Minnesota

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Minnesota lawsuit seeks to bar Trump from ballot under 14th amendment

      by

      A group of Minnesota voters filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in their state, escalating the effort to disqualify the former president from running based on untested constitutional language that prohibits anyone who has “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.The voters are being represented by Free Speech for People, a left-leaning group that has aggressively been pushing to remove Trump from the ballot in several states. A similar lawsuit was filed in Colorado last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, another watchdog group.The petition, filed with the Minnesota supreme court, argues that Trump’s activities to overturn the election, including those on 6 January, amounted to engaging in insurrection. Section 3 of the 14th amendment says that anyone who takes an oath to the United States and then subsequently engages in “insurrection or rebellion against the same” is disqualified from holding public office.“The events of January 6, 2021 amounted to an insurrection or a rebellion under Section 3: a violent, coordinated effort to storm the Capitol to obstruct and prevent the Vice President of the United States and the United States Congress from fulfilling their constitutional roles by certifying President Biden’s victory, and to illegally extend then-President Trump’s tenure in office,” the petition says.The push to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment gained steam after two prominent conservative legal scholars concluded he was disqualified under the language. The push for disqualification also picked up momentum after Trump was criminally charged, both by the justice department and in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the election. A conviction, however, is not required to disqualify him from running.“Donald Trump violated his oath of office and incited a violent insurrection that attacked the US Capitol, threatened the assassination of the vice-president and congressional leaders, and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history,” Ron Fein, Free Speech for People’s Legal director, said in a statement. “Our predecessors understood that oath-breaking insurrectionists will do it again, and worse, if allowed back into power, so they enacted the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause to protect the republic from people like Trump. Trump is legally barred from the ballot and election officials must follow this constitutional mandate.”Still, there is not widespread consensus on whether the challenges will be successful. Some scholars have questioned whether Trump’s conduct legally amount to insurrection (the justice department did not charge him specifically with that crime). It’s also unclear what the proper process and mechanism for disqualification is, or if one even exists at all.In Minnesota, Free Speech for People previously sent a letter to secretary of state Steve Simon, a Democrat, asking him to use his authority as the state’s top election official to disqualify Trump from the ballot. Simon responded by saying that his office didn’t have the power to investigate Trump’s eligibility, but that state law allowed for voters to bring legal challenges to a candidate’s qualifications in court.Trump is already taking action to try and head off the disqualification efforts. In Colorado, he is fighting to have the case removed from state to federal court. Trump’s campaign also publicized a letter on Tuesday from New Hampshire state legislatures urging the state’s top election official not to remove Trump from the ballot.“There is no legal basis for these claims to hold up in any legitimate court of law. The opinions of those perpetuating this fraud against the will of the people are nothing more than a blatant attempt to affront democracy and disenfranchise all voters and the former President,” the letter says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe New Hampshire secretary of state has faced harassment as he weighs how to address issues around Trump’s eligibility. He has one of the most pressing deadlines because it will hold one of the first Republican primaries next year.
      Join us for a livestreamed event on 26 September, Democracy and Distrust: Overcoming threats to the 2024 election More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

      by

      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Minnesota Muslims vow to continue call to prayer despite rise in mosque attacks

