For many years, Naomi Kritzer has compiled the most comprehensive collections of information about candidates in Twin Cities races. We sat down with her to find out her process, how it started, and what advice she has both for campaigns and voters!
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Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was hosted, edited, and transcribed by Ian R Buck and was engineered by Sherry Johnson. Many thanks to Naomi Kritzer for coming on the show. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:00] Ian: Oh, you’re making me wish that I had like put together an activity for you ahead of time like, hey, let’s pretend that Ian Buck was going to be running for office, what would you think of his like social media preference? Because I give my students a like digital footprints assignment where they have to find out as much information about me as possible.
[00:00:19] Naomi: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:24] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R Buck. A few months ago, we promised another episode with Naomi Kritzer, who just won a Hugo Award, by the way, best novelette for The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea. We’re chatting with her about her process of researching candidates for political races. On her blog, Naomi covers every race that voters in Minneapolis or Saint Paul will see on their ballots all the way from national to state to local. I highly recommend adding her blog to your favorite RSS reader. But first, let’s chat with her about how she does it. You never really get a break on these, do you?
[00:01:18] Naomi: Not almost never. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:20] Ian: And I think that’s a lot of that is Minneapolis’ fault because we have our municipal elections on odd years, you know.
[00:01:27] Naomi: Yeah. Yeah. And also like there have been municipal elections every two years for what seems like forever. Right. Right. It’s not supposed to work that way, but that’s how it’s been working.
[00:01:38] Ian: I hear that we might have a break in 2027, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
[00:01:43] Naomi: I bet there’ll be a special election for somebody or something.
[00:01:46] Ian: So you’ve been doing these for quite a while. How the heck did this start?
[00:01:53] Naomi: So in 2004, I was researching the down ticket races, and this was because that year I had figured out how to look up my ballot online, and I had remembered to look at my ballot online. And I had made time to do some research, which looking back is very impressive because my kids were born in 2000 and 2003. And I had a novel deadline happening somewhere around then. So I don’t know how I found this time, but.
[00:02:29] Ian: And 2004 feels like it’s right on the cusp of when like I wouldn’t be sure whether or not the Secretary of State office would have stuff online.
[00:02:38] Naomi: They did. They had, I think it was pretty new at that point, but they had stuff you could look at your ballot. At the time, Minneapolis, in addition to voting for City Council, School Board, and Park Board, Minneapolis also voted for a library board and for soil and water commissioners. And the DFL did endorse a library board, but not soil and water. And so every time I voted, I would look at my ballot and like, you know, if I had remembered to write down all the DFL endorsements, I might know who to vote for for Park Board. And yeah, but I had no idea who to vote for for soil and water. And backing up just a just a little bit, 1994 is the year that Sharon Anderson was the Republican candidate for Secretary of State. [Editor’s note: it was Attorney General] Sharon Anderson, if you’re not aware, is a perennial candidate of the anti-Semitic and Islamophobic variety. She’s a real character slash piece of work. And she won the primary for Secretary of State in the Republican Party. So there’s no one’s entirely sure how this happened. And the Republicans that you’re just literally just like folded up their flag in defeat and were like, they did not, they did not want her as a candidate. They could not remove her from the ballot, but they gave her no backing. They did not give her any help. She was not somebody they wanted representing their party.
[00:04:14] Ian: Imagine that imagine a Republican Party doing that.
[00:04:17] Naomi: You know what? Have you looked at her website?
[00:04:19] Ian: No, I’ve never heard of her before.
[00:04:21] Naomi: I kind of don’t recommend it because it might give you a computer virus. But like, if you look at her website, you will understand even the modern Republican Party would not, they would do the same. Like she makes Royce White look like super respectable and together and smart and not a weird paranoid conspiracy theorist because she’s so much weirder. So anyway, so okay, that’s all preface. This is all the way of explaining why I didn’t want to vote in any election unless I’d researched it. I couldn’t look at it. I could not, you know, in good conscience say, oh, look, like I’ll vote for the woman. Yeah.
[00:04:56] Ian: So what a trauma response to have.
[00:04:59] Naomi: Oh, yeah. So instead, instead, I developed a weird and deeply time consuming hobby of obsessively researching elections. So in 2004, so I did some research on soil and water and library board and a couple other races, all of which were local and just the ones on my own ballot. And then because I was doing this research on my computer and I needed to take notes, I opened a LiveJournal entry window and took my notes into the LiveJournal window. And then and then when I was done, I posted them publicly because I had, you know, a couple dozen LiveJournal friends, at least two of whom also lived in Minneapolis. So I figured maybe this will be useful to other people. And then in 2005, I did this as well. And then in 2006, I did this again. And then in 2007, I didn’t post anything, which I think was because there wasn’t a local election that year. And then in 2008, I went back and looked at this recently. 2008, my post says “by request,” which means somebody had asked me when I was going to get this up. And at that point, I started to feel a real sense of responsibility to do this every year. And then in 2013 was the year my blog broke containment because 2013 was the mayoral race that was the first year that R.T. was retiring. So we were going to have like no incumbent and we had instant runoff.
[00:06:30] Ian: So wide open race.
[00:06:32] Naomi: Yes. But in addition, they had not raised the cost of filing. So you could be on the ballot for $20. And the result was that 35 people ran for mayor. And in retrospect, they were lucky it was only 35. And like nine of them, maybe eight or nine were like plausible candidates.
[00:06:55] Ian: How many people are you allowed to rank when you fill out your ballot? Three. Three. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow.
[00:07:05] Naomi: So yeah, St. Paul lets you do five, but Minneapolis only lets you do three. I got started really early that year and I did them in batches of five.
