Thursday August 16, 2018
By Emily Witt
Most coverage
of Ilhan Omar, the thirty-five-year-old state legislator who won the
Democratic primary in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District last
night, has focussed on her identity. She was born in Somalia, and she
came to the United States when she was twelve, knowing only two phrases
of English: “hello” and “shut up.” Now her primary victory makes her
likely to become the first Somali-American and one of the first two
Muslim women (along with Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib) in Congress. But
stories about these “firsts” tend to miss Omar’s certainty about who she
is, and the rightness of her desire to “expand what is politically
possible,” including cancelling student debt, banning private prisons,
increasing the number of refugees admitted to the U.S., and cutting
funding for “perpetual war and military aggression.” She supports
passing a national bill of rights for renters, the End Racial and
Religious Profiling Act, and automatically registering every
eighteen-year-old to vote. These are the stances Omar is referring to
when she speaks, as she does often, about “a politics of moral clarity
and courage.”
Last night, the city of Minneapolis broke a record
for turnout in a midterm primary. Omar beat her closest Democratic rival
by more than twenty thousand votes, out of 135,318 votes cast for
Democrats in the Fifth District, which includes Minneapolis and its
inner-ring suburbs. (Compare that to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory last month, in New York’s Fourteenth District: she won by four thousand votes, out of only twenty-eight thousand cast.) Around 9:30 P.M.,
shortly after the race was called, Omar ascended a podium at a Somali
restaurant called Safari to the power anthem “Wavin’ Flag,” by the
Somali-Canadian pop singer K’naan. She paused to acknowledge a chorus of
ululations before addressing the room.
“We did it, we won—oh, my
God,” she said. Omar, who is small and thin, has a tiny silver stud in
her nose. Surrounded by student campaign workers, Somali-American
constituents, close friends, and her three kids, who were dressed
casually for the occasion, she was smiling jubilantly, but didn’t give
the impression that her success was entirely unexpected. There were no
power suits, stilted thumbs-up, or stiff waves. Omar speaks English with
a slight Somali inflection, which comes out when she gets more
animated. She told the crowd, “I’ve always said you get what you
organize for.”
Minnesota
takes pride in its lineage of liberal politicians. I grew up in the
Fifth District, in the eighties and nineties, going to Twins games at
the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, named for a senator and Vice-President
remembered for his advocacy of civil rights. In 2002, both of the
state’s senators, Mark Dayton and Paul Wellstone, were among the
minority who voted against the Iraq War. Wellstone’s death, in a plane
crash, two weeks later, was a loss from which the state has never fully
recovered. But Democratic politics in Minnesota is also a story of
failed national ambitions, from Eugene McCarthy’s five unsuccessful bids
for the Presidency to Humphrey’s nadir, at the riotous 1968 Democratic
Convention, and Walter Mondale’s catastrophic loss to Ronald Reagan, in
1984. The revelations of sexual harassment that resulted in Al Franken’s
resignation from the Senate, and the allegations of domestic abuse that
now threaten the career of the congressman Keith Ellison, are only the
latest disappointments. (Ellison has denied the claims, and local
Democrats seem inclined to withhold judgment.) If he leaves a void at
the vanguard of Minnesota progressivism, it may well be filled by Omar.
Ellison,
formerly a state legislator, won the Fifth District seat in 2006,
becoming the first Muslim elected to Congress. Playing up his support
for single-payer health care and his opposition to the Iraq War, and
hiring local community organizers to run his campaign, he pioneered the
strategy of pursuing groups of voters with historically low turnout
rates. The Fifth District reëlected Ellison five times, and he grew to
national prominence as both one of the most progressive members of
Congress and an early supporter of Bernie Sanders’s Presidential run.
Last year, Ellison ran to chair the Democratic National Committee, on
the strength of Minnesota’s voter-turnout rate, which was the highest of
any state in the 2016 election. His loss, in February, was seen as a
snub of his turnout strategy, and of the Party’s progressive wing, in
favor of the traditional focus on targeting centrist swing voters and
the Obama-Clinton establishment.
It may also have caused Ellison
to see Washington as a dead end. In June, after the incumbent attorney
general in Minnesota decided to run for governor, Ellison made a
last-minute decision to pursue the attorney-general office (he won his
primary last night). His decision set off an intense ten-week campaign
to replace him, and Omar was one of three leading candidates, all of
whom would make a typical Women’s Marcher proud. Margaret Anderson
Kelliher, who is fifty years old, grew up on a family farm in rural
Minnesota and was the state’s second female Speaker of the House.
Patricia Torres Ray, who is fifty-four, was born in Colombia, and was
the first Latina elected to the Minnesota senate. All three campaigned
on single-payer health care, gun control, abolishing ICE,
and ending the student-debt crisis. But, in the several days I spent in
Minneapolis, Omar had the most campaign events, and the most energized
base of paid and volunteer canvassers. She was also the only candidate I saw who had constituents attending her events just to tell her that they loved her.