      by

      Muslims in Minnesota have vowed not to stop answering the call to prayer, despite a series of attacks on mosques some believe to be a backlash to a new rule that permits the Adhan to be broadcast at any time of the day or night.In April, Minneapolis made history when it became the first major city in the US to allow mosques to broadcast the call to prayer using loudspeakers at any time. Before the change to a city noise ordinance, it had only been permitted to be put out between 7am to 10pm.Depending on the time of year, this prevented the first and last prayers being broadcast, as is demanded by Muslim tradition. The first prayer, the Fajr, is called before the sun rises. The last, the Isha, is said when darkness falls.Members of the Muslim community and their supporters celebrated the move, which was passed unanimously by the city council. Yet since the city started talking about the measure earlier this year, there have been up to six attacks on mosques and community centers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul.While Muslims in the city have long had to battle Islamophobia, some believe the change in the law was, in part, responsible.“This has increased the worry, and the fear of Islamophobia, with a lot of congregation saying this is because of the Adhan,” said Wali Dirie, executive director of the Islamic Civic Society of America and the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque, in the Minneapolis’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.Three years ago, his mosque was the first to obtain permission for the broadcast of all five calls to prayer during Ramadan, a move that paved the way for April’s city-wide change.“We tell them ‘we don’t know 100%’ … We also tell them this is not new. We tell them we are not going to stop, and that we’re going to continue, and that we’ll work with law enforcement,” he says.During a recent morning prayer, 70-year Sareedo Abdi said she was sad the attacks had taken place and frightened her mosque could be targeted too: “We feel it’s Islamophobia.”Dirie said members of the community met with the office of the Democratic governor, Tim Walz, the mayors of Minneapolis and St Paul, and different police departments. They have asked different agencies for advice on how to improve security, and install cameras. They have also spoken to the state attorney general, Keith Ellison, himself a Muslim, who has vowed to act against hate crimes.The Twin Cities, long a Democratic party stronghold, is home to one of the largest Somali-American populations, with upwards of 70,000, according to a non-profit, Minnesota Compass. The community says it has about 30 mosques, with 22 of them located in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis city council, which unanimously passed the amendment during the month of Ramadan, has three Muslims among its 13 members.In 2018, Ilhan Omar became the first Somali-American elected to Congress, and with Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, was one of the first two Muslim women to take office. Omar and others have often been the target of abuse and Islamophobic attacks. In 2019, then-president Donald Trump earned applause from his supporters at a rally in Minneapolis when he repeated false conspiracy theories about Omar from a rightwing blog, and declared: “Congresswoman Omar is an American-hating socialist. How do you have such a person representing you in Minnesota?”In April, there was outcry over a cartoon about the new rule permitting the call to prayer published by the Star-Tribune. The cartoonist claimed his intention was to show support for the move. It was later condemned by several state legislators, who also denounced the attacks on the mosques.“Globally, many Muslims report not being respected by those in the west, and this cartoon adds to that sentiment right here in Minnesota,” the lawmakers said in a statement.The newspaper’s publisher and CEO, Steve Grove, went on to apologize for publishing the cartoon.Aisha Chughtai, 25, was elected to the council in 2021. She is both a Muslim and its youngest ever member. She cautions those who link the attacks on the mosques to the change in law, which may appear to be a form of “victim blaming”. She attributed the cause to an increase in white supremacist beliefs.Growing up after 9/11, Chughtai said Muslims in the city had routinely been victims of hate crimes and abuse.“Attacks on mosques in Minnesota are shockingly common,” she said in an interview.“Being Muslim in this country, being Jewish in this country, being Black in this country, being a person of colour in this country, being an immigrant in this country, means that you experience discrimination, racism and violence in all aspects of life.”Earlier this spring, data released by the FBI showed hate crimes in America in 2021 increased by 12% on the previous year. In Minnesota, the number of incidents reported rose from 196 to 274, an increase of almost 40%.Chughtai, a Democrat, was elected to represent Ward 10, a downtown neighborhood. The previous representative was Lisa Bender, who five years ago was elected chair of the council but did not seek re-election in 2021. In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by then police officer Derek Chauvin, Bender led calls to defund the Minneapolis police department (MPD), a controversial move that ultimately did not get voted on.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEarlier this month, a damning Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation into the MPD found it engaged in a history of excessive force and discrimination against Black and Native American residents of the city. It said the pattern of behavior “made what happened to George Floyd possible”.“The patterns and practices of conduct the justice department observed during our investigation are deeply disturbing,” said the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.In a statement issued after the justice department report, the Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, vowed to rebuild trust with the community. “These findings are a major step in reforming this department into one that provides a level of service that will be a model for law enforcement agencies across the country.”Chughtai believes people of colour in the city have suffered from underinvestment in basic services and been forced to contend with a greater level of violence.“It’s really devastating and terrifying when the people who are supposed to serve and protect you are the ones furthering harm,” she added. “The responsibility of city leaders right now and the administration, is figuring out [how to address] these deep systemic issues so that our communities are safer.”The attacks on the mosques have been detailed by groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair). They include someone breaking into the Oromo American Tawhid Islamic Center before that facility was destroyed in an arson attack in May. An arrest has been made in that case.In April, authorities arrested and charged 36-year-old Jackie Rahm Little with two arson attacks on mosques in Minneapolis. He was also accused of spraying graffiti on Representative Omar’s city office and damaging a police vehicle assigned to a Somali-American officer.Mohamed Ibrahim, the deputy director of Cair Minnesota, said the community was asking for more help.“People are wary of sending their kids to the mosque,” said Ibrahim. “But we also have a strong portion of the community also saying we will not allow this to stop us from attending the mosque. So, a lot of community members are showing resiliency.”Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, said he spoke to mosque leaders, and police dispatched extra units when the incidents happened.“Places of worship in Minneapolis are places of peace and are sacred for those who visit them – we intend to keep it that way,” he said. “To our Muslim community: we have your back, and we will show it in our actions. These crimes won’t be tolerated in our city, and we will continue to hold perpetrators accountable.”Ellison said in a statement that he traveled across the state to different communities to gather ideas on how to counter hate crimes and vowed to “do everything in my power as attorney general to ensure every Minnesotan lives with dignity, safety, and respect”.At the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque, people said they were offering help and support to those who had been attacked.Dirie said some mosques in the region decided to hold off broadcasting the call to prayer until they had done more outreach to the community, in an effort to avoid more violence. In the meantime, he said people were invited to attend his mosque.Ahmed Jamal, 52, was one of those who delivered the call to prayer. He said he did not feel frightened and added: “When I am calling, it makes me feel so happy.” More

