Browsing through the Secretary of State's final list of candidates for the Minnesota House, we noticed that Marianne Stebbins and Doug "Dug" Malsom had filed candidacies.
As my late, deeply conservative father would have said, "That's a pair to draw to."
Let's examine each card in order of district number. Stebbins filed for 33B (now in the hands of DFLer Kelly Morrison) and Malsom for 38A, suddenly open by the quiet last-minute retirement of seven-nonconsecutive-termer Linda Runbeck.
Stebbins is challenging GOP-endorsed candidate Andrew Meyers. Malsom is part of a field of three Republican primary contenders, including Kelly Gunderson and Donald Raleigh.
Marianne Stebbins
On her Facebook page, now unavailable, Stebbins describes herself as "INTJ. Current obsessions: cellular biology, longevity, paleoanthropology. ~Live free~." That might come in handy if she wins the primary and faces first term incumbent DFLer Kelly Morrison, a Deephaven physician with an undergraduate degree in history from Yale.
Stebbins appears to have made her personal Facebook page unavailable for public viewing.
Stebbins announced her campaign in late February. The Sun Sailor reported in Stebbins announces as candidate for House District 33B:
Marianne Stebbins, of Mound, has announced her candidacy for the Minnesota House District 33B seat. She is seeking the Republican endorsement.
“I’ve organized a successful statewide grassroots movement in Minnesota based on the principles of liberty and freedom,” stated Stebbins. “This campaign will be a large grassroots movement to retake a strong Republican district that we must win.”
Her passion in politics is school choice. She aims to advance legislation that allows parents to have the financial ability to choose the best education for their children. Stebbins’ children attend Holy Family.
More information can be found by visiting stebbinsforhouse.com.
Visiting the website reveals that Stebbins is deeply upset about politicians with radical agendas, like health mandates (code for vaccination). Morrison is perhaps best known for being the House author of the bill that generated the wildly popular Lawns to Legumes program. She discussed her agenda in Rep. Kelly Morrison announces re-election campaign back in early February.
The challenger's campaign Facebook page, Marianne Stebbins for MN House 33B, is filled with posts by members of the New House Republican Caucus. It appears likely that she'll caucus with these ideological soulmates if she wins both.
Stebbins also claimed on to have raised "thousands" of dollars for her campaign, but the first public campaign finance report isn't due until July 27, so that's hard to fact check at this time. She registered her campaign with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board on March 9, 2020.
She was at the April 17 Liberate Minnesota event at the Governor's residence:
Her LinkedIn profile is found here.
It details the "successful statewide grassroots movement in Minnesota based on the principles of liberty and freedom": organizing for Ron Paul's presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, as well as for the Campaign for Liberty in the years between Paul's races.
Stebbins' efforts were widely covered by Minnesota's media. Pat Kessler reported in 2012's Ron Paul Supporters Ponder The Future Of Minn. GOP:
Minnesota Ron Paul supporters are planning their next move in state Republican politics after widespread losses on Election Day.
The Texas Congressman built some of his strongest support here in Minnesota. But at the Liberty Movement Forum in Minneapolis, Paul supporters said the party abandoned small government principles, and hurt the GOP brand in Minnesota with divisive social issues.
Paul’s Minnesota campaign manager, Marianne Stebbins, says the marriage amendment pulled focus away from real issues.
“People who support Republicans support Republicans because they think they believe in small government, and…they believe that they’re strong on the economics. But then when the Republican Party goes out there and runs on the marriage amendment, people are thinking, ‘Well, where’s the small government party?'” Stebbins said.
In Minnesota Lawyer, Paul Demko reported in May 2012's Stebbins, Paulites loom large at GOP convention:
Four years ago, as Marianne Stebbins recalls it, she couldn’t get Republican Party officials to return her phone calls. The state coordinator for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign wanted to know whether the Texas congressman would be granted a speaking slot at the party’s convention in Rochester. Only after sending a certified letter to then-state GOP Chairman Ron Carey did Stebbins receive a response: Paul would not be permitted to address the gathering.
That didn’t dissuade Paul from showing up anyway. The libertarian challenger addressed roughly 400 supporters in a park adjacent to the Mayo Civic Center, garnering unwanted headlines about divisions within the GOP.
“It was kind of antagonistic,” Stebbins recalled of her relationship with the state party in 2008. “We weren’t the best of friends.”
But Carey’s recollection of events is slightly different. He says Paul was perfectly welcome to address the convention, but under one condition: that he endorse presumptive presidential nominee John McCain.
