Look at Who They're Running

Schutz is tailor-made to destroy Ellison. Go to ronformnag.com. Spend five minutes. Read the priorities page. Then come back and tell me Keith Ellison wins that race.

The Republicans aren't running a placeholder this time. Ron Schutz is a Forbes Top 200 lawyer. He's a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, which limits membership to the top one percent of attorneys in the country. He chaired a national litigation firm for five years. He won an $89 million verdict. He's Army JAG. And he's a lifelong Minnesotan with deep roots in the state.

He is also a board member of the Center of the American Experiment, the organization that published the audio recording of Keith Ellison sitting in a room with Feeding Our Future defendants one month before the FBI raids. His priorities page links directly to that recording. Fraud is the centerpiece of his campaign, and he has a direct pipeline to the people investigating it.

This is not 2022. In 2022, the Republican nominee was Jim Schultz, a relatively unknown attorney from Plymouth. He had no major platform, no national profile, no scandal to run on. And he still came within 20,000 votes of winning. Schutz is operating at a different level entirely, and he has something Schultz never had: a sitting Attorney General with a documented record of failure on the single biggest issue in the race.

Now look at the rest of Schutz's platform. Every priority on his website is a weapon aimed at one person.

Fraud. The Feeding Our Future audio, the congressional investigation, the billions in losses. All aimed at Ellison.

Crime. Minneapolis homicide and assault numbers. "Soft on crime." Aimed at Ellison.

Law enforcement. "Defund the police." Anti-police rhetoric. Aimed at Ellison and his political history.

Culture war issues. Aimed at Ellison's progressive record.

Schutz built his entire campaign to beat Keith Ellison. Every dollar he's raised and every ad he'll run is calibrated for that matchup. And based on the 2022 numbers, it will probably work. Ellison won by less than one percent against a candidate with a fraction of Schutz's credentials and no fraud scandal to run on. The math does not get better from here.

So here's the question DFL delegates need to sit with: what happens if you endorse Ellison and send him into November against this candidate?

Now consider the alternative.

I'm Army JAG. That credential is a wash against Schutz. Neither of us has an advantage there.

I'm a consumer fraud attorney. I've litigated fraud cases for close to twenty years. Schutz can't run the fraud attack against me the way he can against Ellison, because I've been doing the work. His best issue disappears.

I have no connection to "defund the police." I have no record of national political fights. I have no audio recordings and no congressional investigations hanging over me. Every attack Schutz has built for this race becomes irrelevant if I'm the nominee.

Schutz has spent months and money building a campaign to beat Keith Ellison. If the DFL nominates me, he has to scrap his playbook and start over in September with two months left. That is an enormous strategic advantage that we are handing to the Republicans if we don't take it.

I am not asking DFL delegates to abandon their values. I'm asking them to protect those values by nominating someone who can actually win in November. Someone the Republican candidate isn't prepared for. Someone who takes away every weapon in his arsenal.

Schutz is ready for Ellison. He is not ready for me.

Dave Madgett is a consumer protection attorney, U.S. Air Force JAG veteran, and DFL candidate for Minnesota Attorney General.