Eric the Blue

It’s perfectly obvious that, in the Minnesota races this election season for governor and US Senate, the Republican party has declined to endorse its only two candidates who have any chance of winning. Since Michele Tafoya and Lisa DeMuth are both women, a natural question concerning the m-word, for misogyny, arises. Do Republicans hate women? What evidence would support an indignant No? I’m trying to remember the last time the Republicans sent forth a woman to vie for either governor or US Senate. Amy Klobuchar has been elected to the Senate four times, and her losing Republican opponents have been named Mark, Kurt, Jim, and Royce. Tina Smith beat Jason. Tim Walz has vanquished Jeff and Scott. You might be tempted to say that Republican men are proven losers.

By the way, speaking of losers: one of Royce’s exes has a restraining order against him, and he has also been dogged by courts attempting to force him to pay delinquent child support. Neither of this year’s Republican-endorsed candidates for the top-of-the-ticket races has ever held any public office, or is even of sufficient public stature to have inspired someone to write them up for Wikipedia. These are the fellas Republicans preferred to Tafoya and DeMuth–who, I admit, are awful, but a couple grams of discriminating intelligence should allow a person, including even a Republican, to detect differences of degree.

For an informative and entertaining tour of this year’s Minnesota races, I cannot recommend highly enough the blog of Naomi Kritzer. She will make you smile and, if you’re not a junky, possibly save you from making a grievous error in a primary, or in one of the lower profile general election contests. I learned from her that, on the subject of gun policy, Tafoya supports red flag laws, so from a Republican perspective maybe the problem with her isn’t that she’s a woman but, rather, that she has a toe nail protruding into the realm of the sane. It’s more than you can say for the boys. Trump has endorsed for governor Pillow Guy, naturally.