Christopher Ingraham, Minnesota Reformer

A Republican senator is proposing an amendment to the state Constitution that would radically alter the structure of the Senate and effectively lock in Republican control of the chamber for the foreseeable future.

Like the House, the Senate is currently apportioned by population, ensuring that each senator represents a similar number of Minnesotans. But SF 696, authored by Eric Lucero of Saint Michael, would assign one senator to each Minnesota county, creating a legislative body with 87, rather than 67 members.

The change would dramatically shift the balance of power in the Senate toward voters in small, rural counties. The 1.3 million residents of Hennepin County, for instance, would have the same amount of representation as the 3,000 residents of Traverse County.

A single voter in Traverse County, in other words, would have as much influence over the Senate as 433 voters in Hennepin County.

Voters in rural counties overwhelmingly support Republican candidates. While Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won 51% of the statewide popular vote, she carried just nine out of the state’s 87 counties. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar beat her Republican opponent by 16 points statewide, but won only 21 counties.

Those lopsided margins mean that, barring a massive political realignment, a Senate apportioned by county would likely remain in Republican control for decades to come.

The measure has attracted no co-sponsors this session and has virtually zero chance of passing the divided Legislature, or of gaining majority public support as a ballot question.

But county commissioners in rural parts of the state have previously expressed interest in such a proposal, and Republican Rep. Krista Knudson of Lake Shore last year told the Detroit Lakes Tribune that she would draft a House bill to that effect during the 2025-2026 session.

Rachel Aplikowski, a Senate Republican press secretary, said Lucero “introduced this bill before and it’s just to make the Minnesota Legislature look like the US. Congress, where representation in the House is based on population and in the Senate is based on geography.”

But the U.S. Supreme Court has previously ruled that state legislative chambers must be apportioned by population, and that doing otherwise violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1964, the court ruled in Reynolds vs. Sims that “the Equal Protection Clause requires substantially equal legislative representation for all citizens in a State regardless of where they reside.”

“Legislators represent people, not trees or acres,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the 8-1 majority. “Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests… it is inconceivable that a state law to the effect that, in counting votes for legislators, the votes of citizens in one part of the State would be multiplied by two, five, or 10, while the votes of persons in another area would be counted only at face value, could be constitutionally sustainable.”

Lucero’s proposal is “flatly unconstitutional” and “profoundly anti-democratic,” according to Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former official in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. “There’s no particular principle for representing each county equally other than the raw desire for power in less-populated counties, subjecting more-populated counties to permanent minority status.”

In a note he was carrying when he was arrested, Luigi Mangione paints himself as a man radicalized by statistics.

“The US has the #1 most expensive health care system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” wrote the alleged killer of Brian Thompson, the late CEO of Eden-Prairie-based UnitedHealthcare. “United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy?”

Mangione is a scion of a rich, connected Maryland real estate family who recently withdrew from friends and family following severe medical issues. The numbers he cites are, in broad strokes, accurate.

On life expectancy, the U.S. ranks somewhere in the 60s among the world’s countries, according to data from the United Nations, falling in between Panama and Estonia. Among the wealthy subset of countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we rate 32nd out of 38.

The U.S. also spends far more on health care than any other country in the world: around $12,000 per person each year, thousands of dollars more than the next-highest spenders.

The discrepancy between the staggering amount of health care spending and our relatively short lives has been perennial fodder for commentary and political debate: Where is all that money going?

The answer, to a significant degree, is that it’s being skimmed off by the private health insurance industry.

“The largest component of higher U.S. medical spending is the cost of health care administration,” according to an analysis by Harvard health economist David Cutler. “About one-third of health care dollars spent in the United States pays for administration.”

Peer countries, even those that have similar systems with multiple private insurers, pay just a fraction as much. “Whole occupations exist in U.S. medical care that are found nowhere else in the world, from medical-record coding to claim-submission specialists,” Cutler writes.

That excess spending adds up to something like half a trillion dollars each year, according to a recent analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project. For every $100 spent on health care, $16 goes directly to private insurance companies and another $16 goes to hospitals to cover the cost of administering care.

