(C) Minnesota Reformer
This story was originally published by Minnesota Reformer and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
What Minnesota primary voters are saying at the polls • Minnesota Reformer [1]
['Christopher Ingraham', 'Max Nesterak', 'Deena Winter', 'Michelle Griffith', 'Ariana Figueroa', 'More From Author', '- August', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus']
Date: 2024-08-13
Minnesotans are energized by the fall election after Vice President Kamala Harris selected Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, but Tuesday’s primary election is turning out to be a relatively sleepy affair.
Republicans need to settle on a U.S. Senate candidate and vote in what could be a couple of close U.S. House races, while Democrats in Minneapolis and close suburbs will again choose between U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and former Minneapolis City Council Member Don Samuels. The primary will settle a smattering of state House contests, as well.
If you need information on how to vote and more about the biggest races, read our coverage here.
The Reformer fanned out across the metro and northwest Minnesota to talk to voters. Here’s some of what they told us so far.
Support for Samuels in the 5th
Ulysses Brown, 76, a retired machine operator with three grown children, said he voted for Samuels because he saw a photo of Omar posing with a gun, although he wasn’t sure it was real.
“TikTok lies a lot,” he said outside a polling place at a high-rise in northeast Minneapolis. (In 2019, a photo circulated on Facebook falsely identifying a woman checking an automatic weapon as Omar.)
He said he doesn’t think things are going well in Minnesota: “Because that’s the way the white man want.”
He said Black people have to work harder than white people for jobs — his top issue this election year — and he’s not happy with Walz. “Because he ain’t doing nothing.”
Mark Johnston, 55, also voted for Samuels because “He cares about Minnesota and not about Ethiopia,” seeming to refer to Omar’s east African origins, though Omar is from Somalia.
“We’ve got problems in Minnesota, and she’s worried about problems in her home country, and I honestly think she shouldn’t be here,” said the IT worker. “I think she’s been illegally gotten here.” (Omar is a legal immigrant.)
His top issue is crime, especially after several of his friends have been “accosted” by criminals, including one who was assaulted in a parking lot.
Overall, he thinks things are “not bad”in Minnesota, although he has some concerns about Walz, including how he and the DFL-controlled Legislature spent nearly all of a $17.5 billion surplus.
“I think we’re turning the economy around a bit, but I don’t walk at night anymore,” he said.
Alex Sloan, a 69-year-old retired University of Minnesota police officer and Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy, also voted for Samuels, citing Omar’s decision to pay $2.78 million to a political consulting firm co-owned by her husband in 2019-2020.
And, he said, “I can’t forget that she’s made remarks in the past that come across as pretty anti-semitic.”
Omar once said support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby.” She apologized.
“There seems to be some questions about the ethics of that, and Samuels just seems to me to be a better option; he strikes me as more ethical,” Sloan said after voting at Ellison High School in northeast Minneapolis.
His top issue is ethical government.
“What we all need is good governance, and the Republican Party has become the Trump cult, and they don’t want to govern. They want to rule, and that’s just completely antithetical to a democracy. And the only major party left that is interested in governing, that is interested in maintaining democracy, is the Democratic Party.”
He thinks Walz has been an “outstanding populist.”
“He’s just an ethical, moral man who’s about leadership, and that’s that is exactly what we need in all levels of government,” Sloan said.
Anna Thares, a 54-year-old ultrasound technician, said she voted for Samuels even though she likes Omar. Thares said Omar “stirs up a little bit more partisanship” and said it would be nice to have a member of Congress who doesn’t regularly make national headlines.
Thares, who lives in Minneapolis’ East Isles neighborhood, said she voted for Will Stancil for the House District 61A seat. Three Democratic candidates — Stancil, Katie Jones and Isabel Rolfes — are battling for the Minneapolis House seat after venerated Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, announced his retirement earlier this year.
“I think they’re all fairly similar, but I just randomly voted,” Thares said after voting at Temple Israel in Minneapolis.
Katherine Byrn, a 53-year-old teacher at the University of Minnesota, said she voted for Omar because she “kicks ass.” Bryn, after she cast her vote at the Walker Art Center, said she voted for Rolfes because she believes Rolfes can unite Democrats on a variety of issues.
Kerry Newstrom, a 45-year-old high school teacher in northeast Minneapolis, voted for Omar because we need women in elective office. She has no kids and called herself “a childless cat lady,” referring to disparaging comments made by Republican vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance.
Her top issues are maintaining funding for underprivileged people; women’s rights and taxing the “super-wealthy.”
She said Minnesota is doing “relatively well,” and Walz has done a great job, especially navigating the state through the pandemic and uprising after George Floyd’s police murder.
Don and Penny Hon of northeast Minneapolis both voted for Omar.
“I’ve been a raging progressive my whole life,” said Don Hon, a 70-year-old retired health care administrator. “I just think she’s done a bang-up job.”
Even though she’s “cute as a button” and a “little, little gal” she’s also “tough as nails,” he said.
