In a November 26 press conference, his first after leaving the VP campaign trail, Governor Walz was asked about Omar’s remarks to the Star Tribune the previous day, when she said that the Harris-Walz campaign message wasn’t progressive enough and that appealing to Republicans with former Rep. Liz Cheney was a mistake.
“No response” Walz said.
Walz’s “No Response” may have been a small public signal that the DFL posture towards Ilhan Omar is beginning to change. In this author’s opinion, if he and other DFL leaders care about the party’s future, it must change.
Over the past three cycles, from 2020 to 2024, many CD5 voters, whom the DFL needs to win statewide offices, have used their votes to express their distress with Ilhan Omar. In every one of her re-election GEs, they have given her far fewer votes, and a lower percentage of the vote, than every other DFL candidate on the ballot, up and down. They mostly are giving their votes to her Republican competitors.
CD5 voters also express their distress in the August DFL primaries, where Ilhan Omar enjoys massive advantages not available to any other candidate. She gets constant exposure on international, national and local TV. Millions of dollars flow into her campaigns from her fervid supporters across the US. DFL leaders ensure that she receives the invaluable DFL endorsement, which confers enormous benefits upon her and handicaps all competitors. Despite these advantages, Ilhan Omar has won her re-election primaries with margins of only 2-20 points, quite modest when compared to other candidates in similar circumstances:
- Keith Ellison, in all his re-election primaries for the same CD5 seat, defeated his primary challengers with margins of 60-80 points.
- Like Omar, Angie Craig and Dean Phillips first were elected in 2018, so all three were in primary re-elections after serving the same number of years:
- In 2020, Omar faced four primary opponents. Had their vote shares been combined, she would have defeated her one opponent by 16.4 points. Since they split the non-Omar vote, she defeated her lead opponent by 19.7 points. Craig was unopposed, effectively winning by 100 points. Phillips defeated his one opponent by 81.5 points.
- In 2022, Omar again faced four primary opponents. Had their vote shares been combined, she would have prevailed by 0.7 points. Since they split the non-Omar vote, she defeated her lead opponent by 2.2 points. Both Craig and Phillips were unopposed, effectively winning by 100 points.
- In 2024, Omar faced three primary opponents. Had their vote shares been combined, she would have prevailed by 12.5 points. Since they split the non-Omar vote, she defeated her lead opponent by 13.3 points. Craig faced one opponent, whom she defeated by 82.0 points. (Phillips did not run.)
Voters communicate their distress with and disapproval of Ilhan Omar. DFL leaders respond by rescuing her. Because she never has earned widespread, durable voter support, she only can win the determinative DFL primary with the outsized advantage the party’s endorsement confers. Although party leaders claim that the endorsement process is community-driven and bottom-up, they make exceptions for Ilhan Omar:
- In 2018, when the CD5 seat unexpectedly opened late in the season, party leaders hastily arranged an endorsing convention to crown Omar with the prize1.
- At the 2022 endorsing convention, Omar failed to achieve the requisite 60% on the first ballot, so “Distinguished Party Leaders” (DPLs) pounded their phones calling other DPLs to the convention, while delaying the second ballot by two hours to give them time to arrive. They nudged her over 60% by two votes.
- In 2024, Senator Tina Smith recruited DPLs to the convention in advance. Most arrived just as endorsement proceedings began, cast their ballots for Omar and then left. Omar received less than 56% of community delegate votes, but more than 90% of DPL votes. Party leaders nudged her over 60% by three votes.
- After the 2024 convention, several community delegates discovered that three of the ballots for Omar had been cast by people who were ineligible to vote. They filed formal challenges; party leaders buried them.
These are the procedural maneuverings that DFL leaders have employed to save Ilhan Omar. They also use rhetoric. Ken Martin publishes missives in her defense right before every primary (2020, 2022, 2024). In 2020, just three weeks before primary election day, the party filed a highly publicized campaign finance complaint against her lead primary challenger; months later, the Federal Elections Commission dismissed it as frivolous.
