What Minnesota’s Fifth District Race Reveals About the State of Identity Politics

At 17, I—a hijab-wearing politics obsessed child of Sudanese immigrants growing up in the eastern suburbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities—related to thousands of American Muslims who saw Somalia-born American politician Ilhan Omar’s 2018 election to the House of Representatives as a shifting tide for political representation. I suddenly felt like a new political door had opened—one flung open to bring in the diversity of people like me.

Six years later, Minnesota’s Fifth District is ushering in more firsts as Republican challenger, the Iraqi-born journalist-turned-politician Dalia al-Aqidi, makes this congressional race the first to be contested by two Muslims in U.S. history. In fact, Omar's near-guaranteed victory has left this historic race underreported.

Even still, Minnesota’s fifth holds valuable insight into patterns replicated nationally when it comes to how representation shapes—or better yet, is shaped by—our leaders. What was once enthusiasm for a diverse political class has turned into a cautionary tale of how politicians’, in this case the Republican Party, use of candidates like al-Aqidi—ethnic and religious minorities that parrot the party’s mainstream agenda—without seriously engaging with the political nuances of minority communities.

Al-Aqidi faces an uphill battle, campaigning in a district that hasn’t gone red since 1963, where about 40% of the population are minorities and an estimated 15% are first-generation immigrants—Omar and al-Aqidi included. With dozens of mentions of her opponent by name (not including retweets) since Omar’s Aug. 13 primary victory and a video of Omar splashed across her campaign front page, al-Aqidi has capitalized on the candidates’ shared minority backgrounds to set herself apart as a “common sense,” all-American Muslim who is diametrically opposed to Omar’s supposed “pro-Hamas,” “radical” and “divisive” agenda.

Al-Aqidi claims her rival divides the district with “identity politics.” but misses that it is Omar’s progressive policies, not just her identity, that largely underpins her appeal. The district is known for its left leanings, driven by its young median age of 34, with Millennials and Generation Z making up 48% of the district’s voting bloc. The Fifth District also has the largest population of Somali Americans nationwide and constantly growing Muslim and immigrant populations, so it makes sense this district elected the first Muslim ever to Congress, the now-Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, in 2006. Minneapolis also became the first major U.S. city to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer five times a day, highlighting the deep roots of the town’s Muslim population and their involvement with local politics.

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While GOP support of minority candidates looks like an effort to bring more diversity into the Republican Party, candidates like al-Aqidi, who simply adhere to the right-wing agenda, doesn’t represent the concerns of the groups they’re a part of. Case in point: Al Aqidi’s Muslim faith is constantly prefaced with the qualifier “secular,” by both the candidate and Republican leadership, as though to soften the blow.

Robert McCaw, the Governmental Affairs Director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), put it best when he told me, “I would love to see the dictionary definition of what a secular Muslim is.”

Tokenism is not representation. But al-Aqidi seems to have become the prime tokenized Muslim for the GOP. Her role as a co-founder of the Clarity Coalition, a group led by rightwing Muslims and ex-Muslims who “reject the acceptance of and justifications for jihad, the use of dawa for political purposes, and advocacy for the institutionalization of sharia” employs the same dog whistles long used by the right to designate Muslims as an “other”, and relies on the public interpretation of mainstream Islam as a threat to Western civilization.

In fact, al-Aqidi has built a reputation on calling CAIR, the largest civil rights organization for American Muslims, “terrorists in suits”—with both the Minnesota chapter and national organization blocking her on X.

This tokenism reveals a concerning underbelly in how Republican leadership embraces minority candidates. Alec Beck, the Chair of the Fifth Congressional District’s GOP, said, “I'm not an expert on Omar or what she thinks, but I like that Dalia presents her Islam very differently.”

The al-Aqidi campaign has not shied away from positioning Omar as a “radical Islamist” or “terrorist sympathizer,” with al-Aqidi even tweeting “@IlhanMN I’ve never seen a woman who is so fascinated by terrorists like you. And I’ve interviewed ISIS brides.” This inflammatory rhetoric has alienated many in the District who use their Muslim faith to inform their voting, ostracized by one of their own.

Michael Minta, Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, explained that candidates need to have positions that reflect their communities. “You can’t just say ‘I’m Muslim.’ That’s not going to be enough.” 

That memo’s not reached area Republicans though. Al-Aqidi’s run fails to comprehensively address issues relevant to the community. They actually often run counter to the views of the constituents she hopes to represent. Her online presence is almost entirely focused on supporting Israel and its ongoing assault on Gaza and now Lebanon. On public safety, a difficult issue in the district that witnessed the police murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests in 2020, al-Aqidi’s approach has fallen short of responding to community needs. Her platform failed to consider the grassroots efforts to reinvent community safety practices or hold police unions accountable, led by community organizers that show the important public safety issues in the district. Instead, al-Aqidi and Minneapolis Republicans saw Omar’s support to defund the police in 2020 and decided that “refund the police” was a more appropriate route. 

With al-Aqidi all but certain to lose in November, critical questions of why the Republican party put her up to the task still remain. Scholar Stephanie Chambers, co-author of Ilhan Omar: Breaking Barriers for Muslim, Somali American and Immigrant Women, says that gender and politics literature theory suggested that, historically, “party leaders would run women as sacrificial lambs when they knew that the race was not competitive.” She added that the theory had been largely discarded.

But Omar and al-Aqidi’s face-off begs the question: should this theory be given new life to include candidates of minority backgrounds, too?

The Fifth District’s recent elections bear this out. The district’s Republicans hold no city council or state legislature seats and are lucky to receive even 25% of the vote–typically from area suburbs, according to Beck. And in every election since 2020, the local Republican party has supported candidates of color: Cicely Davis in the 2022 midterm and Lacy Johnson in the 2020 general election. The problem is that they’ve done so without altering their stances to reflect their constituents.

The reality is that Omar’s identity is definitively not the driving force behind her success here, and Republicans are discrediting her—and their own candidates—in assuming so. While some voters hold an emotional attachment to Omar’s Somali background, her lively support is built on her consistent track record. Her website boasts her support for the Green New Deal, student debt relief and police reform—echoing an unwavering commitment to the policies that unify the most Democratic district in the Upper Midwest. She visited the Uncommitted movement’s sit-in outside of the Democratic National Convention this past August to support calls for a Palestinian American to address the convention. Her office receives thousands of calls for constituent help—and in addressing complex immigration issues, her team has been so determined that local immigration attorneys usher clients to them—asking “have you called Omar?”

To Minta, identity is a contributor to political ideology—but not the sole factor. “Does a person’s lived experience bring something to the table? My research shows that it does matter. But parties have to be reflective.” 

The Republican Party in the fifth district of Minnesota has not reflected their community. It has not understood what candidates like al-Aqidi could bring by engaging with the communities that they seek to govern.

Identity does matter. But when our leaders reduce them to single categories on a checklist, the complexities that accompany them are diminished.

Is this the final nail in the coffin for what we know to be “identity politics?” Maybe. Maybe not. But if it keeps getting warped in this way, when its time does finally come to a close, I, for one, will not mourn.