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Political Note #355   Angie Craig MN 02

2022                             General Election

Let’s play defense.  We have to.  If Democrats are going to recover from the mediocre results in the 2020 House races, they need to avoid losing incumbents.  Here are the10 incumbent Democrats who won with less than 51% of the vote:

  1. Angie Craig MN 02 21%
  2. Susie Lee NV 03 75%
  3. Cindy Axne IA 03 98%
  4. Haley Stevens MI 11 20%
  5. Vicente Gonzalez TX 15 50%
  6. Tom Malinowski NJ 07 61%
  7. Steve Horsford NV 04 67%
  8. Lauren Underwood IL 14 67%
  9. Lizzie Fletecher TX 07 79%
  10. Elissa Slotkin MI 08 88%

We hope there will be one more.  First term Member of Congress Anthony Brindisi (NY 22) is losing to his predecessor, Claudia Tenney by 27 votes with 1,000 votes outstanding; votes a judge has said have to be counted.

I will be urging you to give money to these candidates.  Every one of them if you are so inclined.  One or two of them if you are particularly taken with one or two.

Consider where they are from.  Five are from the Midwest.  Four are from the West.  One is from New Jersey.  If we can create a Democratic wave resembling 2018, Democrats could protect every one of these seats.  Or most of them.

Today’s Note is about Angie Craig.

 Angie Craig https://angiecraig.com received only 48.21% of the vote in the 2020 election because there was substantial support for a third party candidate – Adam Charles Weeks of the Legal Marijuana Now Party.  Republican Tyler Kistner received 45.9% of the vote. Weeks received 5.8% of the vote in November, 2020 despite three startling things:

  • Weeks was dead. He died from a drug overdose late in September, 2020.  Despite that, he got 5.8% of the vote.
  • In a recording, which has been verified as Weeks speaking, he said that Republicans had offered him $15,000 to run for Congress. His candidacy was a plot to draw votes away from the Democratic candidates.  Leaders of organizations that support marijuana legalization were suspicious and opposed Weeks’ run.
  • The election was not postponed. Minnesota law requires postponement of the election if a candidate from a major party dies within 79 days of an election. Angie Craig sued in federal courts and won. She urged her supporters to go forward and assume the election would go on as planned.   The election was held in November 2020 despite Weeks’ September death.

We don’t know what MN 02 will look like in 2022.  Redistricting will take place based on the 2020 census.  Minnesota has minimized gerrymandering the old- fashioned way.  It enters the redistricting season with a Democratic governor, a Democratic House of Representatives, and a Republican Senate.  If the legislature cannot agree on redistricting, the disagreements wind up in state court.  The Minnesota Supreme Court has a reputation for being non-partisan even though it is elected and even though its members are usually appointed and later run as incumbents when a Justice achieves the mandatory retirement age of 70.  Five of the seven members of the Court were appointed by Democratic governors.

Currently, MN 02 is an irregular trapezoid running roughly along the southern border of Minneapolis and St. Paul southeast along the Wisconsin border, continuing from suburbs into rural areas.  Eighty percent of the population is white; the rest is evenly divided between Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The district is prosperous, with a median household income over $90,000.  Until Angie Craig’s 2018 victory, the district had been represented by Republicans since the 2000 election.

Angie Craig lost her first race for Congress in 2016 to Jason Lewis, a far-right radio talk show guy whose repertoire included comments like the following: “If you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.”   She lost in 2016, but ran again and defeated Lewis in 2018 — 52.7-47.2.

Angie Craig was and still is married to a woman.  Originally from Arkansas, she was living with her partner in Tennessee.  They wanted to adopt a child but were not allowed as a couple. Only one of them could adopt.

The child’s mother initially supported the adoption, a matter of importance because Tennessee considers seriously the birth mother’s preference.  After the birth mother’s homophobic parents objected and pressured their daughter to agree, the birth mother objected to the adoption.  Upon reflection, the birth mother changed her mind again and supported the adoption.

