This is the seat currently held by Betty McCollum. On the DFL side of the ballot:
On the Republican side:
Gene Rechtzigel
Paul Wikstrom
Paul Xiong
(Minnesota doesn’t require you to register as a party member to vote in primaries, but in any given primary, you have to pick one party and stick with it throughout. My friends who work as election judges have people who want to litigate this every single time. If you vote in more than one party’s races, you have spoiled your ballot.)
I live in St. Paul, so Betty McCollum is my US House Rep. She’s in the progressive wing of the Democratic party but is not as fighty as some of the other people in that part of the party (like Ilhan) if that makes sense. For example, she’s a long-standing critic of Israel (she’s literally one of the longest-standing supporters of Palestinian human rights in Congress) but sticks with moderate language while talking about Israel’s war crimes (she prefers the term “human rights abuses”).
My personal recent frustrations with Betty: she voted last week for the KIDS Act, which is an Internet censorship / age-verification bill. (There are a lot of problems with age-verification bills; one is that they’re basically data-exposure bills.) She voted last month for the “Combating Organized Retail Crime Act” bill, which expands the criteria where shoplifting can be federally prosecuted. (This bill is 100% a response to the claim that we’re in an “organized retail theft epidemic” which is just horseshit. Or possibly it’s 50% that, 50% an opportunity for the Feds to increase surveillance. Both are bad!) She’s a Democrat in a safe seat and did not have to vote for these.
Anyway, if you’re here because you are mad about these votes (or other things she’s done) and you want to cast a protest vote, and you just want to know if Aswar Rahman is evil: no, he’s not evil, you can totally vote for him if you want.
Aswar came to speak at my caucus, which I was chairing and that was very distracting so I don’t actually remember what he said, just that he was a very dynamic speaker. He has run for office before: he ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 2017 on a “we’re going to save money by cutting stuff based on vibes” platform; he dropped out to do a reality TV series and endorsed Frey. In 2019 he was starting a jeans company and in 2020 he ran for office again, this time in the 60A Special Election. If you read his bio (which is still up but doesn’t appear to be linked from his front page anymore) you’ll see that prior to all this he had “a passion for filmmaking” and made some movies. After the reality TV show (I think after? I may have the sequence wrong) he worked for Dean Phillips and Amy Klobuchar doing digital content. He moved to Los Angeles in 2021 (to try to make it in movies, I think?) but then “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shook Aswar to his core” and he dropped everything and flew to Poland.
He started a nonprofit to bring refugees to Minnesota (the Star Trib wrote about it in 2022) and then used this organization to help US citizens get out of Israel immediately after the October 7th attacks. This organization seems to have run for about a year and a half before overextending itself and going bankrupt. In July 2024, there was a student-led mass uprising in Bangladesh, where Aswar is originally from, which led to him getting interested in the inefficiencies in the textile trade, so his next project was a company called AmeriBangla to sell American cotton to Bangladesh. (That still seems to be a going concern.)
Anyway, my point here is this: Aswar has a ton of energy and a ton of charisma. He also lacks focus and has a tendency to get in over his head.
His website back in February also had a detailed immigration plan (not linked from the home page now but still up). He presented it as a plan that would “FIX IMMIGRATION” (that’s the title of the page). It would, in fact, probably mitigate a number of problems in the tiny corner of immigration that is refugee resettlement specifically (which, as you recall, he worked in with a nonprofit) but it’s absolutely not an Immigration Plan in the sense of dealing with all the other fairly complex pieces, including the key one of “getting the plan you want (whatever it is) through the US Senate.”
His website now is heavily focused on attacking Betty McCollum’s support for the DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act, which he describes as a “Betty McCollum’s inhumane attack on my refugees.” His website centers on that as a reason for running against Betty (although that’s definitely not why he got into the race, since she didn’t sign on to the bill until February 11th, a week after the caucuses.)
