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Daily Reformer: GOP unease about Doug Wardlow [1]
['More From Author', 'August', 'J. Patrick Coolican']
Date: 2022-08-09
This is ripped from this morning’s Daily Reformer. Subscribe to our daily newsletter here.
Happy primary election day!
Our story from Michelle Griffith and Deena Winter is a handy guide to how to find your polling station and what races to watch.
We’ll have full team coverage tonight.
For ye political junkies, some primary thoughts:
Former GOP operative Michael Brodkorb tells me he’s hearing some unease among some Republicans about the attorney general race. Tuesday’s primary features GOP-endorsed candidate Jim Schultz, who is widely viewed as the party’s best shot at breaking a 15-year statewide losing streak, against 2018 GOP nominee Doug Wardlow.
But perennial candidate Sharon Anderson, who was the GOP nominee in 1994, is also on the ballot. The question is whether Schultz and the Republican Party have been able to get the message out to GOP voters that he won the endorsement at the state convention.
Wardlow has been running nonstop for years and likely has decent name recognition from the 2018 race.
And, if Wardlow wins, that’s big trouble for November. “National storylines are manifested in Wardlow,” Brodkorb told me, referring to abortion and 2020 election conspiracies. (Recall that Wardlow was general counsel for pillow mogul Mike Lindell.) “This is Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and the most unsavory parts of the MAGA elements of the GOP, and that introduces all those characters, the MAGA Legion of Doom, into Minnesota.”
MAGA Legion of Doom is a great phrase.
Republican voters tend to back endorsed candidates, so I’m still having trouble seeing Wardlow pulling it out, but we live in strange times.
(You probably didn’t figure Mar-a-Lago getting raided by FBI agents Monday either, right?)
As on election days past, I extended a handful of operatives anonymity to make some predictions.
One of the Republican sources calls it for Schultz, albeit narrowly.
A couple operatives say Sens. Eric Pratt and Paul Utke are in trouble after losing the GOP endorsements at party convention.
Action 4 Liberty-backed candidate Tom Dippel was endorsed over Rep. Tony Jurgens, R-Cottage Grove, in the newly drawn Senate District 41.
Remember that far right Republican Reps. Steve Drazkowski and Cal Bahr are already moving over to the Senate.
Here’s the issue, as one GOP source told me: If you have 75 House seats and five loons, you can still pass bills. But if you have 38 Senate seats and five loons, now you can’t. So, Tuesday may decide just how functional a GOP majority we may have come next year.
Note that they don’t have this issue on the House side, where Republicans mostly took care of business at their conventions. But a fun one we’re watching is Rep. Erik Mortensen vs. former Rep. Bob Loonan. A GOP operative said this goes to Mortensen “decisively.”
On the Democratic side, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s race against Don Samuels is getting a lot of late buzz. I never viewed this as much of a race given Omar’s incumbency advantages, but a lot of people are trying to persuade me otherwise.
There’s also a handful of interesting legislative races on the DFL side, with a couple incumbents facing credible challengers.
The Hennepin County Attorney race also intrigues, as the state’s biggest team of prosecutors will have a new leader after November. The top two in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary move on. Names we hear most often are former Chief Public Defender Mary Moriarty, former judge Martha Holton Dimick and House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler.
And, we’ll see just how much CD1 has changed since it was represented as recently as 2018 by DFL Gov. Tim Walz. Brad Finstad, the GOP-endorsed candidate who worked for USDA in the Trump administration, faces former Hormel CEO Jeff Ettinger. If Ettinger can’t make it close there, we’ll know how much the district has changed — and how hostile the political environment is for Democrats outside bigger metros.
Remember: This is two elections in CD1, one to finish out the term of late Rep. Jim Hagedorn, and the other to determine who will face off in November. State Rep. Jeremy Munson is running in the GOP primary against Finstad.
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