Angie Craig and her partner won their law suit.  After that excruciating experience, time and distance helped. They moved to London, then to Minnesota.  Angie Craig had to talk publicly about this searing experience in the 2016 campaign. By 2018, it was old news.  She has been in a same sex marriage for a long time and has four adopted children.  She continues to support LGBTQ families in their adoption efforts, filing an amicus brief with Senator Gillibrand in 2020 with the US Supreme Court opposing the ability of faith-based adoption agencies to discriminate against adoption by same sex couples and proposing legislation with the same goal.

Angie Craig was really a mainstream candidate in Minnesota.  She was gay, married, and an adopted parent of four children. She had been working in the non-profit corporate world as head of human resources for St. Jude’s Hospital. Her views were consistent with someone working in a large charitable institution.  Some would criticize her for her corporate connections.  Others would be put off by her sexual orientation.  Angie Craig is comfortable with who she is.

In Congress, she joined both the Progressive Caucus and the fiscally moderate New Democrat Coalition.   She is also the Co-Chair of the LGBT Equality Caucus.  She serves on the Agriculture Committee, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and the Small Business Committee.

The Star Tribune endorsed her in the 2020 race based on 1) her work in helping to draft the PPP program in the Small Business Committee, 2) her work across the aisle with a Minnesota Republican and fellow freshman Member of Congress on special education funding and 3) the creation of a bipartisan Supply Chain Caucus to address the vulnerabilities exposed during the pandemic.  The endorsement took pains to explain that Angie Craig has supported funding community police grants, not defunding the police; that Angie Craig is not an advocate of the Green New Deal. After meeting with small business owners throughout her district, she was endorsed by mayors from Saint Paul Park, Wabasha, Zumbrota, and more.

Angie Craig could compete because she received those kinds of endorsements.  She had also introduced and passed a bipartisan effort to fund water pollution controls and introduced and got out of committee legislation to reduce health insurance premiums and other health care costs.

Angie Craig could publicize her achievements and her views because she was good at raising money.  She raised $5.3 million in 2020, $5.3 million in 2018, and even $4 million during her losing campaign in 2016.  In 2020, she husbanded her money carefully so at the end of November she had over a million dollars available for the 2022 campaign.  Her opponents in each of those campaigns raised less than she did – by a million dollars or more.

Help Angie Craig https://angiecraig.com win her third term in 2022.  Support her now and continue to support her as the campaign develops.  She was a Republican target in 2020.  The Republicans’ idea of targeting behavior in 2020 was pernicious.  She will be a target again in 2022.  Angie Craig is a valuable voice in Congress.  With a 221-211 margin right now, every Democratic voice is essential.

Members of Congress to Support. (There will be more)

 Iowa 03          Cynthia Axne  https://cindyaxneforcongress.com  Received 48.9% of the vote in 2020

Illinois 14      Lauren Underwood https://underwoodforcongress.com Received 50.67% of the vote in 2020

Michigan 08 Elissa Slotkin https://elissaforcongress.com Received 50.88% of the vote in 2020

Michigan 11 Haley Stevens https://haleystevensforcongress.com  Received 50.2% of the vote in 2020

Minnesota 02 Angie Craig https://angiecraig.com Received 48.21% of the vote in 2020

Nevada 03 Susie Lee https://www.susieleeforcongress.com Received 48.75% of the vote in 2020

Nevada 04 Steve Horsford https://www.stevenhorsford.com Received 50.67% of the vote in 2020

New Jersey 07 Tom Malinowski https://malinowskifornj.com Received 50.61% of the vote in 2020

Texas 07 Lizzie Fletcher https://www.lizziefletcher.com Received 50.79% of the vote in 2020

Texas 15 Vicente Gonzalez http://www.vicentegonzalez.com Received 50.5% of the vote in 2020

Organizations which Support Congressional Candidates

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) https://dccc.org