Star Tribune Opinion Alumni

The Minnesota Star Tribune is among several large U.S. newspapers that are not doing presidential endorsements. In fact, at least for now, the Star Tribune has stopped doing all endorsements.

In response, 15 of us — most of whom used to research, interview, debate, write and edit political endorsements and the counterpoint letters and commentary that followed — wrote the following and submitted it as a commentary to the Star Tribune this week.

We aimed to do what the newspaper we care deeply about had decided not to do. We wrote the editorial that we think the paper should have published Oct. 27. We added an introduction that explained why we think endorsements are important. The Star Tribune declined to publish our full submission, offering only to print the introduction as a letter to the editor, which we declined.

In support of free speech, press freedom and robust public debate on critical issues of the day, we’re now sharing what we wrote via other means:

The authors of this editorial, the one we assert that our beloved Star Tribune should have run Sunday, are former Star Tribune editorial page writers, editors, one celebrated cartoonist, one former Star Tribune board chair and one columnist whose work continues to appear on the editorial pages.

When we left the newspaper, each of us had the experience of watching the traditions we had upheld for some or all of our careers go through a process of change. We were all professional enough to know that nothing stays the same.

Yet none of us was prepared for the change announced last August when Star Tribune management revealed that the newspaper would no longer offer endorsements in political races. Given the newspaper’s history of holding public officials accountable, it seems perverse to not hold former President Donald Trump to account for his divisive and preposterous performance in office and to withhold an endorsement from his opponent. Surely, readers of the Star Tribune would expect a full-throated editorial opposing his return.

Now the Star Tribune has company in its decision; the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to withhold endorsements in the presidential race. Some executives have justified their decisions by saying a version of the following: It’s not up to us to tell readers how to vote. That’s a stunningly uninformed view. We have never told readers what to think or how to vote.

What we have done is share our thoughts and our values on the issues of the day. We did this because we care deeply about our communities and our nation. We wrote endorsement editorials to demonstrate our deep investment in those communities and in that nation. We took seriously the due diligence and integrity we owed readers as we weighed issues and deliberated positions. When we arrived at agreement on an issue, we did so by consensus. Our work was informed by the institutional memory of the newspaper, going back decades. If we changed a long-held position, we felt duty bound to explain why. All of our work – the writing, the editing, the cartoon drawing – was meant to support our readers in their civic lives. Thus, for our newspaper to stand silent in the face of the 2024 presidential election – and all the state and local elections as well – expressing no opinion on who we believe should prevail is unconscionable. The sad irony in that silence is that if Trump prevails, he will pose a severe threat to our free press.

We stand in solidarity with our industry colleagues. As a sign of our support, we offer the following endorsement editorial:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

On Nov. 5, voters must choose between one candidate who respects the rule of law, and one who doesn’t. One who possesses personal characteristics like integrity, honesty and honor, and one who doesn’t. One who abides by the norms of civilized behavior in a democratic republic, and one who trashes the norms, flouts tradition and makes a mockery of virtues like courtesy and a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. Every presidential election carries enormous importance, but this year’s stands in a class all its own: Do we vote to preserve our democracy and to embrace an invigorating “new way forward,” or do we choose to elevate to the highest office in the land a man who has threatened over and over to end that democracy?

We choose the joy, the hope, the “opportunity economy” that will seek to lift up all Americans and stomp down the efforts of an arrogant, self-absorbed group of billionaires that seeks through Donald Trump to kill democracy and install a plutocracy that reserves for themselves most of America’s wealth and all of its political power.

We endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president of the United States and our own Gov. Tim Walz for vice president. We wish Harris had been tested in a series of primary elections that would have given everyone an opportunity to know her better. But that circumstance was not of her choosing, and in the few months since she became the Democratic nominee, she has worked hard to tell us who she is and what she would do as our president. She has pledged to make building up the middle class a defining goal of her presidency and has laid out in detail how she proposes to do that. If you need a primer before you vote, read “A New Way Forward” at https://kamalaharris.com/issues/

A similarly important goal of her presidency would be building a firewall around American women’s right to comprehensive reproductive medical care – indeed, around the entirety of women’s right to agency in every aspect of their lives. Harris would seek to reverse state policies that have put women’s lives and health and freedom at severe risk. Conservative writer David Frum, who writes for The Atlantic, captured the importance of this when he wrote, “I dropped my ballot in the mailbox today. It was my signature on the form, but it was my daughter’s vote I placed inside the envelope.”

Harris is so right for our nation at this moment. Her candidacy represents an opportunity, as she says, to find a new way forward, a way filled with strong policies to lift up all of the people.

Donald Trump is so wrong for this nation at this moment and at every moment. If you doubt it, sample the videos of his rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, a rally designed to mimic the Nazi rally held there on Feb. 20, 1939. Hear Trump adviser Stephen Miller proclaim that, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a deliberate, word-for-word imitation of a trope from Germany in 1934 that asserted, “Germany is for Germans and Germans only.”

Most of the American national media have failed our nation during this campaign, downplaying Donald Trump’s outrages and his clearly diminishing mental stability. But the New York Times has come around finally to confronting the existential threat that Trump and his followers pose for our beloved nation. In Sunday’s newspaper, the Times ran an editorial that carried this headline: “Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, play politics with disasters, abandon allies. Believe him.” Even that statement, so calm and dignified, fails to capture the horror in store if Trump is again elevated to the presidency. He would debase our national character and almost certainly end the American experiment.

Trump has elevated dishonesty and braggadocio to a personal brand. He characterizes himself as the greatest expert, the smartest mind, the only person whose opinion truly matters. His lies range from great to small, comprising both alleged criminal acts and petty grievances. We now know that his attempt to cling to power after his electoral defeat in 2020 was a premeditated strategy. And we know he has set in place a plan to do it again following the election coming in just eight days. He alluded to that plan most recently at the Madison Square Garden rally.

Trump’s steadfast repetition of the lie that he won reelection in 2020 has somehow succeeded in persuading not only his core followers but also the Republican Party’s leaders to perpetuate the lie. The deception has been accomplished at great cost to the country’s faith in its elections and in its institutions, especially the Justice Department and the courts. Trump has built his power through a constant stream of lies and appeals to the worst impulses in his people. Those who worked closely with him during his administration – whose presence gave him the slightest veneer of respectability and restrained his behavior to the extent possible – flatly say that he is unfit to hold office. In recent days, a number also have confirmed that he is, as retired chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley said, “fascist to the core.”

The United States does not need an imitator of 1930s fascism in the White House. We reject the hate and division sowed by Trump and instead embrace the optimism, the joy and the opportunity to heal our nation’s political rifts that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz offer.

Susan Albright, editorial page editor 1993-2007

Steve Berg, editorial writer 1998-2007

Jim Boyd, deputy editorial page editor 1982-2007

Scott Gillespie, editorial page editor 2007-2024

Dave Hage, editorial writer 1995-2007

Lisa Hoff, letters editor, copy editor 1986-2010

Jim Lenfestey, editorial writer 1992-1998

Ron Meador, editorial writer 1995-2007

Tim O’Brien, letters editor 2000-2010

Eric Ringham, commentary editor 1982-2009

Steve Sack, editorial cartoonist 1980-2022

Michael T.P. Sweeney, Star Tribune board chair 2009-2014

Kate Stanley, editorial writer 1980-2007

Lori Sturdevant, editorial writer 1992-2018, columnist 2000-present

Susan Wolkerstorfer, copy editor/deputy commentary editor 1990-2007