Good morning and happy Thursday.
MPR’s Brian Bakst is looking at the candidates for governor this week. His profile of Tim Walz is a reminder of everything Minnesota has been through over the past four years: The January 2019 inauguration day when Tim Walz drove home his “One Minnesota” campaign theme seems like a lifetime ago. “There's no doubt about it, we face some tremendous challenges in coming years,” Walz told the audience after taking the oath as governor. “I'm not pollyannaish. Those of you who know me in here, I'm an optimist. But I also supervised the lunchroom for 20 years. So I'm a realist." Not even Walz could have foreseen how many challenges were ahead – from a nonstop battle with Republican lawmakers to a global pandemic to a racial reckoning that gained steam after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody. “You don't know what's coming, you know,” Walz said recently when asked how his term compared to what he expected. “You need to be prepared for those types of things. It doesn't do any good to wish these things wouldn't happen. You have to try and solve them.”
Brian also has a look at how the struggle for control of the Minnesota Legislature has come down to a few districts, mostly in the suburbs: Hardly a day passes without a new glossy political piece landing in mailboxes of Woodbury voters, usually carrying warnings in caps-lock type and with searing images to match. “Inflation and taxes are skyrocketing. Politician Ethan Cha will make things worse,” says one from the Republican Party of Minnesota. “Kelly Fenton’s extreme agenda will take us in the wrong direction,” counters another from the Minnesota DFL. The districts pivotal to determining control of the Minnesota Legislature are getting clearer by the week. While this November’s election will fill 201 seats, only a small fraction of them are actually competitive. The in-play House and Senate districts are where floods of literature come in the mail, where hard-edged legislative TV ads air during cable sports games or housing fix-up shows and where armies of doorknockers have descended. The spending is disproportionately focused on a couple of dozen districts that neither party has a true lock on. House District 47B in Woodbury is one of them.
In the 8th District, incumbent Republican Rep. Pete Stauber and his DFL opponent Jen Schultz debated for the first time Wednesday night. MPR’s Dan Kraker reports the two sparred over inflation, copper-nickel mining, abortion rights and public safety. Stauber, who served 23 years as a police officer, said officers know he has their backs. "We must invest in our police. We must stop the defund and disarm the police movement, that my opponent has championed in St. Paul," Stauber said. Schultz responded, “That is just not true, the last time I checked, my opponent was in Congress, he has the tools and the staff, he has the ability to address incarceration, to address crime, and he has done absolutely nothing." The debate was hosted by WDIO-TV. The sprawling northeastern Minnesota district voted heavily Democratic for decades. But voters there backed former President Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Minnesota DFL Party officials filed a campaign finance complaint against GOP attorney general candidate Jim Schultz. They contend Schultz’s campaign and the independent expenditure group Minnesota For Freedom ran afoul of the law when they used one agent to buy ads. State law prohibits candidates or campaigns from being involved in the purchase of independent expenditure ads. DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said both campaigns violated the law by letting one person buy on their behalf. And now, the state campaign finance board should quickly act to penalize Schultz, and his campaign should make amends for the error, Martin said. “I hope Minnesotan voters know and realize that this man who's asking them to entrust him with the keys to the attorney general's office is very clear and willfully violating Minnesota election law,” Martin said. A spokesperson for the Schultz campaign said the allegations were just an attempt to distract voters from bigger issues in the race. Schultz is running against DFL Attorney General Keith Ellison.
Theo Keith at FOX 9 took a look at some of the claims in the governor’s debate Tuesday night, including Walz’s contention that Republican candidate Dr. Scott Jensen prescribed more opioid pain medication than 94 percent of other doctors: Walz's campaign pointed to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that show out of nearly 20,000 doctors in Minnesota, Jensen ranked 1,200th for opioid prescribing in 2013. Jensen didn't dispute Walz's assertion during the debate. On Wednesday, he called FOX 9 to say he wouldn't quibble with the CMS data, but that there were mitigating factors. Older family physicians like Jensen, 67, who have longtime patients with more medical needs are naturally higher in the rankings than doctors with younger patients, Jensen said. Jensen's prescribing numbers have gone down in recent years. Jensen, who successfully ran for the state Senate in 2016, said his practice has gotten smaller since getting into politics. He also no longer does chronic pain management, he said.
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