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Mike Winter (Minnesota)
Mike Winter (Independence-Alliance Party of Minnesota) ran for election for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota. He lost in the general election on November 8, 2022.
Elections
2022
See also: Minnesota gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2022
General election
General election for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
The following candidates ran in the general election for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Peggy Flanagan (D) | 52.3 | 1,312,349 |
 | Matt Birk (R) | 44.6 | 1,119,941 | |
 | David Sandbeck (Legal Marijuana Now Party) | 1.2 | 29,346 | |
| Matt Huff (Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota) | 0.9 | 22,599 | ||
 | Mike Winter (Independence-Alliance Party of Minnesota) | 0.7 | 18,156 | |
| Kevin A. Dwire (Socialist Workers Party) | 0.3 | 7,241 | ||
| Kent Edwards (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 11 | ||
| Lance Hegland (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 5 | ||
| Al Smith (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 4 | ||
| Olamide Jubril (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 0 | ||
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.0 | 1,009 | ||
| Total votes: 2,510,661 | |||
 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Tamara Uselman (Independent)
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
Incumbent Peggy Flanagan defeated Julia Parker in the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Peggy Flanagan | 96.5 | 416,973 |
| Julia Parker | 3.5 | 14,950 | ||
| Total votes: 431,923 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
Matt Birk defeated Kent Edwards and Captain Jack Sparrow in the Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Matt Birk | 89.3 | 288,499 |
| Kent Edwards | 6.6 | 21,308 | ||
 | Captain Jack Sparrow | 4.1 | 13,213 | |
| Total votes: 323,020 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary election
Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
Matt Huff defeated Ed Engelmann in the Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Matt Huff | 59.1 | 1,003 | |
| Ed Engelmann | 40.9 | 693 | ||
| Total votes: 1,696 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Legal Marijuana Now Party primary election
Legal Marijuana Now Party primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
David Sandbeck defeated L.C. Lawrence Converse in the Legal Marijuana Now Party primary for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | David Sandbeck | 51.9 | 1,461 |
| L.C. Lawrence Converse | 48.1 | 1,356 | ||
| Total votes: 2,817 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Campaign finance
2021
Elections in Minneapolis are officially nonpartisan, but the Minneapolis City Charter allows mayoral and city council candidates to choose a party label to appear below their name on the official ballot. Ballotpedia includes candidates' party or principle to best reflect what voters will see on their ballot.[1]
See also: Mayoral election in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2021)
General election
General election for Mayor of Minneapolis
The ranked-choice voting election was won by Jacob Frey in round 2 . The results of Round are displayed below. To see the results of other rounds, use the dropdown menu above to select a round and the table will update.
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Total votes: 143,974 |
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| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Mike Winter did not complete Ballotpedia's 2022 Candidate Connection survey.
Campaign website
Winter's campaign website stated the following:
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Jury Democracy “Effectively, I will not be governor—WE ALL WILL BE! I will give the power to you!” What would be the characteristics of an ideal government? It would produce decisions in this way:
Obviously, our current system falls short of these goals. But that is necessary, right? We do not have time for everyone in society to stop their lives to carefully consider all the evidence on every issue that our government has to decide.
