I regret that Democrat Angie Craig represents me in Congress. In 2020 she narrowly defeated Tyler Kistner in the race for Minnesota’s Second District seat. I hope Kistner can pull it off this time around, but it’s an uphill battle in the Twin Cities and the media environment doesn’t help. At the local Fox affiliate, for example, Theo Keith has served up a couple of purported fact-checks of ads supporting Kistner.
I don’t believe Keith has gotten around to Craig’s ad below. I pulled the ad off Craig’s YouTube channel. Although Craig is a party-line Democrat vote, Craig touts her appeal to Republicans such as Dave in the ad — because she supports pharmaceutical price controls that benefit Dave’s wife.
Craig holds Dave out as a “lifelong Republican.” When I saw the ad on local television over the weekend, however, I thought Dave didn’t sound like much of a Republican. I thought he sounded like a faking phony. We await Keith’s fact-check.
Until then we have Joseph Simonson’s assessment at the Washington Free Beacon. Simonson found that Dave’s last name is Vesledahl and that “Vesledahl’s claim that he’s a ‘lifelong Republican’ is…contradicted by the fact that he voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, according to voter files obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.”
And, by the way, Dave no longer lives in the district either. “The Craig campaign acknowledged that Vesledahl lives in the neighboring first district, and therefore can’t vote for Craig.”
The Craig spokesman contacted by Simonson put it this way: “Dave describes himself as a lifelong Republican, and his voter file registers him as a ‘Lean Republican[.]’” (The term “voter file” is not self-explanatory. It is a commercial product with no official or authoritative status.)
Others would describe Dave as a Democrat shill. Others would find it symbolic that fake “moderate” Democrat Craig had to reach beyond the boundaries of her district to find fake Republican Dave to express his support for her.
