MINNEAPOLIS CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE IS A SOCIALIST WHO GETS THINGS DONE
Zaid Jilani
October 26 2017, 7:00 a.m.
A GROUP OF about 20 Minneapolis residents huddled outside a downtown building on a recent Friday, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with messages, like “Tax the Rich” and “Minneapolis Needs a Political Revolution.”
“Rent control! Rent control! Make Minneapolis affordable!” they chanted in unison. “We’re gonna beat back the developer PACs! We’re gonna beat back the huge developer PACs!”
They were gathered on that unseasonably warm evening, as they do most days, with a singular goal: to help get socialist Ginger Jentzen elected to the Minneapolis City Council.
Jentzen, running with the Socialist Alternative party, is a first-time political candidate, but her campaign – with the support of small-money donors – is the best-funded campaign in Minneapolis City Council history.
She brings to the race a history of community organizing, having led the push to bring a $15 minimum wage to the city. And she is one of many grassroots candidates across the country who has tapped into the energy unleashed by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, finding broad support among voters who want to upend the political establishment.
Sanders is today the longest-serving independent member of Congress, but he himself got his start in municipal politics, and his bid for the presidency last year got Jentzen thinking about running for office as a socialist.
“I think Bernie Sanders’s campaign really threw open the doors to talking about what does it mean to have socialist politics? And what does it mean to firmly stand with working people, and how is this different from the status quo?” Jentzen told The Intercept in a recent interview at her campaign headquarters.
Jentzen announced her candidacy for a city council seat in Ward 3 in January. At the time, she was executive director of 15 Now Minnesota, one of the groups whose advocacy led to an 11-1 vote by the Minneapolis City Council in June for a $15 minimum wage by 2024. Jentzen gained credibility as a result, and she hopes it will help her across the finish line in the November 7 election as she faces off against the Democratic Party and a phalanx of unions determined to keep the council seat in the hands of the city’s political establishment.
Grassroots Support
Candidates from minor parties, such as Socialist Alternative, are often stymied by the two-party system, but Minneapolis’s political landscape and somewhat unique electoral system work in Jentzen’s favor.
Since 2009, the city has used ranked-choice voting — where voters rank candidates instead of voting for just one of them. If no candidate is the first choice for a majority of voters, then all votes cast for the candidate with the fewest votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on who is ranked next on each ballot. This process essentially eliminates votes splitting, gives voters more options, and reduces candidates’ incentives for negative campaigning.
Ward 3 is also an overwhelmingly Democratic ward, which means Jentzen isn’t so much competing as a third-party candidate than as a second-party one. As a Socialist Alternative candidate, she is competing against the dominant Democratic Farmers-Labor Party, Minnesota’s branch of the Democratic Party.
Two Democrats will join Jentzen on the November ballot: Neighborhood North Loop President Tim Bildsoe and Steve Fletcher, whom the DFL endorsed in May. The Green Party’s Samantha Pree-Stinson is also competing.
Fletcher is the opponent with the most heft. In addition to the DFL, he is backed by a slew of unions, like the SEIU and locals from the Teamsters and AFSCME, which tend to line up behind whomever the Democrats have endorsed. His platform focuses on many of the same issues as Jentzen’s — ranging from affordable housing to police reform — but offers less bold policies. For instance, Fletcher proposes using height bonuses, which would allow developers to build higher, as an incentive to spur the development of low-income housing. This is a far cry from Jentzen’s proposal to enact rent control, which could place hard caps on rents as a direct means to increase affordability.
Although most of local organized labor is with Fletcher, Jentzen has her union backers as well, including the Minnesota Nurses Association and the Minnesota State Council of the Communication Workers of America. (The labor union split is not dissimilar to the Sanders-Hillary Clinton matchup in the 2016 Democratic primary.) The Democratic Socialists of America, which sometimes butts heads with Socialist Alternative, has also put its weight behind Jentzen.
Kelly Bellin and Andy Moxley, right, work on Ginger Jentzen’s campaign at its headquarters on Oct. 20, 2017 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Photo: Ackerman + Gruber for The Intercept
There is no polling for the city council elections, but if financial support is any indication, Jentzen is quite popular. She has raised about $140,000 so far, despite a self-imposed fundraising rule against accepting money from corporations and big developers. Fletcher, by comparison, has raised around $40,000.
The Intercept reviewed the campaign’s finance documents, which confirm that Jentzen is very much small donor-funded: As of October 20, a little more than 1,860 donors had backed the campaign with a median donation of $25.
“This is a campaign that is entirely built off grassroots donations from regular working people,” Jentzen said. “Five dollars from a nurse to me is far more important in terms of being accountable and having public representatives who are accountable to movements and the interests of working people, as opposed to $1,000 coming from a big developer.”
Fletcher, in contrast, has argued that developers are an important constituency.
“I think it’s a little bit weird to single developers out as some particularly worrisome group of investors or some particularly corrupting force,” he said at a recent candidate forum, MinnPost reported. “For us, to build the housing we need to build, we need private developers doing what they do. It’s actually a service to our community. It’s actually very important.”
He also sees his association with the political establishment as an advantage. “Ginger has to convince voters they’re socialists, and I have to remind them that they’re DFLers,” he said in a recent interview.
But Jentzen’s message is catching fire in the ward, party notwithstanding.
About 200 people have volunteered for the campaign, according Andy Moxley, the campaign’s volunteer coordinator, who characterized the support as a revolt against the political establishment.
It is “people who don’t like Trump, a lot of people who were Bernie Sanders supporters,” who support Jentzen, Moxley told The Intercept. “The common thread I’ve seen is people who are upset with politics as usual.”
(cont. in link)
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/26/minneapolis-city-council-socialist-ginger-jentzen/
Its nice that people are finally starting to understand what socialism actually is and that its not the boogyman the right wing has been portraying it as for decades, and that its already a function within our society, those taxes are simply going to the wrong people.
Here is a decent interview with her on the Jimmy Dore show:
Log in to comment