    • 263 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘It looked like Chauvin would get away with it’: Minnesota’s top attorney on how he won justice for George Floyd’s family

      by

      When he recalls seeing Derek Chauvin in court for the first time, Keith Ellison references “the banality of evil”, a phrase coined by writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.“The point of the whole book is that Nazis were not these big, scary people that your imagination conjures,” Ellison, Minnesota’s top law enforcement official, says in a phone interview. “They’re ordinary, they’re plain, they’re very regular and they’re a lot less than you assume they would be and that’s how I felt about Derek Chauvin. He looked like a relatively small man – I bet he didn’t weigh 140lb. Here’s this guy who acted so monstrously: it’s just a man, not a very big one.”Chauvin, a white former police officer, was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man in Minneapolis, after kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison and has appealed his conviction.The prosecution was directed by Ellison, who led every meeting, assigned duties to the team and sat in court every day scribbling observations in old notebooks from his 12-year spell in the House of Representatives (he was the first Muslim elected to Congress). When those were full, a friend at a law firm gave him more.The notes were invaluable to prosecutors as the trial unfolded and served as raw material for Ellison’s recently published book, Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence, which offers a blow-by-blow account of the case and spotlights a culture in which the training manual often receives lip service and complaints about “bad cops” are too easily ignored. It asks what role prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians and media figures can play in reforming a criminal justice system that fails people of color.The book begins on the day three years ago last week when Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota, was woken by his phone at 4.45am by an urgent message. He watched a mobile phone video that showed Floyd, trapped under Chauvin’s knee, shouting “Mamma! Mamma! I’m through!” and, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!” Ellison could not believe how long the torment continued.The 59-year-old recalls: “Even though I have been working on police accountability and brutality issues for years, I was still shocked. I was still blown away by the inhumanity of what I saw.”The side of every police car in Minneapolis displays the words: “To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.” The first statement from the city police department about Floyd was entitled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” and made no mention of officers restraining him on the ground with a knee on his neck.The state attorney general comments: “I did not expect to see basically a whitewashing of what happened to George Floyd. It said he died of a medical emergency – sounds like a heart attack or a stroke. It does not sound like positional asphyxia with a knee on the neck and so I found that dumbfounding as well.”With America already traumatised by the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s divisive presidency in the summer of 2020, the killing ignited protests against police brutality and racial injustice. Ellison had expected the conscience of Minneapolis to be shocked but was not prepared for the demonstrations that took hold everywhere from Bogotá to Lisbon.“In cities all over the world you saw an outrage. When I thought about it, I understood it because nowhere in the world do people tolerate arbitrary government force. They always protest it no matter what.”America began a racial reckoning but, Ellison notes, around the world the issue transcended race. “In America everything is racialised but it’s not racialised in every country in which people were shot. There were protests in Lagos – everybody is Black in Lagos. People still recognised government abuse of power and state-sponsored violence and they protested it.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, tapped Ellison, who had spent 16 years as a criminal defence lawyer but served less than two as attorney general, to lead the prosecution when the Chauvin case came to trial. Ellison accepted but, even with video evidence and witnesses, did not take the outcome for granted.A murder conviction of a police officer for an on-duty death is uncommon. The officers accused of beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 were acquitted, while Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s cases never made it past the grand jury. “History was on Derek Chauvin’s side,” Ellison says. “It looked a lot more like Chauvin would get away with it than not.”The makeup of the jury was a key concern. “We grow up on TV shows like Dragnet or Hill Street Blues or Law and Order. We all are raised on a certain amount of media that reinforces this idea that you should trust the police.“And yet here on this video we see officers who don’t deserve to be trusted, don’t deserve to be believed, and so part of the job that we had assigned to us is to help people believe their eyes, trust their instincts, listen to their neighbors. The people who stopped on that street corner were as inclined to believe the police story as anyone but they couldn’t deny it because it was unfolding right in front of them. As we picked the jury, we wanted the jury to identify with that randomly selected group of people who assembled to object to the treatment that George Floyd was receiving.”Ellison succeeded in impaneling the most gender and racially diverse jury of his career. Fellow officers and even a police chief took the witness stand to testify against Chauvin, who did not testify on his own behalf.In April 2021, on the day of the verdict, several hundred people gathered outside the courthouse and 23 million people watched on live television. The jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Ellison felt a rush of relief but took no joy at the sight of a man whose life had changed forever.On the faces of the Floyd family he saw “validation” and “vindication”, he recalls. “More than anything else, their brother was treated like human trash and the verdict said, no, he’s a human being worthy of respect like anyone. To them, it was extremely emotional – tears – and then they were surprisingly calm. They’re a very dignified family, very dignified people. They were clearly relieved: they didn’t know what the jury was going to decide.”In November that year, however, Ellison suffered a defeat. The residents of Minneapolis voted on a ballot proposal that would in effect replace the police department with a public safety department putting an emphasis on public health. The attorney general endorsed the measure but more than 56% of people voted against it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEllison explains: “Sadly, after the death of George Floyd, we experienced what you might describe as de-policing and a lot of officers quit and a lot of officers said we’re not going to engage criminal conduct.“Some of the folks who are inclined to commit crimes felt they had a freer hand and we saw crime statistics go up. Because of that, a lot of people were more concerned about their personal safety than they were about police accountability and that is one reason why the measure failed.”A second cause of rising crime, he argues, was a breakdown in trust between police and community. “People who commit crimes know this. They’re like, ‘Look, I know in this neighborhood people don’t call the police, therefore I’m freer to sell dope, carry guns, harm others, extort people.’ It is very important for the sake of public safety to hold police accountable on a consistent ongoing basis because, if you don’t, it will allow crime to thrive and grow, which is nobody’s benefit.”Centrist Democrats took the ballot result as a sign that the phrase “defund the police” had turned politically radioactive and become a gift to Republicans eager to portray them as soft on crime. Former president Barack Obama warned young progressives that it would turn off many voters.But Ellison, a former deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, believes that “defund the police” has been unfairly weaponised by a Republican party that, given its unwillingness to address gun violence, has no credibility on public safety.He points out that police misconduct lawsuits in Minneapolis and elsewhere in recent years have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars – money that could have been spent on hospitals, parks, public transport or schools. “It’s going to compensate victims of police misconduct. What if we just stop the misconduct?”The failure of the ballot measure in Minnesota hinted at a broader loss of momentum after that seemingly revolutionary summer. The Black Lives Matter signs that adorned many front gardens gradually gave way to Ukrainian flags as new causes took hold. Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Police shot and killed at least 1,096 people – a record – last year, according to a count by the Washington Post.But Ellison sees a mixed picture. “What I can tell you is that on the local level a lot of good things have happened. You’ve seen legislation passed in the state of Minnesota. The city of Minneapolis has taken a number of measures to try to improve things. We’ve hired some police leaders who are reform-minded. But quite honestly, it has been an uneven progress. The federal government hasn’t really done anything, which is really disappointing.”The ambivalence was highlighted earlier this year when Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died after a traffic stop escalated into a beating by a group of Memphis police officers. The horrific killing reopened old wounds but Memphis police and county officials earned praise for a swift, unequivocal response. Five officers were fired and charged with second-degree murder. They pleaded not guilty.Ellison was impressed. “Quite honestly, I think that if George Floyd had not occurred, maybe we would still be stuck in this very ham-handed, fumbling-along approach, but the way that they did it signaled to the population that this was going to be handled in a proper way and it was going to be meaningful accountability.”Indeed, despite all he has seen of the worst in human nature, Ellison remains optimistic about the future. He reflects: “Look, it’s sad but it’s true: the people who killed George Floyd were a multiracial group. There was one Black officer, one Hmong officer and two white officers. But the people who stood up for George Floyd were a multiracial group too. There was a young white woman who was a firefighter, two young white teenagers, a 61-year-old African American man, a 17-year-old Black girl.“It was a mixed group and, if you look at the protests, they were multiracial. I’m not pessimistic. We can move forward but we’ve got to try to take stock of the lessons that are available to be learned and that’s why I wrote the book, because I want folks to really think about solving this problem.”
      Break the Wheel is published in the US by Twelve More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican donor convicted of sex trafficking teenage girls

