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This week, the president buried the hatchet with Ted Cruz and Erik Paulsen, promised that a new tax cut will pass before the midterm elections, and returned to a favorite campaign topic: immigration. Meanwhile, I’m in Minnesota, catching up on all the bad political ads I’ve been missing.

This week in Washington

Greetings from… Minnesota! I’ve left the Swamp behind this week in favor of the Land of 10,000 Lakes, which I’m traveling — from Two Harbors to Rochester and points in between — to cover the home stretch of these 2018 midterm elections.

12 days left to go until Election Day, and we’re in the thick of it. I reported from the race in Minnesota’s 8th District this week, where Republicans believe Pete Stauber will finally flip this seat, a longtime base of Democratic support that swung the other way in 2016. Look for more stories from me in the coming week on Minnesota’s other top congressional races!

[cms_ad:x100]A big endorsement this week in Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District: President Donald Trump tweeted his “Strong Endorsement” of Rep. Erik Paulsen, the Republican congressman fighting for his political life in the face of a strong challenge from Democrat Dean Phillips. (“Hard working and very smart,” Trump said of Paulsen.)

But the endorsement may be evidence that Trump, after a couple of visits here, might be getting the whole Minnesota passive-aggressive thing — because his endorsement is the last thing Paulsen needs right now. Hillary Clinton won the 3rd by nine points in 2016, and the five-term GOP congressman — who says he wrote in Sen. Marco Rubio on his presidential ballot — has spent the last two years distancing himself from the president on issues like immigration and the environment.

Paulsen responded to the @realDonaldTrump seal of approval by saying he wished Trump would instead “endorse” his efforts to protect the Boundary Waters from the impacts of copper-nickel mining.

It’s unclear how much this will hurt Paulsen, but for Democrats trying to paint him as a rubber stamp for POTUS, it’s a gift. (The Phillips campaign immediately blasted out a press release basking in the endorsement news.) Does Trump know what he’s doing here? Per the New York Times, the president — known for tracking who is “loyal” to him and who is not — is well aware that Paulsen and other moderate Republicans are keeping their distance from him. (Unlike nearly every other top GOP candidate in Minnesota, Paulsen has not attended Trump rallies in Duluth and Rochester, and he is the last to get the president’s endorsement — and a “Strong” one at that, not the “Full and Total” that others in Minnesota have received.)

POLL-WATCH: We got a surprising survey out of the 1st Congressional District this week, which along with the 8th is seen as a top pick-up opportunity for Republicans. A KSTP/YouGov poll found Democratic candidate Dan Feehan narrowly ahead of GOP candidate Jim Hagedorn, 47 percent to 45 percent, with just 8 percent of voters undecided.

Like CD8, CD1 — which covers southern Minnesota from the South Dakota to Wisconsin borders — went for Trump by 15 points in 2016. Hagedorn narrowly lost to incumbent Rep. Tim Walz in 2016 in a race that was on no one’s radar, and the Republican — a former federal official making his fourth bid for this seat — has much more support from national GOP groups who want to pick up this district, which Walz has kept in DFL hands since 2006. But Feehan, a former Obama administration official and Iraq War veteran, has been running a competitive campaign, outraising Hagedorn and earning backup from Democratic groups.

Both camps have hit the candidates with outside ads, but Feehan’s approval rating is 12 points above water, per the KSTP poll, while Hagedorn is two points underwater. One thing that stood out from the survey: Women support Feehan by a 12-point margin, while men support Hagedorn by 14 points. Pretty much every political handicapper rates this as a “toss-up” race, and it could be one of the closest outcomes on November 6.

AD OF THE WEEK! Last week, I highlighted an ad from the GOP that linked Dan Feehan to George Soros and violent left-wing protestors. (Versions of this ad are still running, for those who missed it.) This week, an emotional spot from DFLer Joe Radinovich, running against Stauber in CD8, is getting some pickup in Minnesota politics. In a two-minute video (which, at two minutes, is meant for social media, not TV) the 32-year old responds to GOP attacks on his past — which include numerous parking tickets and a citation for marijuana — by talking about a period in his adolescence that was filled with tragedy, including the murder of his mother at the hands of another family member.

Anecdotally on ads: in my time out here in Minnesota, in between the news and bad Dodgers baseball, I’ve seen a lot of ads — and increasingly, a whole lot of ads that are about other ads. Democrats in CD3 and CD8 races have been running ads about the other side’s supposedly bad and wrong ads.

Some other, national-level stuff on the midterms that I found worthwhile: the Atlantic reports that Democrats are worried that Latinos won’t show up to vote in the midterms, which would harm their chances in key U.S. Senate races in states like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas.

[cms_ad:x101]WaPo’s Daily 202 newsletter, meanwhile, had a good look at the governor’s race in Georgia, which has become a proxy for fights between Democrats and Republicans over voting rights and access to the polls — and the outcome will definitely have some implications for that hot-button subject heading into 2020. And the Duluth News Tribune caught up with Duluth native Corey Stewart, a Confederate sympathizer running for U.S. Senate in Virginia, who has embraced elements of white nationalism and the alt-right more closely than almost any other major Republican candidate in the country.

The Week in Trump: POTUS had himself a busy week, hitting up battleground midterm races around the country to stump for Republicans, including Beautiful Ted (Cruz) whose dad still may have killed JFK — who’s to say!

Along the way, Trump made some questionable promises and claims in the course of his efforts to set up Republicans for victory. He said at the White House before going to Texas that he’s working to pass a 10 percent tax cut for middle-class families… before the election. This is impossible for many reasons, the least of which is that Congress is on recess until after the election. As usual, supportive Republicans did the “what the president meant to say” routine; House GOP tax chief Kevin Brady, for example, said that he looks forward to working with Trump on more tax cuts “in the coming weeks.”

On health care, Trump went all-out on the “pre-existing conditions” talking point, as Republicans work to convince voters that their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare would not have harmed access to care for those with pre-existing conditions, even though virtually all observers who aren’t Republican politicians say it would have. (In case you missed it, I have a story from last week about how Republicans are advancing that point, while arguing that Democrats will destroy Medicare as we know it.)

“Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not!” Trump tweeted. “Vote Republican.” (Even Axios issued a fact check, saying the tweet was “wrong.”)

Trump is also hammering issues of immigration and stoking fear about migrants, a strategy that his camp believes is a winner for Republicans this year. This week’s example: the story of the “caravan” of several thousand migrants working their way up from Central America to apply for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, a story that has been buoyed by a steady stream of media coverage in the U.S.

Trump has declared that the caravan is full of dangerous people, including MS-13 gang members and “Middle Easterners.” Later, Trump admitted “there’s no proof of anything” but that terrorists “may very well be” coming. Why is POTUS advancing these theories? The “caravan” is a wellspring of actual, real, fake news, for starters.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is moving to send hundreds more troops to the U.S. border, and WaPo reports on how the White House is trying to figure out a response behind the scenes.

On Wednesday, Trump signed into law a midterm-season campaign boost for Republicans and Democrats alike: a bill to counter the opioid epidemic, which I wrote about earlier this month. A bunch of senators, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Tina Smith, contributed provisions to the bill, and they are touting them every chance they can get in campaign ads and press releases.

Finally: To say this story from the NYT is wild understates things significantly: the Times’ White House team reports that, defying advice and warnings from his aides, the president continues to use his personal iPhones — and Chinese spies are eavesdropping on his phone conversations. At this point, aides are just hoping that Trump doesn’t divulge sensitive information in his routine gabfests — ironic, given the strong information-security focus of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Democrats are vowing to investigate; Trump, along with the Chinese, have both called the story fake news.

This week’s essential reads

When President Trump offhandedly said this week that Congress would move to cut taxes for the middle-class before the midterms, his administration and allies scrambled to make it look like not an offhand comment. In a smart piece, WaPo zeroed in on this odd, Trumpian trend: instead of being prompted by administration research and preparation, Trump’s remarks are prompting it. The story:

The mystery tax cut is only the latest instance of the federal government scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

The Pentagon leaped into action to both hold a military parade and launch a “Space Force” on the president’s whims. The Commerce Department moved to create a plan for auto tariffs after Trump angrily threatened to impose them. And just this week, Vice President Pence, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House all rushed to try to back up Trump’s unsupported claim that “unknown Middle Easterners” were part of a migrant caravan in Central America — only to have the president admit late Tuesday that there was no proof at all.

“Virtually no one on the planet has the kind of power that a president of the United States has to scramble bureaucracies in the service of whim,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Whatever Donald Trump wakes up and thinks about, or whatever comes to mind in the middle of a speech, actually has the reality in that it is actionable in some odd sense.”

News reports have trickled out over the past two years of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to round up undocumented immigrants. BuzzFeed News’ Hamed Aleaziz went to the small town of O’Neill, Nebraska, to report on the aftermath of a raid that arrested over 100 migrants:

The ICE operation on Aug. 8 resulted in the arrests of 118 suspected undocumented workers — mostly in Nebraska — at multiple worksites, including a hydroponic tomato greenhouse, a pork producing plant, a potato factory, and a cattle company. Some laborers were placed in ICE detention, while many were released and told to go to immigration court for their deportation proceedings.

For more than two days after the raid, two dozen migrants across the town slept on the carpets and in between the pews of O’Neill’s Spanish-language Pentecostal Church, fearful that ICE would go door to door looking for people to arrest. Some who came were congregants, many were not. The pastor of the church said the panic and trauma was worse than when a family member dies.

And in the weeks since, the raid has reverberated throughout the once thriving immigrant population in O’Neill, a town of just over 3,600 people, so isolated that it’s the largest town in a 60-mile radius. Fear has gripped the community of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Mexicans. Many now rarely leave their homes, worried that ICE may be around the corner or that long-time residents will call the authorities on them.

The week in takes

• The Week’s Edward Morrissey: Democrats are on the verge of blowing it in Minnesota
• Slate’s Jamelle Bouie: Trump is counting on bigotry to win him the midterms, but it won’t be enough
• Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Avenatti: The 2020 Democratic nominee should be a white man because their arguments “carry more weight”
• Splinter’s Libby Watson: Barack Obama is part of the problem for Democrats
• The Cut’s Anna Silman: Don’t wake up early

Your weekend longread

With pivotal elections coming up for law enforcement officials on the state and local levels, it’s worth checking out this profile, by the New Yorker’s Jennifer Gonnerman, of a very unlikely prosecutor: Larry Krasner, the District Attorney of the city of Philadelphia, who defied political expectations to win an election for that job last year, as he ran on a staunchly anti-incarceration platform.

Now — as Trump’s administration flounders on prison reform but Jeff Sessions quietly advances measures to beef up a tough-on-crime policy — Krasner is being held up by liberals as an example of the best way to fight back.

In 2015, Philadelphia had the highest incarceration rate of America’s ten largest cities. As its population grew more racially diverse and a new generation became politically active, its “tough on crime” policies fell further out of synch with its residents’ views. During Krasner’s campaign, hundreds of people—activists he had represented, supporters of Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter leaders, former prisoners—knocked on tens of thousands of doors on his behalf.

The composer and musician John Legend, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, tweeted an endorsement. In the three weeks before the primary, a pac funded by the liberal billionaire George Soros spent $1.65 million on pro-Krasner mailers and television ads. Strangers started recognizing him on the street. He trounced his six opponents in the primary, and went on to win the general election, on November 7, 2017, with seventy-five per cent of the vote. He was sworn in on January 1, 2018, by his wife.

In the past ten years, violent crime across the country has fallen, but, according to polls, many people continue to believe that it has increased. President Trump’s campaign exploited the fear of “American carnage,” and the criminal-justice system of the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, seems built on this misinformation. And yet, at a local level, there are signs of change. Krasner is one of about two dozen “progressive prosecutors,” many of them backed by Soros, who have won recent district-attorney races. In 2016, Aramis Ayala got early support from Shaquille O’Neal and won a state’s attorney race in Florida, and Mark Gonzalez, a defense attorney with “not guilty” tattooed on his chest, became the D.A. in Corpus Christi, Texas.

On September 7th, President Barack Obama delivered a speech to students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in which he referred to Krasner and Rollins: “If you are really concerned about how the criminal-justice system treats African-Americans, the best way to protest is to vote,” he said. “Do what they just did in Philadelphia and Boston and elect state attorneys and district attorneys who are looking at issues in a new light.”

What to look for next week

It’s the last full week before Election Day, so D.C. will continue to be quiet as campaign season 2018 enters its final stage, despite the president’s promises of passing a new tax cut. POTUS has political rallies scheduled constantly, more or less, until Nov. 6.

Amy Klobuchar is pitching in for Democratic candidates this weekend — in Iowa. She’ll be stumping for a state senate candidate in the suburbs of Des Moines. (Klobuchar is expected to cruise to victory over her GOP opponent, Jim Newberger, in this election.)

WaPo’s James Hohmann read the tea leaves and posits that Klobuchar has “every intention” of running for president in 2020, but Dave Weigel, also at WaPo, has suggested elsewhere that Klobuchar is being less obvious about her presidential ambitions than some of her Senate colleagues like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. Anyway, nothing to see here, folks! Just a trip to Iowa!

That’s it for me this week — back to the campaign trail. Thanks for sticking with me this week, and send me an email if you like: sbrodey@minnpost.com.

Medicine has seen its share of research scandals, but one of the biggest and most brazen ones in recent years has involved the Italian transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Heralded internationally as a pioneer in regenerative medicine for his experimental work using stem cells to “seed” and create viable artificial tracheas, Macchiarini was eagerly recruited in 2010 by Sweden’s prestigious Karolinska Institute (the same institute that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).

But all was not as it seemed with the institute’s new superstar, as several surgeons working with Macchiarini soon discovered. When they looked closely at the papers Macchiarini had published in medical journals — including a widely publicized one in The Lancet in 2011 — they found that he was omitting or falsifying details about the post-surgery condition of his patients. Indeed, Macchiarini made it sound as if his patients had recovered their health when, in fact, the synthetic tracheas he had implanted in their bodies did not work at all. His patients were dying, not thriving.

The surgeons put their findings into a long, whistleblowing report and gave it to the Karolinska Institute’s administrators, who promptly ignored it. Only after a leaked copy of the report made its way into a New York Times article did the administrators commission an outside expert to investigate Macchiarini’s work. In 2015, the investigator concluded that Macchiarini had, indeed, committed research fraud. Yet the administrators continued to defend their star surgeon — and threatened the whistleblowers with dismissal.

Then, in 2016, a three-part documentary, “The Experiments,” was shown on Swedish television. In unrelenting detail, the documentary unraveled — and ultimately exposed — Macchiarini’s scientific con game and the enabling role that the Karolinska Institute played in it. The reaction from the Swedish public was swift. They demanded that officials take action — and this time they did. Macchiarini was finally forced to leave the institute, as were several of the administrators who had refused to take action against him earlier.

[cms_ad:x100]“The Experiments” is going to have its U.S. premiere this Monday, Oct. 29, at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Memorial Union Theater. All three parts of the documentary will be shown that night, starting at 5:30 p.m. The documentary’s director, Swedish radio and TV producer Bosse Lindquist, will be participating in a discussion after the showing. Lindquist will then return to the U of M campus the following day, Oct. 30, to be interviewed by investigative reporter and “In the Dark” podcast host Madeleine Baran. That discussion takes place at 4 p.m. at the Lindahl Founders Room at Northrup Auditorium.  Both events are free and open to the public.

MinnPost recently spoke with Lindquist about the Macchiarini scandal and the making of the “The Experiments.” An edited and condensed version of that conversation follows.

MinnPost: What made you decide to make this documentary? Did you already have a sense that there was a scandal brewing? 

Bosse Lindquist: We got tipped off by a disgruntled former professor at the Karolinksa Institute that four senior surgeons at the Karolinksa Hospital had filed a complaint against a colleague for alleged scientific fraud and for mishandling and possibly killing patients. This complaint had been leaked to an American watchdog site, Retraction Watch, and that’s how we got hold of it.

MinnPost: What did you think of the complaint?

BL: At first, I thought it was impossible that these things could have taken place in the open at the Karolinksa Institute and at the [Karolinksa] University Hospital. I mean, surgeries are performed with five, 10, 15-plus people surrounding the operating table, and permissions have to be given. I thought these things couldn’t have taken place. But then there was the fact that the leadership of the hospital and the institute had, instead of listening to the complaints, gone after the whistleblowers and had even complained [about them] to the police. That’s when I decided to try and do a documentary. I realized that either we have four senior surgeons who are completely nuts and [who] filed this untrue complaint and risked their careers and their families and everything, or we had the leadership of the best two medical institutions in Sweden doing something terribly wrong. Either way there would be a story.

MP: And Macchiarini didn’t object to your doing the documentary?

BL: I called him up and asked to interview him. He said, “Yes, as long as you don’t ask me about the complaints. You can tag along, and I’ll show you my work in Russia, Turkey,” etc. That’s how it all started.

MP: Was there a moment when you suddenly realized that the complaints against him were accurate, that he actually was committing medical fraud? 

BL: No. There were a couple of moments during that year [when I thought] wow, shit. But it was a long struggle. And, actually, many factors pointed to the whistleblowers being in the wrong and Macchiarini in the right. But the deeper we got into the background — the data from the hospital records, etc. — it gradually became clear that the four whistleblowers were totally right and Macchiarini was totally wrong. And the leadership [at the Karolinska Institute and Karolinska Hospital] was totally wrong. One of the decisive moments was when the wife of the initial patient [Andemariam Beyene, an Eritrean graduate student in geology at the University of Iceland] gave us permission to look at his [medical] records. When we saw the actual recordings from inside his throat, it became totally clear that something very, very bad had happened.

[cms_ad:x101]MP: You spent so much time with Macchiarini. What was your relationship with him over that year?

BL: It was really cordial. He’s a very charming man. He’s seductive, and I think he has that influence both on men and women. He’s very charismatic. He will dominate any room that he enters, [whether it’s a] a Russian underground station or a medical conference room. He’s the center of attention. So it’s fun, actually. He can be very nice. But he can also be very terribly frightening and quite aggressive. Extremely manipulative.

MP: Did you come to any conclusion about what was motivating him? It seemed at times at the documentary that he really cared about the patients. He seemed moved by them. And, yet, he then abandons them. He doesn’t follow up with them.