So let’s talk about the DIGNIDAD Act of 2025. It’s not, in fact, a great bill. The National Immigration Law Center describes it as “an outdated and harmful approach to immigration reform.” It does provide a path to citizenship for some DACA recipients and it provides a type of renewable legal status (but not a path to permanent residency or citizenship) for some undocumented immigrants; it also has a big pile of money for new detention centers for asylum seekers, more walls, more enforcement, etc., because the tactic for years now from Democrats has been to offer more money for border enforcement in an attempt to get Republicans to sign on to literally any sort of immigration reform. This is a bipartisan bill; it was introduced by Maria Salazar, a shitty Florida Republican, but with 16 immediate cosponsors, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. It looks to me like as they’ve had cosponsors sign on, they’ve tried to make sure the numbers stayed close to equal.
I’m going to say that under a Trump presidency, this has zero chance of passage because it has any amnesty provisions. But it is in fact a good example of the problem with the Democratic party’s approach to immigration: in an attempt to act reasonable and bipartisan, they offer up increasingly draconian enforcement mechanisms in exchange for literally any movement on immigration reform, and we wind up getting the increasingly draconian enforcement and zero actual progress on immigration reform.
Anyway, I wrote to Betty to ask why she signed on to this bill, if her staff can unpack that for me? What was it about this bill she thought was worth supporting? She doesn’t have a news release about it and doesn’t seem to have spoken about it publicly (that I could turn up). (I wrote to her campaign site. If I hear back I will update.)
But a lot of Aswar’s framing of the bill and Betty’s sponsorship of it just feels like… I don’t know, like someone who literally does not know how this sort of thing works. From his website: “Before Betty signed on, less than 10% of Congress sponsored this bill. They crucially lacked a prominent Democratic supporter. […] When Betty signed on to sponsor this MAGA-written immigration bill, it was the victory that Rep. Maria Salazar was praying for. Betty became the most powerful member of Congress — Democrat or Republican — to sign on for this law. She legitimized a fringe effort into a serious law that can realistically pass.” Nineteen Democrats had signed on before Betty and zero have signed on after her (she signed on in February). Betty is, I think, the most senior Democrat to sign on but one of the original cosponsors, Adriano Espaillat, is also on the Appropriations Committee and is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Also the Democrats aren’t in power and also there’s no companion Senate bill.
Anyway, this was a whole lot of rabbit-hole-diving to say, if you are mad at Betty for whatever reason, you can go ahead and vote for Aswar, he doesn’t seem to be evil. He is absolutely not going to win the primary: someone online was complaining that they’d like to door-knock for him but he has no way to sign up to volunteer, which is not the mark of a serious candidate. I’m probably going to vote for Betty because my bar for casting a protest vote is actually pretty high (Amy Klobuchar has really pissed me off) and while I think he’s non-evil I am not at all convinced that he’d be competent in Congress.
And a quick tour of the Republicans:
Gene is a perennial candidate who’s been running for stuff long enough to have been made fun of by the City Pages (that’s a link to my blog post from 2020, because the City Pages is not online) which said “In the age of widespread disinformation campaigns like QAnon, it’s almost refreshing to hear from a good old-fashioned solitary crank like Gene.” That blog post gives you a pretty good overview of his views, which don’t seem to have changed much. He won the Republican primary a few years ago but needless to say did not win the general election.
Paul Wikstrom is the GOP-endorsed candidate in the primary. He’s a software engineering manager at Raytheon (per his LinkedIn), where he has worked for eight years. (Before that he worked for 17 years at Medtronic, so he’s someone who left the medical device industry to build weapons systems.) His website is top to bottom about fraud and how bad it is, so I sent him an e-mail to ask if he would support HR 7852 (the “No Getting Rich in Congress Act”) and HR 8309 (a law that would prevent Presidents from enriching themselves with public funds)? That was a week ago and you’ll be shocked to hear he has not responded.
Paul Xiong’s website says he’s a former law enforcement officer and was the chair of the Hmong 18 Council. I think I found his LinkedIn and like the other Paul, his actual job is in IT. Unlike the other Paul, he still works in health care rather than in weapons systems, so, point to Paul Xiong there. His social media is full of posts that make me think there’s some drama happening I can’t find. He’s apparently supported Democrats in the past and also got some pushback on his Easter post because he’s not a Christian.
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 Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven all (probably) have signed copies. (I also signed copies at Next Chapter, and will be making my way to other bookstores as time allows!)
Will Tell Stories For Food 