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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Republicans’ vision for the country keeps getting darker and darker.

Amidst Trump’s ranting this past weekend in Pennsylvania, he openly fantasized about a Soviet-style police crackdown on crime. He said to the crowd, “One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.”

Earlier in September he said in Wisconsin that getting undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. will be a “bloody story.”

Trump sounds like a drunk man with a violence fetish solving the world’s problems from a bar stool, but actually he’s a sober convicted felon who is desperate to win the presidency so he can save his own skin from prison.

Trump lies repeatedly about noncitizens voting, which the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 infamy) has barely been able to find a couple dozen examples of between 2003 and 2023. The potential penalties are high, including prison time and deportation, which is probably why actual documented cases are extremely rare. It’s simply not worth the risk. The facts don’t hinder Trump, though, from making wild claims about “millions” of noncitizens registering to vote.

Trump’s stream of lies about immigrants are appeals to both white supremacy and xenophobia. It’s wrong, it’s dangerous and it’s gross.

Furthermore, Republicans like our Congressman Brad Finstad let a bipartisan border security deal die last fall at Trump’s behest because Trump wished to exploit ongoing border issues for his own political benefit.

Finstad has set himself apart as one of the biggest slackers in Congress. His score of 0.0 from the Center for Effective Lawmaking put him at the bottom of the barrel last year. It’s consistent with his quote in a Groundwork Podcast earlier this year, “I tell my kids all the time our goal is to have a ‘Not Congress.’”

Why should we vote for a ‘Not Congressman’ like Finstad when we can vote for Rachel Bohman instead? Bohman is ready and willing to do the job of representing our district in Congress, and she will be a hard worker for all of us.

Last week Finstad voted against a continuing resolution, which passed 341-82 and was necessary to prevent our government from shutting down earlier this week. Every single one of us needs a functioning government, but Finstad seems to favor ideological purity and flaunts his passivity.

The overall quality of Republican candidates is historically low this year. Many high-profile former Republicans have publicly endorsed Harris for president–including Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, John McCain’s son Jimmy, and former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake. Last month more than 100 former national security officials who served in Republican administrations signed a letter endorsing Harris. This is unprecedented, and the list keeps growing as Trump sinks further into despicable rhetoric.

Trump isn’t even willing to disavow Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for North Carolina governor. Besides his violent comment in a church this summer that “some folks need killing,” it recently came out that Robinson used to frequent a porn shop, and he called himself a “black NAZI” and referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Koon” on a pornography website’s message board. Trump had previously referred to Robinson as Martin Luther King “on steroids.”

This is not a satire about white supremacist lunacy, this is real, and the people we elect to run the government have real consequence in people’s lives.

As North Carolina reels from the deluge delivered by heat-charged Hurricane Helene, it’s plain to see that good public servants and a functioning government are crucial for preparation, clean-up and recovery. Project 2025, though, wants to use a second Trump administration to rip up the National Weather Service, FEMA and other federal disaster spending. Republicans apparently think people should not get life-saving weather forecasts from the government for free when corporations could privatize the service and profit from charging money for critical weather information.

When you get down to brass tacks, Republicans consistently prioritize private profits over life, health and public safety. Favoring tax breaks for wealthy people over providing access to basic services is not “pro-life.” We are at the cusp of a stark new climate reality fueled by the carbon we have pumped into the atmosphere, and Republicans have no workable plan for most of us. They have endless culture war baloney, though, to distract us from reality, drain us of empathy and loosen the bonds that hold our rural communities together.

Immigrants are not our enemies, they are our neighbors, and our rural communities have a much better chance of thriving with them than without them. We need each other, and we need a functioning government to represent us. Democrats are the candidates who have a vision of the future in which we can live and prosper together.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.