Samuels is confident that he’ll prevail this time around as Omar continues to stake out extreme positions on Israel and other issues.
It was in the early spring of 2022 — less than five months before the Democratic primary — when Don Samuels announced his first congressional run against Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis.
Looking back, he said, it was not enough time.
Although Samuels is a longtime neighborhood activist and a former city councilman and school-board member, most people in the city didn’t know him well. Omar, on the other hand, is a far-left “Squad” member who has used her divisiveness and attention-grabbing antics to become something of a national political celebrity. Virtually everyone in the city knows her name.
But Samuels campaigned hard in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district, selling himself to voters as a uniter and a collaborator, a sober voice for intemperate times.
Unlike Omar’s previous reelection challenge, the 2022 primary was a nail-biter. Omar beat Samuels by only two percentage points. Her camp was caught off guard by how close it was.
In his concession speech, Samuels told supporters that coming so close to winning, despite long odds, “means that we have our finger on the pulse of the exhausted majority.”
“We know that America wants change,” Samuels said, adding, “We’re not going away.”
In mid November, Samuels made that official, announcing that he is seeking a rematch against the lightning-rod congresswoman. “We just did not have enough time” in 2022, Samuels told National Review. “We were on such a steep incline, many of us felt that if we had another week or two we could have won that race.”
By announcing nine months before next year’s primary, Samuels is optimistic that he’ll have the time to build up his name ID and to win the support of potential voters in small, more intimate settings. And his strong performance last time could help persuade donors that not only is he the right candidate for the job, but that he also can win next year.
Samuels, a 74-year-old Jamaican immigrant and former professional toy designer, says he is still a collaborator and a compromiser with a lifetime of experience building coalitions. Although he views himself as a solid Democrat — he’s pro-choice, pro-immigrant, and supports gun-control measures and Joe Biden’s reelection — he is no radical, and he’s open to working across the aisle. If elected, he hopes to have coffee or tea with every other member of Congress.
“We’re just going to talk about growing up, and what do you remember about what your mom said, or what made you who you are,” he said.
Samuels doesn’t want to be a bridge-builder, he said. He actually wants to be the bridge.
Omar, on the other hand, “hasn’t changed her spots,” he said.
She remains a divisive and problematic figure, he said — an agitator who supported defunding the police during a massive crime wave, who campaigned against Minneapolis’s Democratic mayor, who engages in political stunts, who has made antisemitic and anti-American comments, who opposed the Biden-backed infrastructure bill and a Russian oil embargo.
In a recent interview with the Star Tribune, Samuels said Omar has since “dug a deeper hole” with her response to Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliation — she was one of only ten members of the House to oppose a resolution condemning “Hamas’ brutal war against Israel” and reaffirming Israel’s right to self-defense, and she has introduced legislation opposing American military support for what she has deemed Israel’s “war crimes in Gaza.”
Samuels accused Omar of taking a “one-sided view of the struggle.” While most people were “outraged and appalled” by the brutal slaughter of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists, Omar “didn’t have that reaction,” Samuels said. “She had to be goaded into it.”
“On the other hand, she is strident, passionate on the issue of Palestine,” he said.
Samuels, a supporter of a two-state solution, said he believes that Israel has been too accepting of civilian deaths in its war against Hamas and believes the IDF needs to act with more precision. But he considers Israel to be an important American ally.
“From everything she’s said and done, she doesn’t seem to,” he said of Omar. “She claims to be for justice and against oppression. But it really seems that she is against Israel.”
Samuels has also taken aim at Omar for emboldening criminals at home.
Omar called the Minneapolis Police Department “rotten to the root” in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, and supported a failed ballot initiative to disband the department. Samuels, on the other hand, has been a long-time public-safety advocate in his North Minneapolis neighborhood, and a strong supporter of hiring more and better police officers.
If elected, he said, he would continue to prioritize public safety, including by helping cities in distress to attract and train new law-enforcement recruits.
Combatting homelessness and the housing crisis by steering money to shelters and low-income housing is also a priority, Samuels said. He also believes that Congress has a role in helping to improve struggling school systems. Inner-city families shouldn’t have to move to the suburbs or a whiter neighborhood so their kids can get a good education, he said.
“Black families, especially, are still finding the only way to improvement is to move. The federal government is not stepping in to say, ‘Stay right where you are, and we’re going to make it good for you right there,’” he said. “We need to do whatever we can to make sure that inner-city public schools are producing good outcomes for children, by stabilizing their lives and putting the things around them that make for the kind of stability that can free up their minds.”
Samuels has drawn the ire of far-left activists in the past for criticizing public schools for failing black children, and for supporting school choice and vouchers.
“Education is a big, big deal for me,” Samuels said.
Omar has pushed back against Samuels for painting himself as a moderate voice of reason in the Democratic Party. “Don Samuels has never been a voice of reason on anything,” she recently told the Nation.
Last year, her campaign attempted to paint Samuels as a corporate-backed conservative. She noted to the Star Tribune that he received a donation from Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Samuels insists he doesn’t know Crow — “I wouldn’t recognize a picture of it if I saw it” — and said that Republicans who support him know what they’re getting: a Democrat who might not agree with them on everything, but who doesn’t view them as enemies.
“People see things in such binary ways,” he said. “They feel that if you are for the poor … you have to see rich people as the enemy. If you are a Democrat, you have to see Republicans as the enemy. That is not my world. I’m too old for that.”
As a congressman, he said, his job would be to serve everyone in his district. He accuses Omar of providing poor constituent service, and of being unwilling to engage with people who don’t agree with her leftist politics — she refused to debate him last year.
Omar’s supporters have suggested that because 2024 is a presidential year, the district’s progressive voters will be more engaged than they were last year. Only about 27 percent of voters turned out to vote in the 2022 primary.
Samuels thinks more engagement actually benefits him — he believes he is the more mainstream candidate, and the more the Democratic primary electorate resembles a general election electorate the better. He needs mainstream voters in the district to realize that “the primary is, in fact, the race. And they won’t get a chance in a Democratic-dominated district to make a real choice if they don’t vote in the primary.”
Samuels also pushed back on the idea that a boomer in his mid-70s is too old to run.
He called himself “fresh,” “vigorous,” “strong,” and “excited.” And While Omar has been “baked” in politics her adult whole life, he said, he didn’t really come to politics until he was 50.
“I came into it with a full life involved in private industry, owning my own business, and reflecting on a world in a non-political way,” he said.
Too many younger Americans, he said, are struggling with cynicism about democracy and the future of the country. Samuels said he still believes in the promise of America.
“I’m still carrying the flame, baby,” he said. “I’m still believing that America is a great country, and in many ways is a beacon for the rest of the world. And that it can get better, and it will get better, if we believe and put ourselves shoulders to the wheel.”