Sometimes I think the folks on the right are having a contest to see who can be the biggest bellyacher. Rep. Greg Davids tried by complaining if Rochester were to pilot speed cameras, that would infringe upon his right to speed without consequences. But now Rocks and Cows has a "hold my beer" moment

(Taps the sign)

Many have intuitions about how well or poorly Minnesota voter registration is managed. They would welcome data substantiating those intuitions — and they might even accept data showing they were wrong. A few temperate souls may even be reserving judgment. Few know what is coming.

Given that @dbrauer.net et al. have decided that Thanksgiving weekend is a good time to fret over the gubernatorial race, I'm going to toss this out there: Remember 2010? (I remember elections like some people remember blizzards or fires.)

This is one of my pet peeves about contemporary labor-starved journalism. Reporting what someone said is taking the quick way out. Far more useful to report what is true, either as someone said or contrary to what someone said, as the case may be.

I value using NexTrip to see how my specific bus or train is doing, but I *also* value the macro view of the system as a whole that posts like this provide. Metro Transit deserves praise for providing both.

Nested a couple layers of hypotheticals, if this remains such an easy target and the MNGOP fails to get its act sufficiently together to hit that easy target, then what? How does a replacement for a dysfunctional party emerge?

Grifters, not terrorists. Grifters, not statesmen. There's a certain symmetry to our times.

So is Trump tweeting out a bloodthirsty, imprecise restatement of last week's NOTAM regarding Venezuelan airspace to distract from his administration being credibly accused of murder? Or is he issuing a genuinely ramped-up NOTAM for genuine reasons, but doing it via tweet, because chaos? Who knows.

Newly minted Minnesota Senator Michael Holmstrom is already using his letterhead to issue an offensive demand to Judge West that she unseal a sealed exhibit and send him a copy by December 4th.

Happy 5th anniversary to one of the greatest fact checks of all time. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tru...

I don't think he understands how "decadent" is conventionally used.

Thankful for such rich election data that I can keep slicing it up into different representations. This shows how each of the 13 wards' voters divided their voting among four voting methods, explained downthread.

Despite headlines like "MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce," that isn't what the report says. The researchers did a poor job of explaining their results, and news outlets did a poor job of explaining the poor explanation. iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf

The filing period for MN HD 47A and 64A special elections closed 5pm on 11/25 and the withdrawal period 5pm on 11/26. From what's been posted, it's impossible to say whether anyone withdrew, but even without that it seems that the MNGOP decided not to contest 47A. www.sos.mn.gov/election-adm...

This 1906 story of women on the lower east side rioting because of rising beef prices is delightful and priceless. Complete with dialogue! "You people von't eat dead shickens," he said, "so ve must ... sell dem dead mit a quarter pound less in bleedingness." www.nytimes.com/1906/11/30/a...

As you prepare to celebrate the holiday, here's my story of grumpy old men brought back to life by kindness from long ago. Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

I so regret that I'm no longer teaching or writing textbooks for which "deadlock" needs illustration.

I wish my expectation level were high enough that I could be disappointed in KSTP for acting as though withholding benefits from individual SNAP recipients pending investigation were the same kind of thing as withholding payments to a service provider.

I parted ways with Scouting 25+ years ago, but I still have the 12 points of the Scout Law memorized, and it's easy to see how the current administration would have have a problem with such values. www.scouting.org/about/faq/qu...

Sounds like a plea deal is in the works, which doesn't surprise me. They requested and received two more months to work it out, coming back January 26th.

This afternoon's plea hearing for Timothy Scouton, the election judge who thought election day registrants didn't really need to register, should be interesting. Case 29-CR-24-1128. The denial of motion to dismiss for lack of probable cause, index 42, provides a good recap of where it stands.

Twin Cities folks: Soul To Soul Smokehouse at Midtown Global Market qualified as a reliable smoker of turkeys until they closed. Is there anyone currently operating that we could give a shout-out?

Jeff Howe not seeking re-election in MN SD 13 needs to be put in context of Lisa Demuth doing the same in HD 13A, so the room for GOP newcomers in that area will be even greater. All three legislative districts (SD 13, HD 13A, HD 13B) are safe for the GOP.

I edited my post to include an update: a subsequently-released video describes the MetroTransit garage mural’s creation and credits the artists, Daniela Bianchini, Pablo Kalaka, Gabriela Sepúlveda, and DAKA Studio. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN4I...

The story of two working-class men: a Minnesotan whose identity was stolen and a Guatemalan national living in Missouri who had purchased that stolen identity without knowing its origin. Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/u...