BL: I think that he feels that he deserves success in life and that he ultimately deserves something like a Nobel Prize or something like that. He thinks the world just hasn’t quite seen his excellence yet and that they will eventually. He believes that he’s helping mankind, and I think that he construes reality in such a way that he actually thinks that he was doing good with these patients, but that there were minor problems and stuff that sort of [tripped him up].

MP: Why do you think that the Karolinksa Institute and the hospital supported him so long? What was their motivation? 

BL: I think the hospital was afraid that if these allegations turned out to be true, they might face criminal charges for how they allowed patients to be treated. They could be sued. I think, perhaps, that the leadership of the Karolinksa Institute was afraid of tarnishing their Nobel Prize. I mean, it was the secretary of the Nobel committee who was the prime supporter of Macchiarini and who used Macchiarini as a showcase throughout all those years. They were also in very serious discussions with a Chinese tycoon at the time the four whistleblowers came with the complaint. It was a billionaire from Shanghai who had [offered] $60 million as a grant to build a Karolinksa Institute in Hong Kong, That was the biggest donation they had ever been offered, and Macchiarini was the showcase to get that donation. And there were several other big grants up for discussion, government grants. I also think they were protecting their own reputations. The leaders were so heavily involved with Macchiarini that they realized that they would fall too if he fell.

BL: That’s correct.

MP: And he even got a paper published last spring. The editor of that journal said he had no idea of Macchiarini’s past.

BL: What does that say about academia and academic policy? I assume that the paper was investigated through peer review.

MP: It was.

BL: What kind of peer review is it when they haven’t even Googled Macchiarini? If they had they would have seen this whole scandal. So, yeah, it’s a very faulty system.

MP: You don’t talk in the documentary about the untrue things Macchiarini put on his CV. There’s also all the bizarre lies he told the NBC News producer [Benita Alexander, to whom he became engaged without telling her that he already had a wife of 30 years]. How did you decide what to leave in and what to leave out?

BL: We had realized that the CV wasn’t correct. But it was sort of minor, we thought, in comparison with what he’d done to the patients and his scientific fraud. When it comes to Benita, I had no idea. I mean I knew he was engaged to this lady in the States, but Macchiarini never spoke a word of his private life. He refused. He didn’t even want to tell me where his primary schooling had taken place, or whether his parents were alive or not, or where he was born. I mean it was just a total blank. I accepted that because my job was to look at his medicine and his science and not his private life, so I left it at that. He was adamant. But then a week before we broadcast [the documentary], Vanity Fair published [an article about Macchiarini and Alexander]. I then realized it was Benita he’d been texting all those hours we’d spent together in Russia and places.

MP: But the lies on his CV speaks to the fact that the Karolinska Institute didn’t really do due diligence when they hired him. 

BL: Right. They looked at the CV but they didn’t check whether it was true. There’s sort of an honor culture — is that the English word, honor culture? — where you trust people at their word. The chairman of the board of the Karolinska Institute told me when the scandal broke, “Why should I doubt the vice chancellor that he would be in the wrong? I mean he’s a professor. He’s a man of letters. He deserves my trust.” I don’t know if it’s very different in the U.S., but I think that’s sort of par for academia — that you never ask your colleague to see his or her data. If you decide to trust them, then you trust them. Otherwise you don’t work together.

MP: What has happened to the patients. One was able to successfully have the tube removed, is that correct?

BL: Yeah. One person.

MP: And everybody else has died?

BL: Yes. And the person who is still alive, Dmitri [Onogda] from Crimea, his procedure was different from the others because they actually left bits of the original structure of the trachea in place. So they could sort of pop it out, and he still had a passage for breathing.

MP: Are the families able to sue?

BL: Yes. The Turkish young lady [Yesim Citir] who was operated on in Sweden, her relatives in Turkey have sued the U.S. manufacturer of the plastic tracheas. So there’s progress going there. And in Sweden there’s a criminal investigation ongoing. They come to a decision in November whether they’ll prosecute or not.

MP: And what about the whistleblowers? Have they been able to go back to their careers without any professional harm? 

BL: No. Two of them have had to change cities and hospitals. Two are still there, but they have been subjected to threats from management and from some of their colleagues who were involved with Macchiarini. They have not received any new grants since this whole thing happened. It’s a crying shame.

MP: That’s quite a terrible outcome, because that may stop other people from stepping forward in similar situations. 

BL: Exactly.

MP: Do you feel that everyone who was responsible for ignoring the warnings about Macchiarini has resigned or been fired? 

BL: No, no, no. A number of people are still there and have their old jobs and just carry on. Some have been forced to change jobs, to get another job — but in some other function within the hospital or in the government.

MP: Has the Karolinska Institute recovered its reputation?

BL: Not yet, no. The standing of the institute is very low in most Swedes’ eyes for the moment.

MP: What about Macchiarini? What is he doing? Have you been in touch with him? 

BL: I’m not in touch with him at the moment. My latest news about him is from June. I think he was performing surgery in Spain, Italy, Turkey. And he claimed that he was performing surgery in the U.S., which I doubt, but he claimed that.

MP: Not these same procedures.

BL: No. I don’t think he’s inserting any plastic tracheas at the moment. But he’s [apparently] doing risky, high profile operations in private clinics for high fees. I don’t know if he’s still pursuing research in Russia, but it seems as if he’s doing experimental surgery on primates.

MP: That’s the animal research he should have done to begin with, before he starting operating on patients.

BL: He should have, shouldn’t he?

MP: So what does the scandal around Macchiarini say about our leading medical and research institutions?

BL: There’s very little oversight, very little impartial control of academia and hospitals. I’m not quite sure what the situation is in the U.S. but in Sweden there is basically no one who is overseeing, for example, the Karolinksa Institute or other medical universities, and checking that they’re doing what they should do. The same thing is true with the published findings. The peer-review system obviously doesn’t work if someone is trying to cheat the system. The reviewers have too little time, far too little time, to check on what is being published. The same goes for hospitals — in Sweden at least. There’s no authority above the hospital that double-checks what’s actually going on. It’s a very old-fashioned system where there’s very little law that regulates what to do when things are not done in the right way, when somebody misbehaves this badly.

MP: But this is not just a Swedish story, is it?

BL: What is interesting about Macchiarini is not that a doctor did this in Sweden, but that he basically did the same thing in Russia, the same thing in Spain, the same thing in Italy. His methods were the same in all these different countries, and he [worked with] the same ease in all of them. He did one of the surgeries in the U.S., and I don’t think there’s been much commotion about that. A poor little toddler [Hannah Warren]. And one of the patients he experimented on in Sweden was a U.S. citizen from Baltimore [Christopher Lyles]. Macchiarini found fault lines within academia and medicine everywhere.

For more information:  You’ll find more information about the events surrounding the U of M’s screening of “The Experiments” at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science website.

The two candidates for Hennepin County Sheriff want you to know something: that their opponent faces allegations of illegal campaign activity.

The nature of the accusations aren’t going to shock anyone — they hit on disclosure laws and rules about yard signs — but the finger-pointing epitomizes the intensity of the race between incumbent Rich Stanek and challenger Dave “Hutch” Hutchinson, a contest that is grappling with some of the region’s biggest and most controversial issues: How should law enforcement interact with federal immigration authorities? What is the sheriff department’s role in preventing drug overdoses? What’s the best way to help people in mental crisis?

The back-and-forth between campaigns has exposed broader questions, too, like how does a sheriff balance the interests of a predominantly urban, progressive county in the age of Trump?

‘He cares for the people of this county’

Stanek, a former police officer and one-time Republican legislator who has a “recommendation” from the GOP (the sheriff’s position is technically non-partisan), says he’s the only qualified person to take on those questions, while Hutchinson, a Metro Transit sergeant who is endorsed by the DFL and new to politics, says the department could benefit from a fresh perspective that aligns more closely with the political values of the county’s voters.

Stanek came in first in August’s primary, with more than 49 percent of the vote, while Hutchinson’s garnered 35 percent (a third candidate, Joseph Banks, got 16 percent; only the top two candidates move on to the general election). The early showdown also showed the metro’s split based on geography: Voters for Stanek turned out heavily in the suburbs, while Hutchinson won most precincts in Minneapolis. 

[cms_ad:x100]The Hennepin county sheriff heads a staff of more than 840 people and must coordinate with politicians and law-enforcement agencies from across the county, a group that includes more than three dozen state legislators, two members of Congress and 45 city mayors. The sheriff is also responsible for the treatment of upwards of 36,000 people rotating through the county’s detention facilities and the overseer of a roughly $125 million budget.

Before taking on those duties, Stanek spent more than 20 years moving through the ranks of the Minneapolis Police Department. In 1994, he made the jump into politics, serving several terms in the state House representing the Maple Grove area before leaving the seat to run the state’s Public Safety Department under former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

That gig did not last long. Stanek resigned from the position in 2004 after a deposition surfaced from a civil suit resulting from a 1989 vehicle collision, back when Stanek was with the MPD. He said he initially thought the other driver, a Liberian-native named Anthony Freeman, was intoxicated and saw smoke coming from the vehicle. But Freeman said Stanek approached his car screaming racial slurs. In his deposition, Stanek admitted that he told racist jokes with other officers, but that he never did so in public.

The ordeal spurred new efforts by Stanek to win over support from various community groups as he prepared to launch his first campaign for Hennepin County Sheriff. In 2006, Stanek beat his DFL opponent, Juan Lopez, for the position with more than 64 percent of the vote — replacing former sheriff Pat McGowan, who like Stanek had previously represented the Maple Grove area as a state legislator.

After running unopposed in 2010, he easily won a third term in 2014, beating Minneapolis police inspector Eddie Frizell by more than 35 points.

Among his accomplishments in office, Stanek touts his work to help people with mental illnesses; his efforts to let officers carry Narcan to offset opioid symptoms and map drug overdoses; and his work across party lines. Over the years, he’s embraced efforts by both former President Barack Obama (to reduce gun violence by expanding background checks) and President Trump (on strategies to crack down on illegal drugs).

“When you see him on TV, you see him in front of a group, he’s a speaker; he’s a politician. But what you don’t see is, he’s got a huge heart. He cares for the people of this county,” said sheriff’s Lieutenant Chris Mathison, who’s president of the union representing supervisors in the department. “We built a good relationship over the years — he was an outsider — it took a few years.”

Stanek’s tenure has not been without controversy, though. In 2007, Minneapolis leaders criticized him for falsifying information in a training video on the collapse of the I-35 bridge and taking credit for actions that weren’t his responsibility. He’s also clashed with the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners over budgeting. (At least one current member has come out against Stanek this election cycle.) And he faced backlash over his decision to send Hennepin County deputies to North Dakota during the massive protests over the Dakota Access pipeline.

‘This has been a dream of his’

Growing up in Burnsville, Hutchinson chose law enforcement as a career at an early age. He served as a cop in Bayport, the small Washington County town south of Stillwater, before moving to Metro Transit as a patrol officer in 2006.

Colleagues of Hutchinson said his ability to connect with anyone, regardless of race or background, has helped him him succeed in his current job supervising Metro Transit officers on the northside of Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs.

In that job, Hutchinson said, he hears a lot about the public’s lack of trust in law enforcement. “At some point, you’ve got to point out the problem. The problem is bad leadership. It’s a 1990’s mentality of policing,” Hutchinson said. “[Stanek’s] not right for Hennepin County for multiple reasons.”

But until last winter, Hutchinson thought his level of involvement with the race for sheriff would be as a campaign volunteer, trying to persuade county residents to vote for someone — anyone — with more progressive values than Stanek, Hutchinson said. But every possible candidate, including a handful of suburban police chiefs, told Hutchinson they weren’t willing to spend money and run against the current sheriff, Hutchinson recalled. “One of them said … ‘No, that would be me committing career suicide.’”

Hutchinson said he would do better than Stanek fighting the region’s drug problem by connecting addicts with treatment fast and helping people in crisis by pairing deputies with mental-health professionals on response calls. He also is promising policies to ensure every sexual assault allegation receives a thorough investigation and to save the county money on staffing at the jail.

“He’s a very open-minded person; he’s a fair individual,” said Metro Transit officer Sidney Jones, who worked closely with Hutchinson when he was a patrol officer. “A lot of people think it’s a shot in the dark. I’m an optimist. But I think he can win. Even when he was my partner, this has been a dream of his.”

On ICE

Hutchinson’s campaign has made the involvement of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement the biggest issue in the race. Alongside immigration-rights activists and some elected leaders, Hutchinson argues Stanek goes too far in helping the federal immigration authorities target people coming in and out of jail.

“My goal is to make sure that people, even who are undocumented, are still comfortable coming to the police,” Hutchinson said. “We’re not worried about federal immigration, or undocumented (people). That’s not our job as public safety.”

To help build that trust, he wants deputies to stop asking inmates their “country of origin” during bookings — information the sheriff’s office relays with fingerprints and photos to state and federal investigators — in attempt to stop ICE officials from detaining people in Hennepin County.

Yet Stanek says state law requires officers to ask about birthplaces, while other laws mandate officers identify people from other countries to give them the option of speaking to their foreign consulate.

[cms_ad:x101]But while everyone has the right to decline answering officers’ questions, language barriers mean people do not always understand or know they have that option. In Minneapolis, officials and lawyers are taking steps to fix that by installing placards in police cars that remind people (in Spanish and English) they can remain silent. “We know that even if an undocumented person is not charged with a crime, the mere fact that they’re brought to Hennepin County jail may bring them to ICE’s attention,” said Minneapolis City Attorney Susan Segal at a recent press conference.

Stanek’s campaign says the sheriff’s office does arrange calls to ICE and “offers the arrestee the option of speaking with an immigration agent,” when someone says they were born outside the U.S. or that they are not a citizen. Most of the time, inmates voluntarily speak with ICE agents, the campaign says, and that the federal agency helps them resolve questions about legal citizenship. Also, the campaign says the sheriff’s office does not hold people for an extended time to give immigration officers time to question them without a judge’s order — a move that came out of a 2014 rule change that both Stanek and Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman (who’s also up for re-election this year) are taking credit for this campaign season.

“Only the tiniest fraction of inmates are of interest to ICE,” according to an email from former Republican legislator Julianne Ortman, who is helping with Stanek’s campaign. “We do not transfer custody of inmates to ICE upon release from the jail.”

While the sheriff’s interaction with ICE has raised the ire of progressive activists, the office has also faced scrutiny from critics on the other end of the spectrum. Last year, the Trump administration included Hennepin County on a list of “non-cooperative jurisdictions” for not going far enough to help ICE, a designation the sheriff’s office rebuked.

“If it’s the law that says we have to do something, we do it,” Stanek said.

Real problem or playing games?

On Monday, a complaint against Stanek over campaign procedures was filed with the state’s Office of Administrative Hearings. According to documents, the complaint accuses the sheriff of distributing a handful of campaign signs without including an address in the signs’ disclaimer. Stanek’s campaign says the claim has no merit. A judge has not yet ruled on the matter.

Hutchinson has had his own issues with campaign rules. Documents show his campaign violated campaign finance laws by failing to report any of his expenses by mandated deadlines. (Hutchinson said his treasurer had a family emergency in the early days of campaigning and that caused the violation of Minnesota disclosure laws.) The campaign could face up to $500 fines for the violation, according to Hennepin County Elections Manager Ginny Gelms.

“We’ve owned up to the mistake,” he said. “As sheriff, I will admit to any mistakes that I make. … Nobody’s perfect.”

The fees for that violation would add to other potential legal costs, including a complaint over some of Hutchinson’s old signs that did not have disclaimers. Hutchinson was fined $200 for the violation, court records show.

Stanek argues that such violations should be seen as telling. “If [he] can’t manage his own campaign finances, how is he going to manage $125 million dollars of the taxpayer’s [money]?” Stanek said. “His obligation to follow the law is crystal clear, whether it’s campaign finance law or fraud.”

But Hutchinson says the complaints are merely an attempt to distract voters. “He’s doing all of this, politics, to take away from issues,” Hutchinson said. “I want to worry about making sure Hennepin County gets to vote on the issues — not minor mistakes from a new campaign from mostly volunteers. We’re here to protect our communities; We’re not here to play games.”

Two weeks before the November 6 midterm elections, Dan Feehan is talking about quitting.

Speaking in front of a dozen Democratic volunteers about to set off for an afternoon of door-knocking in Rochester, Feehan — the DFL candidate in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District — offered up some inspiration by talking about the hardest thing he’d ever done: training to become a Ranger in the U.S. Army.

He recalled one night, when he and a fellow soldier were ordered to stand outside in the dark, deprived of sleep and food, for hours. “This feeling is starting to come up,” he said, “I want to quit. This is miserable.”

“I turned to the soldier next to me and he immediately responded. He said, ‘quit tomorrow.’” Feehan says he wiped his face and stammered that he wasn’t going to quit. “He said, ‘yeah, quit tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, quit tomorrow. Soon enough, you’re going to be there.’”

[cms_ad:x100]Feehan is only a few tomorrows away from the end of his latest challenge: running for Congress in one of the most competitive races in the entire country — one that Republicans believe is one of their best chances anywhere to pick up a Democratic-held seat.

Jim Hagedorn, the Republican nominee, ran in 2014 and 2016 against Rep. Tim Walz, the Democrat who has held this southern Minnesota district since 2006. Hagedorn narrowly lost to Walz in 2016, as Donald Trump surged to a 15-point margin of victory over Hillary Clinton. With Walz vacating this seat to run for governor, Hagedorn — who has been running for the CD1 seat basically uninterrupted for the last five years and has a deep well of support within the GOP — is confident that this is finally his year.

Part of his argument is that Feehan is not Tim Walz, and is too liberal to get elected in what he argues is a fundamentally Republican district — one that is “pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-God,” as Hagedorn put it to MinnPost in an interview.

But Feehan’s campaign is borrowing liberally from the Walz playbook, emphasizing the candidate’s appealing biography — military, teaching, government — and advancing a message that eschews hot-button issues in favor of talk about bipartisanship and optimism.

In this toss-up race, both candidates frequently say they are offering a clear choice for voters — but they’re very different sets of choices. To hear Hagedorn tell it, the decision comes down whether CD1 wants a conservative or liberal; to Feehan, it’s whether they want a pragmatist or an ideologue.

