With a handful of days left in a quiet-yet-fiesty State Senate primary campaign, homes in St. Louis Park started getting dark money, independent expenditure mailings attacking Sen. Ron Latz.
The literature from a group called “SD46 Residents For Change” claims that Latz “doesn’t share our DFL values” and accuses him of being a “far-right sympathizer.” The flyers started appearing on doorsteps in the district and were shared with TC Jewfolk on Thursday night, five days before the Aug. 11 primary election in Senate District 46.
The website behind it was registered in Iceland on July 24, per a website domain search tool.
The front and back of flyers dropped in St. Louis Park.
Latz has represented St. Louis Park and parts of the neighboring suburbs for more than 30 years. He was on the SLP City Council from 1994-2003. He won his first race for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2002 and was re-elected two years later. He ran for the State Senate in 2006, and has served there since he was sworn in in 2007.
Latz declined to comment on the flyer, but SLP School Board Member Susie Kaufman, who is supporting Latz’s campaign, blasted it and the anonymous group behind it.
“These are untrue, defamatory claims that are meant to smear someone who has one of the strongest records on fighting for justice,” said Kaufman, a gun safety advocate who worked closely with Latz since he chairs the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee. “Ron has run a positive campaign, and he is always focused on his record. He has stayed above all of the mudslinging, and I find it incredibly disappointing that others are stooping so low.
“I know from personal experience (during the 2025 school board race) that this is how they work.”
Lynette Dumalag, Latz’s primary opponent, said she had nothing to do with the piece.
“I have substantial policy differences with Ron, but I would never approve such a piece, and I denounce the divisive rhetoric and name-calling within it,” she said in an email. “I am focused on providing vision and hope to our neighbors about how we can better our community, improve housing, and provide healthcare for all. That is the campaign I have chosen to run.”
One of the items he’s attacked for is having an affordable housing provision removed from the 2024 omnibus housing bill during the legislative session. Dumalag, a former SLP city councilmember, cited that as her main reason for running.
Dumalag said that language around source of income discrimination was taken out of the bill at Latz’s behest.
“These are things that we just disagree on, and it was enough for me to run,” she said.
Rep. Larry Kraft, who represents House District 46A and is supporting Dumalag, said that he learned a lot from her on the issue of housing since they were on the SLP City Council together.
“I work with Sen. Latz on stuff,” he said. “But from a policy and values perspective, Lynette is where we should be.”
Latz, in an interview prior to the literature being distributed, said that Dumalag has been mischaracterizing the situation for more than a year.
“There was one particular proposal that was intended to increase the willingness of landlords to accept Section 8 housing vouchers, but the mechanism that they were going to use to do it, I thought would be ineffective, and worse, counterproductive,” Latz said.
He said he wasn’t the only member of the Senate who felt that way; the provision wasn’t part of the Senate bill which is why it had to be negotiated in the conference committee, which is where it came out of the bill.
“Rather than simply evaluating on the merits, Lynette decided that it was a sign that I was anti-affordable housing, which is a complete distortion, both of the underlying issue and in my position on that proposal and my record on affordable housing,” he said. “What I did in response to this was I sat down and, in collaboration with public housing advocates, stakeholders in the affordable housing space, and the housing providers, the multi-housing association, I put together a proposal that actually would be collaborative, sustainable, and effective in achieving this goal.”
Latz said he took that vote knowing that there may be some blowback.
“I’d received some political threats ahead of time about this issue, but I’m not going to vote for something that I think is going to be really bad in terms of public policy,” he said. “I’m not afraid to take a principled position.”
Kraft and Dumalag both decried the “outside money” in the race. Dumalag said in an email to TC Jewfolk that the “vast majority” has been in support of Latz, while Kraft made a Facebook video several weeks ago blasting the DFL Senate Caucus for sending out mailers supporting Latz, despite the Senate District not endorsing either candidate. One DFL Senator posted to social media that their caucus supporting one of their incumbents isn’t “outside money.”
“Larry Kraft has complained about outside money in this race; what is this?” Kaufman said of the literature drop. “This anonymous group just tossing things around the neighborhood to four days before the election?”
Kraft said he knew nothing of the flyer.
“Generally I don’t favor that kind of thing,” he said of ‘outside money’ in politics. “I think we should have outside money out of politics. I would apply the same commentary on outside money [whether] it’s on behalf of the candidate I’m supporting or not.”
The piece also quoted Latz from a November 2023 press conference calling attention to the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, where he said:
“Palestinian youth dream of the opportunity to achieve glory and even martyrdom by killing as many Jews as possible. Is it any wonder that these same children grow up and call their parents after slaughtering innocent concert-goers in a desert to brag about killing 10 Jews, saying ‘Mama aren’t you proud of me?’ Who use rape as a weapon of war? Who gleefully paraded the naked body of a desecrated captive Jewish woman through the streets of Gaza, while the Gaza crowds cheered and spit on the body? We know all this from their own recordings.”
Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, who was cited in the mailing as having signed a letter condemning the comments, is backing Latz in the race. In an e-mail, she said called the attempt a “desperate smear piece.”
In a statement Latz made after his Senate colleagues wrote their letter, he said: “The six sentences preceding the one they are criticizing make it clear that I am not referring to all Palestinian youth, but rather the Gazans who are taught at Hamas-controlled UNRWA schools that Jews should be killed, who attend summer camps the teach young kids how to be terrorists, who play ‘kill the Jew,’ on the streets of Gaza, who watched children’s TV shows that glorify the killing of Jews, and who play on UNRWA elementary school playgrounds with plastic AK-47s.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas cited several examples of UNRWA schools teaching a Hamas-written curriculum, videos of children who seek martyrdom, students chanting for the death of Jews, and children congratulating relatives for martyrdom.
There was also Hamas video from a kibbutz showing terrorists torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus, and Israeli forensic scientists had found bodies of women and girls raped with such violence that their pelvic bones were broken.
I know and admire both Ron Latz and Lynette Dumalog. I consider both friends. I know that both visibly stand up for our Latino and Somali American Muslim neighbors. I favor Latz for his track record and continuing work on important state and local issues including housing, civil rights, etc. Latz brings the advantage of Senate seniority allowing him to represent the district on powerful committees such as chairing the Judiciary Committee. I know neither candidate would participate in such foul campaign tactics.