A primary challenger<\/u> to Rep. Betty McCollum raised more than $300,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021, marking the first major\u00a0bid to unseat the Minnesota Democrat in her 21-year tenure in Congress. The challenge to McCollum comes from Amane Badhasso, a Democratic organizer and operative who arrived in Minnesota, like many others in the Twin Cities, as a refugee from Kenya, having been forced out of her home country of Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
McCollum has been a reliable vote for House Democrats and a leader on the question of Palestinian rights, but she otherwise has largely kept a low profile and declined to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In an interview, Badhasso said she would raise few if any substantive objections to McCollum\u2019s voting record. Badhasso said that she has long applauded McCollum\u2019s advocacy on behalf of Palestinians but that\u00a0the representative hadn\u2019t done enough broadly. \u201cI\u2019m not challenging her on the basis of that,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s so much more that we need to do. We can\u2019t just be a champion on one issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rather, Badhasso said, she was making the case that there is more to adequate representation than voting the right way. \u201cHere in the progressive movement, we have to think about what \u2018Democrat\u2019 actually means beyond just who votes along a certain line,\u201d she said. \u201cFrankly, we need a leadership that just gives a damn about folks in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCollum\u2019s Middle East activism has failed to draw much national attention. A recent profile of her in HuffPost was subheadlined<\/a>, \u201cSt. Paul’s Betty McCollum is radically progressive on U.S. policy toward Israel. Why don\u2019t you ever hear about it?\u201d<\/p>\n Though she aligns on many issues with Rep. Ilhan Omar, she and her fellow Twin Cities\u00a0lawmaker have at times betrayed a frosty relationship. \u201cIlhan is on the other side of the Mississippi River, and we talk sometimes in the break room in between votes,\u201d McCollum told HuffPost. When Omar was in the barrel over remarks in 2019 that critics deemed antisemitic, McCollum issued a statement: \u201cRep. Omar has the right to speak freely, and she also must take responsibility for the effect her words have on her colleagues, her constituents, and the policies Democrats seek to advance.\u201d<\/p>\n McCollum\u2019s chief of staff, Bill Harper, went further, telling HuffPost: \u201cMy own take on it is that she really derailed a lot of our work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Omar has not endorsed in the race and has collaborated on legislation with McCollum, but she had warm words for Badhasso. \u201cShe truly is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. She is incredible, and I have never met anyone who disagrees in [the] decade I have known her,\u201d she told The Intercept.<\/p>\n Harper said that McCollum is taking the challenge seriously and is unwilling to cede the mantle of progressivism to Badhasso. \u201cShe\u2019s the most progressive member of the Minnesota delegation,\u201d Harper said of McCollum. Asked if that ranking included Omar, he said that it did, citing McCollum\u2019s vote for the major infrastructure bill in November, which Omar opposed. (Omar opposed voting on the bill until the Senate had fully committed to passing the Build Back Better Act.)<\/p>\n \u201cChange just simply for change\u2019s sake is just shuffling the deck chairs. In Congress, seniority matters. The question I have to ask is why would progressives \u2026 want to throw away 22 years of seniority,\u201d Harper added.<\/p>\n Badhasso\u2019s challenge will be a window into how Democratic voters are viewing 2022: whether as a moment to push forward with an outspoken and unapologetic brand of progressivism and continue the fight for control of the party or focus more on defending against surging Republican energy, which threatens to seize the House and Senate.<\/p>\n McCollum\u2019s bet is that voters are in no mood for an intraparty contest this cycle. \u201cThis campaign in 2022 is squarely focused on stopping Republicans from taking the majority and continuing progressive leadership in Congress,\u201d Harper said. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at the mob being invited into the Capitol and at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n Minnesota\u2019s byzantine primary system gives Badhasso at least two shots at McCollum. The first will come in February at a caucus\u00a0where\u00a0400 delegates will be selected to then vote at a later convention on who will go into the primary with the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement. The officially endorsed candidate nearly always wins the primary, but ultimately voters will decide the Democratic nominee at what is likely to be a low-turnout affair in August.<\/p>\n Badhasso\u2019s background is likely to resonate in the Twin Cities, which has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees, who have in turn revitalized the area\u2019s economy. Her family fled Ethiopia in the mid-\u201990s as a result of conflict between the Oromo Liberation Front and the country’s ruling factions. While a refugee in Kenya, she said, she nearly died of malaria, until a collection could be taken to pay for treatment at a hospital. On another occasion, she returned home to find that the dilapidated building she lived in had collapsed. At the age of 13, she finally arrived in Minnesota, home to a large Oromo community.<\/p>\n Badhasso, who is Muslim, is a well-known Twin Cities activist and was previously an organizer for former Rep. Keith Ellison, whose seat is now held by Omar as he serves as the state\u2019s attorney general. In 2020, she worked on the coordinated campaign in Minnesota aimed at electing President Joe Biden, along with down-ballot candidates. (She said she supported the primary campaign of presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020.)<\/p>\n As a senior organizer with TakeAction Minnesota, she worked on\u00a0a campaign, known as Yes 4 Minneapolis, to transform the George Floyd protests into a radical rethinking of the city’s police department. The ballot measure would have shuttered the police force and replaced it with a Department of Public Safety, but it was beaten back in a November landslide, 56-44. Two members of the City Council who backed the reform were thrown out of office.<\/p>\n Minnesota Democrats Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Angie Craig\u00a0as well as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey campaigned against the ballot question. Omar supported it<\/a>, while McCollum took a more neutral stance. \u201cThe Minneapolis City Council is free to defund or abolish its police department or ask to have federal COPS funding terminated. That will be their decision to make,\u201d she said in a statement in June 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n In her campaign for the House seat, Badhasso broke from the model that has developed recently, with candidates releasing slick, two-minute biographical ads, and instead launched quietly in October and spent the next three months working her network to raise money and demonstrate her viability. To raise the eye-popping number, she canvassed the Oromo diaspora, in which she had built up substantial contacts through years of Oromo advocacy.<\/p>\n After The Intercept reached out to McCollum\u2019s campaign for comment,\u00a0she shared the news with a wide circle of elected officials and power players in Minnesota. \u201cFriends,\u201d McCollum wrote in an email to allies. \u201cEarlier today my campaign received a call from a reporter asking for a comment. He said my DFL opponent has raised over $300,000 in the past three months in her effort to defeat me. The reporter also said my opponent could not articulate any issues or votes in which she disagrees with me, but she\u2019s running to bring \u2018new energy\u2019 to the district.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEnergy is important,\u201d she went on, \u201cbut my energy is focused on governing and chairing the largest and most powerful appropriations subcommittee in Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum Is Facing a Serious Primary Challenge From the Left<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rep. Ilhan Omar says Amane Badhasso, who just raised $300,000, \u201ctruly is one of the most impressive people I have ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum Is Facing a Serious Primary Challenge From the Left<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465648,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463991\/revisions\/465648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Badhasso\u2019s challenge will be a window into how Democratic voters are viewing 2022.<\/blockquote>\n