[00:07:13] Ian: Here’s the thing about like bizarre and time-consuming hobbies, I think, were your words. The dividing line between that and content creation is very, very fuzzy. Yeah. And you’ve bridged that.
[00:07:30] Naomi: So yeah, yeah. So because I did this really early, all the people who googled like John Charles Wilson, my blog was the first hit or the second. And so lots and lots and lots and lots of people found my blog because they were looking at this list of weirdos and they were like, who’s this weirdo? And then they found my blog and I made fun of them.
[00:07:56] Ian: I mean, which really shows you like where local journalism was at on carrying the ball on researching these, right? Like if you were the hit right alongside like the candidate’s actual website, if they even had an actual website, yeah.
[00:08:16] Naomi: Well, and I mean, this is the thing is that like if you, so like Mark Andrews or Mark Anderson was one of the major candidates that year, if you googled him, you’d get like a bunch of news hits because like he was being taken seriously and given serious coverage. But there were like, there were all these people that were not being given serious coverage because they were whack jobs, they were complete flake candidates. And like, it’s kind of valid that the news didn’t cover these people, but at the same time, like everyone’s got questions, right? And like, I think at the time, you know, possibly the Star Tribune was sending everyone a questionnaire, like there’s opportunities for every candidate to fill out like, League of Women Voters questionnaires and things like that, but like the flake candidates mostly don’t. So, you know, if you’re trying to figure out who the heck, you know, this person is. So in 2013, people tended to find me. And that was, I was still in LiveJournal at that point, which everyone thought was really eccentric. And the next year I moved to WordPress. So.
[00:09:22] Ian: I mean, is being on LiveJournal in 2013 eccentric, or is using LiveJournal as your note taking app centric in the first place? Yes. So, you know, maybe you deserved that one.
[00:09:34] Naomi: Yeah, probably.
[00:09:37] Ian: So what races do you cover? Like, what can people expect to see if they’re following the blog?
[00:09:43] Naomi: If you’re following the blog, you should see a post for every race that appears on the ballot, a ballot in Minneapolis or in St. Paul. And if it doesn’t appear in either of those cities, I don’t cover it. So that means I cover like the Minneapolis and St. Paul City Council races and mayoral races and the county races. If it’s legislative, if it’s an uncontested race, I’ve started putting up a post for it anyway, because otherwise people are like, when are you going to write about? So I want people who go looking for the uncontested races to find them. And the state legislative races, I only cover the contested primaries. And then in the general election, if it’s like, I have like one giant post that’s like all the contested state legislative races where I just say, obviously vote for the Democrat, obviously vote for the Democrat, why would you vote for the Republican? If it’s like a Democrat versus a Green, that gets like a real post. But you know, Democrat versus Republican, I figure my readers know which party they are affiliated with. I know I have Republican readers, like they’re Republicans that totally read my blog because like, it’s super useful. It gives them all the information on who they don’t want to vote for. Right. But like, you know.
[00:11:07] Ian: I think so many people, they have this unrealistic expectation that’s like, oh, journalism can be bias free. Right. Like you can have really moderate journalism that tries to claim that it is bias free, but that’s not really bias free. Right. That’s just, you know, moderate status quo. Right. Yeah. And I feel like it’s more useful, more like you’re giving people more value out of owning what your bias is and being up front about like where you’re coming from so that people can, you know, be like, oh, am I to the left of this perspective or to the right of this perspective? You know, how am I going to use this information that’s in there?
[00:11:53] Naomi: Yeah. No, I sometimes get people who complain that I’m, you know, I’m not providing an unbiased perspective. And I’m like, you want an unbiased perspective, feel free to start your own blog. I mean, I’m not, I don’t claim to be a journalist. I am a blogger. I am maybe a citizen journalist, but I do not feel any obligation to pretend to be unbiased. I’m absolutely writing from my, you know, from a very specific perspective, just my very specific perspective. And, and I do this, I mean, I’m doing this, I’m doing this for free. And I am doing this because I find it, I find it interesting. And I think it’s valuable. And a lot of people find it useful. And people who don’t agree with me still find it useful. I mean, even aside from the Republicans, like there are plenty of Democrats who are either to the left of me or to the right of me who like know where I’m coming from and account for it when they look at the post. Also, I just pull together a lot of information. So like, what you’re wanting is just, you know, links to all the stuff that I found, like I will always provide that. So.
[00:13:07] Ian: Yeah. Yeah. So the first step of finding your information is figuring out which races are coming up this year. Is that just as simple as you go to the, the Secretary of State website and pull up the sample ballot?
[00:13:22] Naomi: Oh God, this is such a pain because no, because to pull up a sample ballot, you need an address. And, and so, and like, you know, even just figuring out from the maps, like which, you know, right?
[00:13:35] Ian: Because boards don’t overlap nicely with park board districts. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
[00:13:41] Naomi: So like, I mean, I used to like, you know, go to a lot of trouble to figure, you know, come up with an address in the right park board district to like figure out is this actually contested or not. Because if it’s like too high profile, if it’s like two candidates who are actively running, you generally can find them. But if, if, you know, sometimes somebody’s on the ballot, but isn’t really running.
[00:14:02] Ian: Right. 20 dollars and all that.
[00:14:04] Naomi: Yeah, well they’ve raised it, but still it’s not that much. So these days, Josh Martin has started putting together spreadsheets and I find his spreadsheets so useful, so helpful in so many ways.
[00:14:17] Ian: Does he just do Minneapolis or does he?