Jury Democracy is a system of government of having large juries (about 500 to 2,000 persons) of randomly selected citizens, where the juries constitute statistically valid samples of the citizenry or voters, make policy decisions for government after seeing full informed debate on the policy, being given full information for and against the policy, and fully deliberating and discussing the decision with equally informed citizens in the same jury. For bills enacted into law, the jury can replace one house of the elected legislature or be added as an additional house of the legislature or replace the elected legislature entirely, so every law to be enacted must be approved by a citizen jury. The jury would hear full debate from both or all sides on a proposed bill, be given all the facts and information for and against whatever bill is being considered, just like a jury in a civil or criminal trial is given, be given the required time to read the bill in full (which would already make them better informed than most legislators or congresspeople), then break into smaller subgroups of 12 persons and deliberate and argue for and against the bill under consideration within that subgroup of 12, and then each juror would vote in secret for or against the bill, with a vote in favor of 55% required for passage of a bill. A 55% requirement for passage would insure at least majority support had one been able to convene every voting-age citizen or registered voter into the jury for the same deliberations because it would be outside the statistical margin of error, which would be less than ±5% with a group of 500 or more. Each jury would be called for just one vote or issue and serve for only the time needed to consider that vote or issue, which in most cases would be only one or two days. In this way, each citizen would be invited for this jury service no more often than once per year. Probably we should shoot for about once ever four years to not burden people too much. Participation would be voluntary. In addition to considering bills to be passed into statutes, as the legislature does, large citizen juries can also consider and decide proposed regulations and regulatory decisions, as the executive branch does, and can supersede or constitute the supreme court to decide judicial decisions and the constitutionality of laws, as the judicial branch does. Jury Democracy is an improvement on traditional elected representative democracy because:
Jury Democracy is an improvement on referendum and initiative because:
My other name for Jury Democracy is “Government by Informed Consent” because every decision is made and enacted only if it has the consent of a majority of citizens after the citizens have been given full information and taken the time for full consideration of the decision. In other words, no policy (statute, regulation, regulatory decision, or final judicial decision) can be enacted without the informed consent of a majority of the citizens the policy is being imposed on. As Governor, before I sign any important or controversial bill into law, I will submit it to a citizen jury of at least 500 people. If the jury approves the bill, I will sign it into law; if it rejects the bill, I will veto it. Effectively, I will not be governor—WE ALL WILL BE! I will give the power to you! I will also submit my own bills to juries for consideration and invite non-profits and interest groups of all political persuasions to draft bills and submit them to juries for consideration. We should also have every elected legislator, whether in the majority or a minority party, have the right to submit a bill to a jury once during every 2-year period. All types of ideas can be considered, no matter how far outside the box or outside what is deemed acceptable opinion by our elites. Collectively, we have an enormous number of great ideas out there! Let’s give them a hearing! I will also use a large jury and have its decision be binding for every important regulatory decision. Do we allow a wolf hunt? I believe absolutely not! But I am willing to submit it to a citizen jury and be bound by its decision. Do we allow a copper-nickel mine to be developed and potentially (in reality, certainly) pollute our surface waters and ground waters for centuries, whether the Boundary Waters or Lake Superior, or other waters? Again, I would say no. In fact, I would say “over my dead body.” But I would have a jury hear the issue. I am confident it would reach the right decision.
