There is a special election in Minnesota Senate District 60 (SD60), because the Senator there, Kari Dziedzic, tragically died of cancer in late December. It is happening extremely quickly — the primary is scheduled for January 14th, the general for January 28th. It’s a very blue district, so the primary is when the real contest will happen.

Here’s a map of the district:

If you’re not sure if you live in SD 60 or not, you can also check your address in the Polling Place Finder.

There are a couple of reasons the dates might shift: one of the candidates filed a complaint and requested the primary be delayed until U of M students are back on campus, since a lot of students live in the district. And, one of the other candidates appears to not be a resident of the district based on where he voted in November and there’s also a lawsuit to get him off the ballot. If you want to double check, here’s the page about the election which will get updated (probably much more promptly than my page will) if anything changes.

I am working on a full blog post about the SD60 special primary, which I should have up in another couple of days (fingers crossed). I am posting this post now because people are asking whether I’m going to write about it and I want to just answer that question (yes).

There is also a special election happening (same schedule, 14th and 28th) in House District 40B because the guy who won that race in November turned out not to be a resident of the district. (Which makes me even more irate with Mohamed Jama. There are eight Democrats on the ballot for SD60; do not vote for Mohamed Jama.) I will not be writing about 40B because no part of it is in either Minneapolis or St. Paul. If you live in 40B, my heartfelt advice is to elect a Democrat who lives in the district. (ETA: 40B is not holding a primary due to a lack of primary challengers, and will be going straight to a general election on the 28th.)

There is also a special election happening in parts of Ramsey County for a new County Commissioner and that is on February 11th. I already wrote about that one.

If you want to do your own research on the SD 60 race, you can find a list of candidates here; five of the DFLers filled out the questionnaire circulated by the SD 60 DFL and you can read their responses to learn more about their views on the SD 60 DFL website. I have been sort of live-blogging my candidate research on Bluesky and that thread starts here.

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