U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and former Minneapolis City Council Member Don Samuels are once again vying for victory in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary after facing off in the same race two years ago, where Omar squeaked out an unexpectedly close win.
Omar is campaigning on her legislative accomplishments and promise to continue serving as a progressive voice in Congress. Samuels is framing himself as a pragmatic alternative, maintaining that he’ll compromise on issues and be more present in the district.
The election takes place on Tuesday, August 13, and early voting is already under way.
Omar is running for her fourth term representing the Fifth Congressional District encompassing Minneapolis and some of its suburbs. She previously served one term in the Minnesota House of Representatives, where she rocketed to national fame after becoming the first Somali state legislator elected in the country.
Samuels, who served 11 years on the Minneapolis City Council and four years on the school board, is making a second run for the congressional seat.
Omar is one of the most recognizable progressive members of Congress, known as part of “The Squad,” which includes Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and others. Samuels, who represented the North Side on the City Council, has turned that exposure and reputation into a campaign issue, painting Omar as a politician more concerned about her national image than representing constituents at home.
Samuels has said if elected, he’ll continue to live in the north Minneapolis home where he and his wife, Sondra Samuels, raised their four children.
“I stay with my community,” Samuels said, citing his public service experience. “I’m going to continue to live here. I’m going to continue to have multiple town hall meetings. I’m going to consider every single phone call from a constituent to be an accumulation of the wisdom of the community and what its needs are.”
Omar painted Samuels’ candidacy as reactionary and negative.
“It is a campaign basically designed on hateful rhetoric of anti-somebody instead of the joyful campaign we’re running that is for something,” Omar said.
Although Samuels, a Jamaican immigrant, has a reputation for being pro-police, he and Omar, a Somali immigrant, share largely similar views on key issues, including immigration and abortion rights. They also support police reform efforts like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would crack down on racial profiling by police, and the Amir Locke No-Knock Warrants Act, which Omar authored.
Samuels acknowledged that he and Omar have similar policy platforms. But he contends that many of Omar’s votes in Congress are unpopular with the district and most Congressional Democrats. He said her past votes against bills like the $1 trillion infrastructure plan in 2021 were out of touch. Omar and a block of progressives voted against infrastructure as a protest over President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan not coming up to vote first.
He also criticized Omar for past votes against U.S. funding of the Israeli military.
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“She takes exceptional votes and isolates our district as an outlier, so we won’t get the support we need when the time comes,” Samuels said. “She’s a purist. So what happens then is everybody else is compromising to get things done, being pragmatic, and she stays pure and gets a fan base all around the country of people who admire people who speak truth to power and never compromise.”
Samuels also argued that he would be more effective in Congress by working on issues like crime with local officeholders like Mayor Jacob Frey, who has clashed with Omar in the past.
Omar, however, emphasized that her votes and approach have gained her institutional and popular support in the district.
“As the person carrying the DFL endorsement, I would say my policies, my votes and judgments, have been in alignment with the people that I represent,” she said.
She portrayed her bill to cancel student debt as having a practical impact by leading to President Joe Biden’s executive order on student debt relief. Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Biden’s order, Omar said the issue is now in the mainstream consciousness, and that she hopes to pass her bill in Congress.
She defended her previous votes against U.S. funding of Israel’s military.
“I do believe that it is important for us to stop funding Israel’s military until they stop the occupation and the death and destruction of Palestinians,” Omar said.
Samuels said he supports funding Israel’s military. Both campaigns say they support a ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas, which started last fall after Hamas killed more than 1,000 people in Israel and kidnapped a few hundred more. Israel’s attacks in Gaza have killed more than 39,000 people, including women and children.
Omar’s campaign said some of her key accomplishments in Congress include bringing more than $54 million of federal money for community projects to the district, and authoring and passing the MEALS Act, which Omar says fed more than 30 million children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Omar defended her constituent services; her campaign cites 91 town hall meetings, 7,000 constituent meetings and more than 3,600 constituent cases that her office worked on in 2023.
Samuels has occasionally come under fire for his messaging style, most recently in a TV ad that portrayed Omar as “missing” from the district.
The ad drew condemnation from Omar’s campaign and several local activists, who said the messaging was disrespectful to the issue of missing Black and Indigenous women locally and nationwide. Samuels’ campaign refused to take down the ad.
A close race in 2022
Samuels came within 2 percentage points of beating Omar in the 2022 primary, losing by roughly 2,500 votes.
During that election cycle, Samuels hammered Omar for her support for a failed 2021 Minneapolis ballot measure that would have abolished the Minneapolis Police Department and replaced it with a new public safety department that would have included social workers as well as police officers.
Samuels was a lead plaintiff in lawsuits to prevent the 2021 public safety measure from getting on the ballot.
Omar said the race was close because she was focused on using her resources to support other Democrats who were running for election in the state, including Governor Tim Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and several legislative candidates. Walz was reelected that year, and the DFL defended its majority in the state House of Representatives and gained control of the state Senate, paving the way for a DFL trifecta.
“We did not want to waste a lot of resources in that primary, so we did not run a robust campaign,” Omar said.
But because this year is a presidential election, Minnesota Democrats have a lot of resources to defend the trifecta, she said.
“We can focus all our resources in making sure we organize like we know how to,” Omar said of her primary campaign.
In this year’s race, Omar has raised nearly five times as much money as Samuels, according to campaign finance reports. Omar has $6.7 million as of press time, more than double the amount she raised in 2022.
Omar also has the endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and key state officials like Ellison and U.S. Senator Tina Smith. She recently attracted the support of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who headed a rally for her in Minnesota.
Samuels, who has raised $1.4 million as of press time, is endorsed by three former DFL state party chairs, including former Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch. He maintained that he’s building on the momentum from his 2022 campaign, going from 100 volunteers two years ago to 1,200 volunteers this year.