[00:14:20] Naomi: He just does Minneapolis, but it’s still like so much less work if I can just look at his spreadsheets for Minneapolis. And then I had, there was an article I bookmarked last time around. It was like all the races, all the legislative races that are contested. And so I just scrolled and looked for the ones in Minneapolis and St. Paul. And that was really, really useful. It’s like way more of a pain than you would necessarily expect for something as basic as like who’s running, which, which races are being contested. Like, the good thing though is that if I forget something, I nearly always get an email from somebody who’s like, are you going to write about this? And I’m like, wait, is there a judicial race in there? Oh, it turns out there’s a judicial race or whatever.
[00:15:04] Ian: I just, I do love the idea of like, of having a list of like ghost addresses where it’s like, yeah, this is my hypothetical voter in whatever, but then redistricting happens.
[00:15:15] Naomi: I would have to redo it every decade.
[00:15:20] Ian: Oh man, what a pain. I assume once you know the races, then you can look on the Secretary of State website and find out who has filed. And then where are we at with, what’s the next step of research?
[00:15:34] Naomi: So, like, I usually start by looking for candidate websites.
[00:15:41] Ian: As an extremely online individual, that’s your first step.
[00:15:44] Naomi: My first step, yeah. I, as a general rule of thumb, I say that if you do not, if you are a real candidate who expects to be treated even remotely seriously, you will have a website that is publicly available-
[00:16:05] Ian: -and does not require one to log in to say Facebook in order to see it.
[00:16:11] Naomi: You know, God, there’s a depressing number of people that only have a Facebook.
[00:16:16] Ian: Oh yeah, I know.
[00:16:17] Naomi: And some of them, some of them are, are realish, but as a, as a baseline, you need a website that has a way to contact you, a way to volunteer for your campaign and really give you money. And if you don’t have those things, you’re not really running. You may have filed, but you’re not really running. And you can do all those things with a Facebook. I don’t recommend it to put it mildly, but, you know, there are people that, but it’s just sort of like, if you don’t, if you don’t have anything, you’re not a real candidate and I’ll probably still write about you, but I’m not going to worry that much about you. So, okay, things that I look at, I’m very susceptible to interesting rabbit holes. And if I’m, if I’m writing about like, like a 30 year incumbent who has a Republican upstart challenger, I try not to do too much research because like that’s really all I need to know is that this guy is fine and this guy’s a Republican. Like that’s really all anyone needs to know probably. So I try not to like, you know, go down the rabbit hole of looking up somebody’s like high school athletic record or whatever at that point. It’s just not, this is already time consuming enough. So I’m not 100% consistent on what I look at, but here I made a list of places that I look pretty regularly. First of all, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is actually super useful. It’s even more useful if people didn’t optimize it. There’s a lot of people who run for office that have figured out that people will look at their LinkedIn and so they’ll do a LinkedIn that’s all about like running for office. And what I look at people’s LinkedIn for is to see what your actual job was. So like, and that can be, there was a guy I emailed once who was like, well, I took that out because like, you know, I worked in retail and I’m like, that’s great. Like what I was curious about is like, did you have a real job? And the answer is yes. Right? Like that’s actually what I was looking to find out. It’s fine that you worked in retail. Like that’s not disqualifying at all. Much more disqualifying if like you never had to have a real job because you had family money or something like that would have been, which is what like the complete lack of a job listed on his LinkedIn kind of made look like that might be a possibility. I look on people’s Facebooks in particular, I like to see what memes they shared and like people who are seriously running nearly always lock down their social media really tightly. And then I look, I look them up on Twitter and Bluesky both to find them and to find people talking about them because like there’s all like Minneapolis, Bluesky knows a lot of stuff that I don’t know until like I see them talking about it. I look at their fundraisers. I want to see who’s fundraising for them and who’s endorsing them. Obviously I look on Minneapolis Reddit to see if anyone’s got interest in gossip. Oh, I look, I can look people up in Minnesota court records online.
[00:19:02] Ian: Ooh, yes.
[00:19:03] Naomi: That mostly shows people’s parking tickets and occasionally speeding tickets. But every now and then turns out something really impressively messy. Like there was a judicial candidate last year where what turned out was this really, really, really drawn out custody fight that I looked at it and I was like, okay, it is possible that every single time he dragged his ex back into court, it was 100% justified. But I have seen this pattern enough times to be dubious that it was. This looks like this looks like abusive behavior on his part. So, you know, like that’s the, you know, that can be really interesting. I also checked the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press News Archive and I do it through usually do it through the library because it’s a it’s a good way to get like all the regional papers without a paywall. If there was a forum or a debate I can watch and sometimes they do interviews. Those can be really useful. Wedge LIVE interviews a lot of candidates. I like listening to those. Questionnaires, if they fill out questionnaires, those are great.
[00:20:15] Ian: And those would be like advocacy organizations or like Sierra Club putting together questionnaires and then submitting those to candidates.
[00:20:22] Naomi: Yeah. And like something that I wish more candidates realized is that like the questionnaires that you fill out for those advocacy organizations are sometimes just used internally, but if you filled it out, you can put it on your website. And then everyone can see what you told the Sierra Club. I like asking questions of supporters of a candidate. I like to just when I get doorknocked, I always talk to the people who doorknock me.
[00:20:49] Ian: Do you go and seek out supporters of the candidates or?
[00:20:52] Naomi: Yeah, on Bluesky. If somebody I know is like a big booster of some specific candidate.
[00:20:58] Ian: Well, and I know that you look at like the list of endorsements that they have on their websites, right?
[00:21:03] Naomi: Yes, that’s true. And if I know somebody, I will. I’m not going to cold call.
[00:21:07] Ian: That’s the only time that I’ve ever been mentioned on your on your blog is when Suz Woehrle was running in Ward 1 in St. Paul. And I think you mentioned that Bill Lindeke and I were both on her endorsements page.