John James's op-ed may or may not be good policy advice, but it's lousy history. He asks what has changed since Minnesota's 1858 statehood. Given the context, the most obvious answer is that there were fewer counties then. Also, state tax was property tax. www.startribune.com/mn-human-ser...

Trump has no more power to cut off Somali TPS (whether in one state or nationwide) before its March 17, 2026, expiration date than he has to spell our governor's name correctly. But we should also understand that only 705 Somalis are approved for TPS nationwide, presumably fewer in Minnesota.

Wait, the critic of supposedly secret negotiations advocated against making the deal public? www.startribune.com/university-o...

To belabor the obvious, this is the context in which the U is still talking about finding a new partner. Hello?

Analysis: Ellison Leads by Overriding U of M’s Intransigence tcbmag.com/analysis-ell...

I still haven't seen a press release from @minneapolismn.gov, so this excerpt from the canvassing board minutes will have to do. If you want to see people putting ballots onto piles and counting how many are in each pile to verify the optical-scan accuracy, Thursday is your chance.

I see the U firing the UMP CEO from his parallel role as a VP at the U as a positive development because when his successor fails to negotiate a better deal, it will be apparent that it's because there's no better deal to be had, not conflict of interest. www.startribune.com/u-ousts-high...

I knew MN legislators were elected w/o party designation from 1913 to 1973. But I assumed the 1913 change was just a progressive-era reform idea. The real history of how a provision intended as a "poison pill" to kill a bill became law for 60 years is wild. storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-sup...

Including Minnesota's Steve Simon

This minor-party candidate for Minnesota governor may wind up benefiting one major party or the other, but he passes my initial sniff test of sounding genuine rather than put up by a major party to divide the opposition. www.mprnews.org/story/2025/1...

Minneapolis releases Cast Vote Record (CVR) extracts for each individual ranked-choice race but not for entire ballots. However, based on the precinct columns perfectly matching up, it appears the rows are in the same order in each CVR file. If so, one can do cross-race analyses like this.

On a citywide basis, 13 times as many voters voted for Frey in the first rank and left the next two blank as voted for Frey in all three ranks. But this ratio of styles of Frey-only voting varies substantially from ward to ward, ranging from a low of 4 in Ward 5 to a high of 26 in Ward 13.

The @jakesteinberg.com and @jeffhargarten.bsky.social analysis somewhat misstates its result. Yes, 26,573 ballots were "Jacob Fry, undervote, undervote" but no, that isn't the number "that only ranked Frey" (and similarly for Fateh) because there are other ways to only rank Frey.

the Strib (finally) published my correction of some funky Frey housing math that was featured in Deena’s profile of him pre-election. better late than never, i suppose

Or rather, they won't be counted unless and until a court says otherwise. If they wind up being potentially determinative after the cured ballots are counted, it seems inevitable a court will be asked to weigh in.

A marginal MNGOP candidate, who hopefully will not gain any more traction than on his various previous runs for office, appears to stand as an interesting example of a new phenomenon: an AI candidacy. He has been publishing a torrent of textual and visual "content" that includes hallucinations. 🧵

In the 2025 Minneapolis mayor race, there was an association between voters' first-choice candidate and how many distinct candidates they ranked. The average DeWayne Davis supporter ranked 2.8 versus 1.9 for the average Jacob Frey supporter. Brenda Short and Omar Fateh are higher than I expected.

I will also note that not only were all these candidate filings too late for a primary, they had no choice but to be so late. The candidate filing periods have earliest as well as latest allowable dates, and the periods for elections with and without primary don't overlap.

Jeanne Massey's op-ed in the STrib contains much that is true. However, two passages are baloney: (1) the claim that under the old primary system, Jazz Hampton and DeWayne Davis's voices and supporters would have been shut out, and (2) RCV allowed Kaohly Her to make the November ballot and win. 🧵

In 2021, the average Minneapolis voter ranked 2.17 distinct candidates for mayor, whereas in 2025 the average was 2.31. I'm not clear how one would assess the significance of this difference, but it's in the direction I imagine most pundits would have predicted.

Let's look at the cumulative vote margin in the final round of the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral race as one moves from the ward with largest absolute margin to the smallest. Ward 13's margin is a bit more than the citywide total. From there, it bobs around but largely cancels out.

Here's another view of the final-round 2025 Minneapolis mayor vote by ward. I've sorted from the ward with the largest absolute margin to the smallest. The ones in parentheses favored Fateh, those without parentheses favored Frey.

Based on the 2025 Minneapolis Mayor cast vote records:

For @dbrauer.net and anyone else: here are the final-round results by precinct for Minneapolis Mayor, 2025. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...