Star Tribune
Twin Cities sorority members and Howard alumni host parties for Harris as results tick in
Black sorority members gathered to watch election results Tuesday night at a Golden Valley house party while at the same time alumni from historically Black colleges met in St. Paul to see whether Vice President Kamala Harris would shatter several glass ceilings to become the nation’s first female Black president.
Harris has been a member of the nation’s first Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., since she attended Howard University, where the sorority was founded. Her candidacy has galvanized Black sorority members nationwide, who have thrown parties and events across the country to get out the vote. Harris’s presidential run has also empowered those who have attended historically black colleges and universities or HBCUs.
“I just think it’s so significant. … We are on the verge of electing the first woman president, the first Black woman president,” said Kareem Murphy, 52, of Minneapolis, at a watch party at Pimento Jamaican Kitchen in downtown St. Paul on Tuesday. “But she’s a black college grad. She’s a HBCU grad. She’s a Howard University grad. It means the world for us to come into community to celebrate this moment.”
Murphy, a 1994 Howard University graduate, is a member of a Twin Cities Howard University alumni group who helped organize the watch party at Pimento, where attendees danced and ate as they waited for voting results to be tallied.
As polls began to close throughout the United States, about two dozen Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters held a “sister circle” at an apartment party room in Golden Valley as they supported each other while anxiously watching election results trickle in between spontaneous line dances and a buffet of chips, brownies and snacks.
Stephanie Burrage, 56, president of the sorority’s Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter, said the sorority has done a lot to get out the vote. As a nonprofit, the organization isn’t allowed to endorse candidates but instead, it focuses on voter education.
Burrage worked for Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, as the state’s chief equity officer before leaving last summer. She has met Harris.
“I have been with her previously, and what I have witnessed of her ability to share her plan to discuss what she will do for the American people, I have been impressed with,” she said.
Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Natalie Hudson and Justice Karl Procaccini both held commanding leads early Wednesday in the only two contested races on the state’s high court.
Throughout the whole statewide judiciary, only nine sitting judges were up for election against challengers, and some of those races were too close to call as 1 a.m. approached. Six of the contests involved district court judges in the Twin Cities, central Minnesota and up north.
On the state’s Court of Appeals, incumbent Judge Diane Bratvold was leading comfortably over challenger Jonathan Woolsey of Chaska. She began serving on the Appeals Court in 2016 and was elected to a six-year term in 2018.
Hudson, appointed as the court’s first Black chief justice last fall, was challenged by Stephen Emery, who has run for multiple offices. With 87% of precincts reporting, she garnered 63.5% of the vote. Hudson served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court since 2015 and previously served 13 years on the state’s Court of Appeals.
Procaccini, appointed in August 2023 by Gov. Tim Walz, was running against lawyer Matthew R. Hanson, who two years ago ran unsuccessfully against Scott County Judge Charles Webber. Procaccini served as general counsel to Walz for four years beginning in 2019, helping the governor navigate the pandemic.
Hanson stressed in his campaign that he would be independent from the governor’s office. With 83% of precincts reporting, he drew 43% of votes to 57% for Procaccini.
Supreme Court Justice Anne McKeig, first appointed in 2016 and elected in 2018, was on the ballot without opposition.
In the Tenth Judicial District, Judge Helen Brosnahan held a lead in her first election after being appointed to the bench by Walz in 2022. Her challenger, Nathan Hansen, is a solo practitioner who received Republican party assistance as the party’s recommended candidate. The Tenth Judicial District covers Anoka, Washington, Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Pine, Sherburne and Wright counties.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz were poised to win Minnesota’s electoral votes on Tuesday, but there was little to celebrate as a path to nationwide victory looked narrow.
Neither Harris-Walz nor former President Donald Trump and running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, spent much time campaigning in the state. Republicans had pledged to turn Minnesota red for the first time since 1972, but polls consistently showed Harris-Walz with a slim but steady lead.
Late into the evening Tuesday, the returns looked far less promising for the Democrats.
If elected, Harris would be the first female president and Walz would be the third Minnesotan elected to the vice presidency.
Harris and Walz ran a compressed campaign as she tapped him for the ticket in early August shortly after President Joe Biden stepped aside and just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Walz sought to join Minnesota’s favorite sons, the late vice presidents Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey, who served, respectively, with former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson.
Voting in north Minneapolis Tuesday, Joseph Thomas, 39, said he chose Harris and cited equality, help with housing and taxes as issues he cared about most. He also liked that Harris could be the first female president: “That was a big deal, too,” he said.
At Martin Luther King Recreation Center in St. Paul, Kate Kulzer walked her dog, a Catahoula leopard dog named Rhubarb, and dropped her fiancé off to vote about an hour before polls closed. Kulzer had voted for Harris earlier in the day – but she considered it a vote against Trump.
Less than half of the results in the presidential race in were reported in Minnesota just before 11 p.m. The first race call in Minnesota — Seventh District Rep. Michelle Fischbach’s re-election — came after 10 p.m., two hours after polls closed.
So what caused the delay in reporting results? In 2023, the deadline for receiving absentee ballots was extended from 3 to 8 p.m. That change is causing results to be posted later, said Cassondra Knudson, the spokeswoman for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.
“Most counties are expected to process the absentee ballots received by 8 p.m. before reporting any election results,” Knudson wrote in a statement about the deadline changes.
So far, some state races have almost all of the results posted, while others have a long way to go to be called. Nearly 1.3 million absentee ballots had been accepted, according to the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office. There are nearly 3.7 million registered voters in Minnesota.