‘He was espousing Trump’s positions before Trump was’

“I think we’ve been here about 20 times,” Hagedorn said on a crisp Tuesday morning as he walked around the streets of downtown Preston, the seat of Fillmore County, which is southeast of Rochester.

There are few people who know the turf of CD1 — a district that includes 21 southern Minnesota counties stretching from the South Dakota to Wisconsin borders — better than Jim Hagedorn. His father, Tom, represented the district in the 1970s and 1980s as a Republican; after a career as an official at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, Hagedorn returned to southern Minnesota and launched a bid for Congress in 2010.

Gary Stuart, the chair of the Fillmore County GOP, was accompanying Hagedorn around town. The first time he met Hagedorn eight years ago, Stuart says he thought he should be a congressman. “He’s been consistent,” Stuart says, adding: “He was espousing Trump’s positions before Trump was.”

[cms_ad:x101]It’s a point that the candidate and his allies return to often, and to underscore it, they usually point to an op-ed that Hagedorn wrote in the Star Tribune in 2015, in which he pushed to stop refugee resettlement in the U.S. in response to terrorist attacks in Europe. Trump later picked up the idea, arguing in his 2016 campaign that he would stop resettlement until the U.S. figures out “what the hell is going on.”

“It just so happened that, as I was running for Congress, a guy came along and ran for president on virtually the same issues,” Hagedorn said of his 2016 bid.

But while CD1 voters flocked to Trump, they also sent Walz back to Washington, albeit by a margin of less than one percentage point. For Hagedorn and his allies, that defeat was mostly explained by the fact that national Republicans didn’t see the Trump-leaning direction of places like southern Minnesota and did not invest in candidates like Hagedorn, who was outraised by Walz and got little help from key groups like the National Republican Campaign Committee. (Other Republicans, meanwhile, have groused that a better candidate would have defeated Walz in 2016.)

With significant national GOP support behind him, Hagedorn believes this is finally the moment for his staunchly conservative platform to carry him to Congress. His campaign, which he launched shortly after the 2016 election and before Walz ran for governor, is keeping a close focus on national issues like immigration and taxes along with abortion and guns.

“I think the district leans right, has leaned right all along,” Hagedorn told MinnPost, sitting in the Sweet Stop and Sandwich Shoppe in Preston. He argued that Walz has mostly ran here as a centrist Democrat. (“He sounded like a Republican in some of these areas,” he said.)

“I’ve never been afraid to let voters know I wanted to partner with President Trump, keep moving the country in the right direction, to fulfill the legislative program that he and I ran on in 2016,” Hagedorn said. “And that, if Dan were to win, he’s gonna go out and vote for a Democrat, be part of a group to take us in a far different direction, to resist [Trump] at every point, to replace him if possible, and move us far to the left.”

Military service is front and center

Before talking to DFL volunteers, Feehan was near the Rochester airport, visiting the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 343 to tour their training facility. He popped around the warehouse-like space, asking a few 20-somethings in sneakers and Carhartt jeans about what they were working on, what their educational background was. “That’s awesome” was the most frequent refrain from the 36-year old, clad in a button-down shirt and jeans.

After doing a roundtable with local labor leaders and Walz, who was back in CD1 for his own campaign, Feehan sat down to catch his breath. “When that November 6 comes, I want the feeling of, there wasn’t anything I didn’t leave out there,” he told MinnPost. “You keep earning it one day at a time.”

Feehan’s work ethic is something he shares with Walz, who won six elections in CD1 thanks to a relentless energy and hustle. The two men also share a biographical asset in this district, which is home to 40,000 veterans: military service.

Walz served for 24 years in the Army National Guard, rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major; Feehan made it through Ranger training and then served two combat tours during the Iraq War. He went on to serve as a top official in Barack Obama’s Department of Defense. (Walz enlisted at age 17; Feehan, who spent his childhood in Red Wing and moved to North Mankato in 2017, enlisted after graduating from Georgetown University.)

In stump speeches and in campaign literature, Feehan’s military service is front and center. But he also connects that to his outlook on politics: “As an army officer, I didn’t care if the soldier next to me was Republican, or Democrat, or independent,” Feehan said. “What do we need to get done? That’s the mentality.”

When it comes to what he would get done in Congress, Feehan emphasizes reforming health care — he’s in favor of adding a public option — and passing comprehensive immigration reform. He’s energetic in talking about national security issues and in describing why Trump’s tariff-heavy approach to trade is bad for CD1.

But, like Walz, Feehan truly lights up when he talks about the way he would get these things done. “The entirety of my childhood was based on this idea: I watched people not just get along but get things done in spite of what would be considered disagreement,” he said.

“I’ve been very intentional to try to build a coalition that goes beyond the Democratic Party, frankly,” Feehan went on. “Because winning in the 1st District, looking at its voting history, this is an independent-minded place of people. I don’t think it’s the partisan place my opponent portrays it as.”

“My opponent is fixated on the idea of the political spectrum because that’s the only way that he knows how to function. I have a tough time imagining him working inside the Republican Party, let alone the other side of the aisle. And I think that’s a problem.”

CD1’s ‘independent streak’

Minnesota’s four battleground U.S. House races are at the top of national Democrats’ and Republicans’ priority lists — and they’ve dumped tens of millions of dollars to fund TV ads and other campaign communication so far.

As of Friday, however, no Minnesota district had seen more outside spending than CD1: over $10 million has been spent to influence the race. Of that total, $5.5 million has gone to bankroll attack ads against Feehan, which have primarily been run by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC linked to Speaker Paul Ryan, and the NRCC. Democratic-aligned groups, meanwhile, have spent $2.5 million to attack Hagedorn, particularly on health care, by arguing he’d prevent people with pre-existing conditions from accessing care.

But it’s the attack ads against Feehan that have attracted national scrutiny: one, from the NRCC, attempted to link Feehan to violent far-left protesters through the liberal billionaire George Soros, who funds a D.C. think tank Feehan has worked for. (Attacks that use Soros are widely considered an anti-Semitic dog whistle, a point Feehan has made.) Other GOP ads have also sought to paint Feehan as insufficiently supportive of the military, a tactic the candidate compares to the “swift boating” strategy that Republicans used against John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, in the 2004 presidential race.

At the union event in Rochester, Walz drew attention to those ads, telling MinnPost that CD1 is a district “that will respect leadership, understand service. I gotta tell you, if I haven’t served a day in uniform and I went after someone who served two tours in Iraq, I’d be a little nervous about that with the voters.”

Though CD1 voters went big for Trump, they supported Barack Obama and George W. Bush in past presidential elections, and supported Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Sen. Al Franken in their most recent elections.

This week, the only major poll of CD1 was released: the KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed Feehan leading Hagedorn, 47 percent to 45 percent. That lead was well within the poll’s margin of error, but the result was closer than many Republicans would like to see in a district that they are very optimistic about — and one that is key to their hopes of staving off a “blue wave” and holding on to their 23-seat majority in the U.S. House.

That same poll found Trump’s approval rating was underwater by three points in the 1st — which could spell trouble for Hagedorn, who has reminded voters at every turn that he’s running to be a “reinforcement” for Trump in Congress.

In a sign of the GOP’s enthusiasm for this district, the president visited Rochester in October, backing Hagedorn along with other Republican candidates. Hagedorn pulled out his phone and showed MinnPost a photo he took of Trump inside his presidential limo, which the two of them rode from the Rochester airport to the rally. (“I found him to be someone who really cares about the folks,” Hagedorn said of Trump.)

“It’s up to the Congress,” Hagedorn said, “are you going to work with the president to implement those ideas, or are you going to work against him to block those ideas? That’s what Dan Feehan is, a far-left guy who doesn’t support the major initiatives of President Trump.”

Like other Democrats running in Trump-favoring districts, Feehan says he’d work with the president on topics such as infrastructure and agriculture. He has been on the offensive on Trump’s tariffs, which have sparked anxiety in southern Minnesota’s agriculture economy.

“It’s about being a check and balance, being independent enough to stand up to the president but being independent enough to also work with the president,” Feehan said. “If you don’t have that independence, that’s what’s out of touch with southern Minnesota values.”

Darin Broton, a DFL strategist from Dodge County in the heart of CD1, said the race was a “barnburner” with both candidates running mistake-free campaigns. “The reason why Trump did so well, and why Walz almost lost, was the rural folk,” he said. “The question is, do those folks show back up this cycle?”

“A lot of those folks have a conservative bent to them, but they still have a big independent streak running through them.”

Roundup voted down. The Southwest Journal’s Eric Best reports: “The Park Board’s Operations & Environment Committee unanimously voted to extend the board’s ban on glyphosate to the entire Minneapolis park system. … The resolution would expand a ban on the herbicide to the city’s regional parks and golf courses. The Park Board ended the use of glyphosate in neighborhood parks in 2016.”

Catch up on the Ramsey County sheriff’s race. The Pioneer Press’ Mara H. Gottfried report: “No matter who wins the Ramsey County sheriff’s race, there won’t be a new sheriff in town. … Jack Serier was appointed sheriff by the county board 22 months ago. And his opponent, Bob Fletcher, was Ramsey County sheriff for 16 years and is currently Vadnais Heights mayor.”

Per the Strib, Minneapolis has made some progress in helping people at the Hiawatha Ave. encampment find housing. Chris Serres writes: “On his first night in a new apartment after two years of homelessness, Mike Eagle Tail found himself bolting awake in his bed, expecting to hear the wail of police sirens or the sound of people crying out for help. … Instead, for the first time in months, Eagle Tail heard only his three sleeping children — Raymond, 9, Rolanda, 8 and Lakota, 7 — breathing softly from their bedrooms. Eagle Tail quietly eased his bulky frame through the apartment, checking on his children.”

Nice to have! MPR’s Brian Bakst reports: “Democratic challenger Dean Phillips has poured $1.3 million of his own money into his 3rd Congressional District campaign to unseat Republican U.S. House Rep. Erik Paulsen.”

In other news…

For one day: “St. Paul Expo Elementary principal suspended for dating staffer” [Pioneer Press]

Is this what winning feels like? “Second Trump visit racks up $14,000 in costs for Fargo police” [Fargo Forum]

“Rock snot”: “Trout-snuffing ‘rock snot’ confirmed in North Shore stream” [Duluth News Tribune]

Not so bright: “Man shot with flare gun following argument at a Willmar business” [West Central Tribune]

Mobile home and salon: “Home is where the bus is – Family prepares for life aboard traveling house” [Brainerd Dispatch]

’Tis the season: “Jason Voorhees Immortalized In Minnesota Lake; Freddy Krueger Could Be Next” [WCCO]

How did a country that for decades has been supplying us with a multitude of quality consumer goods, filling orders from American companies like Target and Best Buy, suddenly become a pariah for our current administration? How did the millions of Chinese workers who left their villages to toil in the huge city factories to satisfy our appetites for goods become the invisible and faceless foes of America? Have we forgotten our delights with the unbelievably low and lower prices for our purchases? For investors, many have built their nice retirement funds from owning shares of companies that benefited from globalization, of which China has played a crucial part.

I found some answers to these questions at an October China Town Hall event organized by the National Committee on U.S. China Relations (NCUSCR) and sponsored locally by the University of Minnesota China Center and Global Minnesota. NCUSCR, a nonprofit, held its annual national webcast forum in 100 venues, across 44 states and also simultaneously in three Chinese cities. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was interviewed by Stephen Orlins, president of NCUSCR. The questions and answers reflected mainstream media stories and was conducted in style and eloquence.

Rice stressed the need for greater intellectual property protection, the need for China to further open up its markets, e.g. financial services, and she acknowledged her strong and continued support for student exchanges. Rice herself was a past beneficiary of NCUSCR’s support for her first visit to China.

[cms_ad:x100]What followed the streamed Rice interview was an eye- and mind-opening live talk by Andy Rothman, a seasoned investment strategist at Matthews Asia. Rothman had a long U.S. diplomatic career with a focus in Asia. He offered a perspective of the U.S. China “trade war” that differed vastly from that of the Trump administration.

Rothman’s first assertion was that there is no need for a trade war.

The U.S. economy is strong, with its manufacturing long recovered from the recession of 2008. He reminded us that the manufacturing share of total U.S. employment reached a peak in the 1950s, long before China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), and that manufacturing as a portion of the U.S. economy has been steadily shrinking since the 1950s. He attributed much of the cause for this change to U.S. manufacturers becoming more efficient, via technological advances such as automation, thus needing fewer workers to produce the same amount of goods. He further pointed out that in any society a wealthier population consumes more services than goods.

Many U.S. firms ‘winning’ in China

He then pointed out that many American firms have been and are “winning” in China. Rothman gave statistics showing that since China’s inclusion in WTO in 2001, U.S. exports to China haven risen by 580 percent while only increasing by 100 percent to the rest of the world. He cited examples of General Motors, which now sells more cars in China (4 million) than in the U.S., and Nike, whose sales to China contributed 16 percent of its global revenue. In short, more Chinese have become consumers and have growing spending power, so why do we want to jeopardize this market?

Rothman gave equally credible arguments about the harm to our American economy and American workers in a trade war. He gave the example of Boeing, our largest exporter, which employs more than 50,000 factory workers and 45,000 engineers across 50 states plus supporting 1.3 million workers at parts suppliers. Loss of Boeing sales to Airbus for the China market will have a widespread and long-term impact. Apple products, the darling of consumer desire in China, contain parts from the U.S. reflecting the labor of 2 million U.S. workers. Change of Chinese consumer preferences will not only hurt Apple’s profits, but the incomes of Apple employees and the stock portfolios of countless U.S. investors.

Lastly for Midwesterners, Rothman reinforced our concerns for our own soybean farmers who are now in the crosshairs of reciprocal tariffs. Nowhere else can our farmers find a market large enough to absorb the surplus soybean crops year after year that we have grown for animal feed in China.

Rothman’s final argument against this trade war was helping us to understand that China is no longer an export-dependent country for its economy. Net export (export minus import) accounts for only 2 percent of China’s gross domestic product, and China’s exports to the U.S. accounted for only 19 percent of its total exports. So what is the point?

Economist Stiglitz’s point of view

Some answers come from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, interviewed in the latest Barron’s. Without using economic jargon, he claimed that the trade imbalance that has troubled our administration so much and led it to accuse China of cheating in its trade practices was absurd. Stiglitz explained, “When we save less than we invest, there will be a trade deficit. Because of the very badly structured tax bill of December 2017, combined with the January expenditure bill, the fiscal deficit and trade deficit are going way up.”

China has moved 700 million people out of poverty in just a few decades. Stiglitz considered this as “one of the most important global events in the history of mankind.” The general fallacy was that we were told China’s growth and development was at our expense. “But isn’t it good to have more people with income to want to buy our goods?” he asked.

As midterm election nears, these voices seem to be from the wilderness as we are drowning in the torrent of negative political advertisements or tweets. There have been few meaningful debates in Congress on our president’s trade policies and their potential seismic consequences affecting the relations between the two largest world economies. Media pundits’ coverage is unsatisfactory.

[cms_ad:x101]It is time for us in Minnesota to rise above the din and let our true north be our guide. Some questions for us to contemplate:

Is the world not big enough for us to share?

Is it not reasonable for a country to aspire to advance technologically after it has successfully industrialized?

Can we not find compassionate ways through our own domestic policies to help those who are left behind in a fast-changing world?

Kaimay Yuen Terry is a board member of Global Minnesota, and an advisory council member of University of Minnesota China Center. The is a resident of Wayzata. The author’s opinion does not represent views of the organizations.

Decades after their arrival, the Kurdish immigrant community in Fargo-Moorhead – now into its third and fourth generation – is doing so well it’s hard to get members to sit for an interview.

Newzad Brifki, an author and the founder of Moorhead’s Kurdish Community of America, is running for mayor. He will face off Nov. 6 against City Council Member Brenda Elmer and attorney Johnathan Judd to replace Mayor Del Rae Williams. Brifki said he was too busy to be interviewed.

Equally busy is Chrah Maii, an 18-year-old freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead. He was born in Fargo and grew up in Moorhead with two brothers and two sisters.

“My parents are from Northern Iraq,” Maii said. He’s not sure exactly where they are from or when they immigrated to the United States. “They don’t really talk about it. They think they’re in America, they’re here for a fresh start.”

[cms_ad:x100]Brifki’s run for mayor has not gone unnoticed by Maii.

“It’s awfully inspiring. Here’s a guy who was born over there, came over here and is making a name for himself, running for mayor. Me, being born in the U.S., I believe I could do even more.”

What does “even more” entail? Maii’s goal is to achieve a dual major in neuroscience and biology en route to becoming a pediatric oncologist.

Independence remains elusive

Many of the 1,000 people or so of Kurdish descent who live in the Fargo-Moorhead area were either born in the United States or immigrated from the traditional Kurdish homeland, which encompasses parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Political divisions created at the end of World War I left the Kurds without a homeland. While the hope of political independence is dim today in Turkey and Iran, the Kurdish militia is active in the Syrian civil war while their greatest hope and greatest frustration for independence comes in post-Saddam Iraq, where Kurds have voted for an independence that has remained elusive.

Salman, owner of A&R Auto Sales and Repair in West Fargo, fled Iraq in 1988, lived for four years in a migrant camp in Turkey, then emigrated to the United States. He and his brothers first arrived in Nashville, where exists to this day a large community of expat Kurds. He longed for a smaller town where he could more easily establish himself and so lived in Sioux Falls for four years. He was drawn to the Kurdish community in Moorhead-Fargo and eventually made his home there.

Salman is busy running a business. He says the auto sales and repair business is tough these days. Easy money means more people lease cars rather than buy them and trade them rather than repair them.

‘I came here to find peace’

But Salman is not buffaloed by tough times. “I come from a rough life, not peaceful. I came here to find peace, even if it’s not easy. I have the freedom to do my own thing here even if it’s not easy. My parents had a rough life. I want to show my children they have the chance to be something. I can’t do that there (in Iraq).”

One of his sons is a supervisor at a Fargo-area bank. “I’m so proud of him. I helped send him to college and he got the chance to be a banker. People are really happy with the way he’s helping run the bank,” Salman said. In a reflective moment, Salman added, “When it comes to survival, people come here to make a new life, a better life for themselves and their children.”

