Safe open seats draw out Republican candidates

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The collective mind of the Capitol class is generally free to wander around mid-July. And why not? The special session is long gone, and a new budget is in place, with no new bills to consider until next March; the governor took the week off to visit family out-of-state; weather conditions have been near perfect, and the Twins are holding a wild card spot.

But there’s no lull for prospective political candidates, especially when a safe seat has come up for grabs. In that scenario, a swift, well-organized entry from the right candidate will often serve to bring the race to an end just days after it started.

This summer, the imminent departures of two Senate Republicans have inspired opposite reactions from potential suitors. Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, said she wanted to leave plenty of time for the emergence of strong candidates in her district. Apparently, they needed it.

Scott Jensen, a doctor, Republican activist and soon-to-be published author, made his campaign official in early July, and said he came to the decision only after two months of prayer, discussion with his wife and phone calls from other area conservatives. So far, Jensen is alone in that field.

The picture is much different in the north metro suburbs, where as many as a half-dozen contenders have lined-up along the water’s edge, dipping a toe in while waiting to see who will be first to take the plunge. Potential successors to Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover, include:

• Rep. Abigail Whelan, R-Anoka, a freshman who won the seat formerly held by GOP Rep. Jim Abeler;
• Kathy Tingelstad, a former six-term House member who left the lower chamber in 2008;
• Don Huizenga, who lost to Whelan for the GOP endorsement last year;
• Andy Aplikowski, a Republican Party of Minnesota insider who moonlights as a political blogger.

And that’s not all. Tingelstad said she was aware that at least two other conservatives in the district were “seriously considering it,” as she was, though she did not know their identities. Tingelstad, who lobbied on behalf of Anoka County for six years after leaving the Legislature, also expects that “at least one or two” members of the area city councils — the district includes Anoka, Andover, Ramsey and Coon Rapids — will join the race at some point.

To date, no one has done so officially. Tingelstad observed Thursday that she has actually already represented about 80 percent of what is now Petersen’s Senate district. She won her House seat on one side of the district originally, and, after redistricting, was pushed into almost entirely new territory, and won there as well.

“My district changed by 93 percent,” she recalled. “And because of that, I’ve represented almost everything [in the Senate district] except for the city of Anoka, which is usually characterized as fairly conservative.”

Tingelstad said her own decision would factor in the reality that, in the likely event of a contested endorsement process, the full field might not come into view until the start of the convention.

“The way those conventions are set up,” Tingelstad said, “someone could come forward from floor and announce they’re running that day.”

For her part, Tingelstad said she would prefer to make her decision sometime this year to give her a leg up on fundraising. Aplikowski is working on a shorter timeline, saying he plans to make his decision before the end of July.

“I want to know what the field looks like before I make my decision,” said Aplikowski, who holds positions with the local GOP unit, the 6^th Congressional District GOP and the state party’s executive committee.

One thing both races do have in common is that neither has produced a candidate closely aligned with the district incumbent. Jensen said he has known Ortman for her entire tenure, but said the two probably spoke only “a couple times a year,” on average.

“I would think I might be a little bit more conservative than [Ortman],” said Jensen, a former chair of the Carver and Scott county GOP units. “But it’s probably a tough comparison to make.”

At the time of her announcement, Ortman said she would hope that the district might elect someone with a similar political profile as she had when she first joined, as a working mother with young children. Jensen said he could not presume to know what she had meant in those comments, but thought he would bring the perspective of a parent who has balanced his family and professional obligations.

In Senate District 35, meanwhile, three of the would-be candidates are more socially conservative than Petersen, an ideologically consistent libertarian whose most notable decision during his one term in the Senate was a 2013 vote in favor of gay marriage. The local party went on to censure Petersen, a move he said was motivated by that vote, though the party later rescinded its sanction.

The internal punishment suggested that Petersen could have faced an endorsement challenge next year, and Brad Sunderland, chair of the SD 35 GOP committee, said he could not have predicted if such a bid would have been successful.

“How the process would’ve played out, to be honest, I don’t have a good sense of whether there was more support, because of his vote, or less support,” Sunderland said. “There was certainly some controversy.”

Aplikowski and Tingelstad both said they would have voted against the marriage bill, though Aplikowski said he otherwise considers himself a “libertarian” in most ways. Tingelstad’s social conservative credentials are beyond doubt; in 2012, she was the lone board member with the Anoka-Hennepin School District board to vote against a lawsuit settlement to change the district’s policy toward gay and lesbian students, and resigned in protest immediately after the meeting.

On the fiscal front, Tingelstad’s conservative record is less certain. She was one of the “Override Six” Republicans who voted in favor of a gas tax increase to topple the veto of then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Aplikowski said he knows Tingelstad’s past well — “I think I still have the ‘Taxpayers League’ poster of the ‘Override Six’ in my basement,” he said — and would expect it to resurface as part of an endorsement fight. As for his own record, as a “stream-of-consciousness” blogger on his “Residual Forces” website, Aplikowski said he was comfortable with the idea of opponents digging through archives that number some 7,300 blog posts. A parody Twitter account has already been set up to attack Aplikowski using his own words.

“I’m more than willing to look again at things I’ve written. I’ve done a lot of growing during the time since I’ve been writing the blog, but I don’t think I’ve changed my views,” he said. “I used to be more on the operative side, so I know how this stuff works.”