[00:21:19] Naomi: All right. Yeah.
[00:21:21] Ian: Which I was like, oh, that’s sweet. I had forgotten that Suz put that on there.
[00:21:27] Naomi: But like, yeah, so I mean, if somebody is running and like people I know clearly have like, you know, are clearly supporters, I will send them an email and say, like, you know, can you, you know, I’m researching this race. Can you tell me like what it is about this person? You know, made you like, is there a reason you like her a lot better than this other candidate is there? You know, sometimes the answer is as simple as like, well, I mean, I have lunch with her every week, you know, like I really like her. I know her personally. This other person looks fine. I don’t I think bad about them, but I really like my friend. This is totally a valid reason to like support somebody is that you know them personally and you know them because you know them personally, you know them to be a good person who would do good things that has integrity and as a hard worker. Like there’s all sorts of things you’re just going to know if you know somebody personally. And I will I will also email candidates and I try when I do that. First of all, I try really hard to ask one question or maybe two questions. I figured out pretty early that like, I did learn this the hard way that if you email somebody like six questions, you just won’t ever hear back.
[00:22:34] Ian: unless you are the Sierra C
[00:22:36] Naomi: Unless you are the Sierra Club. And it’s not even that like, like they’re blowing you off deliberately. Like I think most of the time they get your email and they’re like, oh, I should answer this, but I don’t have time right now. I’ll get back to it really soon. And then they forget, which is exactly what I do with emails all the time. Exactly what I write. So I try to ask one or maybe two questions. And I try to keep them like I try to ask something that matters to me, but is also not like, you know, please tell me how you would fix policing and many others. Like, you know, I try to ask them something that’s more than a yes or no question, but like answerable in, you know.
[00:23:22] Ian: And you don’t use the same questions every year. Like you tailor it to whatever the political environment is at the time.
[00:23:29] Naomi: But and then I also try to ask if I’m asking one person in a race a question, I try to ask all the candidates in the race a question. And it’s not always the same question, because somebody might tell me on their website the answer to the question. But I try to ask them something. Because part of what I’m asking when I email a question is, do you answer questions? Do you respond? Do you respond to people asking questions? Yeah.
[00:23:55] Ian: If I recall correctly, one of your favorite questions for Republican candidates in recent years has been-
[00:24:00] Naomi: Yes, who do you think won the 2020 presidential election? That really shouldn’t be a gotcha question. And yet here we are.
[00:24:08] Ian: Right. So how much time would you say this whole endeavor takes for just one race? How long how long would you expect all this to take?
[00:24:17] Naomi: One race. There are races where I can knock out three of them in one evening. And there are races where it takes me like a week of work. And I’ve never calculated how much a whole season blogging takes me ever. And I’m never going to. I don’t know.
[00:24:34] Ian: You’re not in the time tracking crowd. No. That’s probably, you know, it’s probably better not to know. Speaking of knowing though, do you keep track of like website analytics? Do you know roughly how many people are visiting and how many people you’re helping year to year do their research?
[00:24:52] Naomi: So I do look at the analytics election day last year. I had around 16,000 unique visits. 4,700 of them were there to look up the post on the chief justice race. 4,000 school board at large, 3500 Minnesota court of appeals, 12, 1600 people went to the sample ballot and index of posts. But a lot of these people clearly got there by Googling the chief justice. Yes. And came that way.
[00:25:20] Ian: Yes. So you’re seeing a lot of hits for the races that are not well covered. Yes. For other things. Yes. Right. So some things from 2013 never change.
[00:25:29] Naomi: Yeah. That is really true. In October, it looked like 14,000 people viewed the chief justice race post of last year. 12,000 looked at the court of appeals, 12 post. And that was views, not unique visitors. And I don’t entirely trust these analytics, honestly, but like…
[00:25:45] Ian: It’s a ballpark at least.
[00:25:49] Naomi: It’s a ballpark. I do know that it is thousands of people visit every year. Yeah. That much I can say safely. And how many thousands? I don’t know.
[00:25:57] Ian: Right. But you were just talking about one day on election day. I looked at election day and then I looked at October. Right. But yeah, no, people come to my blog for the races where they’ve struggled to find information other places. They are not coming to my blog to figure out, should I vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? I mean, I always vote. I mean, I always vote. I always write about the big races, but no one is actually relying on me for the big races. They’re relying on me. They’re using my blog for the… And it’s not always tiny. Like, I mean, chief justice is a really big race. It’s on every ballot in the state. Secretary of state and state attorney general are also on every ballot in the state, but just don’t get very much coverage. So, you know, yeah.
[00:26:43] Ian: Yeah. And I think a lot of those races probably don’t give the coverage because as you say many times on the blog, like, if you have an incumbent… This is especially true for judicial ones, where like, if you have an incumbent running, unless there are a lot of people who are pissed off at them, it’s probably fine to vote for the incumbent, right? Yeah. And so like, nobody’s going to talk about them. Yeah. If they’re fine.
[00:27:11] Naomi: Yeah. No, I’ve asked like lawyers and people who are, you know, more involved in like, the judicial system than I am, who they usually vote for, how they figure out who to vote for, and overwhelmingly they say they always vote for the incumbent. So, which I mean, sometimes incumbents are not great, but also the people who run against them usually, they rarely seem to have a, yeah.
[00:27:38] Ian: A coherent reason for you to vote for them.
[00:27:41] Naomi: A coherent reason that a lot of them are not trustworthy. There’s their, you know, they’re, they’re conservatives, like arch conservatives or something. Yeah. And some of them are like, don’t really… I love the ones that file to run in a judicial race and then just link you to their website for their law firm. And that’s how they provide. It’s just like, you’re using this as cheap advertising for your legal back doses, I guess. Yeah.