Many of the émigré children, like Salman’s son and Chrah Maii, have gone through the school system, making the 288 students who speak Kurdish at home in 2017-18 one of the largest ESL groups in Moorhead Public Schools.

Kari Yates, the district’s director of Elementary Learning and Accountability, wrote in an email (because she’s busy) that “of the 288 students with Kurdish home language, only 150 of them continue to qualify for participation in the English Language education program. Many of them have been here long-term and have either not entered EL programming or have exited through annual ACCESS testing.”

[cms_ad:x101]When it comes to being busy, few can match Nezir Ahmed. He has a full-time job as a corrections officer with the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, a part-time job as an officer with the Glyndon Police Department, has children ages 5 and 2,  and his wife is due at any moment with their third child.

His children are born under very different circumstances from the ones into which he was born in 1986. When he was 2 years old, his family fled Iraq to Turkish migrant camps where, like Salman, they waited for four years until they were able to emigrate to the United States.

They lived in his aunt’s house in Fargo — he, his parents and eight brothers and sisters in the upper floor while his aunt’s family lived in the main floor. His father worked three jobs and Ahmed started kindergarten without knowing a word of English.

But Ahmed said that by first grade his English was about 80 percent fluent just from being with other children and playing sports. His family eventually moved to Moorhead, where Ahmed remains to this day.

Respect for traditional culture

He said that while he has adapted to American culture, he and many of the émigrés don’t want to leave their old culture behind. They celebrate Kurdish holidays like Newroz, as well as birthdays and weddings, although he hasn’t attended many recently because he’s very busy.

His brothers and sisters have jobs as teachers, accountants and nurses, while two sisters are stay-at-home mothers. Most have one to three children, and while most still live in the Fargo-Moorhead area, some have moved as far away as California and Texas.

As for Ahmed, his desire to be a police officer came in junior high. He said his family had just made the move from Fargo to Moorhead and, in a bid to feel that he belonged, he fell in with a tough crowd. After he found himself in trouble, the school’s DARE officer and GREAT officer “took me aside and said ‘Hey, you have to shape up,’ ” Ahmed said.

“They gave me a vision of the path of where I was going to be as opposed to the path of where I could be. I started getting more into education, sports, listening to the discipline of my father and family. [My brothers and sisters], we kept each other on the right path.”

He said they watch out for each other. “If you see someone going down the wrong path, you try to help them out.”

Ahmed said he was the focus of some bullying while in school. He was in ninth grade during 9/11 and experienced bigotry not only from students but from teachers as well.

“After that, give or take a week, I learned that some of my friends were not my friends – people I had known for years didn’t want to know me. People called me terrorist, jihadist, ‘is bin Laden your uncle?’ … Without my family support, it could have been a lot worse. You don’t want to just take it, but my parents said to just let it go, it isn’t worth it. Pretty soon people learned that I was Kurdish and not Iraqi. You live and you move on.”

‘More American than Kurd’

While Ahmed’s generation still has a toe in the old country, the newer generation does not.

“My kids, my nieces and nephews, they’re more American than Kurd. They don’t even speak their own language. My brother has a daughter who is in a Spanish immersion program and doesn’t speak a lick of Kurdish.”

Ahmed, who has a degree in criminal justice from North Dakota State University, hopes that being a police officer will offer hope to the next generation.

“I wanted to be a cop and you can be one too. I tell them that if you work hard, you can be anything – not just a cop, but a doctor or a lawyer. You just have to work hard.”

And stay busy.

Changes big and small are becoming common around the Twins, even to something as mundane as the Target Field press conference room. The Twins reconfigured it after the season, turning the chairs to face the long wall opposite the main entrance. A Twins official said they switched it up to showcase a different set of oversized magazine covers mounted on the walls.

Into this new setting Thursday stepped new Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, prematurely balding at 37 but otherwise stylish in appearance. A closely-cropped black beard fit nicely with his dark blue suit, maroon tie and dark brown shoes. This was a new day, and baseball’s youngest manager certainly looked the part.

Formerly an outfielder with Tampa Bay and Boston, and later a scout and first-base coach for the Rays, Baldelli’s reputation as a low-ego communicator landed him the job as much as his baseball savvy. Right away, he showed he could take direction. Before joining Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey and General Manager Thad Levine on the dais, Baldelli shook hands with 98-year-old Star Tribune columnist Sid Hartman slouched in the front row, something Baldelli clearly had been asked to do. Dan and Michelle Baldelli, of the Woonsocket, R.I. Baldellis, raised a respectful young man.

It was a good start. Falvey and Levine took yards of heat for firing 62-year-old manager Paul Molitor one year after Molitor was voted American League Manager of the Year. They’re betting their careers on Baldelli being an upgrade. Levine said owner Jim Pohlad gave him and Falvey a critical stage direction: to handle this managerial hire as if it was their last. Not in an ominous way, Levine said, but with a nod to stability, a return to the Tom Kelly/Ron Gardenhire notion of keeping a manager for a decade or more. Baldelli is the first manager hired from outside the organization since Ray Miller in 1985, and the fourth overall since Kelly replaced Miller in 1986.

[cms_ad:x100]You hear a lot about communication and relating to players with first-time managers these days, and Baldelli fits the prototype. With his parents, three brothers and his longtime girlfriend beaming in the front row, Baldelli spoke at length about getting to know his players and giving them the freedom to absorb information, relax and perform. Baldelli seemed smart and approachable with a sense of humility. He speaks minimal Spanish, but stressed the need for a diverse coaching staff to relate to players of all backgrounds.

“Part of what got him on the board was his résumé, but I think what got him through the process was the person,” Levine said. “We did a ton of vetting of every single candidate. Everybody we talked to about Rocco just was glowing about his ability to develop relationships, to respect people, to both lead and follow. He’s willing to talk and to listen. That combination was extremely endearing to us.”

Baldelli grew up in a baseball town — Hall of Famers Nap Lajoie and Gabby Hartnett were born in Woonsocket, and former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Clem Labine lived there most of his life — and his family breathes baseball. Brother Nick, now a dentist, and Falvey were baseball teammates at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn; Nick cancelled appointments Thursday and Friday to attend the press conference. Dante, a junior outfielder at Boston College, was a 39th-round pick of the Phillies in 2016. And his mother Michelle, the daughter of an All-State baseball player at Woonsocket High, was named for Mickey Mantle.

“My boys growing up had bats when they were two years old,” Michelle Baldelli said. “Rocco was very competitive at a very young age. Nobody had to encourage him to do anything. It’s not a surprise where baseball took him. It’s amazing.”

Rocco was one of those too-good-to-be-true athletes who come out of working-class New England once a generation. His father Dan, known in Woonsocket as Rocky, was a teacher and a firefighter before opening a pawn shop, coffee shop and check cashing service in the same building. Rocky set up a batting cage in the basement, called the Dungeon, where Rocco showed off his swing for scouts. Rocco excelled in baseball, basketball, track and volleyball at Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick, R.I., got straight As, and chose Wake Forest over Princeton for college before signing with the Rays as a first-round pick. His nickname: The Woonsocket Rocket. But he never acted like he was better than anyone else.

“He always looked for the good in people,” Rocky Baldelli said. “It didn’t matter if you were the athlete, the smart kid in the class, the people who played the trumpet, the person who was in theatre and the arts. He was friends, and generally friendly, with everybody. I think that kind of translates over to what he’s doing in baseball, when you have so many different types of individuals. I think it works. He’s always accepted everyone and been very fair with everyone. That’s how he is. He’s one of those kids who never changed.”

Baldelli showed that in the way he answered questions. When a reporter identified himself or herself, Baldelli said hello and repeated the first name. He gave long, thoughtful responses, almost always beginning with “So…”, rarely resorting to buzzwords and cliches.

Baldelli is one of the baseball’s most well-liked people, much like Joe Mauer, and that came across repeatedly. He even disarmed one crotchety columnist (no, not Sid, the other one from the Strib) who groused about the new “opener” pitching strategy ruining baseball.

“So, I feel like open-mindedness and just curiosity are generally good traits regardless of what industry that you’re in,” he said, to laughter.

Still, Baldelli knows where he stands. He lacks Molitor’s Hall of Fame playing résumé. Multiple injuries, plus a muscle disorder that caused fatigue and cramping, forced him to retire at age 29. He doesn’t expect instant credibility. “Why would they have an exceptional amount of trust in me?” he said. “They don’t know me. You build that over time. That’s the part I look forward to, building the trust and relationships with these guys. You don’t know how it’s going to end up, but that’s the only way I know how to do it.”

[cms_ad:x101]To gain that trust, he said, “You talk to them. You don’t come out the first day and give your hopefully semi-interesting spring training speech to the whole team and think that’s going to do the trick. That’s not how it works. The way it works is, you hopefully in this off-season get to know them a little bit. Then you get to know them a little more. And hopefully, you show up to spring training and take an interest in them, not just in a baseball career.

“I like getting to know people. I like to know what makes these guys tick, and how to get the most out of them on the field and off. That’s really the answer.”

Communication helps if you’ve got good players, and the Twins enter this offseason with questions and deficiencies just about everywhere.

Earlier in the day, Baldelli said he spoke briefly by phone with Mauer, who still hasn’t decided whether to play next year. (Expect that announcement next week.) Baldelli needs to spend time with the oft-injured Byron Buxton and Miguel Sanó before determining how to help the club’s two most important young players revive their careers. The Twins banked on them as stars, and Baldelli’s success may ride on getting more out of them than Molitor did — a task much more difficult than, say, rearranging chairs.

“I want to hear what they have to say,” Baldelli said. “That’s probably the best place for me to start.”

Thursday evening’s “Monumental Conversations: Lessons from Charlottesville” event at the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota had already yielded many nuggets of wisdom, hope, knowledge and truth from a panel of academics and students who’d gathered to rip scabs off the scars of racism. But two hours in, everything went up another level when Janaan Ahmed leaned into the microphone.

What happened next gave everyone in the room chills, and drew the night’s lone long round of applause.

[cms_ad:x100]“When we first started this campaign, it was the end of the school year, [my] freshman year, and I saw a poster on the wall that said ‘Change The Name,’” said Ahmed, surrounded by a roomful of change-makers who have borne witness to the end of racist statues and monuments in Virginia, and in the renamings and would-be renamings of Bde Maka Ska (formerly named for John C. Calhoun), Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote (formerly Fort Snelling), Justice Page Middle School (formerly named for Alexander Ramsey) and Coffman Union (named for Lotus Coffman) in Minnesota.

“It had a little brief history of who Patrick Henry was, and I hadn’t known who Patrick Henry was. I’m walking into this facility of education every day not knowing who this person is, but every time I fill out an application, every time I let someone know what school I attend, I always say ‘Patrick Henry,’ but I could not name one thing Patrick Henry did, except that he did something for our country.

“So you being a student of color and a student whose history is only told in one chapter in our history books, and the title is just ‘Slavery,’ it hurts, knowing that you come to school to learn every single day and your history is being denied. Walking into a school every single day, eight hours a day, five days a week, knowing that the history’s not being told as complete. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a wide circle of trauma.

“Patrick Henry was a slave owner, and slavery is inhumane no matter how long ago or how current it has been occurring, and I think it’s important for us to analyze our history as corrupt and inaccurate. We’re trying to change the name to something that better represents the community, the students, our visions, our missions, because I think a person who was a lawyer and governor of Virginia whose whole role in the slave trade and slave system outweighs what he did good for our country.

“I’ve actually seen people cover their ears, 50-years-old-plus, while me, 16 years old, is speaking. That just goes to show the ignorance that people want to hold on to rather than the humanity that they would rather grasp. It is very frustrating seeing grown folks covering their ears while you’re speaking, and you invited them to the school you attend that they attended 30 years ago.

“For me, I think the name change last year, as a sophomore, it really hit and touched my own mind and soul first. Last year, I was giving a presentation for the name change and afterwards a senior came up to me and said, ‘Oh my goodness, Janann’ — she remembered my name, and how I presented myself — ‘When you were speaking, I got chills. It’s outrageous that we have to continue to come to a school and not learn our whole history.’

“So knowing that I inspired not only myself but my peers to make a change is empowering, and I think the name change is so important because at our school, the majority is people of color. So you have black students walking into a school and an institution named after their oppressor, someone who could have oppressed my own ancestors, human beings chained up and named as property, as cattle. The historical trauma that we have to face every single day on a daily basis is outrageous and something needs to be done and we start with the name change. So that’s what we’re doing for souls, and minds, and bodies.”

“I think there are a lot of spaces where public history is told and it continues to reinforce white supremacy in many ways and indigenous stories are marginalized,” said Dr. Mattie Harper of the Minnesota Historical Society, who co-authored a piece for MinnPost with fellow historian and panelist Peter DeCarlo about the wayward Christopher Columbus statue on the Minnesota state capitol grounds. “I think it’s important to think about: Why is that monument still there? Why is it uncontested? Why do we just accept the perpetuation of these statues and monuments that reinforce this idea that Native Americans were savages and progress came with Columbus and other Euro-Americans?”

[cms_ad:x101]Thankfully, something like healing was offered Thursday — a day in America when four more white supremacists were arrested on riot charges in Charlottesville; pipe bombs were delivered to Trump critics on the East and West coasts and a race-related murder took place in Louisville, Kentucky.

“We authored the Rename Coffman resolution that took place last year after we had seen the [“A Campus Divided”] exhibit in Anderson Hall,” said University of Minnesota student Natasha Sohni. “Along with Coffman, it showed a lot of the other problematic folks who have been leaders at this university and the things that they have done. Through his practices of surveying students and segregating housing, along with what a lot of other universities are doing across the country and renaming their buildings, we thought it would be best to promote the inclusivity that the University Of Minnesota strives to communicate to prospective students.”

“I think it’s great that it was a student-led process and that we’re named for [Alan] Page,” said E’Rayah Shaw, a student at Justice Page Middle School. “He’s still alive, he’s a Supreme Court justice, he played for the Vikings, number ‘88’, he comes to our school every Friday, and I feel like it’s way better and the community’s way happier.”

Heart attacks occur more often during cold wintry days, according to a Swedish study published recently in JAMA Cardiology.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 274,000 patients who had been admitted to a coronary care unit in Sweden for a heart attack between 1998 and 2013. Using meteorological data, they then looked to see what the weather was like on the days of those medical emergencies in the specific regions where the hospitals were located.

They found that the incidence of heart attack was higher on days with lower air temperature, lower atmospheric air pressure, higher wind velocity and fewer hours of sunshine.

The association was particularly strong when air temperatures fell below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

[cms_ad:x100]When the researchers broke down the data by geographical region, they also found a “pronounced” association between heart attacks and snow and wind in Sweden’s northernmost latitudes.

“Our results not only suggest that weather is independently associated with the incidence of [heart attack] but also that the association may differ with regard to season,” the study’s authors write.

Tackling limitations

As background information in the study points out, the idea that heart attacks occur more often during winter has been reported in medical journals as far back as 1926, when researchers reported the phenomenon among residents of New England.

Most previous studies linking weather and heart attacks tended to focus only on cold temperatures and snow, however. And most did not use clinically validated diagnoses of heart attacks for their data.

The current study was designed to overcome those problems — and to include a very large number of participants.

Still, the study was observational, which means it can’t prove that wintry weather causes heart attacks. Also, the effects found in the study were modest. An increase of 45 degrees Fahrenheit was associated with a 2.8 percent decrease in the risk of heart attack.

Yet, given that 7.9 million Americans have heart attacks each year (about one every 40 seconds), even a 2.8 percent decline is significant, as it represents about 181,000 people.

Possible causes

As Gary Jennings, chief medical adviser of the National Heart Foundation of Australia, points out in a commentary for The Conversation, winter’s link with heart attacks has a plausible biological explanation:

There is a clear association between cold and artery function (the vessels that deliver oxygenated blood from the heart to other parts of the body). This can be illustrated by a common physiology lab manoeuvre known as the cold pressor test. People are asked to put their forearm into iced water. Blood pressure rises immediately because arteries constrict, presumably to maintain core body temperature at normal levels.

Simple hydrodynamics tells us constriction is more profound and impacts more on the flow through a tube – in this case a coronary artery – at points of obstruction. In a few people with coronary disease the cold pressor test is enough to cause the artery to spasm and for flow to cease until the artery relaxes again.

But other factors also make heart attacks more likely in winter.

“In many places, air pollution is more common, and evidence is accumulating that certain particles in the air are related to heart disease,” Jennings explains. “Winter is also flu season, which makes people already at risk of heart disease more vulnerable.”

[cms_ad:x101]Jennings also notes that during the sunnier, warmer days of summer, people tend to spend more time engaged in outdoor leisure activities, a factor that can improve blood pressure and other measures of heart health.

The higher rates of heart attack in winter may also be related, therefore, to increased sedentary behavior.

“So, by all means keep warm and comfortable in winter but get out and do something too,” he says.

“Look after your risk factors and see your doctor regularly for a heart check,” he adds.

FMI: You’ll find an abstract of the JAMA Cardiology study on the journal’s website, but the full study is behind a paywall.

The plan to build a copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota took a leap forward on Thursday, when Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources approved critical permits for the project.

Coming after an environmental review process that took more than a decade, the decision did not shock anyone who had been following the saga. PolyMet Mining has made consistent progress through the DNR’s review, which most saw as a signal the project was likely to move ahead despite fervent opposition from environmentalists.

While those environmental groups are concerned the project could potentially pollute the ecosystem of Lake Superior and the St. Louis River watershed, supporters say the mine will bring hundreds of jobs to the region while upholding the state’s strict environmental regulations.

[cms_ad:x100]But the decision still marks a pivotal moment for the $1 billion project near Hoyt Lakes and could have political ramifications throughout the state just days before elections.

Here are four takeaways from the decision:

1. Environmentalists’ arguments were rebuffed (again)

Environmental groups have so far used two main lines of attack to try and stop the PolyMet project from getting permits.

First, Minnesota’s Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) has argued PolyMet is planning to build a dramatically bigger mine than it has actually proposed. The second is that some disputes over the project — such as questions raised about the safety of its tailings dam intended to store waste — should be subject to review from an administrative law judge.