Only about $68 goes toward actually paying for medical services.

Under a single-payer system, on the other hand, the CBO estimates that the public insurer would need just $1.60 of that hundred bucks to cover its costs, while the hospitals would only need $11.80 to cover administration, because they no longer have to deal with the hassle of multiple private health insurers.

Under that system, $86.60 would go toward paying for care.

As the nation’s top health insurer and the fourth-largest company by revenue, UnitedHealth Group — the parent company of UnitedHealthcare — is also the chief beneficiary of all those billions in essentially wasted spending. In 2023 the company socked away $22 billion in profits on $371 billion in total revenue, adding up to $25 per share. The company paid investors dividends of $7.29 per share.

Think of it this way: A person who owned a single $500 share of UnitedHealth Group stock at the start of the year would get rewarded, at the year’s end, with $7.29* of America’s health care spending, despite contributing precisely nothing to American health care.

In his manifesto, Mangione refers to the private health insurers as “parasites.”

Those profits, it should be noted, don’t simply generate themselves. UnitedHealthcare has developed a reputation for being especially ruthless in its pursuit of shareholder value. The company “relentlessly fought to reduce spending on care, even as its profits rose to record levels,” ProPublica reported last year.

A U.S. Senate committee concluded UnitedHealthcare, along with other insurers, intentionally denied critical nursing care to stroke patients in order to increase profits. The company has been accused of using rigid algorithms to determine when to cut off payments, regardless of whether or not patients still needed care.

Thompson had been accused of dumping stock before the company alerted shareholders that UnitedHealth Group was being targeted by a federal antitrust investigation.

Virtually every American has their own horror story to tell of the Kafka-esque indignities of fighting with insurers over billing codes, prior authorizations, pre-approvals, in-network providers, and the like. This likely explains the organic outpouring of condemnation launched at the health insurance industry in the wake of Thompson’s killing, which spanned the political spectrum, even as elites of both parties scolded the vigilante apologists.

Doctors say the delays caused by those barriers between patients and their care, which are set up largely to protect insurance company profits, can make patients sicker and in some cases kill them.

In his manifesto, Mangione lamented that so little has been done to solve the profit-driven dysfunction of the health insurance system. “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: [Elisabeth] Rosenthal, [Michael] Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain,” he wrote. “It is not an issue of awareness at this point.”

The note makes no mention of any personal struggles with the insurance system, despite evidence that Mangione suffered from chronic back pain and underwent major surgery for it.

But at some point — whether driven primarily by personal experience, systemic frustration, or the sheer force of a mental breakdown — Mangione decided to take things into his own hands. “What do you do?” he wrote in a separate, longer document that hasn’t yet been made public. “You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention.”

This story was originally produced by the Minnesota Reformer which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

A GOP-endorsed candidate for district judge has promoted numerous fringe conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate child sex trafficking hoax.

Nathan Hansen, a practicing lawyer and longtime fixture on Minnesota’s conservative social media scene, has also called an attempted 2009 airline bombing a “false flag attack”; claimed “Satanic people run our government”; said that “all property taxes are illegal under the Minnesota State Constitution”; called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and the Central Intelligence Agency; and once said he found himself “consistently agreeing” with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Hansen deleted roughly 100,000 of his Twitter posts prior to announcing his candidacy, according to social media analytics service Social Blade. But a number of those posts have been preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and other posts on Facebook and YouTube remain public.

Hansen, who declined to comment for this story, is running for a judicial seat in District 10, which includes Anoka, Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Pine, Sherburne, Washington and Wright counties. His opponent is incumbent judge Helen Brosnahan, who was appointed by Gov. Tim Walz two years ago.

Hansen says he has the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party, which could be an advantage given the Republican lean of the district.

His candidacy underscores the emerging influence of conspiracy theories in American politics, which have ebbed and flowed since the country’s founding, but are resurgent in a social media age when everyone can be a publisher.

A history of conspiracy theorizing

In 2016 and 2017, Hansen posted repeatedly on Twitter about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which posited that powerful figures in the Democratic Party were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a DC pizzeria, according to screenshots obtained by the Reformer.