Why do DFL party leaders prevent political gravity from doing its own work? They tell the public, and presumably themselves, that they must stand behind Omar and prop her up because Progressive CD5 is the DFL vote engine for the state, and as the face of the Progressive Movement, Ilhan Omar delivers these votes. We have shown that this is a myth. Ilhan Omar never has delivered these votes. She always has been most popular in precincts that vote the least. Her most popular areas have low and erratic turnout patterns, the same before and after she appeared on the CD5 ballot in 2018. There is no relationship between her popularity and the average performance of all DFL top-ticket candidates.
Now there is evidence that she is a DFL liability: Trump improved most in the Minneapolis wards where Omar is most popular. Why? There are at least two mechanisms. Both rely on the distinction between Omar’s “Progressivist Base” and everyone else: Working class voters of all races and ethnicities, and well-educated professionals.
National research shows that voters without college degrees (e.g., the “Working Class”) are not aligned with “Progressivists” policies. Many are repelled by “Progressivist” vocabulary (most Hispanics reject the term ‘Latinx’), are confounded by “Progressivist” assertions that contradict their common sense (“Biological sex does not exist!”) and reject “Progressivist” policy proposals (“DEFUND POLICE!”). Members of racial minority groups increasingly are exasperated when White Progressives and their party-privileged organizations speak on their behalf, not just with vocabularies but with proposals they oppose. And while many suburban college-educated professionals have been willing to comply with Progressivist sociocultural demands, such as proclaiming their pronouns without complaint, they too recoil when, for example, Minneapolis Ward 9 Council Member Jason Chavez attempts to block the city from closing homeless encampments, and then, when an encampment fire spreads to a nearby home, posts a photo of himself with the displaced residents and urges everyone to contribute to their GoFundMe account. (One of his Council colleagues ponied up $25, no other Council Members, each earning more than $100k per year, contributed).
As “Normies” become more exposed to “Progressivists” and their policies, they like them less, and they are most exposed in areas where Omar is most popular. The dislike extends to the DFL. “Progressivists” hold most DFL party positions in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis City Council has a “Progressivist” super-majority; most members won with DFL endorsement. “Progressivists” have tarnished the DFL brand, and this year, the most exposed “Normies” responded by shifting towards Trump.
That is one mechanism explaining the clear association between Omar’s popularity and Trump’s increased success in CD5. The other is that Ilhan Omar actively turned her base against the DFL, if not encouraging then certainly not discouraging them from punishing the party for failing to capitulate to their demands. Omar: “… more outreach, more policy signals and more understanding of progressive priorities “would be helpful in us winning.”” That was not an explanation, it was a threat.
If Omar’s “Progressivists” insist that the party adhere more to them, and the rest of the party’s coalition is repulsed by them, what should the party do? Ken Martin, in his bid to become DNC Chair, sees his job as getting these various ideological factions of the party to work together. This is a fantasy. These “various factions” cannot work together because they adhere to completely different philosophies, and behavioral standards that follow from them. Party leaders must choose.
In this author’s opinion, the numbers make the choice clear. Even in “Progressive” CD5, Ilhan Omar routinely under-performs in primaries and GEs compared to conventionally liberal DFL candidates. Omar’s “Progressivist” base votes erratically, and at low rates; Ilhan Omar never has stabilized or improved those rates. And there aren’t that many of them[i]. Using the highly correlated results from the Minneapolis Mayoral race in November 2021, and the DFL Presidential Primary in March 2024, under the most generous estimates, there are 41.0k committed “Progressivists” in Minneapolis, 49.7k in CD5, and 124.2k in Minnesota. This is 15.3%, 12.0% and 3.5% of registered voters in Minneapolis, CD5 and the state.
They make a great deal of noise. They demand impunity when they flout DFL rules, even laws. They reject critique and insist on thought conformity. They punish dissenters by assassinating their characters, by threatening their jobs and businesses; they resort to physical confrontations when necessary. They lie: Ilhan Omar, in her 2024 campaign literature, asserted that Harlan Crow was bankrolling her primary opponent’s campaign. Publicly available reports from the Federal Elections Commission showed that Harlan Crow had not given anything to her opponent’s campaign.
Party leaders can be forgiven if they feel personally intimidated, but electorally, the party is at little risk by defying them. Even in Minneapolis and CD5, Omar’s fervently loyal “Progressivist” base is comparatively small, and does not vote reliably. There is no evidence that her base produces victories for DFL statewide candidates and increased evidence that she and her base are DFL liabilities.