Our real goal in life is happiness. Promoting happiness should be the primary goal of government, and it will be in my administration. The Declaration of Independence says that the purpose of government is to promote “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Strangely, it does not mention maximizing GDP growth. What is the primary goal in life? I think it is happiness. Ultimately, each of us primarily wants to be happy. We want money, a good romantic relationship, friends, a meaningful job, a great new phone, a million TikTok followers, and other things, but we want those ultimately because we think they will make us happy. (By happiness of course, I do not mean just pleasure but something deeper than that. And I should say that to become happy, perhaps the best strategy is to focus on others and making them happy.) Since happiness is our primary goal as people, it should also be the primary goal of government. I don’t think it is. Our government and our system behave like their primary goal is maximizing aggregate GDP growth—not even per capita GDP or individual economic wellbeing but just aggregate GDP, the total size of the economy. That will not be my primary goal as governor; my primary goal will be to increase the average level of happiness or per capita happiness, including especially minimizing depression and loneliness. We should measure and track those things with at least as much care and specificity as we measure and track economic measures like GDP. That is how you should judge me as governor and that is how Tim Walz should be judged as governor. We are a social species and most of our happiness comes from interacting with other people. But the lockdown response chosen by Tim Walz and Anthony Fauci was to deliberately isolate everyone from each other -- order everyone to stay home, close restaurants, bars, churches, health clubs, schools, and businesses, and for the businesses that remained open order everyone to work from home if possible. And order everyone to wear masks so we cannot see each other’s faces. The policy was literally to reduce contact with other human beings as much as possible and, for the contact that cannot be prevented, order people to wear masks so they cannot see each other’s faces. If you wanted a policy deliberately designed to make people unhappy, you could not have come up with a better policy. And it succeeded. We went from 8% of the U.S. population in major depression pre-lockdowns to 27% in the midst of lockdowns. We chose to throw 63 million Americans into major clinical depression in a failed attempt to reduce upper respiratory tract infections from a disease 1.7 times deadlier than the flu. Tim Walz and Anthony Fauci effectively chose to maximize depression. I will choose to minimize it. So here are a few proposals to promote happiness: (1) Do the opposite of every policy of the lockdowns:
(2) Replace the Mask Mandate with a Name Tag Request! . I cannot take credit for this idea. I think Kramer on Seinfeld first suggested it. I would propose that the state officially ask all of us to wear a name tag like this: The state can produce them on demand for people. These say “Minnesota Nice” on them, which I hope provides a reminder to us to be nice to one another and helps promote the state as a state with nice people. We can have blank ones available outside of stores and establishments, urging people to fill them out and wear one, the same way we had masks available outside of every store. I thought of this as a contrast to the mask mandates. Masks were a visual reminder to be afraid of one another and that we were in a supposed catastrophe and we should all be depressed. They prevented us from seeing each other smile and made both verbal and nonverbal communication more difficult and thereby discouraged bonding with people and meeting new people. A name tag request, in contrast, would help us meet and bond with one another and be a visual reminder to be nice and friendly to one another. It would promote happiness and fight loneliness and depression. (3) The "Minnesota Siesta." Walk outside for at least 15 minutes every Thursday between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, with businesses required to give all employees at least 15 minutes off in that time frame. Let's call this "The Minnesota Siesta." Again, for individuals this would be a request, not a mandate. But for businesses it would be a mandatory to give all workers at least 15 minutes off in that hour to participate. Walking is the best exercise there is and almost anyone can do it. This policy would promote being outside, exercising, and meeting others, particularly your neighbors. Other than owning a dog, those are the three best things you can do to be happier. (4) Mandatory dog ownership. Just kidding about this one. I would not make owning a dog mandatory. But it is a great way to be happier and we should promote and not discourage dog and cat ownership. Currently many apartment buildings and rental units, especially for low income people, do not allow dog or cat ownership. I would require all rental buildings with 5 or more units to allow both dogs and cats in at least 80% of their units and rental housing with fewer than 5 units to pay a tax on each unit where they choose to forbid dog or cat ownership. Some of these proposals may strike you as whimsical, but I am serious about them. Ordinary politicians propose tax breaks to bring some business to town that will hopefully generate a few jobs for a few years. That does nothing to make us happier, and happiness is really what we are after in life. My proposals above really will help to make us at least a little happier, less depressed, and less lonely.