[00:28:08] Ian: Do you have experience volunteering for or like helping to run campaigns?
[00:28:15] Naomi: I doorknock every year. Okay. Or phone bank. Actually, this past year, I couldn’t doorknock because I had a raging case of Achilles tendonitis and could barely walk across my house, but I phone banked. I phone banked all over the country, not just locally. But doorknocking, I usually doorknock locally. And I have never tried to run. I’m not involved with running campaigns because I would be really bad at it. I’m not organized enough.
[00:28:44] Ian: Well, thanks for undermining the next question, which is what advice would you have for anybody who’s thinking about running for office or for campaign managers, right, to help those campaigns look good?
[00:28:56] Naomi: Number one, get your website up promptly. A legitimate candidate has a website with a fundraising link, a contact link, a way to volunteer and a way to give you money. And check how your website looks on multiple platforms because it’s super annoying when I can’t read your text because my monitor is not as big as what you assumed it would be. Look at every questionnaire that you get from an issues group as an opportunity to show people who you are, even if it’s a questionnaire being put out by a group you disagree with. If you get an F rating from the NRA, that is great and you should be proud. So go ahead and tell them all about your plans for gun control. And remember that you can put those questionnaires up on your site, even if the group doesn’t put it up on their site. I know a lot of people who like won’t do questionnaires from groups they disagree with. And I’m like, I mean, it is an opportunity. They’re offering you an opportunity to tell people where you stand.
[00:29:52] Ian: You want to differentiate yourself from them. Yeah.
[00:29:54] Naomi: And I don’t think that refusing to answer those questionnaires does as good a job at differentiating yourself as answering them does. I mean, obviously, people can differ on this, but get some endorsements when someone has zero endorsements of any kind. I tend not to take them very seriously. Make it easy to contact you if people have questions and answer emails if people get in touch, even if it is just to say, hey, can we talk on the phone about this? A lot of people, if they get a question, would rather chat for five minutes and emailing back and saying, can I call you? Totally valid, but respond. It’s always good to respond. I love specifics about what people want to do in office. Everyone who runs for school board loves children and schools. And I would like to know what makes you different from everyone else running. And giving me specifics about what you want to do is the best way to differentiate yourself. And I think people are fear specifics, because if I give specifics, it gives people ways to attack me. And I’m like, okay, yes, but it also gives people reasons to be excited about you.
[00:31:14] Ian: Have you noticed any recurring themes in Twin Cities politics?
[00:31:18] Naomi: Yeah, the theme that I thought of when there were a couple. The first was public money for sports palaces. But the other one was the cops really suck. That’s been a theme in Minneapolis politics going back a really, really long way.
[00:31:37] Ian: But we also can’t agree on what to do about that.
[00:31:39] Naomi: And that is also true. The cops suck and we don’t seem to be able to fix that.
[00:31:47] Ian: The cops suck and roughly half of everybody believes that that means that we should take money away from them and roughly half of everybody believes that means we should give more money to them. And I don’t know how we got to that shared reality or lack thereof.
[00:32:05] Naomi: Yeah, I was very frustrated and discouraged in when the Charter Amendment on policing in 2021 didn’t pass. And I was thinking about this and how it relates to storytelling, honestly, because I think a big part of why that didn’t pass is that the people who were supporting it within the city were not allowed to develop any sort of plan for what they would do with this public public safety office, what this would look like. And so people were being told like, well, you’re just voting to get rid of the cops. What do you think is going to happen instead of being told like, this is the vision we are moving towards, right? Right. And I do think change is scary. And in order to get people to support change, it helps if you can give them some idea of what you’re moving towards.
[00:33:08] Ian: Right. And which is a vision that you presented in Chaos on Catnet.
[00:33:12] Naomi: Yes. And like, I mean, I didn’t have to get that through a committee or a referendum. I was allowed to just, you know, I use I’m writing fiction about the future, I can envision whatever I wanted. And yes, in Chaos on Catnet, I wrote about a Minneapolis that had, it wasn’t without police at all, but it had also added a whole lot of public safety officers who do not carry weapons and are actually focused on safety. And so what that meant from the perspective of the character is that she’s walking around on a really cold night with an inadequate coat, inadequate coat. And she runs into multiple people that she parses as cops who are like, Hey, kid, do you have somewhere to go? You shouldn’t be outside in this. It’s really cold. Here is a voucher so you can buy a better coat. And like, that’s, that’s something I would, I would love to see. But yeah, I think it’s probably going to be a theme for a while yet
[00:34:15] Ian: So you mentioned the theme in Minneapolis specifically. What are the big differences between Minneapolis and St. Paul politics that you’ve seen?
[00:34:23] Naomi: The summary, my sort of like, you know, capsule summary is that Minneapolis thinks it’s a bigger city than it really is. And St. Paul thinks it’s a tiny, tiny town.
[00:34:37] Ian: But it’s not.
[00:34:38] Naomi: And it’s not. Right. Doesn’t want to admit that it’s a city at all. Yeah.
[00:34:43] Ian: And together we managed to get missed in a lot of like nationwide lists of cities because they’re, you know, going off of like, well, we’re only going to include cities that have like half a million people or more. And neither of us individually has that many people. But together, we certainly do. Like we are a metro area that is larger than. Yeah.
[00:35:01] Naomi: Yeah. And you know, and it’s kind of okay that we stay below the radar because, you know, like, you know, do you want a bunch of like, snotty New Yorkers coming here?
