[...] On Tuesday night, the city of Minneapolis broke a record for turnout in a midterm primary. Omar beat her closest Democratic rival by more than twenty thousand votes, out of 135,318 votes cast for Democrats in the Fifth District, which includes Minneapolis and its inner-ring suburbs. (Compare that to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory last month, in New York’s Fourteenth District: she won by four thousand votes, out of only twenty-eight thousand cast.) Around 9:30 P.M., shortly after the race was called, Omar ascended a podium at a Somali restaurant called Safari to the power anthem “Wavin’ Flag,” by the Somali-Canadian pop singer K’naan. She paused to acknowledge a chorus of ululations before addressing the room.
“We did it, we won—oh, my God,” she said. Omar, who is small and thin, has a tiny silver stud in her nose. Surrounded by student campaign workers, Somali-American constituents, close friends, and her three kids, who were dressed casually for the occasion, she was smiling jubilantly, but didn’t give the impression that her success was entirely unexpected. There were no power suits, stilted thumbs-up, or stiff waves. Omar speaks English with a slight Somali inflection, which comes out when she gets more animated. She told the crowd, “I’ve always said you get what you organize for.”
Minnesota takes pride in its lineage of liberal politicians. I grew up in the Fifth District, in the eighties and nineties, going to Twins games at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, named for a senator and Vice-President remembered for his advocacy of civil rights. In 2002, both of the state’s senators, Mark Dayton and Paul Wellstone, were among the minority who voted against the Iraq War. Wellstone’s death, in a plane crash, two weeks later, was a loss from which the state has never fully recovered. [...]
Ellison, formerly a state legislator, won the Fifth District seat in 2006, becoming the first Muslim elected to Congress. Playing up his support for single-payer health care and his opposition to the Iraq War, and hiring local community organizers to run his campaign, he pioneered the strategy of pursuing groups of voters with historically low turnout rates. The Fifth District reëlected Ellison five times, and he grew to national prominence as both one of the most progressive members of Congress and an early supporter of Bernie Sanders’s Presidential run. Last year, Ellison ran to chair the Democratic National Committee, on the strength of Minnesota’s voter-turnout rate, which was the highest of any state in the 2016 election. His loss, in February, was seen as a snub of his turnout strategy, and of the Party’s progressive wing, in favor of the traditional focus on targeting centrist swing voters and the Obama-Clinton establishment.
It may also have caused Ellison to see Washington as a dead end. In June, after the incumbent attorney general in Minnesota decided to run for governor, Ellison made a last-minute decision to pursue the attorney-general office (he won his primary last night). His decision set off an intense ten-week campaign to replace him, and Omar was one of three leading candidates, all of whom would make a typical Women’s Marcher proud. Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who is fifty years old, grew up on a family farm in rural Minnesota and was the state’s second female Speaker of the House. Patricia Torres Ray, who is fifty-four, was born in Colombia, and was the first Latina elected to the Minnesota senate. All three campaigned on single-payer health care, gun control, abolishing ICE, and ending the student-debt crisis. But, in the several days I spent in Minneapolis, Omar had the most campaign events, and the most energized base of paid and volunteer canvassers. She was also the only candidate I saw who had constituents attending her events just to tell her that they loved her.
[...] As Omar explained to the good liberals at Penny’s, her platform is informed by realities she knows. She has three children. (Her eldest, Isra Hirsi, who is fifteen, played an organizing role in her campaign, and is the chair of the Minnesota High School Democrats.) In this particular primary race, Omar pointed out, “I’m the only one with little kids. I’m the only one with college debt.” (This isn’t exactly true—Anderson Kelliher has graduate debt from completing a master’s degree at Harvard, in 2006.) Responding to a question about affordable housing, Omar pointed out that she’s still a renter. Responding to a question about bridging political divides, she described how she, as a mother who had two children before graduating from N.D.S.U., appealed to pro-lifers in the state House to secure more funding for student parents. Dismantling ICE, too, is “a personal thing.”
“I’ve always seen how it was created out of fear, and how it became a tool to dehumanize and treat Muslims as second-class citizens within this country,” she said. “For me, those issues are not complicated.”
[...] After a discussion about the bad-faith justifications for the recent federal tax cuts, one attendee, a twenty-three-year-old who works in agricultural trading (“selling pork and soybeans to China”) interjected with a stream-of-consciousness lament. Her name is MacKenzie Nelson. She was born in 1994, she began, and has no memory of America not being at war. “I think it’s really disturbing how normalized that is,” she said, “and knowing my tax dollars pay for bombs killing children in Yemen makes my heart break.” At the same time, she continued, she was “really sick of everyone in Washington saying we don’t have enough money in the budget for universal health care, we don’t have enough money in the budget to guarantee college education for everyone.” She described her anxiety about the future: about how she will afford health care, and pay off her student loans, and buy a house or have a family; about how, even if she could save up enough for a down payment on a mortgage, housing prices have tripled; about how there’s no maternity leave in the United States; about generational inequity and the bleak environmental future. “Right now the perspective of a young person is hopelessness,” she concluded miserably, before apologizing for “rambling.”
“Everybody’s paying attention,” Omar said quietly. It was a nice thing to say, because the reigning feeling among people like MacKenzie Nelson of Minneapolis is that the contrary is true: that the political establishment is more concerned about aging male swing voters in Ohio than the dissatisfactions of younger generations in liberal strongholds. Omar did not point out, in this moment, that her own life has not exactly been a cakewalk.
Instead, Omar tells voters like Nelson that they deserve candidates who connect with them. She is not afraid to criticize the Democratic Party. “Fighting gerrymandering is one thing,” she said. “The other thing is insuring we have the right candidates for the people, and not the right candidates for the Party.” Omar went on, “We have people who have been out in the campaign trail in the community having conversations that are not honest, because we don’t really do any of the things we campaign on. We have people who will take votes that they can’t defend. They’ll say they stand for a policy but, when it comes to vote for it, they won’t take the vote. We’ve become the party that wants to appease everyone and no one. And I think the only way that the Democrats become viable again is if we have people who have moral clarity and courage to say what they need to say and fight for what they need to fight for.”
There is no value to trying to restate something that clearly well written. And it ends on the money paragraph. Serve 'em or lose 'em, dear friends in the DFL and independents waiting for the DFL to move to where they can engage fully on such an honest plane as Omar defines.
It is not calculating where a mid-point is which is nether from the Republicans and staking to it it as "win" city. It is more honest than that.