My Modest Proposal: Share the Earth with Other Species. Understanding where I stand on any issue affecting the environment is very simple. I am on the side of protecting the environment. Whatever the issue is, figure out which position would protect the environment more, and that’s my position. My core environmental proposal is the modest proposal that we simply share this state with other species, with wolves and buffalo and sandhill cranes and wood ducks and every other wild species, and that we do that by reverting 50% of our land to nature, to the primary if not exclusive use of wild species. We in Minnesota, the U.S., and the world face two crises in this century and the 20th that are the two greatest crises in human history. Those are:
These two crises are the greatest crises in the 100,000 year history of our species, far more serious than Naziism or racial discrimination or even slavery. If those purely human problems had not been solved at one time, they could still be solved later. Species loss is irreversible. We will never see those extinct species again. Global warming is also mostly irreversible. Jury Democracy I think is our best hope to solve these crises, and I have another essay here on that topic. Mass extinction is the more serious of these two crises, although it gets much less publicity than global warming. And contrary to what you read in the media, mass extinction to date has not been caused significantly by global warming. It is caused primarily by habitat loss, which in turn is caused by human overpopulation. To a lesser extent the extinctions, particularly of insects and amphibians, are caused by pesticides and herbicides and chemical contamination of the environment. In the future as global warming and climate change becomes more severe, it will contribute significantly to this mass extinction event of the 20th and 21st and 22nd centuries, but it will never surpass habitat loss as a cause. Leave half our land for the use of other species. Native prairies and undisturbed forests, meadowlarks, otters, beavers, wolves and buffalo over half the land in our state. I want to protect the environment mostly for other species, not for humans. Humans have all the power and we are perfectly capable of protecting our own interests (although we do it in a shorstighted way that ultimately does not protect our species’ interest). As I mentioned in my values document, we have dominion over the earth and other species are at our mercy. We have a duty to be benevolent rulers and to watch out for them. Humans directly use for our own purposes the large majority of suitable land on earth. Forty percent of earth’s land area was used for agriculture (including farming and grazing) as of 2005 (Foley et al.). It would be more now. That is 40% of total land area, including all the unusable land such as mountaintops, deserts, Antarctica, Greenland, and arctic tundra. Another 3% is urban areas. Most of the remaining arable land is forest that is frequently harvested for timber and therefore is also properly classified as primarily used by humans. Another portion is used for mining. Probably not more than 10% of the world’s land area is potentially suitable for human use and remains unused. That should be at least 50%. My modest proposal is that we humans share the earth with the other species. It is a value we should have learned in kindergarten. It is selfish to take the large majority of land on earth for our own use. Half should be enough for us. We should leave half the earth, at least, for use exclusively by the other billions of species on our planet instead of our one species. Homo sapiens is like a psychopathic billionaire who alone owns 90% of the wealth on earth and complains it is unfair if anyone suggests he should be taxed or give anything to charity. Leaving half of Minnesota to other species would mean no timber harvesting on that land, no mining, and no commercial fishing. The land should be in every habitat, not all in the north woods. We currently farm just about every inch of the former native prairie of Minnesota. We should allow half our current farmland to go back to native prairie. Half of the southeast portion of our state should go back to the Big Woods of maple and ash. Half of the southwest to prairie. Half of the northwest to prairie and bogs and wetlands. Half of the northeast to pine and aspen/birch forest. We will be where we should be when wolves exist in the wild lands that cover half the state and buffalo run wild in these wild lands in roughly the southern half of the state. Is this unrealistic? We won’t achieve it in four years, I agree. But we won’t achieve it at all if we do not try and do not set the goal. With much of my agenda, when I explain it to people they immediately dismiss it and say, “the powers that be will never let it happen” and by implication therefore I should not try. I have been told many times not to run because I can’t win. I disagree. I agree with Jesse Jackson, who once said, “If you try, you may fail. If you don’t try, you are guaranteed to fail.” I want to set the goal that half of each habitat area in our state, half of each habitat area in the U.S., and half of each habitat area in the world is under the exclusive use of other species with no permanent or substantial use by humans. We are currently under 10% and mostly under 1%. Let’s start working toward the goal of 50%. Let’s actually share the planet with other species and be as great and noble a species as we constantly say that we are. The other great thing about setting a goal of 50% is we can compromise on 20%, which would be about 19% better than where we currently are for many habitats. Giving half the land and waters of our state back to nature and to other species is the best solution for the mass extinctions since those are caused almost entirely by habitat loss. We will be giving the habitat back. It is also probably the best thing we can do to address global warming. Biomass, which is the mass of living things, mostly trees and other plants above ground and their roots below ground, is sequestered carbon. Natural habitats such as forests and prairies have more biomass than farm fields or golf courses and far more biomass than suburban housing tracts or cities or pavement. So expanding natural habitats will pull carbon from the atmosphere and reduce global warming. We also of course need to work on the other portion of the causes of global warming, which is burning fossil fuels and I address that here. Reference: 1. Foley JA DeFries R et al. 2005. Global Consequences of Land Use. Science 309:570-574.
