She had two major controversies recently, so I will talk about those.

• The speech about Somali interests. Back in January, Ilhan delivered a speech in Somali to a group of Somali supporters. It got mistranslated and the mistranslation has been widely circulated by Republicans (because Republicans haaaaaaaaaaaate Ilhan). Here’s the Star Trib article with an accurate translation and the translation that was circulated. She basically said, “as Somalis in America you have the same rights as anyone else to ask your representatives to do stuff; I, your representative, am Somali, and will represent your concerns” (on, let me just add, a foreign policy issue that 99.9% of non-Somali Americans know nothing about and don’t care about — a port deal between Ethiopia and the breakaway republic Somaliland. Do I know anything about this topic? No. This is, in fact, part of what I value about having a representative democracy: I do not have to have a take on every single thing our government has to have a take on.) Anyway, if you’ve heard versions of the speech where she supposedly said “The U.S. government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do,” she literally did not say that.
  
• The line about Jewish students. During the campus protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza, which Ilhan’s daughter participated in, Ilhan said, “all Jewish kids should be kept safe. […] We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” The fact that she suggested that some Jewish students were pro-genocide was viewed as super problematic and the Republicans tried to censure her (I can’t find anything saying they actually succeeded, just that a censure resolution was introduced). I am, once again, really not interested in having an extended discussion of Israel in my space and trying to parse out the exact lines one might draw between “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes but not actually genocide, just war crimes,” honestly. I’ll just say, I don’t actually have a problem with her framing here.

I would unhesitatingly vote for Ilhan to be re-elected.

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