Something remarkable just happened in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you don't know, St. Paul is the twin city to Minneapolis, the other side of the upper Mississippi River. These are two jurisdictions, yet one city.
The miraculous thing that happened was that on last Tuesday, Meg Luger-Nikolai won a special election to the state legislature. Yes, she's a Democrat. Democrats win here.
I have more than once spent short bits of time in the Twin Cities on various organizing jobs. I've seen a little of this very Democratic city; I've even seen what kind of people show up to the political party nominating caucuses. Here's what some of them looked like in 2006; I doubt Luger-Nikolai's new constituents look much different now: a little cold with a lot of opinions.
On Tuesday night, Meg Luger-Nikolai, a labor lawyer and Democrat, won a special election for her state legislature with 95.3% of the vote.
Like I said, that could never really happen, right? ... what matters above all else is where the race took place: St. Paul, Minnesota.
Like its sibling on the western bank of the Mississippi, the state capital of St. Paul has been just as much a victim of another would-be dictator, Donald Trump.
The smaller of the Twin Cities has been under siege by ICE for months, its new mayor, Kaohly Her, told The Guardian last week. And the savagery unleashed in Minneapolis, which has reverberated throughout the country and worldwide, has been felt especially keenly in its closest of sister cities.
It was Her’s former seat in the state House that Luger-Nikolai ran for and won, a supersized victory that helps answer a grim and difficult question on many minds: What would happen if Trump tried to send troops into cities right before Election Day?
It turns out, as election law expert Justin Levitt put it, voters will “crawl over broken glass to punish the street gangs gassing and disappearing children.” Despite Trump’s terror campaign, the regime’s opponents overcame whatever fears they might have had to turn out en masse—even though, thanks to ICE’s penchant for smashing car windows, the broken glass is all too literal. Its supporters, meanwhile, seem to have stayed home.
It was by no means easy. In fact, Democrats had to toss the usual campaign trail playbook.
“This election took place while our neighbors were, and still are, being terrorized by ICE agents during this federal occupation,” Luger-Nikolai said in a statement to The Downballot.“It made it impossible to run a normal campaign. People were afraid to open their doors or talk to someone they didn’t know, and we pulled back from those typical strategies out of respect and care for our neighbors.”
“Yet in the conversations we did have, voters raised the same concern: deep disgust with what they are seeing and fear for families, schools, and small businesses in their communities,” she continued. “Families have been destabilized, students pushed into uncertainty, and livelihoods disrupted.”
But, said Luger-Nikolai, the end result was “not only a win at the ballot box, but a powerful affirmation of community resilience in the face of extraordinary circumstances.” Luger-Nikolai’s new district has long been a deep shade of blue, but that backdrop only heightens her achievement.
In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris carried it 84-13, offering little room to improve on those numbers. ... Though Harris won by 71 percentage points, Luger-Nikolai won by 91. That 20-point overperformance would be stellar anywhere. In a district like this? Astonishing hardly covers it.
... Recently, my good friend G. Elliott Morris from Strength In Numbers asked me that same question I posed earlier during a livestream: What would happen if Trump deployed troops to intimidate voters just ahead of an election?
It’s a scary thought, made much scarier by ICE’s blithe killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But as I told Elliott, such an attempt could backfire badly, generating even hotter anger with Trump and firing up voters as never before.
Tuesday’s experience in the Twin Cities is the most vivid evidence we’ve seen of precisely that sort of ballot box backlash. Just as we’ve seen Minnesotans bravely confront Trump’s goon squad despite the grave dangers, they’re not hesitating to make their feelings known at the polling place, too.
If Trump was expecting ordinary Americans to cower at home while his thugs roam the streets, he’s already been proven wrong. And if he imagines that that same army of thugs might save him from electoral catastrophe, voters in St. Paul likewise just showed how very wrong that calculation may be.
It's gonna be a long year. Meanwhile, let's push Dems to prove that the risks we may have to take to elect them are worth it.
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