      by

      A formerly well-connected Republican donor was convicted on Friday of enticing teenage girls with gifts, cash and money in exchange for sex.A federal jury found Anton “Tony” Lazzaro, 32, guilty of seven counts involving “commercial sex acts” with five girls aged 15 and 16 in 2020, when he was 30 years old.The charges carry mandatory minimum sentences of 10 years with a maximum of life in prison.The jury will return to court on Monday to determine what property the government can seize based on each conviction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.Lazzaro – who contends the charges against him were politically motivated – plans to appeal, a spokesperson for his attorneys said in a statement to the Associated Press.“The unusual application of this federal sex trafficking statute to his activities is frighteningly broad, conflating what is nothing more than arguably an act of prostitution with federal sex trafficking,” Stacy Bettison said. “He believes he has strong grounds for appeal, and he will vigorously seek reversal of his conviction. Mr Lazzaro trusts he will be vindicated.”Lazzaro’s indictment led to the downfall of Jennifer Carnahan as chair of the Republican party of Minnesota.His co-defendant, 21-year-old Gisela Castro Medina, who formerly led the University of St Thomas’s College Republican chapter, pleaded guilty to two counts last year. She testified against Lazzaro.Prosecutors argued during the trial that Lazzaro enlisted Medina, who he initially paid for sex, to recruit other teenagers – preferably minors – who were white, small, vulnerable or “broken”.“He wanted sex, and not just any sex,” federal prosecutor Melinda Williams said during closing arguments on Friday. “He wanted sex with minor girls under the age of 18. And he had a plan to get it.”Lazarro’s attorney, Daniel Gerdts, argued that the government’s “salacious” prosecution was based on “completely unfounded” allegations.“The prosecution clearly disapproves of Mr Lazzaro’s playboy lifestyle,” Gerdts said. “And frankly, as the father of three daughters, so do I. The opprobrium is well deserved, but that is not why we’re here.”Carnahan, the widow of former Minnesota Republican congressman Jim Hagedorn, resigned a week after the charges against Lazzaro were unsealed. She denied knowing about Lazzaro’s crimes but his arrest prompted outrage among party activists.Pictures on Lazzaro’s social media accounts showed him with prominent Republicans, including ex-president Donald Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence. He gave more than $270,000 to Republican campaigns and political committees over the years. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

      by

      Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.They voted in rising numbers during the midterms last year in Kansas and Michigan, which both had referendums about abortion. And college students, who had long paid little attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms.But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for the Brennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated PressOut of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15. “The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.A fight over out-of-state students in New HampshireIn New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakers proposed a bill this year that would have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headwayIn Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill to eliminate all polling places on college campuses this year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.Voting advocates see a different motive.“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMs. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other statesIn Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law that lets teenagers register to vote starting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appears to have inadvertently helped younger voters. A G.O.P. bill that would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.But some barriers are already in placeGeorgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, so students at private institutions, including several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Ohio, which has for years not accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.” More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024