Screenshots of Nathan Hansen’s Tweets using the #pizzagate hashtag in 2016 and 2017

In November 2016, Hansen lamented “all of the dumb stuff ‘authorities’ charge out with little evidence while #pizzagate is not investigated.” He mused that a “shadow government” would make the owner of the pizza restaurant “take the fall like Sandusky,” and shared a podcast by people endorsing the conspiracy theory who he said “agree with me.”

Hansen continued posting about the conspiracy theory even after a gunman entered the restaurant in early December and opened fire in an effort to “self-investigate” it.

After that incident brought widespread media attention, Hansen tweeted that “The Wurlitzer rose as one today to try to crush #pizzagate. People must be scared.” (“The Wurlitzer” is a reference to supposed CIA propaganda efforts within the United States.)

He dismissed a subsequent New York Times investigation of the theory’s origins as “a few strawmen,” and suggested a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton was a pedophile.

All told, Hansen used the #pizzagate hashtag on at least 13 different occasions between November 2016 and March 2017.

Pizzagate is far from the only conspiracy theory Hansen has espoused. Years ago on Facebook, he frequently offered fringe opinions on politics and world events.

In 2009 he called the attempted “underwear bomber” attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 a “false flag,” suggesting it was orchestrated by the U.S. government and saying “Black ops has been caught red-handed on this one, and this is a cover-up.”

In 2011 he shared an Infowars blog post about Hillary Clinton, adding the commentary that “Satanic people run our government.” That year he also claimed that “if Obama wanted to grill children on the White House lawn, he could do that.”

He also said he found himself “consistently agreeing with Louis Farrakhan,” sharing a link to an article about Farrakhan’s criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy. Farrakhan is an antisemite and longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, designated by the Southern Policy Law Center as an anti-white, antisemitic hate group.

On his Facebook post, Hansen commented that he “would take Louis Farrakhan as President over Obama any day.”

In 2015 he posted a photo of himself with Judith Vary Baker, who claimed to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s girlfriend, and recommended people check out the work of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Mae Brussel.

More recently he has cast doubt on the idea that there are “clean and fair elections” in the United States. In 2023 he retweeted a Twitter post claiming the Oklahoma City bombing was “a huge false flag” intended to prevent Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot from winning the presidency in 1996.

Conservative activism

Judicial races are nominally nonpartisan affairs, and to maintain the appearance of neutrality candidates rarely seek the endorsement of political parties.

Hansen, by contrast, has embraced the Republican Party’s support, appearing at local party events and obtaining endorsements from Republican state lawmakers. That could be an advantage in a district that has recently leaned conservative in state and federal elections.

He has long been professionally active in conservative causes. He represented a Lynd restaurant owner who fought ( unsuccessfully) against COVID restrictions, as well as the owner of a conservative Twitter account who sued a right-wing think tank (also unsuccessfully) for embedding the account’s tweets.

Hansen also successfully defended Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, against defamation charges filed by fringe judicial candidate Michelle MacDonald.

But Hansen has personally advocated for conservative causes as well. A 2021 video posted to a YouTube account bearing his name shows Hansen berating members of the Mahtomedi School Board over mask requirements, claiming they were violating a law that supposedly prohibits public masking. He cited, among various other things, the 1947 Nuremberg Code prohibiting scientific experimentation on people without their knowledge.

That same account also posted a recording of a 2021 phone call Hansen made to the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, arguing that people wearing masks are “committing a crime” and asking for them to be issued a citation and made to plead their case before a judge.

Hansen also has an unusually partisan social media history. Before most of it was deleted, his Twitter feed was often a mashup of retweets of far-right influencers, harsh criticisms of DFL lawmakers, and various conspiracy theories as noted above.

In 2023 he shared a video of a transgender woman testifying in favor of Minnesota’s trans refuge bill, saying that it “should be used to support a civil commitment to a mental hospital for this poor man.” He also mocked transgender female lawmaker Leigh Finke as “gross.”

More recently, Hansen denigrated DFL lawmakers as “ Bolsheviks.”

