Minnesota voters are heading to the polls on Tuesday for a special election to fill the state House seat of the late state Representative Melissa Hortman, who was killed in June alongside her husband in what officials described as a “politically motivated assassination”.
Residents in Minnesota’s Brooklyn Park and surrounding suburbs will have the choice between Democrat Xp Lee, health equity analyst, former Brooklyn Park city council member and Republican Ruth Bittner, a real estate agent.
The election comes amid heightened alarm in the US over political violence, and comes just days after the far right activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University.
Authorities say that the man accused of killing the Hortmans, 58-year-old Vance Boelter, had a list of targets which included Democratic lawmakers and abortion rights advocates, and that he traveled to two other legislators’ homes that evening – with plans to assassinate them.
In an interview with the Associated Press over the weekend, Bittner said that she noticed early in her campaign that residents in the area where Hortman was killed seemed afraid to open their doors.
“We are in very, very scary times, and we definitely need to get out of this trajectory that we’re on here,” Bittner said.
Bittner said that the rise in political violence briefly made her question running for office, but that she ultimately decided, “We can’t cower.”
“We have to move forward as a country,” she added. “We have to embrace the system that we have of representative government, and we have to just do it, you know?…There’s no way to solve this problem if we shrink back in fear.”
Lee told the Minnesota Star Tribune in August that one of his motivations for running was to “take up” Hortman’s “legacy of leadership” and said that Hortman “paved pathways for a lot of us”.
Lee told the AP that Hortman was a neighbor he often saw walking her dog, and that she had offered him guidance when he ran for city council.
“I can’t think of a better way to honor her than to go to the Capitol and do my best in the seat,” Lee said.
Lee acknowledged the heightened tensions following Kirk’s killing, describing the current political climate as a “charged atmosphere”.
“So I want to do what I can to really bring that down,” he said, including supporting a ban on automatic and semiautomatic weapons and high capacity magazines.
Lee said that he keeps a shotgun himself for home defense but that assault-style rifles “are weapons of war that really we don’t need on our streets”.
Boelter faces federal and state murder charges in the Hortmans’ deaths, as well as attempted murder and other charges in the shooting of another Democratic Minnesota lawmaker, Senator John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who both survived.
Boelter was indicted in July on multiple federal and state charges, including murder, attempted murder, and firearms violations. He has pleaded not guilty.