Both were rejected by the DNR. In a news conference Thursday, DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr said the agency had done enough research and planning to justify skipping the administrative law judge, and he also tried to downplay concerns of a bait-and-switch. He said any “substantive” change to the current PolyMet project would set up “another environmental review and permitting process not unlike what we have done here in the last 14 years.”

In a statement earlier in the day, Landwehr said “no project in the history of Minnesota has been more thoroughly evaluated.” The DNR also highlighted a financial assurance package from PolyMet to cover clean up costs. It starts at $74 million during construction and scales up to more than $1 billion during the peak of mining, according to the agency’s news release.

PolyMet says its current 6,000-acre open-pit plan would result in roughly 1.2 billion pounds of copper, 170 million pounds of nickel and 6.2 million pounds of cobalt, plus other precious metals, over 20 years. If built, it would be the first non-iron mining operation in the state.

Based on financial information submitted by PolyMet through Canadian disclosure laws, however, the MCEA contends the mining company wants to build a mine at least double in size. Copper-nickel mining has long-term risks for the environment, including the creation of acid that can leach heavy metals into water.

“It is very rare for a regulatory agency to say no to an expansion,” Aaron Klemz, a spokesman for the MCEA, told reporters Thursday. “This is a very common technique for the mining industry — to get their camel’s nose under the tent and then come in with the actual proposal.” Klemz’s organization has a pending lawsuit challenging the decision to not review a larger mine in the Court of Appeals.

2. The timing of the decision might help  — or hurt —  the DFL

The DNR said its decision to permit the PolyMet mine this week had nothing to do with Tuesday’s election and the timing was purely coincidental. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean the ruling won’t have an effect on voters.

Aaron Brown, a writer and professor in Hibbing who closely follows Iron Range politics, said there’s not likely to be a huge PolyMet ripple but said it could give a “pro jobs talking point” to DFLers like Tim Walz, who is running for governor, and Joe Radinovich, who is a candidate in the 8th Congressional District. In those races, the PolyMet decision could act as a “cover for Democrats who are worried about losing votes to Republicans on this issue,” Brown said.

[cms_ad:x101]Mining plays an outsized role in the 8th Congressional District, which encompasses the Iron Range in northeast Minnesota. The GOP has hammered DFLers who oppose another project, the Twin Metals mine plan near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and argued the environmental review process for PolyMet took far too long.

That said, both CD8 candidates, Radinovich and Republican Pete Stauber, have backed PolyMet’s mining plan. Brown said people shouldn’t think “the Range is going to come thundering in for Radinovich simply because of this.”

Another group the DNR permits could influence: disaffected environmentalists. Brown said the decision could drive some in the 8th Congressional District to vote for an alternate candidate. Ray “Skip” Sandman has been running with an anti-mining stance in the district. 

Tim Lindberg, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Morris, said if Walz comes out strong in support of the PolyMet decision, it could “reinforce the belief among some DFLers in the [Twin] Cities that Walz is too moderate for them.”

Walz has signaled his support for letting the project go through the environmental permitting process. But an email to a spokeswoman about Thursday’s decision was not returned.

3. The politics of the PolyMet project are not the same as those of Twin Metals

The positive reaction to the DNR permits across much of the political spectrum underscores the difference between the PolyMet project and the contentious copper-nickel mining future of Twin Metals near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

Some Democrats have worked to throw roadblocks to mining near the BWCA, worried it could harm Minnesota’s most famous natural area. Just one example: former President Barack Obama ordered a study of the impact such a mine might have on Superior National Forest and the BWCA that could have led to a 20-year moratorium on copper-nickel mining in the area. It was ended recently by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Gov. Mark Dayton, Walz and other prominent DFLers have tried to slow or stop minerals exploration in the region, too. (The same goes for U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen, a Republican.)

On the flip side, Dayton has supported PolyMet outright, while Walz and DFL Sens. Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar worked to facilitate a land exchange for the PolyMet project in Congress.

“Mining is not only part of the north country’s past, but it’s also part of its future,” Smith said at a debate Thursday with Republican state Sen. Karin Housley. Smith added the PolyMet project “should go forward.”

4. There is an air of inevitability about the project

Kathryn Hoffman, CEO of the MCEA, declared in a statement that the DNR’s decision “does not mean that PolyMet will move forward.”

She’s right. While the DNR approved 11 permits it has control over, PolyMet still needs a bundle of other permits from Minnesota’s Pollution Control Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and other local permissions. (The MPCA permit decision is expected by the end of the year, according to PolyMet, and the Army Corps will follow after.)

The MCEA’s lawsuits remain pending and more from environmental groups appear likely in the coming months. But Thursday’s decision gives more certainty to PolyMet and its investors, and many supporters are celebrating.

PolyMet said the DNR permits allow them to move forward with “financing and final engineering designs” on the project, and paves the way for them to begin modernizing old LTV Steel Mining Company processing facilities for a new PolyMet mine.

“It is a victory for Iron Range families who have steadfastly supported us and who depend on and will benefit from the hundreds of jobs that construction and operations will create and support for years to come,” PolyMet CEO Jon Cherry said in a news release.

Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, said in a statement that the DNR permits were “great news for the Iron Range and for all of Minnesota.”

Aaron Brown said his attention is now largely turning to whether the mining project can actually become and stay a profitable venture in an industry that can be volatile.

“I think the bigger issue is that everyone on the range has put their hopes and dreams into this enterprise here — and that it might not deliver the manna from heaven that everybody hopes for even if it opens,” he said.

Jeff Johnson was angry.

“There is a special place in hell for people who would write an ad like this and think this is acceptable behavior,” Johnson said at a press conference Wednesday. He was referencing a new attack ad sponsored by the DFL-supporting independent expenditure committee called Alliance for a Better Minnesota. In it, a man named Austin tells of being born with a disability and claims that Johnson’s plan for health care could deny him affordable insurance.

“For Jeff Johnson to treat us this way is profoundly shameful,” Austin says.

Johnson has asserted throughout the campaign that he would assure those with pre-existing conditions would have affordable health insurance. ABM and Democratic nominee Tim Walz have responded by claiming putting high-cost patients into high-risk pools would make the insurance purchased there unaffordable.

But the ad and the press conference illustrate a different issue in the 2018 campaign: the clout and impact of independent expenditure campaigns that are separate from campaigns but often work in concert. The spending from these committees dwarfs what candidates can raise and spend.

Outside money

The most recent reports to the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board show that non-candidate committees have spent heavily on state races — outpacing, in many cases, the money spent by candidates themselves. Based on the the reports, independent expenditure campaigns had spent just less than $20 million in campaigns for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor and the Minnesota Legislature. Of that, $13.4 million has been spent to aid DFL candidates, either from electioneering in support of those candidates or against GOP rivals. GOP-leaning committees have spent $6.4 million.

Now, a caveat here: these numbers are current as of Tuesday. Nearly 100 past-due state campaign finance reports and about 100 handwritten reports that were not yet entered (that’s right, handwritten reports) had not been entered in the state’s system. MinnPost removed spending data for candidates who were defeated in primaries, but money spent to affect candidates who won primaries may be included.

No limits

State campaign finance limits cap how much candidates can accept from any single donor. Candidates who opt into the state public subsidy program accept caps on total spending in return for the additional campaign funds from the state.

DFL nominee for governor Walz has a spending cap of $5.039 million. GOP nominee Johnson can spend no more than $4.58 million. (The difference is due to Walz’s status as a first time statewide candidate.) Attorney general candidates Doug Wardlow and Keith Ellison can spend no more than $720,000. And state House candidates have base lids of $65,500 plus the value of the first-time candidate bonus and the contested primary bonus if eligible.

Independent expenditure committees have no limits on how much can be contributed and how much can be spent. One result is Johnson’s own campaign committee spent $2.1 million as of the latest Campaign Finance Board report while the Alliance for a Better Minnesota has already spent $4.1 million against him, with another $500,000 added after the reporting deadline. Though not included in the totals for the general election, ABM also spent $2.5 million against Tim Pawlenty before Johnson bested him in the GOP primary.

All totaled, independent expenditure committees have spent $11.65 million in the governor’s race, with Walz benefiting far more than Johnson: $9.6 million to $2.06 million. But for legislative races, GOP-leaning committees are spending significantly more: $4.3 million, vs. $2.7 million on behalf of DFLers.

ABM is the primary expenditure committee for DFLers and gets most of its money from two other DFL-affiliated committees: WIN Minnesota and the 2018 Fund. Those groups are funded both by wealthy individuals and labor unions. The 2018 Fund also benefited from a $1.9 million donation from State Victory Action, a Democratic organization based in North Carolina that is aimed at winning state legislative races.

ABM is spending primarily in the governor’s race.

Other DFL-affiliated groups are the DFL state Central Committee, the Walz-backing Minnesota Victory Fund. That committee added nearly $3 million since the last finance report, nearly all from the DFL central committee organization.

Supporting GOP candidates are the Freedom Club, a PAC created by Bob and Joan Cummins which is spending to help Johnson’s campaign for governor. Other GOP-leaning committees are the Minnesota Jobs Coalition and a set of organizations connected to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce — the Pro Jobs Majority and the Coalition of Minnesota Businesses.

But the GOP groups, other than the Freedom Club, are concentrating on legislative races.

Different focus

Republicans, who want to maintain or increase their 20-seat majority in the Minnesota House, are spending much more heavily in pursuit of keeping control of the Legislature than the Democrats seeking to wrest control from them.

According to spending reports, independent expenditures to help Republicans (in favor of Republican candidates or against DFLers) weigh in at nearly two times the amount to help Democrats (money spent in favor of DFLers or against Republicans).

Much of that spending is happening in the Twin Cities suburbs.

The suburbs are pretty clearly the battleground this year, said Gina Countryman, the executive director of Minnesota Action Network, a Republican group that has spent in the governor and attorney general races on behalf of Republicans.

These are areas where many voters split tickets in 2016. For Democrats, the challenge will be to pick off Republicans who have weathered tough years for their party in the past by getting those split-ticket voters to vote straight-ticket, Countryman said.

That puts Republicans on the defense in districts like:

• 44A, longtime incumbent Rep. Sarah Anderson’s Plymouth seat
• Roz Peterson’s 56B in Inver Grove Heights.

Anderson and Peterson’s seats are among the 12 that, in 2016, elected Republican representatives the same night they voted for Hillary Clinton and are two major targets for Republican spending. 36A in Champlin, formerly held by Republican Rep. Mark Uglem, is also a top target. It went for Trump but is open this year.

Also in Republican groups’ top five targets are two seats they hope to pick off from the DFL. Apple Valley’s 57A, an open seat Erin Maye Quade stepped away from when she ran for lieutenant governor on Erin Murphy’s ticket (they lost the primary), has seen more spending than any other Minnesota House district on the whole, though far more from Republicans. Another Republican spending target, 37A in Spring Lake Park  went for Trump by a small margin, but elected DFLer Erin Koegel in 2016.

DFL-affiliated groups are spending more in Sarah Anderson’s seat in Plymouth than anywhere else in the House, hoping the longtime Republican incumbent, who has withstood DFL waves in the past, won’t be able to pull it off this year. Other Republican-held seats round out DFLers top five independent expenditure districts, including:

• 34B in Maple Grove, currently held by Republican Dennis Smith;
• Inver Grove Heights’ 52B (Regina Barr);
• Eden Prairie’s 48B (Jenifer Loon);
• and one on the Iron Range, Cohasset’s 5B (Sandra Layman).

With the exception of the Cohasset-area seat, the others are among the 12 Republican-held Minnesota House Districts that favored Clinton in 2016.

Though Republican groups are spending more on the whole in the House, and in most districts, there are some races where DFL groups are spending more than Republicans. One of them is the special election in Senate District 13, in the St. Cloud area, which pits Republican Jeff Howe against Democrat Joe Perske. Control of the Senate wasn’t supposed to be on the ballot this year, but a chain reaction that saw Tina Smith appointed to U.S. Senate and Sen. Michelle Fischbach ascend to lieutenant governor means the Senate — held by Republicans by one seat — is also in play.

The seat is in a fairly Republican territory and had been held by Fischbach for a long time. But the prospect of an open seat and control of the Senate may be attracting money from DFL groups, even if the chances aren’t great. DFL-affiliated groups have spent $675,000 to Republicans’ $354,000.

Republican groups are far-and-away outspending DFL groups in the House, but the opposite is true in the governor’s race, where spending in favor the DFL outstrips spending in favor of Republicans by nearly 5:1.

What it all means

Where the two sides have put their money could be an indicator of where they think they have their best shot to control a branch of government.

Republicans might see maintaining their majority in the House, by either holding on to some, all, or gaining on their margin as their best shot this year.

Johnson was asked about the gap between outside spending for his campaign and the spending to help Walz and said he didn’t know what the election-day impact would be.

“We went into this planning to win it alone and we have had help from some folks and we appreciate that,” he said. “But this is not unusual in Minnesota. The left outside groups almost always spend more than the outside groups on the right, by a lot. The same thing happened four years ago.”

After eight years of control of the governor’s office, and with Walz ahead of Johnson in the polls (within the margin of error, in most), Democrats may be more concerned with keeping control of the governor’s office for another four years. They may also see it as the best bang for their buck, given Republicans’ sizable margin in the House.

A year ago, Tina Smith never imagined she would be here.

“I was thinking about what I was doing a year ago, and it’s so completely different,” she said, sitting in her car in the parking lot of an Apple Valley shopping center. “If somebody told me that I would be doing this a year ago, I wouldn’t have seen the path.”

It’s possible the former lieutenant governor could have seen the path to where she was on this recent Saturday — popping into DFL rallies around the metro area to fire up volunteers on the eve of a crucial midterm election. In 2014 and 2016, she was practically Gov. Mark Dayton’s official ambassador on the campaign trail.

But Smith, along with the rest of the political world, could not have imagined who she would be today: a U.S. senator in the thick of a campaign to win a seat she was appointed to in January, after Al Franken resigned in the wake of a sexual misconduct scandal.

[cms_ad:x100]After spending decades doing almost everything and going almost everywhere in Minnesota politics, Smith has found herself in a new place this midterm year: the spotlight. The longtime behind-the-scenes politico is finally a so-called “principal” — the one who is introduced at rallies, not the one doing the introducing.

As she manages that learning curve, Smith has also been tasked with making a name for herself and getting things done on Capitol Hill, no easy feat in the maelstrom of crisis and partisan warfare that is Donald Trump’s Washington. Like the last person to hold this seat, Smith has started out in the Senate by maintaining a close focus on Minnesota issues and working to bring home the bacon on big items like the Farm Bill.

Even as Smith juggles all these tasks, she has been favored to win Minnesota voters’ approval to continue with her new job, and the special election for this seat was not expected to register on a U.S. Senate map already crowded with more high-priority races for both parties.

But the Republican candidate, state Sen. Karin Housley, has run a persistent campaign, needling Smith on everything from #MeToo politics to her failure to appear at a televised debate. Housley has trailed in every poll, but she has raised enough money and garnered enough support that this race is on national Republicans’ radar as a possible wildcard.

The new senator knows as well as anyone Minnesotans’ independent tendencies at the ballot box, and she says she is taking nothing for granted. Smith, someone who brandishes a reputation in Minnesota politics as a coalition-builder, is now trying to scale that approach statewide to win over a Minnesota that seems more politically divided than ever.

‘Wired’ to find common ground

Since being appointed to this seat by Dayton in December 2017, Smith has repeatedly said she would be a “fierce advocate” for Minnesota, a label that’s become something of a mantra for her and her campaign.

But before Smith was a “fierce advocate,” she was the “velvet hammer.” That nickname was formed during her career in Minnesota politics, during which she became known as someone with an uncanny ability to make things happen behind closed doors. Smith jokes she was called the “velvet hammer” because she was able to persuade powerful people to do the right thing — and that the right thing was their idea.

The 60-year old’s path to Minnesota political prominence began in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she grew up. It’s a place where she continues to have deep roots: her father, a retired attorney, still lives there; the senator owns a second home there with her husband, Archie — an investor who has specialized in medical device stocks — in addition to their home in an upscale section of southwest Minneapolis.

Smith picked up degrees from Stanford and Dartmouth before moving to Minnesota to take a job at General Mills in the 1980s. Before long, she got involved in Minnesota politics, and by 1998, she was managing Ted Mondale’s campaign for governor. In 2002, after Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash days before the November election, Smith stepped in to run the replacement campaign of former Vice President Walter Mondale, someone who Smith now refers to as her political mentor.

[cms_ad:x101]After that, Smith was a top official at Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and the Dakotas — an organization that has championed her U.S. Senate campaign — before becoming chief of staff to R.T. Rybak when he was re-elected mayor of Minneapolis in 2005. Smith, Rybak told MinnPost, “deserves a lot of credit for things that I’ve gotten credit for.”

“She’s just kind of wired to find common ground,” he said, echoing one of Smith’s current campaign themes. When the I-35W bridge collapsed in 2007, Rybak watched Smith work with the office of then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty as the Democratic mayor and Republican governor attempted to move forward from the devastating accident.

“There was a tremendous lack of trust between two offices that had to work together on a horrendous disaster,” he said. “Tina was the one, more than anybody, who pulled those two offices together and had them acting almost as one.” He recalled that at a joint meeting months after the collapse, Pawlenty slipped and referred to Smith as his own chief of staff.

After Dayton defeated a field that included Rybak in the 2010 DFL governor race, the new governor brought Smith on as chief of staff. In 2014, when Dayton was selecting a new running-mate, Javier Morillo, a DFL activist and head of the Service Employees International Union Local 26, recalled asking the then-Dayton chief who the lieutenant governor pick was. When Smith texted it was her, Morillo thought she was joking, so he quipped back that the office was “where careers go to die.” (“I’ve never been more embarrassed,” Morillo says of attending Dayton’s presentation of Smith as lieutenant governor.)

But Smith turned a dead-end job into a springboard, becoming Dayton’s emissary, enforcer and close advisor. Summing up sentiment in Minnesota politics, MinnPost’s Doug Grow wrote in 2016 that Smith was a new kind of lieutenant governor in that she “actually has real responsibilities, as well as what seems to be the respect and loyalty of her boss.”

Allies like Morillo weren’t surprised that Smith became an effective lieutenant governor. But they were surprised at how she took to a new task: the nitty gritty of campaigning as a candidate, not as an operative.

