In a critical victory for progressives, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) won a second term as the state’s top law enforcement official on Tuesday, beating back an energetic Republican challenger who accused him of responding inadequately to an uptick in crime.
The outcome solidifies Ellison’s place in the national political firmament after his prosecution of the Minneapolis police officers who killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on May 25, 2020, made him a household name. It also preserves the Democratic Party’s control of the office of Minnesota’s attorney general, which has continued uninterrupted since 1971.
Ellison, one of the highest-ranking Muslim elected officials in the country and one of Minnesota’s first Black statewide elected officials, defeated Republican Jim Schultz, an in-house attorney for a Minneapolis hedge fund.
“This election was tough. Millions of dollars were spent to sow division, hate, and fear,” Ellison said in a Wednesday morning statement touting his victory. “And we overcame it: we were positive, and Minnesotans responded.”
He thanked the voters and his staff, as well as Democratic U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith and other elected officials who endorsed him.
“I promise to continue helping you afford your lives and live with dignity, safety, and respect every day,” he said.
Ellison won over voters by touting his work protecting Minnesota consumers from COVID-19 pandemic price gougers, slumlords, bad employers, negligent gun sellers and Big Pharma. When it came to the pharmaceutical industry, he was proud of his work advocating for a state law capping out-of-pocket insulin costs and defending that law in court.
“This entire fight is one of the many versus the money,” he said at a Nov. 1 news conference about his work on the insulin law. “That is the challenge: Will we be able to afford our lives?”
He also argued that Schultz, who is personally opposed to abortion rights, could not be trusted to faithfully uphold Minnesota laws protecting abortion rights — notwithstanding Schultz’s assurances to the contrary.
“The stakes [of this race] are whether or not women can count on safe, legal abortion into the future,” Ellison told HuffPost.
Schultz had accused Ellison of supporting an effort to “defund” Minneapolis’s police force, because Ellison had spoken up in favor of a failed 2021 referendum that would have transformed policing in the city.
The referendum, Question 2, had proposed transforming the city’s police force into a more holistic “public safety” department with a public health approach to preventing crime. The ballot measure included language eliminating minimum funding requirements for the city police force and empowering the City Council to play a greater role in managing what would be a new department of public safety. And the camp of people advocating for Question 2 was closely associated with proponents of reducing police funding or even abolishing the police.
But Ellison pointed to his record of supporting full funding of police departments, regardless of what other referendum supporters had wanted. And he noted that in Minnesota, the state attorney general does not prosecute criminal cases unless a county asks them to step in.
“I’ve asked for literally millions of dollars over the course of four years of my term so that we can put violent criminals in prison when counties call on us to do it,” Ellison declared in a televised debate with Schultz in late October.
Instead, Ellison put Schultz on the defensive about how he would finance his proposed increase in resources for the criminal division of the attorney general’s office.
“Who’s going to do the opioid cases? Who’s going to do the landlord-tenant cases? Who’s going to do the wage theft cases? Who’s going to do just basic fraud cases?” Ellison told HuffPost. “He’s talking about changing the attorney general’s office in a way that it never has existed.”
There’s no question that Ellison suffered from the perception, in some voters’ eyes, that he is too left wing on policing and crime.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) won reelection against his Republican challenger by more than 7 percentage points.
At least one lifelong Democrat told HuffPost he was so turned off by Ellison’s association with the left wing of the Democratic Party that he voted for Schultz.
“We have to find a happy medium” between the extreme poles of the police policy debate, said Jesse Bissen, a graduate student who lives in North Minneapolis. “[Ellison] seems to be hiding his support for ‘defund the police.’”
Bissen had never voted for a Republican before and cast his ballot for Democrats on the remainder of the ticket.
But enough other Minnesota Democrats had different concerns when deciding for whom to vote.
“I prefer someone with some experience,” said Chris Fogelsonger, a writer from Wayzata, echoing Ellison’s criticism of Schultz’s qualifications. “And Schultz has apparently never tried a case in court.”
Allie Rose, a finance manager for a property management company who lives in Woodbury, said protecting abortion rights was a priority for her.
“I voted Democratic almost all the way down the ticket just because I’m trying to save my options for my bodily functions,” Rose said.
Rose also appreciates that Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006. (Ellison is one of the highest-ranking Muslim elected officials in the country and one of the only Black people to win statewide elected office in Minnesota history.)
“It’s important for inclusion for all people to be represented in the Congress at some point,” she said.
Another election result in metropolitan Minneapolis suggests that residents of the Twin Cities area may no longer be as motivated to punish the progressive Democrats whom they associate with efforts to “defund” the police.
In the race for Hennepin County attorney, Mary Moriarty, a former public defender backed by Ellison and other progressives, defeated the more moderate retired state Judge Martha Holton Dimick, by a wide margin. Moriarty is now due to take over criminal prosecutions in a county of nearly 1.3 million people that is home to the city of Minneapolis.