      by

      Republicans are focused on voter ID rules and making it harder to cast mail ballots, while Democrats are seeking to expand access through automatic voter registration.The tug of war over voting rights and rules is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats fight to get new laws on the books before the 2024 presidential election.Republicans have pushed to tighten voting laws with renewed vigor since former President Donald J. Trump made baseless claims of fraud after losing the 2020 election, while Democrats coming off midterm successes are trying to channel their momentum to expand voting access and thwart efforts to undermine elections.States like Florida, Texas and Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of state government, have already passed sweeping voting restrictions that include criminal oversight initiatives, limits on drop boxes, new identification requirements and more.While President Biden and Democrats in Congress were unable to pass federal legislation last year that would protect voting access and restore elements of the landmark Voting Rights Act stripped away by the Supreme Court in 2013, not all reform efforts have floundered.In December, Congress updated the Electoral Count Act, closing a loophole that Mr. Trump’s supporters had sought to exploit to try to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.Now the focus has returned to the state level. Here are some of the key voting measures in play this year:Ohio Republicans approve new restrictions.Ohioans must now present a driver’s license, passport or other official photo ID to vote in person under a G.O.P. measure that was signed into law on Jan. 6 by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican.The law also set tighter deadlines for voters to return mail-in ballots and provide missing information on them. Absentee ballot requests must be received earlier as well.Republicans, who control the Legislature in Ohio, contend that the new rules will bolster election integrity, yet they have acknowledged that the issue has not presented a problem in the state. Overall, voter fraud is exceedingly rare.Several voting rights groups were quick to file a federal lawsuit challenging the changes, which they said would disenfranchise Black people, younger and older voters, as well as those serving in the military and living abroad.Texas G.O.P. targets election crimes and ballot initiatives.Despite enacting sweeping restrictions on voting in 2021 that were condemned by civil rights groups and the Justice Department in several lawsuits, Republican lawmakers in Texas are seeking to push the envelope further.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.G.O.P. Debates: The Republican National Committee has asked several major TV networks to consider sponsoring debates, an intriguing show of détente toward the mainstream media and an early sign that the party is making plans for a contested 2024 presidential primary.An Important Election: The winner of a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April will determine who holds a 4-to-3 majority in a critical presidential battleground state.Dozens of bills related to voting rules and election administration were filed for the legislative session that began this month. While many are from Democrats seeking to ease barriers to voting, Republicans control both chambers of the Texas Legislature and the governor’s office. It is not clear which bills will gain the necessary support to become laws.Some G.O.P. proposals focus on election crimes, including one that would authorize the secretary of state to designate an election marshal responsible for investigating potential election violations.“Similar bills have passed in Florida and in Georgia,” said Jasleen Singh, a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We should be concerned about whether this will happen in Texas as well.”Under another bill, a voter could request that the secretary of state review local election orders and language on ballot propositions and reject any that are found to be “misleading, inaccurate or prejudicial,” part of a push by Republicans in several states to make it harder to pass ballot measures after years of progressive victories.One proposal appears to target heavily populated, Democratic-controlled counties, giving the state attorney general the power to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate voter fraud allegations if local officials decline to do so. Another bill goes further, allowing the attorney general to seek an injunction against local prosecutors who don’t investigate claims of voter fraud and pursue civil penalties against them.A 19-year-old registering to vote in Minnesota, where Democrats introduced a bill that would allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. Tim Gruber for The New York TimesDemocrats in Minnesota and Michigan go on offense.Democrats are seeking to harness their momentum from the midterm elections to expand voting access in Minnesota and Michigan, where they swept the governors’ races and legislative control.In Minnesota, the party introduced legislation in early January that would create an automatic voter registration system and allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. The measure would also automatically restore the voting rights of convicted felons upon their release from prison and for those who do not receive prison time as part of a sentence.In Michigan, voters approved a constitutional amendment in November that creates a nine-day early voting period and requires the state to fund absentee ballot drop boxes. Top Democrats in the state are also weighing automatic voter registration and have discussed criminalizing election misinformation.Pennsylvania Republicans want to expand a voter ID law.Because of the veto power of the governor, an office the Democrats held in the November election, Republicans in Pennsylvania have resorted to trying to amend the state constitution in order to pass a voter ID bill.The complex amendment process, which ultimately requires putting the question to voters, is the subject of pending litigation.Both chambers of the Legislature need to pass the bill this session in order to place it on the ballot, but Democrats narrowly flipped control of the House in the midterms — and they will seek to bolster their majority with three special elections next month.