I support common sense gun control There is broad consensus on gun rights and gun control and I support that consensus. Law-abiding citizens have a right to own handguns, rifles, and shotguns. But I support bans on semi-automatics and ammunition for semi-automatics. I support universal background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. 60% or more of the population share those positions with me. If we had Jury Democracy, all of that would become law. Tim Walz has not really even attempted to make any of that law. I can get it enacted with Jury Democracy.
In addition to destroying education for our children and young people, throwing over 300 people into major clinical depression and 127 people out of their jobs for every 1 COVID death prevented, and being the largest impairment of our freedom since slavery, lockdowns killed more Americans than they saved. Lockdowns caused more loss of life (lost person-years of life) from the deaths they have caused (mostly ncreased suicides, drug overdose deaths, alcohol deaths, and increased murders from the increased crime) than they have saved in prevented COVID deaths. I estimate 5 times the loss of life. The median person dying of COVID is an 84-year-old in a nursing home with less than one year to live. The median person dying of suicide or drug overdose is a 42-year-old with 38 years of life left. But we decided as a society to increase suicides and drug overdose deaths in order to reduce COVID deaths. I say we decided to increase suicides and drug overdose deaths because that effect was entirely predictable and was in fact predicted by me and others. The CDC now confirms that by a report that in 2020 we lost 1.5 years of life expectancy but only 1.1 years was due to COVID, meaning the lockdowns caused 0.4 years of life expectancy loss. We deliberately decided to inflict on ourselves deaths resulting in 0.4 years of life expectancy loss, which is to say an increase of about 40,000 suicides and drug overdose deaths and murders in 2020 alone, in a (failed) attempt to reduce COVID deaths. We decided to kill young people (including driving some children to suicide) to try to save 84-year-olds in nursing homes. The excess deaths caused by the lockdowns will be more than the number of U.S. deaths in the entire Vietnam War. You might also be interested to know that we lose more time of life to suicides every year than we did to COVID in 2020 or 2021 and more time of life to drug overdoses than we did to COVID. But we decided to increase deaths from the greater risks to decrease deaths from the smaller risk. In addition, and worst of all, we threw 1 in 5 Americans into major clinical depression by the lockdowns. The percentage of the U.S. population suffering from major depression (excluding mild depression) went from 8% in 2019 (already the highest of any society in human history) to over 27% during the lockdowns. I consider time spent depressed to be lost time of life. The lost time of life from time spent depressed that we decided to inflict on ourselves is at least 30 times the time of life saved in prevented COVID deaths, even if the lockdowns prevented 200,000 COVID deaths, which they almost certainly did not. Note that I have not mentioned money or loss of freedom, just deaths and unhappiness. I could also add that by the lockdowns we decided to kill more than a million people worldwide from hunger. Chapter 11 (from my book COVID Lockdown Insanity) Philosophers have a thought experiment known as “The Trolley Dilemma” that is illustrated by this diagram. Imagine there is a trolley or train coming down the track and below it on the track, in this diagram, three people are tied to the track who will be killed by the train. But between the train and where the three people are tied to Track 1, the lower track in this diagram, there is a fork in the tracks and a switch, and you are standing at the switch and you could pull the switch to divert the train to Track 2, the upper track in this diagram, to avoid having the train run over the three people tied to track 1 and save their lives. Unfortunately, however, there is a different person tied to Track 2 who will be killed if you pull the switch and who would not have been killed if you did not intervene. So you would be responsible for that person’s death, whereas you could argue you would not be responsible for the deaths of the three people on Track 1. Do you pull the switch? This is figuratively what we have done with COVID. The train of COVID was coming down the tracks and it was going to kill some people from COVID if we did nothing. So we decided to intervene with our lockdown response to divert the train to Track 2 to avoid those COVID deaths. But we forgot, or more accurately, refused to acknowledge, that there were people tied to Track 2 who were harmed, and in some cases killed, by that decision. The tables below show the choices we had, and still had throughout the year+ of lockdowns, between Track 1 and Track 2, as I have calculated them in Chapters 2-9. The numbers between Track 1 and Track 2 are normalized to one person on Track 1 whose COVID death