6 October 2023
DULUTH The upcoming mayoral race is shaping up to be one of the most hotly contested local elections in more than a decade, pitting incumbent Mayor Emily Larson against former state legislator Roger Reinert.
In all, more than 13,000 people voted in the primary, the most in a mayoral primary since 2011, when Charlie Bell and Don Ness squared off for an open seat. The primary that year drew nearly 21,500 voters, with Bell collecting the most votes in August only to narrowly lose to Ness in the November general election.
Nevertheless, Reinert’s large margin of victory in the latest primary certainly has heightened speculation that Larson’s bid to seek a third term as mayor may fall short. Reinert captured 65% of the primary vote to Larson’s 35% in August.
The News Tribune recently sat down with the candidates, who are both avid runners, to take the pulse of their campaigns and to hear about what they plan to do, if elected.
Emily Larson
Larson, Duluth’s first woman mayor, doesn’t make too much of her primary loss.
“It’s not an election, but it’s a gauge. So, part of what you need to figure out is what was being measured there,” Larson said. “I think there is a desire on the part of some to go back to old Duluth days, and I think they found a candidate they believe can help them find a path back to that place in time.”
She also said August primaries tend to draw fewer voters, including many driven by single issues or identity-based politics.
“It really is post-primary that people start paying close attention,” Larson said. “The general election is exactly that: It’s the general expression of the populace, and those results are often very different.”
Larson’s campaign has relied on direct contact with voters, with the mayor and her supporters knocking on 7,000 doors and placing an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 personal phone calls, to date.
The mayor also has received support from a DFL political action committee, whose negative tactics have created at least a bit of backlash.
Larson says she had no prior personal prior knowledge and had no hand in the ad campaign that dubbed her opponent “Risky Roger,” and suggested he could not be trusted based on his past record. By law, candidates cannot coordinate with PACs, which are required to operate independently.
But Larson also said negative campaign advertising is far from new in Duluth politics, citing critical campaign literature distributed against her by the local firefighters union a few years back.
“I am campaigning in a way that’s very genuine to me. I am going to be specific. I am going to hold myself and my opponent accountable,” Larson said. “I am going to step into the success that I have helped drive in this community, and I am going to empathize with what remains truly challenging.”
Larson also suggests voters would be wise to keep a close eye on who aligns with each candidate.
“We only navigate all these things together. The mayor is only one person. So, for me, who is supporting a candidate really matters,” she said. “People should really pay attention in every election to who is standing publicly with that person, because those are the people who will be there to do the hard work, and they will be there to amplify when it’s easy. But those are the values you’re publicly aligning yourself with.”
Larson suggests that her challenger has not laid out a clear road map for the improvements he proposes to bring to city government, and how he would reallocate city resources.
“Just talking about things being different isn’t enough to demonstrate that different is better or that you’re making clear distinctions about what goes away then,” Larson said.
She said she’s happy to stand on her record of accomplishments.
“The progress is undeniable: an 850% increase in city street improvements, a 32% decrease in greenhouse gas, a 22% reduction in citywide crime, 1,700 units of new housing, and we are literally in our fourth record year of investment in the community. Those are facts,” she said.
“And what we get to do now is build off of that. Those are the launch points.”
While Reinert’s campaign slogan is: “Expect more, do better,” Larson said he has done little to lay out how he plans to do more without lifting taxes or making cuts to other city services.
“I think voters deserve as many details and specifics as possible,” she said.
Larson also dislikes the idea of the city breaking stride now. She said the pandemic had already interrupted her administration’s plans, and that was a large part of the reason she decided to seek a third term: to finish the work her team had begun.
“We have an exceptional team at the city of Duluth that is operating at such a high level because they have what they need, they have a vision, they know how it fits into mine, and we’ve got the relationships on the county, state and federal levels. And we have this tremendous momentum that is good for this community,” Larson said, citing her success seeking financial support for city initiatives.
As for Reinert’s inclination to bring in an entirely new leadership team to city government if he is elected, Larson said it would be a “reckless” and “very political” decision to simply dismantle an effective administrative team that is working hard to bring so much funding and good work forward.
But Larson said she welcomes the energy and attention Reinert has brought to the mayoral race.
“Everybody deserves to have their candidate, period. Whether I agree with that person or not, whether I’m going to vote for that person or not, a community that’s engaged and has the person they believe in, that’s actually really good. It gets people talking. It gets the conversation moving. It starts to really differentiate, and we’re very different candidates,” Larson said. “And we are tapping into very different bases.”
Larson said the outcome of the election rests largely on voters’ assessment of whether Duluth is headed in the right direction. But she, herself, has little doubt.
“I am so confident about what we’re building and where we’re going. And it requires constant course corrections. You have to build that in. Four years ago, I envisioned a very different four years than we just experienced. It required constant course correction with the community,” she said.
Speaking of the community momentum she feels, Larson said, “It’s like an ore ship. It is something that takes an incredibly long time to get going, and once it’s going, you steer it very carefully, you make these corrections along the way.