“I’ve known her for a long time as the person behind the scenes who gets stuff done,” Morillo says. “I just didn’t think of Tina in that way, who would be the public face of a campaign… Gov. Dayton did very little campaigning himself in the re-elect — it was Tina who criss-crossed the state and she really enjoyed it. She took to it in ways that people never imagined she would.”

Just a ‘replacement’?

By 2017, Smith had a bright political future in front of her: Dayton seemed to be setting her up to run for governor herself, and some confidantes were urging her to run for mayor of Minneapolis. Many paths appeared to lay ahead, like she’d recalled in Apple Valley, but what happened next was not one of them.

In November, several women came forward to accuse Sen. Franken of sexual harassment, and in a matter of weeks — spurred on by his Democratic colleagues in the Senate — the national liberal icon announced his resignation from office. In December, Dayton appointed Smith as his replacement, and every big name in Minnesota DFL politics said to be interested in the job quickly backed Smith, heading off a crowded primary.

Sworn in on January 3, Smith faced a tall order: learning how to function in the Senate while gearing up for two grueling elections in three years — this Nov. 6 special election contest, and then another campaign in 2020, the year this seat’s next election was scheduled.

But Smith also remained attached to the lingering Franken scandal in ways big and small. In March, for example, she fired back at Politico, which ran a headline that simply referred to her as “Al Franken’s replacement.”

But the more difficult task for Smith has been navigating the minefield of pain and hurt feelings lingering in Minnesota among many who believe that Franken did not get a fair chance to defend himself from the misconduct allegations — or even that those allegations were part of a targeted smear. (Smith’s main rival for the DFL nomination for Senate, former George W. Bush ethics lawyer Richard Painter, said Franken’s ouster was “likely a Roger Stone/FOX set up job.”)

“People have lots of different feelings about what happened when Sen. Franken made the really hard decision to resign. I have come to respect people have lots of different feelings, sometimes very strong feelings, and they’re not all the same,” Smith told MinnPost.

“What challenging circumstances to come in, right?” said Fourth District Rep. Betty McCollum about Smith’s arrival in Washington. McCollum, an admirer of Smith’s, has known her since they worked on Roger Moe’s 2002 campaign for governor. “Our party was really mourning the loss of Al Franken, as well were many people nationally,” she said. “It was bittersweet for her to come into the office.”

“There were many people who were extremely upset and continue to be about losing a senator who they feel really strongly about,” said Rybak. “That just made her job more complex… But she has navigated through it exceptionally.”

Smith says that she’s never felt like anyone has held her responsible for what happened. “The thing that people are most likely to say to me, people who come up to me, is something along the lines of, thank you for doing this, thank you for stepping in. You didn’t have to do this.” (These days, Smith says she is occasionally in touch with Franken. “We’ll exchange a text,” she says. “He’s been very helpful in terms of giving good advice.”)

In public appearances, Smith has been careful to praise Franken. In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in June, Smith called Franken a “great leader in Minnesota” and said he was a “champion for a lot of issues that matter to women.” The flip side of Smith’s balancing act on Franken is the group of mostly young progressives who believed the senator deserved to go — a division Republicans have occasionally exploited.

According to Steven Schier, a retired professor of politics at Carleton College, Smith has been faced with a remarkably difficult task. “If someone wants to enter the U.S. Senate, it’s hard to imagine more complicated and challenging circumstances than she has faced,” he said.

“Up against an immediate re-election, she is dealing with the Franken fallout and she’s having to learn a new job with a different president in charge. Add it up, and I don’t think I’d like to do that.”

Doing the ‘senator’ part

To many of his supporters, Franken was an irreplaceable progressive advocate, someone with a singular ability to pressure the Trump administration, as evidenced by his headline-grabbing lines of questioning in 2017’s Cabinet confirmation hearings.

Smith — who people like Rybak say faced some pressure to come into D.C. as a “female Al” — is a progressive Democrat who is in line with the party’s left wing on issues like health care, for which the senator supports a single-payer system. She is described by supporters as meticulous on policy, but few call her flashy when it comes to politics.

In her time in the Senate so far, however, Smith has acted more like Franken than it may seem: the former senator arrived on Capitol Hill in 2009 after a 300-vote victory, laser-focused on Minnesota issues, shunning the spotlight and working to improve his policy bona fides. It was a posture he maintained for his first six-year term, and then some.

In the Senate, Smith has followed in those footsteps, largely focusing on parochial and bread-and-butter issues like rural access to broadband internet, student debt relief, workforce training initiatives, and programs to benefit farmers in Congress’ Farm Bill. (Smith sits on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, the Agriculture Committee, the Energy Committee, and the Indian Affairs Committee, giving her an issue portfolio that overlaps with Klobuchar’s, and is similar to what Franken’s was.)

Smith has also targeted the pharmaceutical industry, which has been a useful piñata for both Democrats and Republicans in the 2018 midterms: Her first piece of legislation in the Senate was a bill to aid consumer access to more affordable generic drugs. (Her campaign literature often emphasizes she is “standing up to Big Pharma.”)

To get a grip on the challenge of learning how the Senate works while running for it, Smith says she went “all-in on the Senator part.” “I tried to think about who were the people who were interested in the same issues,” she said. “Who are those people and the relationships I could build to help me accomplish things and find common ground with people?”

“I think the best job for her was always the Senate, because of this exceptional quality to get conflicting people to agree on something,” Rybak said. “It’s a unique fit for her.”

But there is a limit to that approach in this increasingly partisan Senate, where Republicans hold a two-seat majority. The congressional watchdog website GovTrack rates Smith in the more moderate half of the Senate Democratic caucus, almost exactly in line with where Klobuchar sits. But on key votes, such as judicial and administration appointments like that of Gina Haspel to head the CIA, Smith has been a reliable “no” vote for Democratic leadership.

Showing up

Back in Minnesota, Smith trades the formal attire of the Senate for the campaign casual of flannel shirts, vests, and pairs of blue Converse sneakers that have become something of a logo for her campaign.

Smith is trying to translate the bipartisan, above-the-fray tone of her work in D.C. to the campaign trail: Instead of talking about President Trump, she would much rather talk, for example, about legislation she co-authored with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, to improve access to mental health services in schools. That provision passed as part of an opioid crisis relief package signed into law in October.

With Minnesotans deluged with midterm politics, from endless debates to a constant barrage of negative ads on TV, Smith is positioning herself, like many other candidates are, as an antidote to the toxicity.

“What I observe is that Minnesotans are tired of the division, they’re tired of the heatedness of the political debate, they’re really sick of the negative advertising,” she said. “I know people always say that. I feel that today, and I’ve been around a lot of campaigns… I feel like there’s a heightened level of weariness with that.”

It’s a point echoed by her opponent, Karin Housley, who also says that people are tired of the division and fighting in politics and want a no-nonsense person in this Senate seat who can get things done.

But this race, which has hovered on the edge of the national Senate priority list for both parties, has been heated and divisive, no matter how much the two people at the center of the election decry it. Smith and Housley have gone at each other vigorously, and sometimes personally, on a variety of topics.

Housley, who entered the race before Smith was sworn in, has sought to make what many Smith allies see as a strength — her long history in politics — into a weakness, referring to her as a “political insider” or a “career politician.” (Housley, a real estate agent by trade, has represented a Washington County district in the Minnesota state Senate since 2012.)

She has also sought to paint Smith as a hypocrite on her signature issue — going after the high cost of pharmaceutical drugs. That line of attack produced one of the more negative ads of the 2018 cycle: a 30-second spot, funded by Housley’s campaign, which accused Smith of profiting off the opioid crisis due to her husband’s ownership in stock of Abbott Laboratories, the original marketer of the addictive opioid OxyContin. The ad, which showed stand-ins for the Smiths toasting champagne glasses on the beach, has been determined to be misleading by multiple fact-checkers.

The heart of Housley’s closing argument against Smith, however, stems from the senator declining to appear at a televised debate between the two, scheduled for October 21 on KSTP. From that episode, Housley got an invaluable gift: the image of herself standing next to an empty podium. (Smith’s campaign cited scheduling conflicts as the reason she could not debate; the two sparred on Thursday in a debate carried by WCCO.)

Republicans have used the empty-podium visual to cast Smith as an appointee acting like an established incumbent. Housley’s final campaign ad puts this front-and-center: “Tina Smith may have gone to Washington, but she still hasn’t shown up for us,” the GOP candidate says in the ad. “She was never elected – and when it comes down to it, Tina Smith doesn’t show up.”

Navigating Trump in a divided Minnesota

Most observers say that Smith has run a competent and cautious campaign: in one year, she has raised over $8 million for this special election. In the contest’s closing months, and with public polling showing her with healthy to commanding leads over Housley, Smith has been unafraid to go after her opponent hard in order to win.

Smith’s campaign has pushed the narrative that Housley lacks basic policy knowledge on issues like Social Security; they have also sought to turn the pharma industry attacks around on Housley, accusing her of siding with the industry by voting no on legislation, which passed the state Senate overwhelmingly in May, to impose millions of dollars in fees on pharma companies to help address the opioid crisis.

But one of Smith’s key lines of attack reveals a major fault line in the race: Trump. In an October interview on MPR, Housley said she would be a “rubber stamp” for the president and his policies. Housley appeared on stage with Trump at an October rally in Rochester and, in the closing weeks of the election, has increasingly embraced the issue of immigration and border security.

While Smith makes the argument that Housley would simply be an extension of the president, the senator isn’t making opposition to Trump a key theme of her own campaign message. The only mention of the president that Smith gave during a recent stump speech at a union hall in South St. Paul was that the president had mentioned her during his rally in Rochester. (“Who the hell is Tina Smith?” Trump asked. “Just say my name a few more times!” Smith joked to the crowd.)

“I think there are fundamental differences with the way I’d approach issues and the way the president approaches issues,” Smith says. “I’m fully believing that Minnesotans are looking at that and saying, OK: the president wants to repeal the protections that protect people with pre-existing conditions, and Sen. Smith doesn’t want to do that. Who’s on my side?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t shy away from standing up against the president or other people who I think are taking us in the wrong direction,” she said. “It’s not this, happy, smiley we can all get along. We don’t agree on some things. But that doesn’t have to be personal.”

To Carleton’s Schier, Trump’s outsider appeal could contrast unfavorably with Smith and her long record in politics. Smith, he said, is “someone who worked behind the scenes but has all the traits of someone who could be attacked as an insider, and someone who is part of the system, someone who is far from being a breath of fresh air. That’s the risk she runs right now in this election campaign.”

Smith, who has been on the losing end of campaigns as well as victorious ones in Minnesota, says “you take voters for granted in this state at your great peril… That’s why we’ve worked so hard in this campaign to build relationships with voters with me as a Senator, and be very clear about what I’m for, what I’m working on.”

When asked about her weaknesses, Smith allies like Rybak say it’s that the senator doesn’t take enough credit for what she accomplishes. (“It’s about time the women who’ve been making men like me look good lead,” he said.) Privately, others say she simply isn’t as exciting as other Democratic candidates on the ballot.

“She’s not a flashy politician in the way some people might expect that a politician should be,” Morillo said. “The things that people might talk about in politics as a weakness — well, she’s good on policy but can she connect — the persona she puts forward is, she’s a hard worker who listens.”

If Smith is victorious on Nov. 6, she’ll have won her first election in her own right — not as a running-mate, or as a campaign manager. To keep her job, she’ll have to do the same thing two years later.

“I was appointed to the Senate, and it has been my job to serve in the Senate and then to earn the vote of Minnesotans. That’s what this whole election is about, right?” Smith asked. “I wasn’t given a pass on this. I was given the responsibility of serving and then running, and I’ve never taken that for granted.”

As Smith prepared to head into the Apple Valley DFL office to rally volunteers ahead of a day of organizing, she recalled something her friend and mentor Mondale — who himself was appointed to the Senate — said to her. “He said, ‘you only ever feel like half a senator until you have that election certificate.’ And I think maybe that gets to the point.”

Sore spot. Libor Jany at the Star Tribune has a piece on the potential moving of Minneapolis’ Fourth Precinct police station: “Fifth Ward Council Member Jeremiah Ellison and senior police officials in recent months have quietly been negotiating a deal with an unnamed group of local investors to move the station from its longtime Plymouth Avenue home. Key details, like how much it will cost or exactly where it may go, have yet to be revealed.”

First Kandiyohi County, now Stearns. Anna Haecherl at the St. Cloud Times is reporting another H5N2 outbreak: “The Minnesota Board of Animal Health on Thursday identified H5N2 low pathogenic avian influenza in a Stearns County turkey flock.… The virus was detected during a routine test, according to Dale Lauer, director of the Minnesota Poultry Testing Laboratory and an assistant director with the board.”

Good news/bad news. KARE-11 has a story on Minneapolis-based Jeremiah Program expanding to Rochester. It’s building a 40 unit affordable housing campus thanks to a big funding boost from the state.

The Body politic. KSTP-TV flashes back 20 years to the election that “shocked the world”: “After he was declared the winner, Ventura took to the podium at Canterbury Park in Shakopee in front of a crowd of jubilant supporters. He referenced Muhammad Ali’s 1964 upset of Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight title, and the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s Cinderella victory over the heavily-favored Soviets in 1980.”

In other news…

What if your cart simply tallied everything you put in it? “Roving cashiers are Target’s latest gambit” [MPR News]

Cop-out: “‘Deeply Frustrating’: Star Tribune Editorial Board Opts Out Of Endorsement In AG Race” [WCCO]

News from North Dakota: “Candidate for Barnes County State’s Attorney receives package filled with feces” [Fargo Forum]

Our next monthly MinnPost members ticket giveaway will start at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 6, and feature the following offers:

• Minnesota Orchestra — One pair of tickets to A Christmas Oratorio on the date of your choice: Dec. 8 at 8 p.m. or Dec. 9 at 2 p.m.
• Minnesota Opera — Two pairs of vouchers good for any performance in the 2018-19 season.
• Park Square Theatre — Two pairs of tickets to Marie and Rosetta on Friday, Dec. 7 at 7:30 p.m.
• VocalEssence — One voucher for two tickets to Welcome Christmas on Saturday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Apple Valley
• University of Minnesota, Northrop — One pair of tickets to Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra on Thursday, Nov. 8 at 7:30 p.m. and two pairs of tickets to Nathan Laube in Concert on Tuesday, Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m.
• Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus — Two pairs of tickets to A Million Reasons to Believe on Saturday, Dec. 8, at 8 p.m. at Ted Mann Concert Hall
• Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts — One pair of tickets to Katha Dance: The Hungry Stones on the date of your choice: Nov. 16 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 17 at 7:30 p.m. or Nov. 18 at 2 p.m.
• Westminster Town Hall Forum — Two pairs of premium reserved seats for Michael Beschloss – Presidents of War: 1807 to Modern Times on Tuesday, Nov. 13 at noon.
• Dakota Jazz Club — One pair of tickets to Liz Callaway and Ann Hampton Callaway: Sibling Revelry on Sunday, Nov. 11 at 8 p.m.

Tickets are distributed via our partner offers page on a first-come, first-served basis to MinnPost Gold and Platinum members, who support our work with contributions of $10 or more per month.

Those who make a qualifying donation before 9 a.m. on Nov. 6 will be eligible to participate in this month’s giveaway. Members can create a MinnPost.com user account and verify their login status in advance via our partner offers page.

If you have any trouble donating, creating a MinnPost.com user account, logging in, or viewing our partner offers page, please contact us at members@minnpost.com.

Also, we would like to again thank the partners who provided our October offers:

• Minnesota Orchestra — Shaham Plays Prokofiev
• Minnesota Opera — Any performance in the 2018-19 season
• Park Square Theatre — The Agitators
• VocalEssence — Music for a Grand Cathedral
• Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus — A Million Reasons to Believe
• Westminster Town Hall Forum — Mona Hatta-Attisha: What We Can Learn from Flint, Michigan
• Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts — James Sewell Ballet
• Dakota Jazz Club — Lisa Fischer & Grand Baton
• Cantus — Alone Together

Have you heard the sleazy tale about “glider trucks,” shady campaign contributions, and a tiny business interest’s big gift from Donald Trump and his Environmental Protection Agency?

I myself had missed the New York Times investigative report earlier this year — lost it, I suppose, in the ceaseless news of assaults on public health, public lands and waters, and all the other assets that make each of us the true beneficiary when government protects this abstraction we call “the environment.”

But then I caught a lecture that the Times reporter, Eric Lipton, delivered last week on what’s really been driving these rollbacks. It ain’t free-market philosophy or promoting economic growth. Mostly it’s quiet trading of gifts and favors among pro-Trump business interests, administration officials, and various Republican politicos the White House chooses to back, with the truck thing as just one egregious case in point.

“Glider truck” is kind of a charming misnomer for a front portion of a tractor-trailer rig that’s built and sold, initially, without an engine. Later an aftermarket outfit adds a pre-1999 engine, which then propels the truck through a curious loophole in the modern, health-protecting limits on diesel pollution that evolved through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

[cms_ad:x100]Each step of the way, a glider truck is considerably cheaper to buy and operate than one that meets the standards. Considerably filthier, too.

This strange-sounding exemption arose from an argument that can be summarized like so: If you crashed your 1998 Peterbilt rig in, say, 2002, and the engine could be salvaged, why shouldn’t you be able to re-use it? After all, the environmental impact would be the same as if there had been no wreck.

The rulemakers thought this made sense, and nobody much objected while the numbers of shiny new trucks with dirty old engines remained small. But then production and sales of gliders began to surge, reaching 1,000 a year by 2010 and swelling to 10,000 in 2015, and the Obama administration sought to tighten and eventually close a loophole stretched far beyond initial expectations.

This clampdown had considerable support, Lipton has written, from manufacturers like Volvo and Navistar, as well as major purchasers like United Parcel Service; also backing it were the National Association of Manufacturers and, of course, the American Lung Association and other clean-air groups.

On the other hand, Lipton told a program for environmental journalists at the University of Colorado, the loophole’s pending demise rankled Tommy Fitzgerald Jr., whose output  from three plants in Tennessee make him the largest supplier of glider trucks in the country.

