No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.<\/p>\n
But the big news in my book? \u00a0The\u00a0Strib’s\u00a0<\/em>poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.<\/p>\n In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness\u00a0despite\u00a0getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the\u00a0Strib<\/em> that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional\u00a0politician\u00a0Julie Bunn. \u00a0 Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).<\/p>\n But it was in the western subs that the\u00a0Strib\u00a0<\/em>truly came a’cropper.<\/p>\n In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled\u00a0<\/em>career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement. \u00a0Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues. \u00a0That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.<\/p>\n That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.<\/p>\n The nail-biter came in Senate District 33. \u00a0Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening. \u00a0With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead. \u00a0The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.<\/p>\n As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. \u00a0Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly. \u00a0I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.<\/p>\n Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn. \u00a0Housley will need some help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls. But the big news in my book? \u00a0The\u00a0Strib’s\u00a0poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”. In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness\u00a0despite\u00a0getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the\u00a0Strib that served mostly as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,130,132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12","category-tc-media-bias","category-mn-legislature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29629,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29625\/revisions\/29629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}