[00:35:10] Ian: Oh, I’m just talking, I’m thinking about like when, when people make lists of like, Oh, you know, we’re going to analyze like, Oh, yeah. No, that’s whatever aspect of X number of, you know, large American metros.
[00:35:22] Naomi: We’re counted as separate cities and is because we are instead of being counted as one city, which for the purposes of things like that, we basically are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, St. Paul is St. Paul. It’s still controversial that we all have our trash picked up by one company. And if you want your alley plowed, you and your neighbors all have to chip into a pot and hire a guy. I just like…
[00:35:51] Ian: Well, okay, here’s my hot take on that. Minneapolitans are super duper proud of the municipal plow alley plowing. Yeah. I have biked in Minneapolis alleys in the winter. And if that’s what they’re proud of, like, Oh my God.
[00:36:08] Naomi: Well, yeah, I will say, okay. So on one hand, it’s ridiculous. And it’s a real problem for people whose neighbors don’t pay up. I know somebody who is like shares an alley with like an apartment building where like the management won’t chip in. And this creates all sorts of problems. The plus side is, is that in the alleys where like, you know, enough people just go ahead and pay up and like, you know, you’re, you’ve got somebody who’s willing to do the organizing every year, which no one wants to do this. This is the work. It’s not quite as bad as being on Minneapolis school board, but it’s the worst job in St. Paul as being your alley captain. Yeah. They do a really good job though. Like the people that you hire all do a really good job. So like our alley usually gets plowed before our street does, which, you know, yeah. The other thing I find sort of weird is that somehow Minneapolis is way more dramatic. Yeah. And like St. Paul has so much material for drama. And yet our politics seem to be much less dramatic.
[00:37:09] Ian: So the analysis of that that I’ve heard from Janne Flisrand was that it’s a result of this, the structure of, you know, up until recently, Minneapolis did not have a strong mayor. Yeah. And so all of the conversations that were going to happen had to happen in the open. Whereas in St. Paul, the mayor’s office takes the lead on a lot of things. And so a lot of the decision making and the conversations around those decisions happens on staff time and not necessarily on city council time.
[00:37:43] Naomi: That makes sense, actually. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense because, yeah, no, stuff in St. Paul just seems to kind of happen. And in Minneapolis stuff gets like discussed a whole lot before it happens. And every now and then something in St. Paul blows up like the situation with the trash hauling. Recently, there was like the new contract was supposed to start and they needed a place that was sort of like a base of operations. And they’d gotten permission to do one. Yeah, it just.
[00:38:10] Ian: Which is like, when you look closely at that situation that happened, where like the city council was trying to prevent this from happening, and then the mayor vetoed it, and then it went back to the council and stuff. And like combined that with like simultaneously the council wasn’t able to decide on who was going to fill Mitra Jalali’s vacant seat. And it’s like, that’s when you’re like, there’s drama going on that we can’t quite see below the surface. Yes. But holy moly, it must be intense.
[00:38:45] Naomi: Yes. Which is really funny because when that city council got elected, everyone was like, look, I know the council full of women. So nice. And there’s just this weird superstitious belief that women all get along, which is very
[00:38:59] Ian: And it’s honestly probably a really harmful perspective.
[00:39:05] Naomi: Terrible stereotype. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it’s kind of like the back in the 80s when I was a child, there were, you know, you’d see people who’d be like, if only women were in charge. I think this was the era of Margaret Thatcher. She apparently just didn’t count.
[00:39:22] Ian: Well, she wasn’t American, so.
[00:39:25] Naomi: Well, I suppose. But yeah, anyway.
[00:39:27] Ian: Yeah, what was the, this is a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote where she was saying, you know, when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, when all of them are?
[00:39:35] Naomi: Nine. Right. Yeah. I liked that quote a lot, actually, because, you know, the point she was making was not like women are smarter. Her point was that it was men, it was just men for a long, long time. You know.
[00:39:49] Ian: How about trends? Have you seen anything shifting over the years?
[00:39:54] Naomi: Yeah. I thought about this a lot recently when I was like thinking about the ways in which Minneapolis has changed during the time that I’ve been writing. So in 2004, when I started writing, four of the Minneapolis City Council members were not white. Nine of the 13 city counselors in 2004 were white, and they were much more conservative. They were much less urbanist. They were much more focused on cars. They were much more, they were much more interested in pandying to NIMBYism. And they were much more interested in representing like the middle class white homeowners of the city. And what has changed is that people started showing up who were not old white homeowners. Right. Which is why the Minneapolis senior, the DFL senior caucus for a very long time was like, what has happened here? We don’t like it. Yeah. Although now, you know, that that’s shifting. Different people are showing up there as well. It turns out that, yeah, showing up, showing up makes a huge, huge difference. So yeah, no, like people started showing up at meetings to say, actually, we want more housing. Actually, we’re in favor of bike lanes. We want more transit where we’re like, you know, we want to have transit close to us. We want to have, you know, we want to be represented by people who value those things. And so stuff started shifting. Like we have a much less car centered. I mean, it’s not that it isn’t a car centered city, but it has moved the Overton window has shifted massively since I started paying close attention to local politics. I mean, my own orientation towards this has shifted over time. When I look at my old posts, they’re much more car centered than they are now, which is not to say I don’t drive, right? Like that’s how I got here today.
[00:41:59] Ian: And how is the parking in Uptown?
[00:42:02] Naomi: You know what? I found a spot right by your building. It was totally fine. I was a little worried, mostly because the weather today is really unpleasant. And so it was like, if I had to park like a five minute walk away, it was going to be a walk through like rain. And I did bring an umbrella, but nonetheless, like less, but you know, it was completely fine. It was completely fine.