Fitzgerald met personally with Scott Pruitt, when Pruitt was head of the EPA, to plead his case, and he had support from Tennessee’s Rep. Diane Black, a Republican who was leaving her seat in Congress to run for governor with Trump’s backing. A look at campaign finance records, calendars and emails showed the support was mutual:

Turns out that Fitzgerald had been donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to Diane Black, who had gone to Pruitt and said, you know, Scott, can you take care of this? There’s a campaign contribution limit in Tennessee, but they  figured out a way to evade it by using every possible LLC and all their family members.

With a chuckle, Lipton put up a slide of a document listing suspiciously attributed gifts and said:

When you’re a reporter looking at campaign contributions, and you see something like this, you know you’re onto something good: Peterbilt LLC 1, Peterbilt LLC 2, 3, 4, 5, 6….”

Buying favorable research

[cms_ad:x101]Also, Lipton found, Fitzgerald had financed a study at Tennessee Tech University to compare the pollution from gliders with those from normal new trucks. Remarkably, it concluded that the emissions were the same, “even though it’s hard to imagine how that could even possibly be the case.”

Coincidentally, the EPA’s regional office in Michigan was doing its own study, which found that glider trucks had 43 times the particulate emissions of modern equipment, and much higher output of sulfur and nitrogen compounds. In fact, EPA figures showed that a year’s worth of glider truck sales would contribute 13 times as much nitrogen oxide as all the cars involved in the Volkswagen diesel-testing scandal.

(Not only that, but a salesman at one of the Fitzgerald operations — presumably taking Lipton for a customer — bragged that the glider trucks were exempt from the safety rule that requires tracking of a driver’s time behind the wheel, as well as from the federal excise tax on trucking that funds road construction and repair.)

When word of the study’s findings got out, it embarrassed the school’s president — who had attended NASCAR events with Fitzgerald, and accepted millions in donations for building projects — into withdrawing the research and opening an investigation into academic misconduct.

Nevertheless, Lipton said, Pruitt directed EPA staff to prepare a new rule on glider trucks that “incorporates the latest technical data” — meaning the Tennessee Tech study, not the agency’s own work. And on his last day in office, just before resigning under pressure of ethics investigations, he announced that the EPA would simply stop enforcing a limit holding each manufacturer to 300 gliders per year. (Fitzgerald sold about 3,000 in 2017, Lipton has reported.)

Under court pressure, EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler has countermanded that decision, which seemed plainly illegal. But work on revising and extending the loophole, and exempting glider trucks from other emissions standards, continues.

Nothing personal

This would be a good place to point out to any skeptics in the house that Lipton — whose work has been honored with three Pulitzer Prizes — also noted that he has been a Pruitt admirer, and was not an uncritical observer of Trump’s predecessor.

What I’m doing is all about transparency and gameplaying. It’s not personal.

When I first met Pruitt in 2014, when I spent time with him in Oklahoma, I was actually really impressed with the guy and how well he understood federal environmental regulations, and he could talk about them very eloquently and he had a level of understanding that was quite surprising for a state attorney general. I respected that he had a different view of government.

There was gameplaying going on in the Obama administration, too, with environmental groups at times literally conspiring with the administration to get certain rules passed, and I wrote about that. For example, the “waters of the U.S. rule.” The Sierra Club was working with EPA to try to influence public opinion to build support for the rule, which has been very controversial; it expands EPA jurisdiction over surface waters. And EPA had aligned itself with this social-media effort to get more people to comment in favor of the rule. I wrote a story about that, and it generated an investigation by the Government Accountability Office that concluded there had been a “covert propaganda” effort by the Obama EPA.

That kind of PR effort isn’t honorable, to be sure. But is it on par with the rollback on glider truck pollution? Lipton didn’t address that point, and nobody in the lecture hall asked him to, but I’ll just go ahead and say I can’t see reasonable equivalence there. I’ll also say it was kind of moving to hear him speak of Pruitt’s ethical meltdown and shameful departure after Trump, with an eye to midterm elections, finally yielded to pressure and dumped his loyal functionary.

Other exemplary rollbacks

The glider truck story wasn’t Lipton’s only example of industry-influenced policy rollbacks, and Pruitt wasn’t the only notable dismantler:

• Nancy Beck left the American Chemistry Council to run the EPA division that regulates the council members’ products, having obtained a waiver from rule that usually requires a two-year pause when the conflict of interests is so large and evident. Even before the waiver was in place, Lipton said, “she went in and started to rewrite the risk evaluation and prioritization rules that EPA was adopting to decide how it would evaluate the most toxic chemicals in the United States.”

She was literally taking the documents from the guy — it happened to be a man, and I know who he was — whose job was to oversee the rule-writing, and she took the pen from him and rewrote the rule herself, and it directly reflected the comments she’d submitted on behalf of the council  just months earlier.

• Bill Wehrum, a top lawyer/lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry who now heads another EPA division dealing with air quality, has pursued an agenda of regulatory rollbacks that just happen to match a PowerPoint presentation he had given at a meeting of U.S. petrochemical executives, listing their repeal priorities.
• Scott Angelle, formerly a Sunoco executive and lobbyist pressing for more lenient rules on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, now runs the Interior Department bureau that applies those regulations — and in the last few weeks has rolled back a suite of new rules adopted in response to the 2010 blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. Pressing hardest for the repeals, Lipton found, were companies drilling in the shallower zones of the continental shelf:

Most of them are these rusty [rigs] owned by companies that are barely holding on financially, really low-producing, and they’re in really bad shape. And what I found in the data I collected from the Interior Department was that these companies had the worst safety records and the worst conditions at the platforms…. The Exxons and Shells and Chevrons had basically written the cost of the rules into their bottom lines, and they were ready to comply with them.

Earlier on, it was possible for some journalists, including me, to see much of the Trump White House’s anti-environment agenda as empty or clumsy gestures that would fade away or fail court review, but Lipton feels that outlook is changing as the Pruitts are replaced by more skillful Wehrums, Angelles and Wheelers:

The bottom line is, [Wheeler] has the same regulatory philosophy that Pruitt had, and the regulated industries still have incredible influence inside the agency … all the repeals are still moving ahead, but he’s doing it more rigorously, and they’re more methodical. Bill Wehrum is also a really smart guy, and fewer of their repeals are going to be thrown out by the courts, because they’re doing things in a much smarter way.

* * *

Lipton’s full lecture can be viewed here without charge; I’ll just note that his delivery is conversational and casual, laced with a lot of ums and you-knows and fumbles that I’ve eliminated here. I found the informality engaging and refreshing, but your mileage may vary. Though I can’t see how it matters, I’ll err on the side of disclosure and note that I was a Scripps Fellow in 2001-2002 at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which sponsored Lipton’s talk in honor of Len Ackland, the fellowship program’s founder and a mentor of mine.

The D.C. Memo is a weekly recap of Washington political news, journalism, and opinion, delivered with an eye toward what matters for Minnesota. Sign up to get it in your inbox every Thursday.

This week in Washington, the president closed out the 2018 election season like he started the 2016 season: raising alarm about immigrants. Minnesota’s candidates, meanwhile, headed into the campaign’s home stretch, as Democrats are favored to take the House and Republicans are poised to hold the Senate. Remember that everyone was wrong about the election two years ago.

This week in Washington

Good afternoon from Washington! I’m back in the (admittedly crisp and fall-like) Swamp after spending some time out in Minnesota for the midterms’ home stretch. I put over 1,000 miles on a rental car and drank a whole lot of gas station coffee to bring you some on-the-ground campaign dispatches from the races in Minnesota’s 1st, 3rd, and 8th Districts. Give ’em a read.

[cms_ad:x100]It’s hard to believe, but by this time next week, we will know who will control Congress. (Well, probably.) Some of the candidates running have been campaigning for over 18 months, and MinnPost has been covering these crucial midterms from the get-go, too. As you buckle in for Nov. 6, head over to MINNPOST ELECTION CENTRAL, the landing page for our complete coverage of state, federal, and local races in Minnesota over the past two years. There’s lots of good stories in there to inform your vote, and/or prepare you for what happens after.

Wrapping up this week of campaign news: candidates had to submit their final fundraising reports before Election Day, giving us an idea of who raised what (and from who). Check out MinnPost’s Campaign Finance Dashboard for the money picture.

Something I’m paying a little more attention to on the money front: the avalanche of outside cash coming into Minnesota. As of this week, the total amount of money spent by outside groups on Minnesota’s four battleground U.S. House races was over $38 million — about $10 million more than what was spent in Minnesota’s races in 2016. (The open-seat 1st attracted the most spending, followed by the 3rd, 8th, and 2nd races.) The Center for Responsive Politics, a D.C.-based money-in-politics watchdog, is an incredible resource on all kinds of campaign spending, and it’s worth diving into all the data they have over there.

According to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising, it’s been a record-breaking season for the negative ads that all this outside cash funds: they found that the volume of negative campaign advertising has increased a whopping 61 percent over the last election. (Only a few more days until our regular, inane TV advertising replaces the depressing, inane political-season ads.)

So what’s going to happen on Tuesday? The big-picture read on the midterms: Democrats, like they have been for nearly this entire election cycle, are favored to pick up the 23 U.S. House seats needed to reclaim the majority in the lower chamber. Most nonpartisan election observers are predicting this will be the outcome, like FiveThirtyEight; if you read insidery tipsheets like Politico’s Playbook, Republican strategists have been talking about probably losing the House for months.

The bigger question is this: how big could the “blue wave” be — if there’s one at all? There was some evidence this week that Republicans are worried about a larger group of seats than previously thought: GOP groups spent money backing up Republican candidates in deep-red districts in states like Kentucky and South Carolina. Some polling has shown Republicans tied with longshot Democratic challengers in places like Montana. Slate has a look at the expanding House battleground. As a counterpoint: BuzzFeed lays out the reasoning why a “blue wave” might not materialize.

While the House goes one way, the Senate is going another: several Democrats in deep red states, like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, look like they could weather the storm, but Republicans feel states like North Dakota and Missouri are all but theirs for the taking. Meanwhile, an incumbent New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bob Menendez, is putting that safe blue seat in jeopardy due to very New Jersey reasons.

At the same time: Republicans are playing defense in states like Texas, as you may have heard, and Tennessee. Things are weird! Overall, though, the odds that Democrats take — much less maintain — their Senate numbers look increasingly long.

What we do know is that all eyes will be on Minnesota on Tuesday, where four U.S. House seats are in play — possibly even five. I’ll have a more in-depth preview story next week, but to set the table a bit: right now, the four key races could plausibly go either way. Democrats like their chances to knock off GOP incumbents in the suburban/exurban 2nd and 3rd Districts, while Republicans feel good about picking up the Republican-leaning 1st and the Obama-to-Trump 8th, both held by departing Democrats.

In most of these races, different polls have shown different candidates on top, save for CD3, where all public polling has shown Democrat Dean Phillips with a lead over GOP Rep. Erik Paulsen.

[cms_ad:x101]In the 8th, where Republican Pete Stauber, a St. Louis County commissioner, is favored to turn this longtime DFL stronghold red, Democrats hoped for an October surprise in the form of… his emails. Specifically, emails that Stauber sent to GOP political entities from his official government account. After a lawsuit from the DFL, the county was forced on Tuesday to release those emails, which did not reveal anything scandalous beyond normal behind-the-scenes politicking. Democrat Joe Radinovich’s campaign is hammering home that the emails show him violating official policy that prohibits taxpayer-funded resources (like email) going toward campaign activity.

Floating a thought that’s been at the back of my mind, and maybe yours, all year: both parties will spend tens of millions of dollars on the midterms — only for the partisan balance of Minnesota’s U.S. House delegation to stay the same, just shifted a little bit geographically.

Look for more from me soon on Minnesota’s U.S. Senate special election between Tina Smith and Karin Housley. For Minnesota’s other Senate seat on the ballot, the question is, how much does Sen. Amy Klobuchar win by? Her longshot GOP opponent, Jim Newberger, dinged the senator for spending some time last weekend in the 3rd Congressional District — of Iowa, not Minnesota. (Suburban Des Moines is very pleasant this time of year.)

The Des Moines Register has more on Klobuchar’s visit to stump for a Democratic candidate favored to knock off a vulnerable House Republican in Iowa. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe looks at the possible 2020 presidential hopefuls who have their own reelection campaigns to win in 2018, a group that they say includes Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and yes, Klobuchar.

What do you think will happen on Election Day? Email me your predictions: sbrodey@minnpost.com.

Our final installment of the AD OF THE WEEK! Campaigns are releasing their closing arguments to voters, emphasizing things like their life experiences, their opponent’s deficiencies, and the qualities they share with other humans. But for sheer chutzpah, you gotta hand it to the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is running an ad in several congressional districts warning Minnesotans that a “caravan” of Central American migrants is on its way to Minnesota. (Presumably to squat at their lake houses.)

The ad ran in districts 1, 2, 3, and 7. Unclear how it’ll play in the moderate 3rd, where Rep. Paulsen has backed centrist immigration measures and opposes building the border wall. It also looks like this is one of the first big outside ads to run in the 7th, where President Donald Trump won by 32 points. DFL Rep. Collin Peterson has weathered all political storms and has been favored to win a 15th term in Congress over Republican Dave Hughes. Though Hughes hasn’t attracted much money or national support, he did come within five points of Peterson last time.

On to the week in Trump: The president tried and failed — or perhaps did not even try — to balance two conflicting presidential roles: working for his party’s success in the midterms and trying to soothe and unite the country in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

Last weekend, a white supremacist opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people. He was motivated by anti-Semitism, of course, but also by the congregation’s association with HIAS, a Jewish refugee aid organization that has become a focus of right-wing conspiracy theories.

To many, Trump’s campaign strategy of stoking fear over immigrants and refugees is impossible to untangle from the conspiracy theories that fueled the shooter. (The Washington Post explores that here.) The White House has, in some ways, made moves to tone down inflammatory rhetoric, in one example canceling a planned anti-immigrant campaign speech to visit Pittsburgh, where POTUS was greeted by crowds of protesters. (Trump, meanwhile, has blamed the media for violence and division in the U.S.)

Through it all, Trump has hammered home his midterm closing argument. It’s not about the GOP’s main legislative achievement of his presidency — the tax bill — or other tangibles like health care or regulations. It’s immigration! The president this week floated in an interview that he’s considering eliminating birthright citizenship, something that is literally in the Constitution, via executive order. Speaker Paul Ryan, who is patiently crossing off each day on the calendar until he can retire and makes a bunch of money doing something else, gamely stood up to the president by pointing out that simple fact. Trump slapped him down on Twitter and told him to mind his own business. Happy trails, Paul!

Sen. Klobuchar was out front early with the Democratic response on Trump’s big new plan: “He’ll say anything before the election,” she tweeted. “Don’t take the bait. Focus on ending the hate. Hug a kid. Be nice to someone you don’t know or agree with. And vote.”

The president also ordered his Department of Defense to send more troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to stop the so-called “migrant caravan’ — as many as 15,000, he has said, confusing military officials at the Pentagon who were planning on some 10,000 fewer troops being deployed. You can read more in WaPo about the people who Trump is sending troops to stop.

Finally: the Pittsburgh attack seems to have forced something of a reckoning over anti-Semitism in the U.S., and anti-immigrant sentiment more broadly. Iowa Rep. Steve King, who has for years associated with far-right anti-Semitic and Islamophobic European politicians, promoted neo-Nazis, and sounded alarms that the white race is under threat, is finally feeling some consequences. Arden Hills-based dairy company Land O’Lakes said it will stop giving money to King, while Rep. Steve Stivers, the head of House Republicans’ campaign arm, called King’s recent remarks and conduct “unacceptable” in a rare kind of public rebuke.

Part of King’s “unacceptable” recent conduct is his promotion of conspiracy theories about George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jew who is a billionaire advocate for liberal causes. Attacks on Democrats that use Soros are widely considered an anti-Semitic dogwhistle, but they have mostly stayed on the fringes of the right. But Soros attacks have become an increasingly bigger feature of the GOP’s midterm strategy: The NRCC, which Stivers chairs, has run ads in Minnesota’s 1st District linking Democrat Dan Feehan to Soros. The attack ads feature Soros’ face, obscured by shadows, with piles of money raining down. Stivers and other GOP groups aren’t relenting on using Soros in attacks in the lead-up to the midterms.

The week’s essential reads

These are weird times: in the network of the MAGA internet, a catchy offhand tweet can become a presidential slogan in a matter of days. Politico’s Ben Schreckinger dives deep into how “jobs not mobs” became part of Trump’s closing midterm argument. It’s one of the best examples yet, to me, of how technology has enabled Trump to thrive:

On a Thursday morning earlier this month, a Twitter user in Georgia with 500 followers responded to a video of Trump touting the economy and denouncing Democrats by tweeting the hashtag “#JobsNotMobs.” The next day, Scott Adams, the pro-Trump creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” who has nearly 300,000 followers, endorsed this catchy framing in a tweet of his own. The hashtag took off from there, as Trump supporters on Reddit turned it into a visual internet meme, with images of autoworkers set against leftist antifa protesters. Even former House Speaker and Trump confidant Newt Gingrich tweeted in praise of the concept, calling it “a nice, clean formula.”

Within a week, Trump had begun incorporating a variation of the concept — “Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs” — into his stump speech, and his campaign began printing up signs to distribute at rallies with the slogan “Jobs vs. Mobs.”

The line’s journey from a stray thought on social media to the heart of Trump’s closing midterms argument offers a case study in the free-wheeling approach to messaging that has enabled the brander-in-chief to thrive in a fast-moving information environment even while relying less than his recent predecessors did on consultants, focus groups and other tools of modern political messaging.

Tuesday could potentially be a historic night for women in politics, from voters to the candidates themselves. However things shake out, however, in 2018 female candidates, despite their successes, continue to lag behind men when it comes to fundraising. The NYT’s Kate Zernike, who has done great work on this beat this year, with the story:

Women have broken many barriers in this midterm election cycle: Record numbers have run for Congress and record numbers have won primaries, including a record number of women of color like Ms. Tlaib.

Women are newly asserting themselves as donors, too, often helping female candidates; while donations from women to Republican men have dropped off a cliff since the election of President Trump, donations from women to Democratic women have shot up, reflecting a trend the Women’s Philanthropy Institute calls “rage giving.”