“If the chips fall in a certain way, it is unlikely that this will move forward and it might quite possibly be dead,” said Susan Gobreski, a board member of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “But it ain’t dead yet.”Gov. Josh Shapiro has indicated an openness to compromise with Republicans on some voting rules.“I’m certainly willing to have an honest conversation about voter I.D., as long as that is something that is not used as a hindrance to voting,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview in December.First-time voters and those applying for absentee ballots are currently required to present identification in Pennsylvania, but Republicans want to expand the requirement to all voters in every election and have proposed issuing voter ID cards. Critics say the proposal would make it harder to vote and could compromise privacy.Mr. Shapiro has separately said he hoped that Republicans in the legislature would agree to change the state’s law that forbids the processing of absentee ballots and early votes before Election Day. The ballot procedures, which can drag out the counting, have been a flash point in a series of election lawsuits filed by Republicans.Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, calls to end runoff system.Early voting fell precipitously in Georgia’s nationally watched Senate runoff in December after Republicans, who control of state government, cut in half the number of days for casting ballots before Election Day.Long lines at some early-voting sites, especially in the Atlanta area, during the runoff led to complaints of voter suppression.But the G.O.P. lost the contest, after a set of runoff defeats a year earlier that gave Democrats control of the Senate.Now Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is Georgia’s secretary of state and its top election official, wants to abandon the runoff system altogether, saying that the condensed timeline had put added strain on poll workers.Critics of ranked-choice voting cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican.Ash Adams for The New York TimesRepublicans in Alaska want to undo some voting changes approved in 2020.After a special election last year and the midterms, when Alaska employed a novel election system for the first time, some conservatives reeling from losses at the polls have directed their ire at a common target: ranked-choice voting.At least three Republican lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to repeal some of the electoral changes that were narrowly approved by voters in 2020, which introduced a “top-four” open primary and ranked-choice voting in general elections. In addition to deciding winners based on the candidate who receives the most votes, the bills also seek to return to a closed primary system, in which only registered party members can participate.Supporters of the new system contend that it sets a higher bar to get elected than to simply earn a plurality of votes.But critics have called the format confusing. Some have blamed it for the defeat of Sarah Palin, the Republican former governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee, in a special House election in August and again in November for the same office.They also cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican who angered some members of her party when she voted to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6 attack.Still, Republican foes of ranked-choice elections could face hurdles within their own party. According to The Anchorage Daily News, the incoming Senate president, a Republican, favors keeping the system in place.Nebraska Republicans aim to sharply curb mail voting.Nebraska does not require voters to provide a reason to vote early by mail, but two Republican state senators want to make wholesale changes that would mostly require in-person voting on Election Day.Under a bill proposed by Steve Halloran and Steve Erdman, G.O.P. senators in the unicameral legislature, only members of the U.S. military and residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities could vote by mail.The measure would further require all ballots to be counted on Election Day, which would become a state holiday in Nebraska, along with the day of the statewide primary.The League of Women Voters of Nebraska opposes the bill and noted that 11 of the state’s 93 counties vote entirely by mail under a provision that gives officials in counties with under 10,000 people the option to do so.“This is an extreme bill and would be very unpopular,” MaryLee Mouton, the league’s president, said in an email. “When most states are moving to expand voting by mail, a bill to restrict vote by mail would negatively impact both our rural and urban communities.”In the November election, Nebraskans overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that created a statewide photo ID requirement for voting.A Republican bill in Missouri would hunt for election fraud.In Missouri, where Republicans control the governor’s office and Legislature, one G.O.P. bill would create an Office of Election Crimes and Security. The office would report to the secretary of state and would be responsible for reviewing election fraud complaints and conducting investigations.Its investigators would also be authorized to enter poling places or offices of any election authority on Election Day, during absentee voting or the canvass of votes. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Oakland’s Next Mayor Is an Example of Hmong American Political Success

