Minnesota has had Democratic attorneys general for more than fifty years. Yet Jim Schultz has an excellent opportunity amid the chaos that now plagues the state to break that one-party dominance. It is hard to identify any public official on the ballot today more ill-suited to the challenges of our time than the incumbent, Democrat Keith Ellison. During his tenure as attorney general, Minnesota has faced the greatest increase in violent crime in decades, including a record number of murders for two consecutive years. Yet Ellison has spent his time trying to defund the police, partnering with Representative Ilhan Omar, his successor in the House, to push an ultimately unsuccessful Minneapolis ballot measure that would have replaced the city’s police department with a public safety agency and eliminated a minimum staffing requirement for officers.

Keith Ellison took office in 2019, after a dozen years serving as one of the most liberal members of Congress—more liberal than 90 percent of House Democrats, according to ideological ratings compiled by FiveThirtyEight. Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Ellison endorsed both times he ran for president, has campaigned in Minnesota for Ellison in an apparent effort to increase turnout among young and liberal voters.

He also has pushed other favored causes of the Left. He filed amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to halt the Texas Heartbeat Act and Mississippi 15-week abortion ban and to uphold New York’s onerous restrictions on carrying weapons for self-defense, in addition to defending the DACA program before the Fifth Circuit. For the current Supreme Court term’s docket, he filed briefs opposing the graphic designer who does not wish to be compelled to create a website for a same-sex wedding and attacking Alabama’s congressional redistricting with a challenge that would effectively require race-based line-drawing. Ellison also wrote to congressional leaders early in Biden’s presidency urging a broad cancellation of student loan debt.

Ellison is also a big proponent of no-limits abortion. In Congress he voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, and his platform for attorney general in 2018 promised not to defend new abortion restrictions if approved by the state legislature. In June of this year, he held a press conference with Planned Parenthood and launched an official government website advertising the availability of abortion, including for women in other states who have found Minnesota to be the go-to state in the region for the procedure.

The Republican challenger, Jim Schultz, offers a sorely needed change from the liberal ideologue currently in office. A native of South Haven, Minnesota, he attended the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, where he spent two years in seminary. He attended Harvard Law School, where he served as national editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and won the Dean’s Scholar prize in constitutional law. His legal career spanned from service in an honors program in the Department of Defense legal department to one of Minnesota’s largest law firms, Dorsey & Whitney, as well as work as in-house counsel.

Schultz is respectful of the rule of law and of those who enforce the law. In other words, he is the opposite of the incumbent. Schultz has not surprisingly won a level of support from law enforcement officials and organizations that is unprecedented for a Minnesota campaign. He has promised to add dozens of prosecutors to the attorney general’s office and to proactively seek to prosecute violent offenses in high-crime counties in which county attorneys are not doing their jobs. Schultz is pro-life, a position that will likely have less room to play out in a state with a supreme court that has an activist record on abortion. But his support for religious freedom, including the protection of the conscience rights of medical professionals, would make a real difference.

Just this week he polled seven points ahead of Ellison, 49% to 42%. For Minnesotans who are concerned about the rising tide of crime and lack of respect for the rule of law, the choice could not be more clear: Elect Jim Schultz as your next attorney general.