But women who run for office are still struggling to raise as much as men, particularly if they are Republican, or challenging incumbents, or running in places where the opposing party has a big advantage — as is the case with many Democratic women this year. Men are still making the large majority of political contributions, and male candidates are still raising more money.

The week in takes

• The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer: Trump’s rhetoric about the “caravan” led to the massacre in Pittsburgh
• NYT’s David Brooks: Congress would be better if people in blue states voted in Republicans and people in red states voted in Democrats
• Medicare and Medicaid czar Seema Verma: This year’s scariest Halloween costume? Medicare-for-All supporter
• The Federalist’s Rachel Stoltzfoos: Democrats are working to destroy America, American institutions, and the American way of life
• Vox’s Matt Yglesias: Climate change means we should move the U.S. capital to Minneapolis

Your weekend longread

Republicans may hold up George Soros as a bogeyman, but it remains the case that Democrats’ most prolific megadonor these days is Tom Steyer, the California investor billionaire. Long known for climate advocacy, Steyer has funded a sprawling grassroots effort to grow support for the impeachment of President Trump.

The Ringer’s Katie Baker checked in with Steyer, who – as he mulls a 2020 presidential run — insists he can do a lot more than raise money.

But don’t call him a mega-donor: Whenever Steyer is introduced or described that way, as he often is by interviewers and panel emcees, he will almost always point out that he finds the term misleading. To him, it carries the implication that he’s simply writing the checks, rather than doing the work: traveling the country, engaging in a grassroots get-out-the-vote effort, listening to what regular folks have to say. He likes to point out that NextGen employees and volunteers aren’t just in states like California and battlegrounds like Nevada and Iowa, but that they’ve been there, organizing, for several election cycles by this point, just like their leader himself. Recently, he was deep in the clipboarding trenches at Cal State Fullerton, pestering students and trying to register them to vote. It was a long way away from a past life spent in boardrooms and on Bloomberg, and it was just the way he liked it. …

In the months that followed the Inauguration, Steyer rebranded NextGen Climate as NextGen America, a tacit acknowledgment of the broadening of the organization’s fight, though he insists that his longtime central mission — not only to battle climate change, but also to promote prosperity and fundamental human rights — has remained unchanged even as words like “impeachment” have crept into his vocabulary.

As he had done before, Steyer toyed with the idea of running for major office in California this fall, but determined he’d have more of an impact by using his money and his influence in the coming midterm elections than by engaging in a bitter campaign fight himself. When he’s asked, as he very frequently is, whether he’ll run for president in 2020, his answer is always the same: He’s got his sights set on the midterm elections taking place on November 6, 2018, he tells everyone, and not a day later. (He’ll need to come up with a new response by next week.)

What to look for next week

You know it. I know it. It’s Nov. 6 — National Nacho Day.

There’s also an election. Some things to look for on Tuesday evening: as you anxiously await Minnesota returns, numbers should be trickling in from races in the Northeast, South, and Rust Belt. Some of these races could indicate how Minnesota’s own contests might go: to get a sense of how the Romney-to-Clinton suburbs (like CD3) are swinging, watch New Jersey’s 7th District. An Obama-to-Trump district (like CD1 and CD8) to keep an eye on could be New York’s 19th, a mostly rural swath of upstate New York.

I’ll also be watching the Florida governor’s election, which has been held up as the single best proxy test of the popularity Trump and Trumpism. Georgia’s governor race, where voting rights has been the defining issue, also fits this bill.

At 10 p.m. Central time, polls will close in California. The Golden State is home to several key House races that could decide the balance of the chamber. Between that and the fact that Arizona and Nevada could tip the balance of the Senate, many of us may be running on Pacific time on Tuesday night.

The president will spend the next few days on the campaign trail, skipping House battlegrounds to back governor and Senate candidates at 11 rallies across eight states, including Florida, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Ohio.

That’s all from me for this week. Rest, relax, hydrate, do whatever you gotta do, and I’ll see you back here next week to recap the midterms. Again, email me: sbrodey@minnpost.com.

What’s more, if you blinked in the news cycle, you might have missed the local story of St. Thomas freshman Kevyn Perkins, who woke last Friday to a racist slur scrawled on his dorm room door. If you were to read the comments section under this story (and, yes, I know, you should NEVER EVER read the comments), you would stumble across vitriol enough to make a Klan member blush. Interspersed in this more blatant racism is a subtler form of discrimination. Comment after comment “wonders” if the kid made this whole scenario up? Is he just trying to get attention? It would appear that for many in our community, this seed of doubt is all they need to silence Kevyn’s voice, disregard his story, and go on pretending like things are just hunky dory in our world, that this kind of overt hatred just doesn’t happen all that much anymore. Alas, the data says otherwise. According to a recent study from the Department of Justice we now know officially what many of us suspected intuitively, that over half (54 percent) of all hate crimes go unreported to law enforcement. Even if some stories are made up (heavy emphasis on “if”), there are far more instances of hate, a majority in fact, that never get told.

Our discomfort with looking the hatred and evil that lurks in plain sight, manifested in the lives of leaders and bosses and the powerful, is too much for us. So, we hush, we discredit, we doubt, and we silence.

This may be the ugly truth of the world in which we live. But, as I told my congregation this past Sunday, Christians have practices that can transform us into people capable of so much good. Practices like prayer, reconciliation, giving, serving, and forgiveness, can cultivate the best in us — things like generosity, gratitude, hope, and love.

[cms_ad:x100]These are not just sentiments — they require discipline and hard work! We have to practice certain habits of life, over and again, to cultivate them. And, these things become tools in our toolkit for the hard work of resistance. They equip us for the equally hard work of building, with God’s help, a more peaceable world. Gratitude, hope, generosity, and love help galvanize us for the work of pushing back against the market’s insistence that we and our bodies and our work are all commodities. They make us people capable of welcoming the stranger and the immigrant, capable of respecting the dignity of our black, brown, white, rich, poor, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans neighbors. They make us capable of hearing and believing those who are crying out for mercy.

I reminded my congregation this week of the French village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, whose residents harbored more than 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Their story, reluctantly told decades later, when they began to receive recognition for their bravery, yielded this humble response: “How could you call us ‘good’? We were doing what had to be done.” Not a single Jew who happened upon the village or who came to them seeking refuge and asylum was turned away. The response of the villagers was rooted in an ethic and worldview deeply formed by the habits of their faith. These habits and the virtues they created, empowered the village to do what had to be done. The day after France surrendered to the Nazis, the village pastor preached a sermon wherein he said, “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.”

At the end of the day, our job as people of faith is not to bemoan the state of the world, or to come inside the church, or the synagogue, or the mosque, merely to be comforted. Nor are we called to come into those spaces to think holy thoughts which we can promptly set aside when we re-enter the real world. For Christians at least, to be the church is to practice those things like gratitude, faith, hope, and love that shape us into people capable of doing what has to be done, to believe victims, protect the innocent, welcome asylum seekers, comfort the grieving, and stand up with all our will and lift our voices and votes in resistance against those who would do evil in our name.

The Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson is the rector of St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St. Paul. 

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Tim Walz and Jeff Johnson probably don’t have to tell voters how different they are from one another.

But they often do anyway.

In most of their debates and joint appearances, both preface many answers with variations on that theme.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Walz said early in a KSTP-TV debate on Oct. 21. “There are two competing philosophies. What you’re gonna see tonight is two different visions of Minnesota, one that tells you what we can’t do and one that tells you what to fear. The other one that tells you what we do we do together and how to grow.”

[cms_ad:x100]At the same event, Johnson closed his remarks with a similar theme: “While Tim and I get along, we just have dramatically different views of where to go from here,” Johnson said, listing taxes, health care, immigration and accountability in state government as examples of how they take starkly different positions.

“We need a fundamental change in the status quo,” he said.

You can’t argue that there isn’t a clear choice to succeed two-term DFL Gov. Mark Dayton. While Walz might be considered closer to the center of the DFL, he does take positions closer to the progressive wing of the party, and Johnson has accused Walz of doing so in order to win the DFL primary and asked earlier in the campaign (“… which positions are you going to take as governor?”).

Walz responds by saying he considers being able to change his mind as a virtue, not a vice. “I think you want a leader who is able to adapt to changing situations,” Walz told an audience at an Oct. 9 debate in Willmar. “We’re never going to find solutions if we can’t bring people over to see things from a different way. You’ll never change the system if you yourself can’t change.”

Nowhere is that tendency more obvious than on the issue of gun safety. Walz, born into a Nebraska farm family and lifelong hunter, had gotten high grades from the NRA for much of his time in Congress. That grade was changed to an “F” as Walz began supporting enhanced background checks for gun purchases, red flag warnings to prevent potentially dangerous people from getting guns and bans on bump stocks that modify a semi-automatic weapon to fire like an automatic weapon.

Johnson, by contrast, says he doesn’t favor any changes to gun laws and said earlier in the campaign that American society needs to look at itself rather than gun laws. Sometime in the 1990s, “something happened to at least a few of the young men and boys in our society and now (school violence) is becoming more and more prevalent,” he said during a joint MPR interview at the state fair.

He cited family breakdown, mental health issues, pop culture and school discipline changes as potential reasons and said society needs to have difficult conversations to address the issue. “We never talk about those things because the answer is always, let’s ban bump stocks, maybe that will prevent the next school shooting and it won’t,” Johnson said.

But guns is far from the only issue on which the two disagree. Walz has said he thinks a gas tax increase will be necessary to resolve road and transit infrastructure gaps; Johnson says he doesn’t favor any increases in overall taxing levels. Johnson wants a hiatus in the state’s acceptance of refugees fleeing political strife or warfare, Walz does not. Walz supports so-called separation ordinances and laws that keeps local law enforcement from questioning the immigration status of people they come in contact with while Johnson says such policies equate to sanctuary state status that will attract more undocumented immigrants to the state.

State budget? Walz talks of gaps in funding for schools and social services and Johnson thinks the state spends too much and too carelessly. Education? Johnson favors more school choice including vouchers for low-income parents to pay for alternatives to public schools, Walz opposes vouchers.

The path to November

Earlier this year, Walz survived a difficult primary, a contest that might have once looked like an easy one. After failing to claim the DFL endorsement, he had to face off against an energized state Rep. Erin Murphy. Then both saw their plans — and perhaps their arithmetic — get disrupted by the late entry into the DFL race by state Attorney General Lori Swanson.

This time it was Walz’s come-from-behind story. After trailing in all of the public polls, he won a relatively easy victory in August.

As they face Tuesday’s election, Johnson might be buoyed by the state’s history: Minnesota doesn’t tend to elect the same party for three-consecutive terms to the highest office. Walz, who has led in every public poll, could benefit from a different piece of history: that the president’s party does poorly in the first mid-term after his election. Yet while Johnson generally supports President Trump’s policies and Walz opposes much of it, the president has not been a prominent character in either campaign.

Walz: ‘I will govern with partners’

Walz didn’t give up a safe seat in Congress, exactly. His southern Minnesota congressional district had elected Republicans before he won in 2006 and his margin was narrow in 2016, when Trump easily carried the district. But he says he wanted the different challenge of being governor.

“It was becoming increasingly clear to me that dealing with the difficult issues of health care and education that we were becoming more paralyzed, that the politics were becoming more partisan,” he said in an interview this week. “It seemed that Minnesota was still holding onto the belief that we could work together.”

Because he is a Democrat from farm country — an increasingly rare commodity — Walz said he thinks he is positioned to work with different sides of issues. He was actually criticized by some activists before the DFL convention for being too willing to compromise. Walz said he was stricken by the accusation — that what he thinks of as a virtue was considered by some as a vice.

“I was convinced as I was then, and am more so now, that they were going to end up in the place where I’m at: that uniting this state around One Minnesota, not compromising your progressive values but with an idea that taking that message to a broader audience, was going to be what it would take,” he said. Party activists and those especially invested in issues “were falling into camps that were pretty rigid. But there was an opportunity to bridge that.”

Yet Walz agrees with critics of the DFL who say it hasn’t embraced a sense of urgency on issues of social justice and economic justice. That it was too often too timid. “Activists play an important role,” he said. “They continue to push the envelope on things they care about. But the capacity to govern is going to require someone who can build a broader coalition.”

Walz has been criticized by Johnson for overpromising, for saying yes to every interest group that seeks more spending and more government intervention. Whether in reaction to that or not, Walz has been much less specific about spending and taxation, preferring to say he would bring people in and discuss issues before committing. That tendency caused some embarrassment last month, when he refused to say what amount the state minimum wage should be, even while his campaign website said he favored $15 an hour.

“I’ve said that I will govern with partners. I would say I need to bring them in and find ways that will work for all of us,” Walz said. “How does a partner come in, how does a legislator come in, how do businesses come in if they’re already being told that this is exactly what is going to happen?

“Jeff has told us exactly what he is going to do on taxes: he’s not going to do anything,” Walz said. “If a bridge falls down he’s gonna take it out of human services, he’s gonna take it out of education. That doesn’t open up any space at all to have real foundational changes to fixing our political system is broken and why our budget is broken.”

Walz’s core campaign theme is to appeal to what many consider a Minnesota tradition of less divisive politics. “In a time that feels more divisive — and especially this week — fearful, hateful, angry and violent, there is still a core belief that we can make this work, that there is some middle ground to get this done,” Walz said. “What the president is doing this week is proof positive that we’ve got to do something different.”

Johnson: ‘We are not serving people’

Like Walz, Johnson is spending the final days of the 2018 campaign engaged in retail politics, including a caravan with other candidates to make as many visits as possible. Between stops, Johnson spoke about the motivation for spending months and months on the road to try again to win the governorship.

“It’s the same reason I would have given four years ago. I truly see an attitude in government right now where we are not serving people,” Johnson said. “Maybe that sounds a little corny but that’s what government is supposed to be doing. But there is a level of arrogance in government right now that’s just wrong, and I want to change it.”

Like Walz, Johnson said he is troubled by the hostile atmosphere around politics and says there is blame on both sides. But he said he has a style of leadership that is different than others. “I firmly believe you’re not going to accomplish things that are lasting if you haven’t formed relationships on both sides of the aisle,” Johnson said. “You simply have to. That’s something I have been able to do. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to fight about things sometimes, you are. Some things are worth fighting about. But it doesn’t have to become personal and if we can avoid that there is a lot that can be accomplished.”

Part of Johnson’s criticism — what he sees as Walz taking more moderate stances for the general election after winning the DFL primary — stems from what he considers cynical politics. His general election campaign doesn’t look much different from his campaign against Pawlenty, except perhaps with fewer references to his support for Trump.

“It’s what annoys people more about politicians, when you run to the right or the left to win your primary and then try to change your positions and make the general public think you stand for something different than what you just stood for,” he said. One of the lessons he learned from his run four years ago was focusing too much general election energy on independent and unaffiliated voters, assuming his GOP base would be there for him on election day.

“That wasn’t about changing what I was saying. It was about where are you traveling, how are you directing your TV ads, how are you directing your social media,” he said. “We were directing all of our attention to independents, and it worked. But we assumed that Republicans would get out and vote and we were wrong. You have to focus on both.”

Johnson agrees that Minnesotans have a more-accepting view of government but that trust is being tested. “I think there is more trust in government than in many states and part of that is we’ve had a long history of ‘good government.’ People define that differently but most people believe that historically government has been pretty competent,” Johnson said. “But that is changing and the perception I’m hearing out there is no longer that we have good government.”

Johnson said paying high taxes make residents more demanding of their government. “While I believe that they are entirely too high, I think most Minnesotans realize we’re never going to be a low-tax state but they want their money to be spent wisely,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to be No. 1. I don’t want to be number 47 either,” he said of state-by-state ranking of taxation. “But maybe 12 or 10 would be more reasonable.”

Warning: With apologies in advance to the elderly and the coot community, I’m getting to be a weird old coot. The other day, I urged you to stop watching campaign commercials on TV, unless you like to be manipulated and deceived and treated like a sucker. (Another apology, to the sucker community.)

But I stand by the recommendation, and, although it’s a little late for this, I recommend the same for paying attention to polls. They change. They are a snapshot of a moment, not a prediction, although most of us who consume poll results treat them as predictions. Even if you believe in them, if you also take the margin of error seriously, they mostly show elections that could go either way.

And by the time the latest poll numbers reach you, they are out of date.

I’ll make an exception for the political professionals, who perhaps can’t really ignore the murky vision of the past and present (but not the future) represented by a fresh poll result by a competent pollster. They may have to use these estimates to make semi-educated guesses about how best to use their resources of time and effort (kinda like whether it is worth your time and effort to vote).

[cms_ad:x100]But the biggest problem with poll numbers (in my humble opinion) is that poll-pondering takes up time that would be better spent understanding the issues that face us, the various candidates ideas for dealing with those issues, deciding for ourselves what seems like the best approach and even, if you’re an outgoing sort, in dialogue with our friends, neighbors and fellow citizens about those issues and those proposed approaches to dealing with them.

Tomorrow is Election Day. Please vote (if you haven’t already early-voted). Urge your kids and your neighbors to vote. Vote as if your and your kids’ futures depended on it. Vote with your head and your heart. Vote for the candidates whom you believe will do the best job of governing your state and/or your nation, and then be prepared to deal with whatever happens.

What set me off on this particular rant? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.

Last week, I read a piece by the famed political numbers guru Nate Silver headlined: “Democrats Need A Systematic Polling Error To Win The Senate; And even that might not be enough.”

What’s a systematic polling error? Silver explains: “By a systematic polling error, I mean one that occurs in a correlated way across every race, or in certain groups of races — not merely errors that happen on a one-off basis.”

Read the piece if you want to know what that means. Personally, I don’t want to know.

Then on Sunday, Silver published a follow-up headlined, (maybe you guessed it):

“Republicans Need A Systematic Polling Error To Win The House.” Silver is smart. He works hard at this. Perhaps that link will cause you to read the piece. I don’t recommend it, and I don’t plan to do so myself. I plan to vote, even if my ballot won’t be the deciding one in any race, even if the Dems are going to take the House and the Repubs are going to hold the Senate whether I vote or not.

Democracy, Churchill said in 1947, is “the worst form of government” that has ever been tried and will ever be tried “in this world of sin and woe …except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Just vote; vote as though your country depended on it. If nothing else, they give you an “I voted” sticker.