      by

      Over platters of fried rice, egg rolls and crab rangoon, Sheng Thao took the microphone and asked for support in June from several dozen people gathered at a Hmong restaurant in Wisconsin.Ms. Thao, 37, was running to become the mayor of Oakland, Calif., but she took a detour to the Upper Midwest because it has some of the nation’s largest communities of Hmong Americans.When Ms. Thao spoke, Zongcheng Moua, 60, found himself nodding along, never mind that he lived 2,000 miles away from California. Like Ms. Thao’s parents, Mr. Moua landed in a refugee camp in Thailand after fleeing the war in Laos nearly 50 years ago. His siblings, like Ms. Thao’s parents, struggled to adapt to life in the United States after arriving with no money, formal education or language skills. “Our Hmong community for the longest time did not have a voice,” Mr. Moua, one of the organizers of the event, said. “So regardless of where Sheng lives, her success is our success.”In November, Ms. Thao, 37, narrowly edged out Loren Taylor, her fellow Oakland council member, by a few hundred votes thanks to support from progressive groups and labor unions, but also from a tightly knit Hmong network that contributed about one-fifth of her campaign funds.When she is sworn into office in January, Ms. Thao will become Oakland’s first Hmong mayor and the most prominent Hmong American officeholder in the United States to date. She will lead a major city of 440,000 residents that is grappling with a rise in violent crime and homelessness but remains a vibrant counterweight to the city across the bay, San Francisco.In St. Paul, Minn., home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Hmong Americans, Angelina Her shops with her sister, Maleena Her, 2, for the Hmong New Year celebration.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesA portrait of General Vang Pao, a major general in the Royal Lao Army and a leader in the Hmong American community in the United States, sits inside the Hmong Village in St. Paul, Minn.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesMs. Thao was part of a wave of Hmong Americans to triumph this year in state and local elections across the country. In Minnesota, home to the nation’s second-largest concentration of Hmong residents, a record nine Hmong candidates won their races for the State Legislature. In Wisconsin and California’s Central Valley, Hmong Americans also won local seats.“I didn’t do this on my own — I did it with the help and support of Oaklanders and the Hmong community far and wide throughout the whole nation,” Ms. Thao said in a recent interview.It is a remarkable feat for a small contingent that arrived in the United States about 40 years ago from Laos as refugees of the “secret war” backed by the C.I.A. against Communists there during the Vietnam War. While Hmong immigrants have come to the United States from various nations, most came as refugees from Laos during the post-Vietnam era.After settling in the United States, Hmong immigrants as a group struggled socioeconomically. In the face of language and cultural barriers, and lacking transferable skills, many Hmong lived in low-income neighborhoods and worked in low-skilled factory jobs, like food processing and textiles manufacturing.Hmong Americans have improved their standing over the years as some members of the first generation saved money and bought homes in the suburbs and the second generation earned degrees and entered higher-paying professions. But all told, they still fare worse than most ethnic groups on multiple measures of income: 60 percent of Hmong Americans remained low-income, and more than one in four lived in poverty, based on a 2020 report.Representative Samantha Vang, at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, is a second-generation Hmong American who was first elected to her seat in 2018.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“We have definitely advanced much faster than some other groups, but we’re still struggling,” said Samantha Vang, a Minnesota state representative and a second-generation Hmong American who was first elected to her seat in 2018.A refugee camp in Thailand, near the Laos border, on April 20, 1979. There were 11,000 refugees in this camp — 90 percent of them Hmong.Eddie Adams/Associated PressHmong students in a class at the Lao Family Community Center inside the St. Paul Y.M.C.A. in Minnesota in 1980.Michael Kieger/Minnesota Historical SocietyAn ethnic minority in Laos, Hmong people were secretly recruited by the United States to help disrupt supply lines and rescue downed American pilots in the fight against Communists in Southeast Asia, an effort first confirmed by a congressional report. After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, they were targeted by the Communist-run government in Laos, and many fled to refugee camps in Thailand before eventually resettling in the United States in the Twin Cities in Minnesota and Milwaukee, as well as Fresno and Sacramento in California.Unlike the Vietnamese refugees, who came from diverse backgrounds, the Hmong people who came to the United States were mostly farmers, said Carolyn Wong, a research associate at the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Because of the clandestine nature of the conflict in Laos, few Americans knew about how Hmong people had helped the United States as allies during the war.Undeterred, and with no homeland to go back to, Hmong refugees embraced the United States as their home. Experts suggest that because Hmong Americans generally came to the United States in the same post-Vietnam era, they have more cohesion than larger Asian American groups that attained earlier political prominence.