On a judicial candidate questionnaire, Hansen told the Minnesota State Bar Association that he was the best person for the judicial position because he always treats people “with the same care and dignity no matter who they are,” and that he believed “all litigants should be treated with respect,” and that “a judge should demonstrate neutrality, including in demeanor.”

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and X.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance faced off Tuesday in their first and only vice presidential debate.

But both brought up claims that were nothing new.

Here’s a look at some of those claims and States Newsroom’s assessment of the facts:

CLAIM: Walz said Vance called his running mate, former President Donald Trump, unfit for the office of the presidency.

THE FACTS: True. Vance said it in a New York Times op-ed in 2016. The Washington Post reported that as recently as 2020 Vance criticized the Trump administration’s record, saying Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver.”

Nevertheless, from the earliest stages of his U.S. Senate campaign in 2022, Vance described and defended his change of heart. At a campaign event in January that year, he said, “I’m not gonna hide from the fact that I did not see Trump’s promise in the beginning but you know, he delivered,” Vance said. “He delivered, and he cared about people. And I think that’s important. It’s important (to) change your mind.”

___

CLAIM: Vance argued schools, hospitals and housing in Springfield, Ohio, are overwhelmed or unaffordable “because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.” He added American citizens in Springfield have “had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”

THE FACTS: Vance and Trump have been the driving force behind several smears of the Haitian community in Springfield. Although the population influx has strained resources, state and local officials – some of them Republicans – have rejected Vance’s false characterization of the Haitian people living there.

Those migrants are primarily in the country legally under a program called Temporary Protected Status. It offers work authorization for people who would face danger in their home countries, and has been in place since 1990.

___

CLAIM: In response to moderator Norah O’Donnell asking about Donald Trump’s claim that Walz supports abortions “in the ninth month,” Walz said “In Minnesota, what we did was restore Roe v. Wade.”

THE FACTS: Minnesota Democrats, with Walz’s support, passed a bill in 2023 enshrining Minnesota’s existing abortion protections into law after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right the year before. Abortion had already been protected under a 1995 state Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing women the right to an abortion.

The 2023 bill modified some language governing care requirements for infants “born alive” following an abortion procedure, but the law still states that any such infants “shall be fully recognized as a human person.” Abortions during the third trimester typically only happen in the case of severe fetal abnormalities or threats to the health of the mother.

There is no gestational limit on abortions under Minnesota law, but data from the state Department of Health shows that only one or two abortions per year happen at any point in the third trimester. More than 90% of abortions in the state happen during the first trimester.

___

CLAIM: Vance argued he and Trump would pursue “pro-family” policies and make fertility treatment more accessible. He also stated he never favored a national abortion ban, but rather described his position as “setting some minimum national standard.”

THE FACTS: Vance has repeatedly insisted he supports access to in vitro fertilization treatment, but he voted against a Senate measure to establish protections for it in June and skipped the vote when it came up again in September.

Vance’s framing of his position – minimum standards versus a ban – is little more than semantics. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he expressed support for a bill cutting off access to abortion anywhere in the country after 15 weeks.

“You can have some minimum national standards, which is my view,” he said, “while allowing the states to make up their minds. California is going to have a different view than Ohio, that’s totally fine.”

Under that proposal states would be able to set abortion policies more restrictive than that 15-week cut off.

Vance was unwilling in that 2022 campaign to embrace the typical exceptions of rape, incest or the life of the mother.

“An incest exception looks different at three weeks of pregnancy versus 39 weeks of pregnancy,” he said.

___

CLAIM: On paid family leave, Walz said “We implemented it in Minnesota and we see growth.”

THE FACTS: In 2023, Walz signed Minnesota’s family and medical leave bill into law. The bill creates a state-run insurance program guaranteeing up to 20 weeks paid time off per year to deal with family or medical issues. The program is funded, in part, by a new tax on employers and employees.

However the law will not take force until 2026, and certain details — including the final payroll rate — are still being ironed out by state regulators. The effect on Minnesota’s economy remains unknown, although many studies have shown that paid leave requirements in other states and countries increase womens’ workforce participation and boost economic growth.

