Rep. Ilhan Omar Survives Close Primary After Campaign Focused On Policing

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., narrowly defeated a primary challenger on Tuesday, topping former Minneapolis city councilman Don Samuels by a single-digit margin after a campaign focused on crime and Omar’s effectiveness in Congress.

“Tonight’s victory is a testament to how much our district believes in the collective values we are fighting for, and how much they’re willing to do to help us overcome defeat,” Omar said in a statement after Samuels, 73, conceded defeat.

With all but a few precincts reporting, Omar led Samuels by fewer than 3,000 votes out of more than 110,000 cast in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.

It was the narrowest win yet by an incumbent member of the “Squad,” the name adopted by six left-wing Democrats who defeated more moderate opponents in 2018 and 2020. The margin was also a surprise to supporters of Omar, who had prevailed in the face of millions of dollars in spending against her two years ago.

Omar’s close call came after her critics in the party mobilized against her, arguing that Samuels, who had campaigned against a 2021 ballot measure that would have disbanded and replaced the Minneapolis Police Department, would better represent the heavily Democratic district. That ballot measure sprung out of the police reform movement that grew after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin – a movement that has been blamed by some Democrats for alienating suburban voters.

“We need partners across levels of government who prioritize teamwork, collaboration, and a seriousness of approach to match the seriousness of the issues we face,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement last week, announcing his support for Samuels.

Omar’s campaign had initially dismissed the threat from Samuels, a longtime Democratic activist who left the council in 2018 and lost a race for mayor nine years ago. He entered the race in March, after no other challenger emerged. Omar had won an expensive primary in 2020, when pro-Israel groups and donors poured in resources for her opponent – a result that kept some groups that had opposed her, like the pro-Israel group AIPAC, on the sidelines this year.

In an interview shortly after he announced his campaign, Samuels told The Washington Post that Omar had been wrong to support the 2021 ballot measure, and that she had made trouble for Democratic leadership without notching her own accomplishments.

“She’s making points, gaining notoriety, and we are left unrepresented and unaccounted for,” Samuels said at the time.

The 2021 defeat of the ballot measure was a major setback for Omar and the Democratic Party’s left wing in Minneapolis, just a year after Floyd’s murder inspired a political uprising, including riots that torched the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct.

Several members of the Minneapolis City Council who had voted to disband the police department lost reelection that year, while Frey won reelection over a policing “abolitionist” supported by Omar. The ballot measure to disband the police department failed by 12 points, in a city that had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a 75-point landslide.

“The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t really take off in Minneapolis,” Samuels told The Post. “It was a couple other groups that benefited from the drama around the George Floyd crisis.”

Omar declined to debate Samuels during the campaign and spent less on this primary than she did to win in 2020. Her campaign opted not to run TV ads, while a pro-Samuels PAC went on the air in the final week. Omar outspent Samuels overall, $2.1 million to Samuels’s roughly $800,000. But the Make A Difference MN05 PAC, founded just two weeks before the primary, spent more than $600,000 against Omar.

In an interview Tuesday at an affordable housing apartment complex in the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield before polls closed, Omar said she wasn’t surprised at the challenge from Samuels.

“I think that when you push power, power pushes back,” she said. “We’ve never been afraid to challenge the status quo. And when people feel threatened by the kind of progress that’s being made, they’ll do anything to take it back.”

At a voting location at the nearby House of Prayer Lutheran Church, 59-year old Dawn Welter, a coffee shop worker, said abortion rights were the main issue bringing her to the primary. She was one of the only people walking out of the polls around 10 a.m.

“I’ve always been a liberal, but it just reinforces the importance to get out in the primaries,” she said. “Ilhan is very smart. She is for everybody. I feel like she speaks her mind, and she backs up what she says.”

Turnout was tracking lower this year than it had in 2020, another factor that liberals saw as a problem for Omar. While she had avoided the kind of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns that brought down other Israel critics in Democratic primaries this year, Omar’s supporters called the win a triumph for grass-roots politics.

“Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has faced some of the ugliest attacks of any elected official and had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent against her,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in a statement.

Local Democrats who opposed Omar said that they’d done so because they felt the incumbent had gotten away from the needs of the district.

“I endorsed Samuels because he listened to what my constituents wanted, which is a closer relationship with our member of Congress,” said Jake Spano, the mayor of St. Louis Park. “I hope Congresswoman Omar hears that request and is willing to work with me on it.”

(c) 2022, The Washington Post · David Weigel