His top concern is saving democracy and opposing the conservative initiative called Project 2025, which is a conservative blueprint for a second Trump term. The BBC recently described some highlights: “The document calls for the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and more.”
“I don’t want to see the country turn any more fascist than it already is,” Don Hon said.
Penny Hon, 63, said her top issues are human rights, women’s rights, health care and feeding the hungry. She, too, thinks Walz has done a “bang-up job.”
Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District
Michelle Volgren, 67, cast her Republican primary ballot for Wayne Johnson for state House and Joe Teirab for Congress at Park Senior High School in Cottage Grove.
“I’ll vote for a veteran anytime,” she said of Teirab, noting her late husband served in the U.S. Air Force during Vietnam.
Asked about Walz’s record serving for 24 years in the Army National Guard, Volgren said, “Yeah but he’s an educator … and I’m sorry but I don’t have a whole lot of respect for a lot of them.”
She said public school teachers “whine all the time” while making good money for only working nine months a year. She said she homeschooled two of her kids and sent the other two to private school on her husband’s blue-collar salary working for Anderson windows.
Needless to say, she won’t be supporting Walz for vice president in the fall.
Mary Heath, a retired retail manager from Apple Valley, voted for Royce White, the GOP-endorsed candidate for U.S. Senate, and Teirab.
She said she’s disgusted by Democrats allowing undocumented immigrants to get drivers’ licenses and tampons in the boys’ bathrooms in schools.
Walz has been called “Tampon Tim” in conservative circles on social media because of a new state law requiring school districts to provide free menstrual products. Walz is accused of requiring tampons be placed in both girls and boys bathrooms, but school districts have autonomy over where the products are placed.
“I’m a Christian. I have principles,” Heath said. “I’m a pro-life person, with exception, and the fact that you can come from any state now and get a full-term, almost full-term abortion, that was a big issue for me.”
Speaking with the Reformer, Teirab said he was humbled as the son of a Sudanese immigrant to be able to vote for himself for U.S. Congress at a church in Burnsville.
“It’s just utterly humbling, and I’m just very, very thankful to be an American, where we have the freedom to vote,” he said.
Teirab’s challenger, GOP-endorsed Tayler Rahm, suspended his campaign to work on re-electing Trump, but he still appears on the ballot and most voters interviewed by the Reformer didn’t know he had dropped out of the race.
Rahm’s campaign signs are also still up around the district and his campaign literature has reportedly continued to arrive in voters’ mailboxes, raising questions of whether he’d fully dropped out of the race.
Teirab brushed off the possibility that Rahm might win.
“Tayler Rahm is a true patriot … and I’m thankful for the race that he ran,” Teirab said. “I’m focused right now on uniting a party to make sure that we take the fight to Angie Craig and that we elect Republicans up and down the ballot in November.”
Tom Murr, 74, of Apple Valley voted for U.S. Rep. Angie Craig and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, neither of whom face a serious primary challenger.
Murr, who is retired, said his biggest issues are LGBT rights and abortion rights.
He said he’s pleased with the state of the state and more hopeful about Democrats’ prospects in November since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“He’s got 50 years of experience … He’s still capable. He’s not capable of winning,” Murr said. “And who knows where he’ll be in two years. I mean, I’m 74 years old and I feel myself sliding a little bit. It’s not like I’m 68 anymore.”
Minnesota’s 7th congressional district
Despite a relatively high-profile GOP primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach, turnout was light in the 7th Congressional District in the rural western part of the state. By noon about 25 people — including the dozen or so volunteers working the polls — had cast their ballots in the town of Red Lake Falls.
Joanne Covlin, a retired retail worker voting in the Democratic primary, said she turned out primarily to support Klobuchar. She said she is relieved Biden had turned the reins over to Harris.
“It was to the point where I didn’t even want to vote, because I didn’t want either” Trump or Biden, she said. Citing the latter’s age, she added that Biden “couldn’t fight against things that were happening.”
Covlin also gave the governor high marks on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Not as many people died in Minnesota as died in Arizona and Florida and all those other places,” she said. “I was grateful to him for that.”
But most primary voters in this deep red district said they were supporting Republican candidates.
In neighboring Thief River Falls, a retiree named Judy — who declined to give her last name — said she was voting in the Republican primary “just to get some decent people in there.” She was especially concerned about Walz and the DFL’s efforts to expand abortion protections.
Patrick Whitcomb, a Red Lake Falls resident who works at a local electronics manufacturer, said he was voting for Fischbach against her primary challenger, Christian nationalist Steve Boyd of Alexandria.
Fischbach’s “voting record in Congress has been right along with what I’ve been wanting a Republican to do,” he said. He cited the economy as his primary concern, with Second Amendment rights a close second.
Whitcomb said that while he wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction Minnesota was heading under the Democratic trifecta led by Walz, he understood why things are the way they are.
“It’s part of the democratic process,” he said. “I love this state. Hopefully one day it will swing back to the right.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/08/13/what-minnesota-primary-voters-are-saying-as-they-head-to-the-polls/
Published and (C) by Minnesota Reformer
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/MnReformer/