Perhaps in his role as Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Walz escaped the Minnesota DFL bubble long enough to experience how normal voters react to The Progressive Movement, and to its Minnesota leader, Ilhan Omar. Perhaps this is why he declined to comment when asked about her remark (her threat?) that pandering more to her and her loyalists “… would be helpful in us winning”. He no longer could, or would, prevent political gravity from doing its own work. This author opines that other DFL leaders would be wise to emulate him. When Ilhan Omar next begins to sink from the weight of her many inadequacies, let her sink.
But Walz’s refusal to comment on just one of Omar’s many inane remarks will not be enough to restore voters’ trust. By promoting her all these years, by preventing political gravity from doing its own work, party leaders have encouraged “Progressivists” to dominate the DFL in Minneapolis. “Normie” political aspirants dare not challenge Omar because they know that the party will destroy their careers. If the DFL wants to restore voters’ trust, leaders must acknowledge, at least to themselves, that it was an initial mistake to promote Omar above better qualified candidates, and that they compounded this mistake every time they intervened in endorsing conventions to bless her with that prize. At some point they must admit these mistakes to the public and tell voters how they intend to change. Only then can trust be restored; only then will better candidates, who are not liabilities to the DFL, feel confident stepping forward.
But a small start is now. Acknowledge that myth, not reality, has justified their behavior for the past six years, and commit to reality. The data are here.
[i] There now are two ways to estimate the size of Omar’s “Progressivist” base. One uses outcomes from the Minneapolis Mayoral race in November 2021. The other uses results from the DFL Presidential Primary in March 2024.
In 2021, Omar issued precise instructions for how to vote in the ranked choice election for Mayor. Among the 17 candidates, they were to rank Sheila Nezhad and Kate Knuth in slots 1 and 2, either order, and #DontRankFrey. Slightly less than 36k voters, 13.4% of those registered, and 24.8% of those voting for Mayor, followed these instructions precisely, an outcome that would have occurred by chance with a lower than 5% probability. Another 5k voters ranked Nezhad first and did not rank either Knuth or Frey, bringing the total to a more generous 41k voters, 15.3% of those registered.
Two and a half years later, in late winter 2024, “Progressivists” insisted that Biden withhold support for Israel or suffer their withheld votes in November. To project power, they organized their base to vote #Uncommitted in the March 2024 Presidential Primary. With Omar’s tacit support, slightly more than 15k Minneapolis voters complied, approximately 6.2% of those registered.
In each Minneapolis precinct, these two outcomes – one from November 2021 and the other from March 2024 – were correlated at rates higher than 95%. It is reasonable to assume that both capture the same “Progressivist” strength in the precinct. Liberally assuming that the larger number was correct, and also assuming that the same ratio exists outside Minneapolis, then at most, there are 49.6k committed “Progressivists” in CD5, and 124.2k in Minnesota. Generously estimating, “Progressivists” are 15.3% of registered Minneapolis voters, 12.0% of registered CD5 voters, and 3.5% of registered Minnesota voters.
Pt 1: Ilhan Omar and the DFL: Insights from Eight Years of Election Results
Pt 2: Omar’s impact on the 2024 Presidential race in CD5
Pt 3: Ilhan Omar does not produce votes for statewide DFL candidates
Pt 4: lhan Omar portends a DFL vote margin collapse
“Ilhan Omar has won her re-election primaries with margins of only 2-20 points, quite modest when compared to other candidates in similar circumstances”. Yiscah, Ilhan Omar must have taken your advice to heart. She won last night with 80% of the vote. She has only you to thank for putting herself on a straight and narrow path to achieve greater success. Congrats!
Below quote from the story above — in a nutshell, this is what I always say. I was at that convention, the people did not overwhelmingly vote for Omar — it was the super-delegates who swooped in to get their way. Basically telling the regular people to shut up and go home. Very discouraging. This article accurately depicts how we could do better if we pick someone else.
“At the 2022 endorsing convention, Omar failed to achieve the requisite 60% on the first ballot, so “Distinguished Party Leaders” (DPLs) pounded their phones calling other DPLs to the convention, while delaying the second ballot by two hours to give them time to arrive. They nudged her over 60% by two votes.”