our policies averted from the 200,000 COVID deaths (or zero to a maximum of 400,000 deaths) I estimated in Chapter 3 may be averted by the lockdowns. (So in the table for Track 2 we have fractional people; if you do not like to think of fractional people you could multiply the numbers in both tables by 10 or 100 or 1,000.) Which track do you think involved more harm? Did we cause more harm than we prevented by switching the train from Track 1 to Track 2? If Track 2 involved more harm, was it ethical to pull that switch and have the train run over the people tied to Track 2, instead of allowing it to run over the one person tied to Track 1? Now that we know what these numbers are, and once we knew these numbers by about the summer of 2020, is it and was it ethical to continue to pull that switch and continue to pursue the lockdown approach and continue to run over the people tied to Track 2? It is important to emphasize again that none of these bad outcomes on Track 2 were caused by COVID—they were caused by our response to COVID. They were caused by the lockdowns. We did not have to take the approach we took. We could have educated people about their actual risk of death if they become infected with SARS-Cov-2, and then let them make their own decisions about whether they want to isolate themselves to reduce their risk of being infected, wear a mask, etc. That is the approach Sweden took, and they had fewer deaths per capita than us (Chapter 1) and had almost none of the other collateral damage we suffered of increased unemployment, depression, suicides, and general unhappiness. My moral code says it cannot be justified to cause 19.3% of the population to become clinically depressed in order to extend life by 1 day on average. It should also be noted that the people we have imposed the sacrifices on are not the people at risk of dying from COVID. So we ordered some people to sacrifice to benefit others. In fact, we decided to kill some people, almost all of them young or middle aged, by driving them to suicide or drug or alcohol deaths, in order to extend the lives of other people, almost all of them old and in poor health and with little life expectancy left. All of the costs listed were entirely predictable and were in fact predicted, so we decided as a society to inflict those harms in order to save the lives of other persons from COVID. One of the worst parts is that when the people we have killed or harmed who were tied to Track 2 object to the decision to harm them to try to save the lives of some elderly people from death by COVID, we self-righteously scream at them that they are selfish. When people have lost their jobs or their businesses because their restaurants were ordered closed, they are shouted down that they have no right to complain when others are dying of COVID. The same happens when parents or university students complain that schools are closed and they or their children are being denied an education and the right to simply live their lives. The millions we have driven into major depression mostly don’t object or complain because they are too beaten down at this point to object and afraid that if they object people will like them even less than they do now. The people who have killed themselves, of course, are no longer around to object, and those contemplating killing themselves are too beaten down to object. I am here to say that the people tied to Track 2 that we decided to run over by diverting the train from Track 1 have every right to object. Their lives are every bit as valuable as the elderly who are dying, like all of us will die, from, in this case, pneumonia caused by a natural virus I would not have pulled that train switch. I think it was immoral to do so. Knowing what we know now, I would not continue to keep that switch pulled. I think even more clearly it is immoral to continue to keep that switch pulled. Why we might have chosen lockdowns Looking at this table it seems pretty obvious to me that the outcomes on track 2 are worse than those on track 1. And these harms were predictable. We knew the lockdowns would cause massive unemployment. We knew the social isolation we were mandating and the unemployment would lead to massive increases in depression and suicides. We obviously knew we were impairing education and harming young people by closing their schools and universities. And the experts, although perhaps not the public, knew at the very beginning of this that the infection fatality rate was less than 1% and probably less than 0.5%, so the number of deaths we have had is not much of a surprise, and even if we thought the restrictions would nip COVID in the bud and we would have almost no COVID deaths, the number of deaths prevented would only have been about five times the 200,000 I am estimating here, and therefore the harms of our policy would still have exceeded the benefits. And very soon into the spring lockdowns it was very clear the policies were not going to eliminate COVID deaths, so at that point the most you could hope for is maybe the restrictions would prevent 600,000 COVID deaths or three times the