There’s a worm in our apple.

Minneapolis is a beautiful city, and its best asset is its people. We have neighbors who care about one another and who work hard to uphold the common good, organizing trash cleanups, shoveling one another’s sidewalks, coordinating food shares, and leading community tree plantings. That’s what makes the city special, and it’s something people shouldn’t take for granted.

But for as good as I think our people are, the political culture in this city has been allowed to decay. With hard choices ahead, this is a critical moment when we need to lean into our values rather than further abandon the things that make this city great. 

Minneapolis is like an apple, or if you want to be really corny about it, a mini apple. Our people, and our neighborhoods, are like our bright, red exterior, the thing that makes us shine. At our core is a place founded by hearty, rugged people and immigrants who came from faraway places to make a better life. But there is a worm in our apple, and if we aren’t careful, it will eat us from the inside.

There aren’t many people who would describe our city’s current political climate as a healthy one. The issues arise when you begin to identify the culprits. In most conversations that I’m involved in, one of two factions is blamed for the city’s current political dysfunction – the progressive majority on the City Council or the mayor and his moderate allies. [Editor’s note: I am going to use the term “progressives” to talk about the faction that’s further left and “moderates” to talk about the faction that’s further right in the city, and if you can’t handle that, this piece might not be for you.]

I am going to try to persuade you that there is nobody here without a little blame. The city has been allowed to devolve into warring groups of political insiders that play zero-sum games with one another, while the rest of us are forced to sit back and watch. The two major causes are Political Action Committees (PACs) pumped full of money that would violate any reasonable campaign finance laws and a caucus and convention system that keeps out anyone but the most hardened political actors to split up the spoils of the Minneapolis DFL before most reasonable people are paying attention.

The PACs and the political-industrial complex

That zero-sum politics now has an entire self-reinforcing architecture of PACs that not only operate during election cycles, but between them as well. After playing a pivotal role in the 2022 city elections, All of MPLS (the PAC that’s aligned with the mayor and the moderates) and Minneapolis For The Many (the PAC that’s aligned with the city’s progressives) did everything in their power to demonize and destroy their rival faction – which left very little room for compromise, working together, or functional governance. 

This is genuinely a new development, and a profoundly negative one. PACs that operate outside of election cycles and spew negativity towards the opposing political “side” and never cease to exist even when the vast majority of us need people to work together is a really bad outcome for the whole city. It’s creating a new political-industrial complex where consultants earn their checks by maximizing tension, pumping people with scary, negative information to justify the fundraising efforts that pay their bills.

This election cycle, there’s a new PAC to support the moderate faction, We Love Minneapolis. Will they continue to run their political operation outside of election cycles, working to influence public opinion during a time we desperately need people to work together on our behalf, or disappear into the wind once their mission is complete? Time will tell. 

A couple local media outlets have even gotten in on the act. The Minnesota Star Tribune was even nice enough to allow We Love Minneapolis to run a free ad complete with a call-to-action and link to their website the day before the Minneapolis DFL caucuses. The Minneapolis Times sent a blast email to a list to which I was added without my permission the weekend before the caucuses, containing a hit piece on one of the PACs and a positive spin on another one. Was there coordination involved with the PACs directly? I'm not sure, because they won't answer my emails about it.

This is the world that Mitch McConnell’s efforts to destroy the campaign finance system created, and both the moderates and progressives are playing in it with glee. The moderate side, for the record, has substantially more resources, but the progressives chose to play this game too. As far as I know, I have yet to see a single candidate say that they will reject PACs and disavow anyone that spends money on their behalf. Until that happens, it's safe to assume that everyone feels pretty ok with the status quo.

There is a cynical voice that I can already hear responding to this piece, saying, “Well, this is just how it always is!” But it’s really not. The magnitude of these PACs is something we’ve never seen before. It is not lost on me that millions of dollars will be spent on the city’s elections this year, while the entire budget for Minneapolis Voices (the one publication that interviewed all five major mayoral candidates before the DFL caucuses) has an annual budget of close to $150,000.