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CLAIM: Vance claimed illegal immigration is driving up the cost of housing and alluded to a Federal Reserve study that drew a link between the two.

THE FACTS: Vance posed the idea to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell himself in July. Powell expressed skepticism at the time, noting in the long run, immigration likely has a neutral impact on inflation, but he acknowledged there may be regional impacts on housing. A pair of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas studies released that month bolster Powell’s argument. One suggested immigrants boosted the U.S. economy without contributing to inflation; the other noted immigrants “could put upward pressure on rents and house prices, particularly in the short run before new supply can be built.”

There doesn’t appear to be a Federal Reserve study drawing a bright line between immigration in housing prices. If anything, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers argued last May that the relationship between those variables is the opposite of what Vance suggested.

Housing experts have consistently said that an ongoing shortage in housing supply has driven up costs.

___

CLAIM: Walz was asked to explain the discrepancy between his account of being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and recent reporting showing he wasn’t there until months later.

THE FACTS: Walz acknowledged he was wrong: “I have not been perfect, and I have been a knucklehead at times…. All I said on this was, I got there that summer and misspoke on this. That is what I have said. So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, went in and from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

Far-right conspiracy theorist Royce White won his U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, taking advantage of a big field of candidates to eke out a victory with less than 40% of the vote.

White was endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party in May despite a lengthy history of bigoted comments against women, Jews and LGBTQ people, in addition to findings of campaign finance irregularities and missing child support payments.

His endorsement and subsequent victory are emblematic of an ongoing rift between institutionalists and burn-it-all-down activists who are increasingly frustrated with the party’s failure to win a statewide race since 2006. That split is plainly on display in the geography of yesterday’s primary results.

Minnesota Reformer

The maps above show precinct-level vote counts for Royce White and Joe Fraser, the mainstream candidate who came in second with about 29% of the statewide vote.

Note that the maps show counts, not percentages: Because primary turnout is so low, in rural parts of the state one or two votes can mean the difference between winning 0% and 100% of a given precinct. Comparing raw counts between the two candidates allows for a clearer picture of where the differences in support lie.

While both candidates had considerable support in the populous Twin Cities suburbs, White was particularly strong along the southern and western parts of the suburban ring. He beat Fraser by 14 percentage points in Scott County and by nearly two-to-one in neighboring Carver County.

White also performed well in central Minnesota along the line of cities running north from St. Cloud into the heart of lake country, where communities like Brainerd and Nisswa lie.

But the west-central part of the state shows perhaps the biggest difference in support between the candidates. White dominated in the arc of communities running from Alexandria to Fergus Falls and up through Detroit Lakes and Pelican Lakes.

Not coincidentally, that region has seen some of the fiercest conflicts between Republican activists and party leaders. Earlier this year, for instance, a far-right group of Otter Tail County Republicans successfully prevented the party from endorsing incumbent U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach of the 7th Congressional District.

Their goal was to elevate the primary campaign of Christian nationalist Steve Boyd, an Alexandria businessman who pledged to “harness God’s power to lead ordinary Americans and their legislators in Washington back towards the Lord.” Boyd and Fischbach are virtually identical in their policy views; the only major difference is that Boyd couches his appeals to voters in explicitly religious terms.

Ultimately the push to unseat Fischbach was unsuccessful, with the incumbent winning the 7th by nearly two-to-one.

Those results illustrate how Royce White’s statewide anti-establishment campaign succeeded while Steve Boyd’s failed: In the 7th District, White actually won fewer votes (15,737) than Boyd (16,645). But White benefited from the remaining two-thirds of the vote being split among seven other Republican candidates. Boyd was taking on Fischbach head-to-head.

White’s victory is reminiscent of former President Donald Trump’s primary win in 2016, when the reality TV show host was able to take advantage of a party establishment that couldn’t settle on an alternative.

The end result is unlikely to resemble 2016, however: Recent polls show Sen. Amy Klobuchar beating any Republican challenger by more than 20 points.

But the race underscores how a committed core of hardcore activists can eke out victory when a party establishment fails to unify around a candidate.

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and X.