“There is an amazing amount of revisionist history by the Paul forces to try and whip their team up into a frenzy,” Carey said. “Unfortunately, the story is much better than the truth. … I still stand by that decision as the right decision. I wish Dr. Paul would have gotten behind John McCain. Maybe we would have had a different outcome.”
Four years later, Carey is long gone as state GOP chairman. But Stebbins and the unruly Paul supporters that she’s charged with organizing are a much more cohesive force heading into this weekend’s state GOP convention in St. Cloud. They have spent the intervening four years training Paul’s supporters — many of whom are younger, and not traditional GOP activists — in the finer points of the arcane caucus system. By most estimates they have commandeered roughly half of the delegate slots for the state convention, where they will endorse a GOP candidate to run against U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
That Senate candidate was Kurt Bills, who experienced an epic loss that November.
Stebbins was elected chair of the 2012 Minnesota delegation to the Republican National Convention, the local Patch site reported in Ron Paul Supporter Leads Minnesota Delegation to Republican National Convention.
At MinnPost, Cyndy Brucato report in 2013's Minnesota GOP will choose new state chair from rival factions still at war:
With the contest for a new chairman, the Republican Party of Minnesota is headed for another power struggle between two blocs of activists — the Ron Paul supporters who have taken over much of the party’s grass-roots structure, and traditional conservatives who lost their hold at the state convention last spring.
Two of the key players in this competition are Marianne Stebbins, not a candidate for chair but the chief organizer of Paul supporters, also known as the “liberty” wing, and Keith Downey, a former state representative with a business and legislative résumé, who is a candidate for party chair.
The victor will determine nothing less than whether the Republican Party can return to dominance. Each group believes it has a vision that will lead the party back to financial solvency and organizational effectiveness that, in turn, will lead to the broad voter support that the party lacked in the 2012 election. For Stebbins, that means a radical retrenchment of party ideals.
“We looked at the last election and the party just showed that it was genuinely out of touch,” she said. “They weren’t talking about the economy, they were talking about the constitutional amendments.” For Downey, the party’s principles are not the problem, but he believes they got lost in the translation to voters.
“The basic Republican message of relying on Minnesotans and not bigger government is an appealing one,” he said. “If we can animate the activist base and make people understand we do care, we can excite the public.” . . .
Stebbins is not so sure about that and implies there will be a litmus test for future candidates to get the liberty wing’s stamp of approval. “We’re not interested in electing any Republican that runs,” she said. “We want to choose a candidate that has principles.”
Neither the Paulites nor the establishment activists can claim any high ground based on the results of the 2012 election. Ron Paul supporters succeeded in winning the Republican endorsement for U.S. Senate for high school teacher Kurt Bills, who went on to lose to Sen. Amy Klobuchar by the widest margin in state history.
As to why, Stebbins explains, “Nobody was going to do well against Klobuchar. He [Bills] got started late and his campaign was run by the establishment Republicans.”
Downey was elected chair, serving four years before launching an unsuccessful bid for Republican endorsement for governor.
Quartz' Guilford reported in 2016's How the Republican elite tried to fix the presidency and instead got Donald Trump:
“I was the biggest Party cheerleader for so long,” says Marianne Stebbins, a forty-seven year-old resident of the western Minneapolis suburbs. A stalwart of Minnesota’s Republican Party caucus system, Stebbins had clocked up 15 years volunteering for campaigns before it dawned on her that, once they got in office, none of the candidates she backed actually championed the small government tenets they ran on. . . .
An interesting read.
Will the district yearn for the Good Old Days of SW Metro Tea Party maven Cindy Pugh? Or side with Republican endorsed candidate, Minnetonka Beach city council member Andrew Myers?
The first option happened back in the 2012 primary, Tom Scheck reported in Tea party wave rolls over Lake Minnetonka's suburbs:
An electoral wave of discontent hit legislative districts near Lake Minnetonka Tuesday. Republican primary battles in the western metro suburbs bounced one veteran incumbent from the Minnesota House and removed another House incumbent who had hoped to move up to a Senate seat.
Cindy Pugh, a co-founder of the Southwest Metro Tea Party, easily defeated Republican Rep. Steve Smith, who was the longest serving member in the House. Pugh says her victory in District 33B is proof voters in the district wanted changes. . .
That was then. Is it now?
Doug Malsom
Without fanfare, House District 38A representative Linda Runbeck did not file for office this year. Doug Malsom, one of the hosts of April's Liberate Minnesota anti-COVID 19-protest at the Governor's residence, filed on June 2.