[00:42:24] Ian: I wonder if we can find any cops who would give you a voucher for an umbrella? Do you have a favorite perennial candidate? Okay, so I, I know there are a lot of stinkers, but like, yeah, no, I do have who do you like when you see them come up again, you’re like, ah, yeah, an old familiar face.
[00:42:43] Naomi: There are two that I immediately thought of when I saw it. So one is Christopher Robin Zimmerman. He’s a libertarian candidate and he ran, well, you know, honestly, I’m not sure he would say he was libertarian. He’s really eclectic. He’s a real oddball, but he ran in the Republican primary for the special election in 61, the one that we had in January. Oh, in northeast? Yeah. Kari’s seat. Kari Dziedzic’s seat. And I, he ran in 2013. He was one of the, one of the 35 people who ran for Minneapolis Mayor. And he was really fun because he went through, in 2013, he had his own blog, which he was also blogging about the race, and he was going through the entire list in I think order of filing. And for each person, he was like, would they make a better mayor than me? And I, it was very funny. He was very funny. So I was very pleased to see him running, running again, like you genuinely, like I was genuinely pleased. The other one. And I don’t know that I like this candidate so much as he’s really entertaining to tell people about when they’re not from the area. John Charles Wilson, the Lauraist Communist. So he’s a Lauraist by which he means that he believes sincerely that Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House and the Big Woods among other books, is God. Based on a vision he had when he was a teenager. And he’s a communist because also he’s a communist. And he believes he had a conversation with the almighty Laura and she is also a communist, which I’m like, does he know about Rose Wilder Lane’s connection to libertarianism? I don’t, I don’t know. I’m kind of curious what he thinks Laura thinks of this, but not curious enough to email and ask.
[00:44:45] Ian: Yeah, you’re a bit afraid to ask. Yeah.
[00:44:48] Naomi: Yeah. He’s, um, but yeah, he, he got really mad that I made fun of him. He was one of the people got really mad that I made that I mocked his religious beliefs. But also he believes that Laura Ingalls Wilder is God. Also, he’s, um, the last time he ran one of his campaign slogans was that personal hygiene is a personal choice. And yeah, no, he’s a real interesting character.
[00:45:19] Ian: I don’t know that that’s something that needs to be said as a candidate, but all right.
[00:45:23] Naomi: Yeah. No, there was some, he also at one point wanted, he’s very transit focused. Okay. He wants to, at one point wanted to restore the Minneapolis transit system to the exact routes and state that it existed in on some specific date in the 1970s. I no longer remember when it was. It was post trolley, which I think is sort of interesting. It’s not that he wanted to rebuild the trolley system. It’s that he wanted, he thought the bus routes that existed in this particular point in the 70s were much better and we should return.
[00:46:00] Ian: Would that be like right before we established the Met Council?
[00:46:03] Naomi: I’m not sure. And, uh, and he wanted, when he first ran, he wanted a Lauraist homeland, which would exist as a circle of a 100 mile radius centered on some point in Minneapolis, which incidentally includes part of Wisconsin.
[00:46:23] Ian: Wow. Uh.
[00:46:26] Naomi: And he’s serious about this. Like all of this is sincere. Like some people run for office with like, you know, you know, like…
[00:46:34] Ian: I hope that the audience can imagine my face during that stunned silence because I don’t even know what that would mean.
[00:46:43] Naomi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He came in last in that 35. He was the first person eliminated.
[00:46:55] Ian: Oh, man. I, yeah, I’m sure that he was blogging his way through it. Aside from reading your blog, what do you hope that every Twin Cities voter does to prepare for election day?
[00:47:06] Naomi: Something that I think more people should do to prepare for election day is to use their political contribution refund to make a donation to a swing district Democrat in the legislature. That is a legislative races are one of the places that your money goes a really long way. They’re not, they do not have nearly the fundraising budget of, you know, an Angie Craig, who I mentioned because she’s a swingish district congresswoman, not because I’m a fan of Angie.
[00:47:39] Ian: And donating to the state level DFL is not going to have that same impact?
[00:47:45] Naomi: You know what? Donating to the state level DFL is fine. But I like to donate to legislators in swing seats. So for instance, Brad Tabke, I donated to Brad Tabke. And I can’t remember if this was Brad or if this was a different person that I’ve donated to in the past. But there was somebody who introduced a bill. I tried to figure this out before I came over and I couldn’t find the news story. But the the person who briefly introduced a bill to like give handouts to Canterbury Downs because of a decrease in interest in racing. It was it was like a very badly it was it was it got a lot of he got a lot of flak for it and with the bill didn’t go anywhere. And he was somebody he’s a Democrat and somebody that I have supported in the past. And I’m like, Yeah, you know what? That’s fine. He is doing what he needs to do to keep his seat in like in a in a very like contentious very contentious district. You know, like the Democrats in Minneapolis, the only scenario in which they would lose, they would lose in a write-in to another Democrat, right? They would lose in a to a write-in other Democrat before any of them would ever lose to a Republican. And like, but there’s a lot of seats around the state where that’s not true and is totally worth donating to the Democrats that are running in those seats or the party in those areas. And the PCR means you can donate, I think it’s $75 now per person.
[00:49:16] Ian: Yes, they did recently increase it.
[00:49:16] Naomi: $75 and then you fill out a form and you get a check from the state reimbursing you. And that is money. You’re leaving on the table if you don’t use it, right?
[00:49:28] Ian: You’re planning on keeping doing this for a while, right? We’re not gonna have to scramble and find somebody else.