I
first saw Omar speak last Saturday morning, in Linden Hills, an
upper-middle-class, overwhelmingly white neighborhood in south
Minneapolis, which has one of the highest voter-turnout rates in the
district. In a normal primary, where turnout is as low as twenty per
cent, getting the vote of Linden Hills would be vital. Though part of
Omar’s strategy was to insure that this would not be a normal primary,
the neighborhood still mattered.
At ten-thirty in the morning,
Omar met Linden Hills voters at Penny’s Coffee, a standard-issue
Minneapolis café with high ceilings, blond-wood furniture, concrete
floors, and natural light. Arriving from a previous event, Omar found a
place that a staffer had set for her. There was a large coffee waiting
for her, plus a handful of sugar packets; Omar emptied four or five of
them into her cup. She wore an outfit of sky blue and white: a denim
jacket over a floral blouse, paired with a dust-blue hijab embellished
with pearl beads. Even casually dressed, she cut a distinctly
cosmopolitan figure in the room, where most people were dressed in
T-shirts and shorts, as if they were fitting in their civic duty between
walking the dog to Lake Harriet and buying local produce at the Linden
Hills Co-op.
The twenty or so
people in attendance were a mix of couples, young parents, and retirees.
Most of them were white; many of them reminded me of the mellow,
gray-haired people I met when my dad went through a phase of attending
Quaker meetings. When Omar hosts such gatherings, she begins by asking
everyone to introduce themselves and share where they live, their
profession, and any issues that particularly concern them. There were
many teachers, a couple of college students, a child psychologist, and
retirees. The group applauded for two new citizens, a French
earth-sciences professor at the University of Minnesota and a pregnant
Nepali engineer. Their concerns, which they expressed with urgency,
ranged from education to social justice to climate change. “There’s a
lot of things going on, and thank you for all that you’re doing,” a
blond woman said. She was in attendance with her partner and their young
son, and she added that her primary concern was health care. Tears
sprang to her eyes. “We’re here to support you,” she said.
Celebrating
her primary win on Tuesday night, Ilhan Omar didn’t give the impression
that her success was unexpected. She told the crowd, “I’ve always said
you get what you organize for.” Photograph by Mark Vancleave / Star
Tribune / AP
I saw
Omar give several speeches during the next few days, and they usually
began as the one at Penny’s did, contrasting “the politics of fear and
scarcity” and “destructive and divisive policies” with the “moral
clarity and courage” of people who are “reminding us of the fundamental
ideals of this nation, and getting us closer to the American promise.”
As Omar told the group, she “learned about that promise twenty-three
years ago, in a refugee camp.” She was eight when Somalia’s civil war
began. Her family fled to Kenya, where they lived in a refugee camp for
the next four years. After being sponsored for asylum in the United
States, they settled first in Virginia, then moved to Minneapolis, which
has the largest Somali-American community in the country. She graduated
from North Dakota State University and began her political career doing
public-health outreach for the University of Minnesota’s extension
program. In 2016, at the age of thirty-three, Omar became the first
Somali-American woman to win a seat in the Minnesota House, unseating a
forty-four-year incumbent in the Democratic primary.
As Omar
explained to the good liberals at Penny’s, her platform is informed by
realities she knows. She has three children. (Her eldest, Isra Hirsi,
who is fifteen, played an organizing role in her campaign, and is the
chair of the Minnesota High School Democrats.) In this particular
primary race, Omar pointed out, “I’m the only one with little kids. I’m
the only one with college debt.” (This isn’t exactly true—Anderson
Kelliher has graduate debt from completing a master’s degree at Harvard,
in 2006.) Responding to a question about affordable housing, Omar
pointed out that she’s still a renter. Responding to a question about
bridging political divides, she described how she, as a mother who had
two children before graduating from N.D.S.U., appealed to pro-lifers in
the state House to secure more funding for student parents. Dismantling ICE, too, is “a personal thing.”
“I’ve
always seen how it was created out of fear, and how it became a tool to
dehumanize and treat Muslims as second-class citizens within this
country,” she said. “For me, those issues are not complicated.”
Omar’s
next meet-and-greet was at a “market-inspired café” called the Lynhall,
another industrial-chic space in a neighborhood of duplexes, five- and
six-story brick apartment buildings, bars and restaurants, and young
professionals. Almost nobody at this meeting looked over the age of
thirty-five. Omar formed a connection at each introduction. To a
television-caption writer, she said that she had learned English from
watching captioned TV; to a massage therapist, she said, jokingly, “I’ll
call you on Wednesday.”
After a discussion about the bad-faith
justifications for the recent federal tax cuts, one attendee, a
twenty-three-year-old who works in agricultural trading (“selling pork
and soybeans to China”) interjected with a stream-of-consciousness
lament. Her name is MacKenzie Nelson. She was born in 1994, she began,
and has no memory of America not being at war. “I think it’s really
disturbing how normalized that is,” she
said, “and knowing my tax dollars pay for bombs killing children in
Yemen makes my heart break.” At the same time, she continued, she was
“really sick of everyone in Washington saying we don’t have enough money
in the budget for universal health care, we don’t have enough money in
the budget to guarantee college education for everyone.” She described
her anxiety about the future: about how she will afford health care, and
pay off her student loans, and buy a house or have a family; about how,
even if she could save up enough for a down payment on a mortgage,
housing prices have tripled; about how there’s no maternity leave in the
United States; about generational inequity and the bleak environmental
future. “Right now the perspective of a young person is hopelessness,”
she concluded miserably, before apologizing for “rambling.”
