Good morning, and welcome to the Tuesday after Labor Day, the unofficial first day of fall, the first day of school for many students, and the day many people start to think about the fall election. Here’s some news you might have missed over the long weekend.
DFL Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Scott Jensen have agreed to a late October debate on MPR News. The Oct. 28 debate was announced Friday after both campaigns signed off. Jensen has been asking for earlier and more frequent debates. He told me on Friday that he’s frustrated by the timing because he believes many people will have voted by then but will participate. “So now Governor Walz is telling you 'I’ll give you a debate so that I can say a debate has been scheduled,’ and I don’t know how many of the votes will have been cast but a lot will have been cast,” Jensen said. “I mean dagnabbit!” The two candidates met once already on stage during a head-to-head forum at FarmFest in August. Walz has said he expects at least a couple more debates before the Nov. 8 election. MPR invited the two candidates to debate at the State Fair, but Walz declined. Jensen also told me he won’t release his tax returns until after the election. “I’m not interested in having the media divert from the issues of inflation and crime and education in order to do this spitballing, because that’s what’s going to happen,” he said.
Jensen and his supporters were also upset over an interview with WCCO TV Sunday when the feed dropped just as he was talking about the lack of debates, and the station cut to an anti-Jensen ad. Reporter Esme Murphy, who was interviewing Jensen, apologized for the sequence of events. In the interview, Jensen faulted Walz’s approach to public safety after a shooting at the State Fair Saturday night. "I think it's absolutely undebatable that Minnesota is not as safe as we would like it to be,” Jensen said. "I think earlier in the last couple of weeks we had Gov. Walz saying that people can come to the fair and enjoy the tradition and be safe.” MPR News reported that on Sunday, Walz said despite this high-profile incident, it’s believed there have been fewer incidents in general over the course of this year’s fair. He said it’s a sign that the updated security plans, including added partnerships to call in extra law enforcement personnel when needed, have largely been successful. “I think what you’re hearing from these folks is the plan operated,” Walz said. “There’s always the assumption is something could have been done. My question is — three dozen officers within several feet of this happening and it still happened? And I don’t know in a free society … at what point that is.”
There was another shooting just outside the State Fair Monday night as the fair was ending its 12-day run.KARE-11 reported that a teenage male was shot about 8:30 p.m. on the 1500 block of Como Avenue, just two blocks east of the gate on the southeast corner of the fairgrounds. The teen was taken to Regions Hospital by ambulance and is expected to survive.
The New York Times reportsthe midterm election is shaping up to be a referendum on which party is more to blame for a country that has decidedly not returned to normal. The fundamentals — high inflation, an uncertain economy, the president’s dismal approval ratings — still favor Republicans, as do the recent shifts to the electoral map because of redistricting. But outrage over abortion rights, the passage in Congress of a series of economic and climate change bills and the continued dominance of Trump within his party have made some Democrats hopeful that they can triage some of their deepest losses. Representative Angie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat, said abortion rarely came up in her 2018 election, and even after the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision in May, voters in focus groups conducted by her campaign were not strongly motivated by the issue. Now, as she campaigns in the swing suburbs outside the Twin Cities, she said she is asked about abortion rights daily. “This issue has really triggered my constituents in a way that it is just an attack on freedom,” she said.
One Republican who is confident about their changes in November is Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee. In an appearance on FOX News Sunday , Emmer said he was confident Republicans will win back control of the House. "This election … can be summed up with one word: security," Emmer said. "It’s about Americans’ economic security, it’s about Americans’ physical security." Emmer suggested it was a mistake for Democrats to try to make abortion the main issue in the election, when the economy is the key issue. "Americans are struggling. They have to make difficult choices every single day about groceries and gas,” Emmer said. And on the security side, their physical security, Democrats’ pro-criminal policies have literally made our cities war zones."
A former Republican donor facing federal charges of child sex trafficking is claiming is he being unfairly singled out based on wealth and politics. He wants the charges against him dismissed because of it, the Star Tribune reports: Anton Lazzaro, indicted on 10 counts of child sex trafficking charges, has gone through multiple legal teams while filing a volley of motions to drop his charges since his arrest more than a year ago. Federal prosecutors last week filed their own rebuttal against his latest effort to get the case thrown out. "In filing this motion, Defendant Lazzaro continues his well-documented pattern of lodging unsupported allegations and personal attacks," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Polachek. "His motion has no basis in fact or in law." Lazzaro first asked a judge to dismiss charges on similar grounds in January, alleging that he was being prosecuted based on his wealth and prominent status as a major Republican donor. He fired most of those original attorneys weeks later before the second iteration of his legal team withdrew that argument over his objections. | 