[00:49:32] Naomi: Well, I am planning to continue doing it, although like, I mean, I could like get hit by a bus or something on my way home today. And if I dropped dad, I have not trained replacement. So I have to figure it out. I do worry about that. Like, you know, joking aside, I do worry about that a little bit that I have not have not set this up to be sustainable. But I’m also really not sure how I would do that. It is just it is just a lot of work. And like most people don’t want to do it. And I don’t blame them. Yeah.
[00:50:06] Ian: Like one thing that I’ve really valued about the blog is that you are really upfront about most of the techniques that you use already. So I did feel a little silly asking all these questions because you already answered them in text.
[00:50:19] Naomi: But I will say I do for people who are researching stuff on their own. I can give you like a really detailed rundown on everything I do, but also bear in mind that you don’t need to look up everyone’s LinkedIn if you don’t want to. Most races are not that complicated. Like most if you’re, you know, if I had a friend who moved to Illinois and was looking up, trying to figure out school board, they had a school board race in their in their area. And I looked up the two candidates and I basically just Googled both of them. And one of them had a Facebook page that was like lots and lots of American flags and eagles. And one of them had a website with a big pride flag up the top. And I was like, vote for the pride flag person. Like, I mean, I don’t know that much about your area, but like just from vibes alone, right? Like this is probably a better choice. This is probably a better choice. And like it’s okay. You know, I sometimes worry that one of the things people take from my blog is a is a sense of like, I can’t vote unless I know an incredibly detailed amount. And it’s not true. You can you can just if you are researching on your own, you can you can totally go based on vibes and most of the time this will work. And sometimes you will look at the two candidates and you will be taken in and you will vote for the wrong person. But this happens to me too, with all of my research, I have totally been taken in by people who then let me down later. And we’re not as cool as they sounded they like they would be when they were campaigning this happens to everyone.
[00:52:11] Ian: because a campaign is marketing.
[00:52:13] Naomi: A campaign is marketing! Yes. Right.
[00:52:17] Ian: The trailer for a movie is not there to give you an accurate sense of what the movie is going to be. A trailer for a movie is to get as many people into the theater as possible. Yeah. And yeah.
[00:52:30] Naomi: And like honestly, and yet like also if you’ve watched movie trailers, you probably have a decent idea when you watch a movie trailer if this is a movie you’re going to enjoy because you know you’ve watched a million movies trailers and you’ve watched a million movies and you like there’s signs and indicators and stuff that they show you in the trailer that will usually give you a sense of oh, this isn’t going to be an action movie with lots of explosions and fighting. Right. I’m not into that. I won’t like this movie. And candidates are like that, right? Like most candidates are going to give you some information that communicates more or less the sort of stuff that you can expect from them. I do way more research than most people actually need.
[00:53:14] Ian: Which is honestly why I read the blog. Like I don’t just read the posts about a race that I’m going to be voting on. Right. Like your writing style and like the juicy details that you find about some of the like what like the candidates that do not matter. Right. That would never have caught my attention in the first place. But then you find out something like really goofy. Yeah. And I’m like, like that’s what I’m here for. I want the drama.
[00:53:44] Naomi: And that’s so valid because that’s totally what I’m here for as well. Like I love doing part of what I part of the rewards of doing this are finding stories like Michelle McDonald, the judge who the woman who ran, she’s not a judge, the woman lawyer, disbarred lawyer now who ran repeatedly for Supreme Court while also representing the lady who kidnapped her kids and squirreled them away on a horse farm and like out state. And it just there’s just so that that lady is fascinating. There’s so much drama there. She got endorsed by the Republican Party. And then they found out she’d had a drunk driving arrest. And so they would they they banned her from the state fair campaign area like their little party area at the state fair. And she showed up anyway with a video camera. So we have a video of her trying to get in and they hired a guy to just obstruct her. They couldn’t touch her, but they could obstruct her. So there’s this there’s this video of her trying to get around this really big bouncer that they hired.
[00:54:48] Ian: Would you call this obstructed justice?
[00:54:53] Naomi: That I feel like that’s I feel like that gives her more credit that she deserves. Honestly, she’s really not.
[00:54:59] Ian: Okay, an obstruction of prospective justice.
[00:55:02] Naomi: There we go. Anyway, like that’s the kind of story that I love so much. I enjoy this sort of drama so much. And that’s that’s part of why part of why I do this research part of why I write about the candidates is to share these stories and to find these stories and share them. But but yeah, fundamentally, if you’re just trying to figure out who to vote for and you’re you know, and you’re somewhere where you don’t have a an obsessive person blogging all the races and you know, you can just-
[00:55:33] Ian: You could be that person, you know?
[00:55:34] Naomi: also you could be that person. And then oh yeah, okay, that’s that’s the other final thought I would share. If you are researching candidates, like share them with your friends and neighbors and don’t feel like you’re pushing your beliefs on people. People are so hungry for information about down ticket races. It is so hard to find out stuff about school board and park board and even city council and legislation.
[00:56:01] Ian: Like you said, a lot of a big part of your research is just looking at the Minneapolis St. Paul hive mind online to see what other people are talking about. Yeah.
[00:56:10] Naomi: And like if you if you if you found information and you have opinions and there’s somebody you want people to vote for, tell your neighbors, tell your friends, post it to your communities because this is how people figure out who to vote for now. And you will be you will be doing a public service and you may be getting better people elected.
[00:56:32] Ian: Yeah. So and that’s a beautiful note to end on. Naomi Kritzer, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:56:37] Naomi: Thanks so much for inviting me. Yeah.
[00:56:41] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. This show is released under a Creative Commons attribution non commercial non derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was hosted, edited, and transcribed by me Ian R Buck and was engineered by Sherry Johnson. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community blog and podcast and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #streetsmnpodcast. Until next time, Take care.