We take an early look at the DFL money game for 2025. The election calendar this year will be dominated by city-level races in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Also, there…
The Education Minnesota teachers union and oil-heiress Alida Messinger continued to dominate the DFL money game last year. You will recall my Minnesota For Sale series of years past, tracing…
Campaign finance reports for 2024 reveal layers upon layers of donors to the state Democratic cause. As an example, we look at the money brought in by the large Democratic-aligned…
There is one constitutional amendment on the ballot this November that seeks to renew and extend an amendment passed originally in 1988 directing proceeds from the Minnesota Lottery into a…
The main group advocating for the new amendment calls itself Minnesotans for the Great Outdoors. The organization boasts of a long list of entities supporting the effort. But of more…
Digging into the most recent batch of campaign finance reports, I came across this gem: on the last day of the latest reporting period (May 31), a man named Barry…
The final campaign finance numbers are in for the 2023 election for the Minneapolis city council. All 13 council seats were on the ballot, and the results saw the avowedly…
Another election cycle is already underway, and the money is piling up. I’ve been following the money in state Democrat politics in my Minnesota for Sale series. I’ve assembled the…
The DFL sold the state’s politics to out- of-state interests — and it was a fire sale.
Picking up where we left off in Part 4 of our Minnesota For Sale series on campaign finance, we dig up more names and money in the shadowy world of…
Digging deeper into the world of “dark money.” We’ve mentioned a couple of times the possibly non-existent Toolbox Fund, which contributed $232,000 to the Democratic party effort last year, through…
In this Part 6 of the Minnesota For Sale series, we dive into the recent political donations of the controversial New York family. On a number of occasions, we’ve highlighted…
It’s surprisingly cheap to purchase the politics of a mid-sized state in flyover country. Now that all the campaign finance reports are in for 2022, we can add up the…
With the 2022 election behind us, we can now total up the money. In this Part 2 of Minnesota For Sale, we focus on the state Democratic party. Minnesota Democrats…
It’s been almost a month since the 2022 election, so it’s time for your esteemed editors at Capitol Watch to provide our expert analysis about what happened.
Despite its reputation as a solid “blue” state, national Democratic campaign cash is flowing into Minnesota in this election season. The top race in the state is for Governor this…
So far in this 2021-22 election cycle, Alida Messinger has donated $1.8 million to Democratic political causes in Minnesota. Messinger is the daughter of J.D. Rockefeller III and the former…
The most important address in Minnesota politics is located in St. Paul, but it’s not the state capitol building. The most important address is 1600 University Avenue. This glass office…
A prominent DFL donor and key witness in an unfolding Indonesian corruption scandal committed suicide last month after a nine-hour standoff with a SWAT team in Los Angeles. Johannes Marliem,…
A prominent DFL donor and key witness in an unfolding Indonesian corruption scandal committed suicide last month after a nine-hour standoff with a SWAT team in Los Angeles. Johannes Marliem,…
On May 28, the Center’s Peter Nelson had an op-ed in the St. Cloud Times. The op-ed dealt largely with Connecticut, a high-tax state state like Minnesota, which is rethinking…