Good morning, and happy Monday. It’s the 78th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
State officials traveled to International Falls over the weekend to survey areas affected by record flooding. Gov. Tim Walz made the trip with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith. “This is pretty historic flooding,” Walz told KBJR-TV. “We’ve got a lot of houses, we’ve got some public infrastructure that’s still under threat, and this is going to go on for quite some time.” Local officials said they’ve had to construct a clay berm around the water treatment plant and evacuate some residents. A temporary shelter has been set up at International Falls High School. The water levels on Rainy Lake have surpassed the previous record high recorded in 1950, more than 70 years ago.
Nearly 10 percent of Minnesota’s legislative elections are all but decided, reports MPR’s Brian Bakst. There are 19 races where only one candidate is on the ballot. Write-in campaigns are seldom successful, so those candidates are virtually certain to win in November. Sixteen of the single-candidate races involve DFLers in and around Minneapolis, where they’d be heavily favored anyway. Three involve Republicans in safe districts. Most of the uncontested elections are for the state House. All 201 legislative seats are at stake this fall, with Republicans defending a narrow Senate majority and DFLers a slim House majority.
Briana Bierschbach of the Star Tribune reports:Six centuries of experience are leaving the Minnesota Capitol building. Those 600 years, spread out among 47 retiring senators and representatives, became official on Tuesday as the deadline passed to file to run for office in Minnesota this year. A few more legislators quietly declined to run again, adding their names to the long list of people who have already said their goodbyes. A dozen more legislators are leaving one chamber to run for another, but their return is not guaranteed. A large number of retirements is typical in redistricting years, when the state's political boundaries are redrawn and scramble the political dynamics in districts across the state. But this year's retiring class represents roughly a quarter of the 201-seat Legislature, the biggest exodus from the legislative branch since the 1970s, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
Gov. Walz met with DFL House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Republican Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller on Friday for the first time Friday since the Legislature ended their session without passing major spending bills and a big tax cut.Dana Ferguson with the Forum News Service reports: While the DFL governor said he'd hoped to chart a path for a special session, the leaders came up short of that during their virtual meeting. But Walz said they'd agreed to have a handful of committee chairs return this week. By this coming Friday, lawmakers should be able to make those compromises and forge the path to a special session, Walz told reporters at the Capitol. “It’s my hope that they’ll find common ground and what will really happen is we button-up that final deal, have that special session and get everything done,” Walz said. “I'm optimistic." But that plan could hit a snag if Republicans refuse to take up the issues in a special session or if Democrats and Republicans at the Capitol remain at an impasse.
Fargo has started using a system known as approval voting, where voters can choose as many candidates as they want.MPR’s Dan Gunderson reports North Dakota State University political science professor and Fargo resident, Kjersten Nelson, plans to vote for multiple candidates. There are seven mayoral candidates and 15 candidates for two at large city commission seats. “With such a huge field, I have sort of appreciated that I haven't had to narrow it down to one or two,” said Nelson. She thinks approval voting has the potential to open elections to more candidates. "I do think there's, in theory, the potential that people would be willing to maybe vote for candidates who they don't think can win, but they really do support, which might give a more accurate sense of what they would prefer."
Wisconsin Democrats are trying to block Republican Tim Michels from appearing on the ballot in the governor's race, saying Michels failed to follow the law when he circulated his nominating petitions. Wisconsin Public Radio reports a formal challenge filed Saturday with the Wisconsin Elections Commission argues 3,516 of Michels' nominating signatures are invalid because they failed to list both Michels' voting address and his mailing address as required by state law. If the Wisconsin Elections Commission were to agree with the complaint, it would leave Michels well short of the 2,000 signatures required to get on the ballot for governor in Wisconsin. The challenge comes days after Michels was endorsed by former President Donald Trump in the GOP primary for governor over fellow Republicans Rebecca Kleefisch, Kevin Nicholson and Tim Ramthun. While technical in nature, Democrats say the other candidates for governor followed the law to the letter. | 