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Capitol View®
Bill Wareham

Daily Digest: One week to go

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Good morning. One week to go until the election and plenty of election-related stories for your Tuesday Digest.

1.  AG campaigns swat at opponents' suitability for office. With eight days to go until Election Day, candidates and their supporters in the race for Minnesota attorney general raised questions about the other side’s management style — and character. In a morning press conference Monday, a group of Republican state legislators criticized DFL candidate Keith Ellison, for everything from failing to pay his taxes on time to his political positions on officer-involved shootings, arguing he would be unsuited to run the state’s top law enforcement agency. An hour later, Ellison and a group of former and current employees in the St. Paul city attorney’s office, said his first priority as attorney general would be to push for civil service reform in the office, which would protect lawyers from being fired for things like their political beliefs, religion, gender or sexual orientation. (MPR News)

2. Which candidates have gone viral? If you're looking for substantive coverage of issues including health care, economic policy or education this midterm election, it's probably best to stay off social media. The most popular article about a Minnesota politician in the past year of campaigning comes from a right-wing website called the Tennessee Star. It's about Keith Ellison and an abuse allegation from 13 years ago, which Minnesota news sources tried unsuccessfully to confirm years ago and which he denies. It's separate from the recent claim from Karen Monahan that many news outlets have covered, including MPR News. The partisan news site was trying to derail the Democratic congressman's run for Minnesota attorney general. MPR News ran searches for candidates in this year's highest-profile contests using the web analytics tool Buzzsumo. It monitors major social networks for frequency of shares, comments and likes a link gets. On social media, Ellison is Minnesota's most popular politician of the past year, an MPR News analysis finds. Behind him are Ilhan Omar, Amy Klobuchar, Jason Lewis and Tina Smith. (MPR News)

3.  Deja vu all over again. All 134 Minnesota House seats are on the ballot this year, and 22 of the contests are rematches. Most are in districts that vote reliably DFL or Republican, but some are in true swing districts. Democrats need to gain 11 seats to take the House majority. They're targeting a dozen Republican-held suburban districts where Hillary Clinton outperformed Donald Trump in 2016. The rematches include the race for House District 34B in Maple Grove, where Democrat Kristin Bahner is challenging Rep. Dennis Smith. When Bahner lost by about 2,932 votes in 2016, she knew right away that she would run again. North central Minnesota has another notable rematch -- former four-term DFL Representative John Persell of Bemidji is challenging first-term Republican incumbent Matt Bliss of Pennington. And in Bloomington, former Republican Representative Chad Anderson is trying to win the seat he lost two years ago to DFL incumbent Andrew Carlson. This is the third time they've faced each other. (MPR News)

4. GOP immigration ads target Minnesota Democrats. A new Republican TV ad ties Dan Feehan, the Democrat running in southern Minnesota's First Congressional District, to the caravan of Central American immigrants headed to the southern U.S. border. Over images of marchers, an announcer says the caravan "is full of gang members and criminals" and adds that Feehan would vote for "open borders and amnesty, putting Minnesota families at risk." An earlier ad linked Feehan to Colin Kaepernick's NFL protests, Reps. Keith Ellison and Nancy Pelosi and ended with a shot of a sinister-looking, dark-skinned man. Feehan, that voice-over said, would give "taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants." The Congressional Leadership Fund ads highlight the issue's prominence in the final days of U.S. House campaigns. It has surfaced in the Second, Third and Seventh Districts as President Donald Trump vows to stop the caravan. (Star Tribune)

5. Minneapolis 2040 plan draws big crowd. Hundreds showed up to City Hall Monday night to speak at the first formal hearing for the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan, enough to fill the City Council chambers and still require two rooms for overflow, before the Minneapolis Planning Commission voted 8-1 to send an amended version of the proposal to the City Council. Audience members clapped uproariously and occasionally heckled speakers as the Minneapolis Planning Commission spent four hours hearing public testimony limited to two minutes per person on the 20-year road map for the future. The comments ran the gamut from people asking the city to scrap the entire plan, to those appealing to the commission to amend it for changes on specific properties and some urging city officials to push even further in loosening zoning restrictions to allow for more multiunit housing in Minneapolis neighborhoods. (Star Tribune)