ST. PAUL, Minn. — Following a closed-door session that ran four hours past its scheduled end because nobody wanted to be the one to suggest wrapping up, the Minnesota DFL announced Tuesday a formal, unanimously ratified strategy to blame one another continuously until the Minnesota Democrats primary resolves itself sometime in late August.
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The resolution, titled “Strategic Mutual Deferral,” commits all seven declared candidates, eleven county chairs, and an unspecified number of aggrieved former field directors to a rolling program of recrimination that party leadership describes as “organic,” “already happening anyway,” and “honestly kind of the only thing everybody agrees on.”
“We looked hard at coalescing behind a front-runner, and we looked hard at an open convention, and both of those require somebody to lose in front of other people,” said state party vice chair Bev Halvorsen, standing at a folding table in a Roseville church basement beneath a bare fluorescent fixture that has been flickering since the Coleman administration. “So instead we’re going to point at each other for eleven weeks. It’s cheaper. It’s what we’re best at. And nobody has to say anything out loud that they can’t later claim was taken out of context.”
Under the plan, blame will circulate clockwise on a rotating weekly schedule, beginning with the Iron Range delegation, passing through the Minneapolis progressive caucus, moving to the suburban moderates in the western metro, and terminating with whichever staffer most recently sent a group chat screenshot to a reporter.
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Party officials stressed that no accusation will be made directly. All blame is to be delivered in the form of a compliment with a load-bearing pause in the middle.
“Nobody’s saying it was Dale’s fault,” said Hennepin County organizer Marcus Peltier, referring to a canvassing operation that knocked 4,000 doors in a district that had been redrawn out of existence in 2022. “Dale worked so hard. Dale worked incredibly hard. Dale really put everything into that. And that’s the kind of effort that makes you go, wow. Wow. Anyway.”
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The seven-way field itself has been described by neutral observers as “a Venn diagram of guys who each have one issue and a podcast about it.”
The declared candidates include a former nonprofit executive running on abundance who has used the word “permitting” 900 times since March; a 34-year-old app founder whose entire platform is an AI tool that reads state statute aloud in a calming voice; a labor-backed county commissioner who begins every debate answer by saying “look, I’m just a guy from Hibbing” before delivering nine minutes of extremely detailed transmission-line policy; and a wellness-adjacent city council member who has twice paused a televised forum to guide the audience through box breathing.
None of them polls above 19 percent. All of them believe, privately and correctly, that the other six are the reason.
“There’s a real energy in this race,” said Duluth delegate Sharon Kvamme, using a tone of voice normally reserved for describing a nephew’s mixed martial arts career. “Everybody brings something. Everybody’s got a lane. My hope is that the voters sort it out, because I have said everything I intend to say about it, and I have said it to my sister, on the phone, for two hours, and that’s where it’s staying.”
Party strategists say the Strategic Mutual Deferral approach carries meaningful advantages over the traditional method of endorsing a candidate and then quietly resenting them for six years. Chief among them: cost. The plan requires no polling, no media buy, and no consultants, though four consultants have already been retained to explain the plan to other consultants.
“You have to understand the operating conditions here,” said DFL communications director Anne Torkelson. “This is a state where two cars will sit at a four-way stop for forty-five seconds because neither driver wants to seem presumptuous. You cannot ask that electorate to pick. They will not pick. They will wait for one candidate to make a mistake, and then they’ll all feel terrible about it, and then they’ll vote for him anyway.”
The Minnesota Democrats primary has already produced what party historians call the most sophisticated blame architecture the state has seen since the 2018 fundraising email that used the word “folks” fourteen times and was subsequently attributed to at least nine separate people, none of whom wrote it.
Field staff report the new system is functioning smoothly. A 26-year-old organizer in St. Cloud, granted anonymity because her union contract has an arbitration clause, said she received a text at 11:40 p.m. that read only “hey — no worries at all!! quick thing when you have a sec 🙂” and has not slept since.
Republican operatives, for their part, have announced they will spend the summer doing nothing at all.
“We looked at running ads,” said state GOP consultant Rick Denhoff. “But it turns out if you just stand there quietly, they’ll do a really thorough job. I’ve never seen people be that polite about it. It’s like watching someone get stabbed with a casserole.”
Not all Democrats are supportive. A dissident faction of roughly forty activists has circulated a competing proposal calling for the party to instead confront its disagreements directly, in a room, with a facilitator. The proposal was tabled after members expressed concern that it might make things weird.
Party leadership has scheduled a unity event for the second week of July at a VFW hall in Bloomington, at which all seven candidates will appear onstage together, shake hands, and stand two feet farther apart than physically necessary.
The basement emptied slowly. Somebody rinsed the coffee urn. Halvorsen wiped down the folding table with a paper towel, folded the table, leaned it against the wall where the last person had left it, and stood there a moment looking at it. Then she took out her phone and started typing something that began, “Hey! Loved your thoughts today.”