Minnesotans: Trump’s Raid on Ilhan Omar Will Backfire Big-Time

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Inside Washington

Minnesota leaders are decrying the raid on Representative Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home as a blatant attack on their state ahead of the midterms. “The purpose is to animate their base, which is incredibly demoralized and deflated because we are in a war no one wanted to be in” said Minnesota state Senator Erin Quade about why HSI agents, who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raided Omar’s home just 22 days before Election Day. 

“Trump and his DOJ have a bizarre obsession with tearing down Minnesota, our leaders, and our communities,” Minnesota Senator Tina Smith said in a statement to The New Republic.

Several Minnesotans who spoke to The New Republic see the raid on Omar’s home as a continuation of the Trump administration’s anti-Somali racism and xenophobia, which has long been a part of the president’s playbook. The raid came four days after President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social and urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against the Somali community. 

“It’s not just xenophobic,” said Jay Young, the senior policy director of civil rights and civil liberties at the nonprofit watchdog Common Cause, about the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration. “It’s tantamount to almost a race war.”

In conversations with The New Republic on Tuesday, community leaders expressed concern about the electoral and political consequences of the raid, but some also spoke about their concern for Omar’s personal safety. “It was only months ago that a person attacked Ilhan during an event in Minneapolis,” said Minnesota state Representative Leigh Finke, who is the first openly transgender member of the state’s legislature. “These things are not abstract concepts in our lives. People want to kill us because of the things that are said by this administration.”

Republicans have attacked Somali Americans for political ends before. In the aftermath of a number of statewide fraud cases, some of which involved Somali American perpetrators, the Trump administration began repeatedly referring to “Somali fraud,” despite the fact that the main perpetrator of one of the most prominent fraud cases was a white woman. 

In Minnesota’s Senate race, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan is running against Republican Michele Tafoya, who has attacked Flanagan over her role in state leadership during the fraud scandals. The goal of Trump’s rhetoric and the raid on Omar, Young said, “is to chill all of his political enemies, to let them know that this administration is not above weaponizing all of the power at its disposal.”

Politicians, civil society groups, and everyday Minnesotans have rallied around Omar. On Monday night, Minneapolis residents and leaders held a rally in a city park to show support to the lawmaker, who has represented the city and some of its suburbs in the House since 2019.

Attacks on Omar are likely to backfire in Minnesota. Quade described something truly surprising to anyone who has been following politics lately: On Monday, she was knocking on doors in the suburban district that she represents and said that every voter she spoke to cited concerns about ICE and Trump as their top priorities for the election. That’s a marked shift from recent months, she said, when affordability concerns were top of mind. Suburban voters are exactly the demographic that Tafoya needs to clinch a victory in the state.

“It’s certainly stoking the same kind of unity feeling that people felt during Metro Surge more than it is anything else,” Quade said about the attacks on Omar and other Somali Americans. 

The best response to the attacks is to vote early, said Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh in a statement to The New Republic. “We endured collectively Metro Surge, and we continue to be the target for this administration. And it’s because that you know we are everything that they can’t fathom,” she said. “We’re an inclusive, loving state where we care about our neighbors, even if they don’t look like us, even if they don’t pray like us.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A new poll shows Democrat James Talarico still ahead of Ken Paxton—but not by much. In results published by ReconMR on Tuesday, Talarico appears to be up four percentage points in Texas’s Senate race, with a +/- 4.4-point margin of error; the polling outfit’s senior research analyst Lindsay Hendren notes in a press release that Talarico has lost some ground, specifically in the San Antonio area since ReconMR’s September poll. Gina Hinojosa’s numbers also appear to be slipping: In September, she led Republican Governor Greg Abbott by four points, while the recent poll shows her trailing him by one point.

The poll was conducted prior to new revelations about Paxton. Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the candidate attended a New Year’s Eve party in Dubai in 2024 “with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.” That Paxton has had extramarital affairs is not news at this point, but the “fugitives” in question had been indicted for health care fraud and had donated to Paxton’s campaign funds. In response to the Journal’s query, Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux said, “Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office.” Paxton voters do seem unfazed by a remarkably long list of imbroglios. In ReconMR’s press release, Hendren offered a succinct assessment of where things go from here: “The race for Senate will come down to three things: turnout, turnout, turnout.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Wednesday at 1 p.m., the Bipartisan Policy Center will host an online discussion about policies to reform the Food and Drug Administration—particularly adjustments to “processes that may safely deliver effective treatments to patients faster.” Speakers will include Zach Gaumer, Rohini Kosoglu, Andi Lipstein Fristedt, Ryan Long, Janet Woodcock, and Lauren Gardner.

The Center for Biological Diversity, CU Maurice River, Hackensack Riverkeeper, Delaware Riverkeeper, New Jersey Conservation Foundation, and Project Terrapin on Tuesday petitioned New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection “to require simple bycatch-reduction devices on blue crab pots statewide” to keep turtles from being caught in the traps and drowning. The groups are particularly worried about the state’s diamondback terrapins, a vulnerable species inhabiting brackish coastal marshes and estuaries. Current regulations only require these protective devices to be used in around 5 percent of the relevant habitat, the groups estimate. Diamondbacks have previously been something of a bipartisan cause in the state: In 2016, Republican Governor Chris Christie signed a Democratic bill sponsored by then-Assemblymembers Bob Andrzejczak, Bruce Land, Eric Houghtaling, and Reed Gusciora (now mayor of Trenton) to ban hunting of the turtles and require the state to monitor diamondback terrapin populations.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act

By Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris

THE GIST: Miller and Morris tell the story of how the U.S. got the landmark achievement of the Civil Rights Movement—and how decades of conservative political and legal activism tore it down.

PRAISE: “An American Problem is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and anyone who cares about voting rights,” says University of California Berkeley professor Jake Grumbach.

CRUISING THE INDEX: The book’s second half, which traces the aftermath of the fateful 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, is particularly compelling (and extremely damning). The authors meticulously chronicle the return of discrimination in American voting.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Miller and Morris focus convincingly on “preclearance”—the idea that localities and states with a history of discrimination had to get federal permission before changing their voting laws—a requirement that was gutted by the 2013 Supreme Court decision. President Lyndon B. Johnson, urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, said: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” An American Problem is the story of how that particular American problem reared its ugly head again.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

 Who was the first woman to serve as White House press secretary?

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky