Moriarty’s Dominant Victory Even Chipped Away at the ‘Golden Crescent’

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily midday digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.

Election Firsts, Election Maps

Lotta neat "firsts" came from last night's midterm elections, including: Minnesota's first Black women state senators, as well as the first trans and the first rapper state reps. DFLers nabbed the statewide political power triforce for the first time since 2014, aided by a commanding win from incumbent Guv Tim Walz over litter box conspiracist Dr. Scott Jensen; Secretary of State Steve Simon smashed kook GOP challenger Kim Crockett; AG Keith Ellison barely snuck past odd-headed Republican foe Jim Schultz; and the Hennepin County Attorney race—perhaps the only contest from which left vs. moderate insights can be gleaned—resulted in a landslide victory for Mary Moriarty, the progressive prosecutor who was profiled last year in Racket.

That latter win provided the most interesting intel from the Strib's robust suite of election-data maps. In Moriarty vs. Martha Holton Dimick, the so-called "Golden Crescent" of Minneapolis—the white, affluent stretch from the southwest corner, up through the lakes, and into downtown—couldn't even deliver for Holton Dimick, who received endorsements from centrist Dems like Mayor Jacob Frey and Rep. Dean Phillips despite not securing the DFL endorsement. In fact, Holton Dimick's pro-cop, pro-status-quo vision only managed convincing margins in two neighborhoods: Lynhurst and Kenwood. (She was, however, a runaway hit in Edina and all around Lake Minnetonka.) "We now have a historic opportunity for change and justice in Hennepin County," Moriarty told supporters following the rout.

Strikes at the U

Earlier this week, the Minnesota Daily took an in-depth look at all the labor action happening on and around campus. “I think it’s impossible not to notice that other workers are at their breaking points,” Eric Immler, a worker at M Health’s Riverside mental health clinic told the Daily's Devlin Epding, who covered the timeline of recent strikes and info on the negotiations, along with some context about why so many union members have been striking this year. Among the reasons cited by workers: staffing shortages, bullying, and a general feeling that they're not respected as people by others at the university. We love a labor story that centers worker voices, don't we folks?

Politically Celibate Reporter Ratio'd to the Moon

In this dumb business, tedious debates over objectivity can be found from J-school halls all the way to the New York Times, though, increasingly, an emphasis on fairness is winning out over the theoretical attainment of opinion-scrubbed brains. Non-voting is one extreme gesture taken by journalists who bend their knees at the shaky altar of objectivity; it happens to be the preferred route of Pioneer Press political reporter Dave Orrick. On Tuesday, he let Twitter know all about it, even illustrating his decision to opt out of democracy with a baffling video of him… scanning a blank ballot?

For thousands who dunked on the tweet, Orrick’s #PoliticalCelibacy hashtag punctuation was too much to handle. "My eyeballs are rolling right out of my head. Congratulations on this incredibly noble act," Athletic reporter Jon Kraczynski noted in response to the clip, which has been viewed almost 600,000 times. "This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life," added another responder. “Imagine sharing this! Wild times,” concluded literary great Roxane "Friend of Racket" Gay.

We reached out to Orrick, who recently accepted a job at the Star Tribune, to chat about his backfiring tweet. He politely declined. We’ll give our own Em Cassel the final word:

Ding Dong Bandits Strike

It weighs around 1,000 pounds. It has both dinged and donged since the 1900s. And, in mid-October, it went missing from the Swan Lake Cemetery chapel in the southern Minnesota town of Dassel. There aren't any leads, but authorities suspect "multiple people" stole the jumbo bell. "It's really disappointing someone would do something like that," Meeker County Chief Deputy Becky Howell told Bring Me the News. Agreed. Remarkably, BMTN reports, another giant graveyard bell was swiped last January in Nicollet, Minnesota. That theft resulted in two arrests, the return of the very large bell, and the ringing sound of justice.