Wrong About Free Press!

So, as I mentioned, we are here 30, 39, what is it? We got about 30, about 40 days, give or take, yeah, before the election.

November 3rd is the day.

And let's cue up the story about the spending of that is being undertaken by candidates and by others to influence voters in the state.

There was a story this morning about, or actually rather a couple of days ago, rather in Star Tribune by Brianna Biersbach about some of the spending in one of the, I think universally accepted as one of the most competitive Senate races in Minnesota, that being the Senate District 3 held by Senator Grant Hauschild in Northeast Minnesota.

in this quote from this story, by our tally, at least $1.3 million has been deployed in Senate District 3, the enormous northern Minnesota district where first-term DFL Senator Grant Hauschild is facing Republican Andrea Zupanzich, the mayor of Babbitt, in a rematch of their extremely close 2022 contest.

Both sides are currently on television, which makes sense once you see how much money is sloshing around the race.

Guys, we've all been around.

The notion of $1.3 million, I'm sure by now it's well over $1.5 million, being dropped on a single race for the Minnesota Senate seems simultaneously like a snoozer of a story and also kind of a An interesting observation, given what a senator makes each year, for example.

What do you all think about the Senate and the race for the legislature and spending more broadly? Well,

I mean, I think that what we've seen is that as Minnesota gets more definitely blue or definitely red, depending on which district you're in, there are fewer and fewer districts where actually it makes any sense to spend money because the outcome is somewhat predetermined.

There are two, three, four, five districts, tops, where you have a chance to either flip a seat from blue to red or red to blue.

The current makeup of the Minnesota Senate is 34 Democrats, 33 Republicans.

So every seat does absolutely matter.

And this is not the first time we've had, you know, a million dollars spent in a seat.

But, you know, it's a little bit the way of the world.

And I have a hard time limiting, you know, speech.

Funny what we're going to talk about later, but I have a hard time limiting speech when it comes to money, but it does seem like more money is being spent than the impact that it actually has.

You kind of get pretty – especially in a district like that, you just can get – I mean, what else could you say about about Zupanich or or Housechild? And this is at some point just people like us making money, you know, churning the file.

So I don't know.

That's kind of world according to Brian.

I mean, the one thing we can say for it, though, is that it is it is an extremely big district.

So that particular race, at least there is that component to explain the vast expenditures, right? Because like every message needs to reach a very large geography.

But yeah, no, this is another race this year with like incredible amounts of money going into it.

And

we have to wonder if the impact that all this money has ultimately on the democracy itself.