“You have to be monitoring the big picture. How it’s going to come in safely, where it’s going to come into port, what you’re carrying, who’s on board. It’s constant, but you’re moving,” she said. “And it’s important for people to understand the momentum that’s on the line.”
Roger Reinert
Reinert took the results of the primary as an indication that his campaign is very much on track.
He noted that primary participation was up nearly 70% from the last mayoral primary and said: “We won 30 out of 35 precincts, and had a strong showing really from east to west.”
Reinert said the results also confirmed what he’d been hearing from people eager to see him run for mayor.
“And those conversations were across the community. They were east, west, old, young, liberal, conservative. It was just a wide array of people saying, ‘I wish you would think about this.’ So, when we saw the primary results, it kind of mirrored that,” he said.
Reinert considers the number of yard signs people have requested yet another indicator.
“The old political adage is: Yard signs don’t vote,” he said. But the sheer demand for signs seemed to be reflected in the results as well.
Reinert said about 1,000 signs were in yards by the primary a quantity that has since grown to almost 2,200, with another 250 on the way. In comparison, Reinert said he’s never previously had more than 300 campaign signs planted, even in a state Senate race.
Although Reinert has previously run successfully as a DFL-endorsed candidate for Duluth City Council, as well as for the state House and Senate, he chose not to seek the party’s seal of approval in this race, ceding the endorsement to Larson. The move has likely broadened his reach across the political spectrum, including conservative voters.
“I’ve definitely had interesting conversations with people who are supportive, and we’re not always in agreement, especially on state and national issues. But where we are in agreement is on core city services: streets, utilities and public safety. And I always say, those are not Democrat or Republican things. They’re city things. So, I like to say, ‘I’m a D. I’m a Duluthian, and this a nonpartisan race,” Reinert said.
Since the primary, Reinert believes it has become ever more clear that his campaign was right on the issues. “There’s some sparring over how and why but not that they’re the main issues,” he said.
Those five issues where he aims to make a difference include: improved streets, a revived downtown, more housing, affordable property taxes and growing the local commercial property tax base.
Reinert said the opportunity to serve as mayor of Duluth is really his last political aspiration, and he was slow to agree to run after what he called “the three hardest years of my life.”
He described that as: “a combat deployment in Afghanistan, my personal life imploding after coming home from that, deploying again to Italy at the start of the COVID pandemic, and then being at the DECC during its most challenging year.”
Reinert is a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve and served as interim director of the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center during the height of the pandemic, upon his return from back-to-back overseas deployments.
But as Reinert listened to people’s concerns, he began to come around because they were his concerns as well: a feeling that while taxes continued to rise rapidly, “if anything, basic city services had degraded.”
“I think we first have to start with what the mission of local government is, and that’s core city services that are effective and efficient at a tax rate that we can all afford and sustain,” he said.
When asked by the News Tribune how he might fund more work in some of these areas, Reinert responded: “I’m not getting paid to run for office, and when you announce as a candidate you don’t suddenly have access to all of the information that a two-term incumbent might have. But what I would say is: I’ve read the budgets going back to 2016, and I’ve looked at the trend-line analysis, and quite frankly, I’ve talked to some city staff who are no longer with the city.
“And what I would counter is: It’s not an either-or,” he said, noting that the city’s proposed 2024 general fund is more than 50% greater than it was when Larson was first elected in 2015. “So, it’s not a revenue issue.”
If elected, Reinert plans to begin assembling a leadership team to deliver on his campaign pledges and said, “I think you can expect changes.”
Reinert said he has been disheartened by some of the political advertising of late in the mayoral race.
“I was really surprised to see what I feel is sort of the DC-style of politics coming into play in a local race the attack mailer, the billboards, the website, the social media ads,” Reinert said.
“I do get a kick out of the fact that my supporters have taken the ‘Risky Roger’ thing and made it their own,” he said, noting that some are riffing on the Risky Roger label with T-shirts of their own design, flipping the message on its head with the addition of: “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“I will continue to say, I don’t think that works in a big small town. I mean we just talk to each other, and we saw a spike in donations after that. I’ve had so many people stop me and say, ‘I was really offended by that,’” he said.
Reinert has himself recently received support from a political action committee, called Forever Duluth, that has paid for billboards across town. Quite frankly, he says he has little knowledge of its supporters. But so far the PAC has not gone on the attack, opting instead for messages of support for Reinert.
“I’ve been very intentional about not using the word ‘opponent,’ because I feel that’s inherently divisive. I don’t attack or critique other candidates. I think their job is to talk about themselves. My job is to talk about myself. And the job of the voter, the citizen, is to draw comparisons and make distinctions,” Reinert said. “Now, that may be a bit naive, but I’m a civics teacher at heart.”
Reinert predicts he will prevail.
“I believe we will be successful on Nov. 7, and we will be successful running a campaign that is positive, focused on ourselves and focused on the issues. And that will not just be an affirmation that that’s possible, but it will be a rejection of those DC-style tactics in a local race.”
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