What have we become? Do we have a city where you can only get elected mayor if you raise a million dollars for a campaign and create a secretive PAC on the side? It’s grotesque, and ripe for corruption.

This soft corruption creates a permission structure that enables more scandalous behavior. Speaking of which, as a symbol of how far our standards have slipped, take a look at the City Council. 

One councilmember has been directly implicated in the Feeding Our Future scandal, where funds intended for kids’ lunches were stolen. His wife’s nonprofit was shut down after an investigation into their involvement, and the councilmember himself ran a nonprofit that was implicated in fraud perpetrated with one of the mayor’s aides. To my knowledge, not a single politician or candidate in Minneapolis has called for him to step down, or even indicated that he shouldn’t run. 

Our ethical standards have slipped, but that’s what happens when everyone’s hands are dirty.

It’s the caucuses, too

It isn’t only the PACs that are making things worse. You may not know this, but on a Tuesday night a couple of weeks ago, the Democratic endorsement for mayor was all but decided. The Minneapolis DFL held their caucuses, where each area of the city elects their representatives to the city’s party convention. The caucus in my precinct ran until about 11 p.m. I have a young kid, so I couldn’t attend mine without incurring a really expensive bill from a babysitter. Even if you attend the first caucus, and you are lucky enough to be chosen as a delegate, you are rewarded by being sent to a gymnasium on a beautiful spring Saturday where you will have to wait for upwards of eight hours in order to participate in the final vote. The winner of this Model U.N.-meets-war-of-attrition exercise gets the party endorsement and unlocks a lot of resources. 

Most likely, all of this attention, energy, and resources will be devoted to a process that won’t end up endorsing anyone, just like the last DFL mayoral convention in 2021, the convention before that in 2017, and every other convention but one since 1997. I’m going to say that again: the convention process, in which mayoral candidates focus on the most highly engaged political insiders in the city, sucking up all of the attention and resources in the race for weeks on end and delivering a process that most people with social lives, anyone that works nights or weekends and can’t get the time off, or has familial responsibilities can’t participate in, has resulted in one endorsement since the Clinton administration. 

The caucus and convention system is outdated, it is undemocratic, and it needs to die. Every year, immediately after the convention, a big chunk of people that sees the process up close will agree with this once again until we get to our next election cycle and do this all over again. 

So, what can you do?

With those conditions in place, is it any wonder that people feel really alienated from a political system pumped full of money, run through a caucus process that keeps most people out, and with fewer local news resources dedicated to revealing the truth of what’s happening? Is it any wonder people feel negatively about our city when there’s big money being spent to destroy our political leadership of all stripes?

I have great news. You are a point of maximum leverage with your political leaders. They need something from you, right now, that they won’t need from you again for a few years, if ever. They need your vote. Oh, and whatever happens at the city’s DFL conventions, remember that 90% of the city never got to participate in the process at all, and the results aren’t indicative of anything. 

This election cycle, I encourage you to ask hard questions and reject simple answers. Don’t cater to the demagogues or people that want to exploit your fear to achieve their favored political outcomes. When the mailers hit your mailbox, and the ads hit your social media feed, remember that you’re not getting the full story. Dig deeper. 

The next mayor and City Council are going to have a really tough task ahead of them. While many things in Minneapolis are moving in the right direction – crime is down again this year, neighborhoods are feeling livelier than ever, and mercifully we will be through a bunch of major construction projects at the end of this summer – we are in for a tough couple of years. The writing is on the wall, and budget cuts are on the way. There’s no way around that when you have an economy that’s teetering, a federal government that’s cutting funding to programs that impact us left and right, and a city budget built around a downtown core during a time when the downtown office real estate that our city is reliant on for our tax base has decreased in value, like it has in cities all across the country. 

Whoever is elected will have to do really hard things and make impossible choices. If the demagogues win, it will be very easy to use that moment as a time to tear down more people. 

I still think this city is a beautiful piece of fruit, but if we don’t get rid of this worm it won’t stop until it eats us from the inside out.