“Everybody’s
paying attention,” Omar said quietly. It was a nice thing to say,
because the reigning feeling among people like MacKenzie Nelson of
Minneapolis is that the contrary is true: that the political
establishment is more concerned about aging male swing voters in Ohio
than the dissatisfactions of younger generations in liberal strongholds.
Omar did not point out, in this moment, that her own life has not
exactly been a cakewalk.
Instead, Omar tells voters like Nelson
that they deserve candidates who connect with them. She is not afraid to
criticize the Democratic Party. “Fighting gerrymandering is one thing,”
she said. “The other thing is insuring we have the right candidates for
the people, and not the right candidates for the Party.” Omar went on,
“We have people who have been out in the campaign trail in the community
having conversations that are not honest, because we don’t really do
any of the things we campaign on. We have people who will take votes
that they can’t defend. They’ll say they stand for a policy but, when it
comes to vote for it, they won’t take the vote. We’ve become the party
that wants to appease everyone and no one. And I think the only way that
the Democrats become viable again is if we have people who have moral
clarity and courage to say what they need to say and fight for what they
need to fight for.”
On election night, I called Nelson and asked who she voted for. She voted for Omar.
Omar’s
next stop was an Urban League block party on Minneapolis’s
predominantly African-American north side. Nearly every Democratic
candidate running for statewide and local office was there shaking
hands, as residents ate barbecue and watched a drum-line performance on
an outdoor stage.
On indices of racial equality, Minnesota ranks
as one of the worst states in the country, with dramatic differences in
outcomes for black and Native American Minnesotans on income,
home-ownership rates, graduation rates, school-suspension rates, infant
mortality, criminal sentencing, and unemployment. Omar is one of many
activist candidates who have run on confronting these disparities more
directly. In 2017, a year after Omar’s win in the state House,
Minneapolis voters elected two openly transgender candidates to their
city council, Phillipe Cunningham and Andrea Jenkins, both of whom are
also people of color. In his race, Cunningham unseated the city-council
president, a twenty-year incumbent named Barb Johnson, by focussing on
turning out poor and working-class voters. The pattern of activist
candidates running against longtime incumbents has continued in this
year’s local primaries, too, in races for county commissioner and county
attorney.
“It’s
not about just trying to go places and get votes—it’s really about
connecting and building relationships,” Alicia Garza, one of the
founders of Black Lives Matter, told me. Garza met Omar at a conference
for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Omar was the first
candidate endorsed by Black to the Future, the social-welfare arm of the
Black Futures Lab, the activist organization that Garza started earlier
this year. On Sunday, two days before the election, Garza came to
Minneapolis from Oakland to stump with Omar at the University of
Minnesota. That evening, I met her at a fund-raiser for Omar, at a local
art gallery. “I think one of the lessons that the national Democratic
Party can learn is to really put yourselves in communities that are
being directly impacted by being left out of governing and governance,”
Garza told me. In her meet-and-greets, Omar spoke of following a
“co-governance model,” and emphasizing listening and learning over
top-down prescriptions.
Another key part of Omar’s strategy is
working with young people. As it happens, they adore her. Omar’s
campaign manager, communications director, and field director were all
in their early twenties. The art-gallery fund-raiser was staffed almost
entirely by high-school- and college-age interns. I spoke with two of
them, a seventeen-year-old student named Rayaan Ahmed and an
eighteen-year-old named Kia Muleta, who were greeting people at a
sign-in table. For several minutes, they gushed about Omar to me: about
how many languages her staff could speak, about how watching her raise
money emboldened them, about how good she is with children, about her
unapologetic support of liberal policies, about how she gives young
people real responsibilities instead of menial tasks.
“For the
first time in my life, I saw someone who looked like my mom, I saw
someone who looks like me making decisions for me that are right,”
Ahmed, whose parents are also
Somalian refugees, said. She described her experience on the campaign
as “powerful and empowering,” but, she added, “it’s not about the
identity—it’s about the politics behind it. The fact that she’s a
progressive means more to me than anything she is.” “I think it’s a
reflection of what our country could be like,” Muleta said.
They
quieted as Omar got up to speak. This time, she concluded her speech
with a call for “a politics of joy.” For those who were listening, this
was an old Hubert H. Humphrey catchphrase. “Hope”—Barack Obama’s
signature word—was thrown in there, too. Her campaign, she said, has
“been filled with excitement, it’s been filled with hope, because every
single person in our district, in our state, in our country, understands
how powerful this seat is, how powerful our message of hope can be in
this time, how important it is going to be for us to worry about one
particular election but to continue to mobilize for a movement that will
get many Ilhans, many Ilhans.”