Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon (D) has been projected to be reelected to a third term, defeating a Donald Trump-endorsed challenger who had promised to restrict certain voting methods and antagonized the state’s large community of Somali immigrants.
Democrats had prioritized the Minnesota race, calling attention to its implications for the state’s future of free and fair elections. “Secretary of State Steve Simon makes it his job to defend democracy,” announced one campaign ad launched in September by a political action committee affiliated with the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “But this November, our rights are under attack.”
Simon, who ran on protecting the integrity of elections against potential Trump-inspired efforts to overturn legitimate results, told HuffPost in August that Republican challenger Kim Crockett “could leverage [her] belief in conspiracy theories to at least slow down the process, or cast doubt on the process” in a way that “could have an effect on the certification process.”
Crockett has called the last presidential election “rigged,” and in January agreed with an interviewer who said the 2020 election was “illegitimate” because Minnesota had expanded voter access during the pandemic.
“I don’t think the word lawless is too strong,” Crockett said, referring to a consent decree Simon had signed that suspended the state’s requirement that mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted, as long as they were received within five business days of Election Day. An appeals court blocked the extension in late October 2020.
Of Joe Biden’s victory in the state — the president bested Trump by more than a seven-point margin — Crockett has said, “I don’t think we’ll ever know precisely what happened.”
Crockett, former vice president of the right-wing think tank Center of the American Experiment before running for office, has also earned a reputation for bigoted statements.
“I think of America, the great assimilator, as a rubber band, but with this — we’re at the breaking point,” she told The New York Times in 2019. “These aren’t people coming from Norway, let’s put it that way. These people are very visible.”
She was referring to Minnesota’s large Somali community, which Crockett has at times singled out for scrutiny over unfounded allegations of so-called “ballot harvesting.”
“I’m not willing to get up in the morning and go work for people who aren’t from here,” she said separately in a 2018 interview, referring to immigrants who receive welfare.
In 2020, when referring to a court ruling regarding voting assistance for people who have difficulty reading or speaking English, Crockett questioned whether those voters should participate.
“So, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English, which raises the question, should they be voting?” she said. “We can talk about that another time.”
And earlier this year, the state’s Republican Party apologized after a Crockett campaign video depicted George Soros, the liberal philanthropist and bogeyman for antisemites, as a puppet master controlling Simon. He, like Soros, is Jewish.
Trump endorsed Crockett in a post on Truth Social late last month.
The former president said Crockett would “get to the bottom” of what he claimed was “rampant” election fraud in the state. But it wasn’t clear whether Crockett wanted the endorsement, given Minnesota went for Biden over Trump in 2020 by a margin of 233,000 votes. She called Trump’s post a surprise and said she appreciated the “unexpected vote of confidence.”