He is one of three Republican candidates in the August primary for the district.
Like Stebbins, Malsom created a campaign Facebook page, Doug Malsom for MN House 38A. Malsom's Facebook page was created in February. The campaign website linked at the Secretary of State's candidate filing database hit of his campaign, malsomforhouse.com, takes readers to a blank Go Daddy page for now.
From Doug Malsom for MN House 38A Facebook about page:
I am running for MN House 38A.
*I will NOT vote for an Omnibus bill that is not narrow and defined
*I am 100% pro life and will refuse to fund abortion
*I will Champion 2nd Amendment legislation
*I will NOT vote for any increase in taxes
That sounds like a New Republican agenda, and like Stebbins, Maslom shares posts from New House Republican members on his campaign Facebook page.
Malsom announced his filing on his personal Facebook page, leading with fears that irrigation season for the tree of liberty is fast approaching.
As the banner at the top of this section illustrates, Malsom was one of five hosts for Liberate Minnesota. Alpha News reported this in Minnesotans Plan To Protest Stay At Home Order Outside Walz’s Mansion. Unicorn Riot's Niko reported in Who’s Calling to ‘Liberate Minnesota’, and Why?:
The Facebook event page for Liberate Minnesota had five organizers listed; Michele Even, Marni Hockenberg, Don Huizenga, Randy Quick, and Doug Malsom. During the protest, Unicorn Riot spoke with all of the organizers but Huizenga, and asked them what brought them to help organize the action. . . .
Co-organizer Doug Malsom told Unicorn Riot that this shutdown is creating a “black market” because the “economy is organic, it’s everybody here” and that Walz has no levers to stop it. Malson said the economy should open back up right now and not wait until May 4, as other lawmakers have agreed. Malsom feared the White House’s three-phase plan is faulty because new tests will alter the case rate, preventing states from moving forward to the next phase.
“My understanding is that we have to have less cases for 14 straight days to go to the next phase, but we’re going to increase our testing up to 5,000 tests a day. There’s no way we’re going to have lower [cases] if we’re increasing the amount of tests we’re doing.” – Doug Malsom, Liberate Minnesota Co-organizer
When asked about the risks to the protest and opening up the economy, Malsom said, “absolutely there’s risks” but said if you have underlying conditions, stay home, and the rest should “live free, not scared.”
He's on to something there: no tests, no record of new cases, though Bluestem has doubt about the value of such a strategy in a pandemic.
Malsom appears to have been a Republican activist for years. In a Dispatch from the GOP's Election Night bash at the Star Tribune's Hot Dish blog, Curt Brown reported in 2010:
. . . Doug Malsom, a 43-year-old Internet engineer from Lino Lakes, was among the Republicans watching results on the big screen TV in the hotel ballroom. He was decked out in a Tom Emmer hockey jersey.
“I had a dream Emmer won by 6, but that might be pushing it,” Malsom said. “Nationally, it’s going crazy for the Republicans and we could pick up 90 seats.”
He said he wore his Emmer hockey jersey to work on Tuesday and five union members who planned to vote for Tom Horner said they switched to vote for Emmer.
One final note about Stebbins and Maslom. On earlier versions of Malsom's About page on his personal page, he noted that he was in a relationship with Marianne Stebbins. That link, like the photo at the top of this page, has disappeared from his personal Facebook page, since this morning we began writing this post. He's still in a relationship since October 5, 2019. He's just not telling with whom now.
The GOP House problem
In Minnesota Republican Party Allows Democrats To Run Unopposed at Alpha News, we read a fascinating complaint:
Meanwhile, a stalwart Minnesota conservative, Jeremy Munson, is faced with a Republican primary challenger. Jake Duesenberg, the President of Action4Liberty, criticized this in an interview with Alpha News.
“[Republican House Minority Leader] Daudt had time to find a primary challenger for the most conservative Republican in the House, Jeremy Munson, but not time find someone in Edina” which is District 49A, he said.
Given the challenges of endorsed Republicans by radical right candidates in MN16A (endorsed: Torkelson), MN33B (endorsed: Meyers) and possibly 31A (endorsed: Daudt), the claim could be made Duesenberg's club played that game too.
Related posts:
Screengrab: Malsom's photo of Marianne Stebbins and Jonathan Painter, another Liberate Minnesota rally participant. The photo is no longer public on Malsom's Facebook page. He seems to have done some editing.
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