MINNEAPOLIS — Democrats on Thursday accused a Republican-endorsed candidate for the Minnesota Senate of condoning political violence, when he talked concerning the want for “voting with the ballot before we have to vote with bullets.”
The candidate, Stephen Lowell, countered that he wasn’t advocating violence however as a substitute merely warning about what can occur when folks lose religion of their authorities.
Video posted on his marketing campaign social media and recirculated by the state Democratic Party confirmed Lowell, of Eagan, making the remarks final month at a Dakota County Patriots occasion.
“We need to grow our teeth back. Fast,” Lowell informed the group. “So, part of those teeth, in this particular set of terms, is voting with the ballot before we have to vote with bullets. Because at the end of the day, when people don’t believe that their elections are stable, they don’t believe that police will protect them, they stop using the democratic, of any kind, method. … And so we have to bring back that faith, and we have to come out and vote.”
DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin denounced Lowell’s remarks as “violent” and “dehumanizing” and referred to as on Republicans to ship a robust sign that such rhetoric gained’t be tolerated.
Lowell, a libertarian conservative, denied that that was what he meant.
“The purpose of the statement I made was the degree to which societies tend to degrade when people don’t have faith in the government in a very broad and general level,” Lowell mentioned in an interview, citing the French Revolution. “At the end of the day, the point is when people don’t feel like their government represents them, countries get very unstable.”
Lowell, a draftsman who’s making his first run for workplace, is difficult Democratic Sen. Jim Carlson, of Eagan, who was first elected in 2006. Their largely Democratic district contains Eagan, Burnsville and parts of different suburbs.
Lowell informed the group on the Dakota County occasion that he helped guard a Minneapolis tobacco store throughout the riots that adopted the homicide of George Floyd in 2020. He mentioned within the interview that the arson and looting occurred as a result of folks misplaced religion within the police.
“I imagine that loss of faith in our government as a whole would be much, much worse,” he mentioned.