“Perhaps that’s been our strength — we’re hungrier for that sense of visibility,” said Mee Moua, a former Minnesota state legislator and an early political pioneer in the community.In 1991, Choua Lee was elected to the school board in St. Paul, Minn., becoming the first Hmong to hold public office in the United States. In 2000, Hmong lobbied for a bill that helped make it easier for many former Hmong servicemen to gain citizenship. As of 2019, 81 percent of foreign-born Hmong people in the United States had become naturalized citizens, the highest rate among Asian American communities, according to the Pew Research Center.In Minnesota, especially, the growing number of naturalized citizens and the state’s already-strong tradition of political participation created fertile ground for the emergence in the early 2000s of a young generation of Hmong American leaders like Ms. Moua and Cy Thao, a former state representative.“In those early days, they didn’t necessarily understand what a political party was, or a party slate, so all of these things had to be learned through experience,” Ms. Wong, the research associate, said. “But very quickly those ways of running and building the support of the community became a time-tested path to success.”Minnesota is home to the country’s second-largest concentration of Hmong. A group of friends at the Hmong Village in St. Paul.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesRoughly 300,000 Hmong Americans now live in the United States, still largely concentrated in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin. California has about one-third of the nation’s Hmong residents, the most in the nation, and relatively few of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles. Many have remained in the Fresno and Sacramento regions where immigrants first settled, and some have moved to the far northern reaches of the state to grow marijuana.Fewer than 1,000 live in Alameda County, where Oakland is the county seat. While Ms. Thao did not have a sizable Hmong voter base to draw from, she benefited from the nationwide Hmong clan system, which has been key to the success of some Hmong American political campaigns.Organized around the 18 main surnames within the Hmong community, the system has been largely preserved by Hmong in the United States, and it remains an important source of identity, social support and, increasingly, political backing.In Ms. Thao’s race for the Oakland City Council in 2018, her father, in accordance with the clan system’s patriarchal traditions, approached local Thao clan leaders to seek help.The leaders were not familiar with Ms. Thao, said Louansee Moua, a longtime campaign consultant to Ms. Thao and other Hmong political candidates. Born and raised in Stockton, Calif., to parents who met in a refugee camp in Thailand, Ms. Thao had grown up at a relative distance from the Hmong community, in part because of her parents’ concerns that their sons might get trapped in the Hmong street gang culture that was active at the time, Ms. Thao said.The Thaos still held tight to Hmong traditions, including the Hmong language and the practice of shamanism, which made Ms. Thao feel self-conscious in the predominantly white, working-class neighborhood where she grew up.“I remember growing up feeling like, why can’t we just be like everyone else?” she recalled. “But it’s such a beautiful culture that, in hindsight, I wish I was raised around other Hmong people so I could be proud of who I was a lot sooner.”A self-described “rebellious” teenager, Ms. Thao left home at age 17 and soon found herself in an abusive relationship, she said. At 20, she spent several months alternating between living in a car and couch surfing with her son, then an infant.Later, while working a full-time administrative job, she enrolled in a community college and then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating, she started to work her way up in local politics in Oakland.When Ms. Thao was ready to run for City Council, the clan elders swung into action, helping to mobilize a statewide network of Thaos and other Hmong residents to raise money and volunteer for her campaign, Louansee Moua said. When Ms. Thao won the race, the Thao clan threw a baci ceremony attended by more than 500 people for her in Merced, Calif., during which many in the community tied a blessing string around her wrists for good luck.When it came to Ms. Thao’s mayoral race this year, the clan was once again eager to help out.“There’s this strong cohesive network within the Hmong community and a sense that because she’s a Thao and we’re Thaos, of course we have to help her,” Louansee Moua explained.To win in Oakland, Ms. Thao relied on a broad coalition of voters who supported her progressive policies, as well as endorsements and funding from major labor unions that are influential in the heavily Democratic city. But Ms. Thao said her narrow victory simply would not have been possible without the help of her nationwide family of Hmong elders, aunties, uncles, brothers and sisters.“This wave of Hmong electeds across the nation — they go out and they ask for support in the Hmong community,” Ms. Thao said. “Then the Hmong community shows up and they show up big time.” More