Minnesotans just showed they’ll ‘crawl over broken glass’ to vote, despite ICE terror
If Trump sends troops to disrupt voting, he could face a massive backlash
In the spring of 2021, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad claimed he’d won a fourth seven-year term as president with 95.2% of the vote.
Three years later, Assad was overthrown and exiled to Russia. But while his regime lies mercifully dead, the ludicrous results of his thoroughly fraudulent final election still live on—in the form of an internet joke.
“Assad-like margins” has become shorthand for an electoral performance—often a hypothetical one—so dominant it could rival that of the deposed Syrian despot. Of course, the phrase was always purely rhetorical. In a proper democracy, no one could ever really hope to rack up numbers so comical.
On Tuesday night, Meg Luger-Nikolai, a labor lawyer and Democrat, won a special election for her state legislature with 95.3% of the vote.
Like I said, that could never really happen, right?
But Luger-Nikolai’s almost impossible-to-believe triumph stands out not just, or even chiefly, because, in a free and fair election, she actually exceeded Assad’s made-up margins.
Rather, what matters above all else is where the race took place: St. Paul, Minnesota.
Like its sibling on the western bank of the Mississippi, the state capital of St. Paul has been just as much a victim of another would-be dictator, Donald Trump.
The smaller of the Twin Cities has been under siege by ICE for months, its new mayor, Kaohly Her, told The Guardian last week. And the savagery unleashed in Minneapolis, which has reverberated throughout the country and worldwide, has been felt especially keenly in its closest of sister cities.
It was Her’s former seat in the state House that Luger-Nikolai ran for and won, a supersized victory that helps answer a grim and difficult question on many minds: What would happen if Trump tried to send troops into cities right before Election Day?
It turns out, as election law expert Justin Levitt put it, voters will “crawl over broken glass to punish the street gangs gassing and disappearing children.” Despite Trump’s terror campaign, the regime’s opponents overcame whatever fears they might have had to turn out en masse—even though, thanks to ICE’s penchant for smashing car windows, the broken glass is all too literal. Its supporters, meanwhile, seem to have stayed home.
It was by no means easy. In fact, Democrats had to toss the usual campaign trail playbook.
“This election took place while our neighbors were, and still are, being terrorized by ICE agents during this federal occupation,” Luger-Nikolai said in a statement to The Downballot. “It made it impossible to run a normal campaign. People were afraid to open their doors or talk to someone they didn’t know, and we pulled back from those typical strategies out of respect and care for our neighbors.”
“Yet in the conversations we did have, voters raised the same concern: deep disgust with what they are seeing and fear for families, schools, and small businesses in their communities,” she continued. “Families have been destabilized, students pushed into uncertainty, and livelihoods disrupted.”
But, said Luger-Nikolai, the end result was “not only a win at the ballot box, but a powerful affirmation of community resilience in the face of extraordinary circumstances.”
Luger-Nikolai’s new district has long been a deep shade of blue, but that backdrop only heightens her achievement.