number in Track 1. Again, it should have been obvious at that point that the harms would have vastly exceeded the benefits of preventing those deaths. So why did we persist in our lockdown approach and persist in pulling the switch and running over the people tied to Track 2? I think the answer is human psychology. We were faced here with two bad choices. People would die from COVID or people would die from suicide and have their lives ruined for a period of time with clinical depression. We were faced with a choice between bad and worse, not bad and good. We are not good at facing that. We have all been raised on movies where the good guy beats astronomical odds to escape and save the day. We hoped against hope that somehow that would happen here, and we have kept hoping even to this day, when the evidence is very clear that it has not happened and will not happen and that our approach has been a disaster and caused vastly more harm than it has prevented. We need, and needed, to be adults and realize that sometimes bad things happen and the best thing to do then is move on and try not to make things worse. From the Conclusion It is not a matter of legitimate disagreement whether the lockdowns were a mistake. It is not a matter of legitimate disagreement whether an approach of no mandatory restrictions at all, but just educating people on their risk from COVID and on what modifications to their behavior would reduce that risk and then letting them decide for themselves whether and how to modify their behavior, would have been a better approach than lockdowns. Lockdowns have no advantage at all. If you think life is better than death, a long life is better than a shorter life, happiness is better than depression, more money is better than less, education is better than ignorance, child abuse and domestic abuse are bad things, and more personal freedom is better than less, then you agree the lockdowns were a mistake. How this ties into Jury Democracy With Jury Democracy, I or someone would have been able to make the arguments above to a jury. When a jury had to choose between the harms in Track 1 and Track 2 in the table above, no jury would choose Track 2 and the lockdowns. Ordinary people would not make the collassal mistake that the elites and experts made in choosing lockdowns. One of the things the lockdowns have proven is that experts make terrible, terrible decisions. Ordinary people could not possibly have done worse. One of the reasons the experts made these terrible decisions is groupthink and peer pressure. It was very clear to everyone in government and academia and the public health community which way the wind was blowing and what was the "right" position you were supposed to take. And it was clear that to oppose lockdowns would be career suicide. A jury would not be prone to that problem. Their votes will be secret and their careers will not depend on how they vote. Another reason we have continued to inflict lockdowns on the public long after all the evidence showed this was inflicting vastly more harm on society than benefit is the inability of our leaders to admit a mistake. That is human nature. When you have taken a public position, it is hard to admit you were wrong. But that will not be a problem with juries. Even if one jury initially decided to impose lockdowns, a later jury would be open to the evience this was a mistake and would not be afraid to change direction because it was not them who had imposed lockdowns--it was a previous jury. So they would not be wedded to the original answer and unwilling to see it was a mistake.
I am pro-choice on abortion and pro-bodily control period and therefore opposed to vaccine mandates and vaccine coercion I am pro-choice on abortion. And unlike Walz, I could get the right to an abortion enacted into law through Jury Democracy. And it is not just pregnant women who have the right to control their bodies. Everyone should have the right to control their body, no exceptions. That means no vaccine mandates and no vaccine coercion. You should not have to take a drug you do not want to take. Tim Walz thinks only pregnant women should control their bodies but other people should not and should be forced or coerced to take a vaccine they don't want to take. Scott Jensen thinks everyone except pregant women should have the right to control their bodies. They are both wrong. EVERYONE has the right to control their own body. No exceptions.
We should enforce our immigration laws, have lower immigration numbers, and ban "sanctuary" cities Immigration damages our environment, reduces wages, and increases inequality. It hurts minorites and the poor most of all. The number one problem in society is overpopulation. That is at the root of all other problems, especially environmental problems. And immigration is responsible for all of the population growth in the U.S. Immigration drives down the wages of workers and therefore increases inequality. Studies show that and it is common sense. Immigrants come here for jobs, therefore they compete with American workers and drive down their wages--unless the law of supply and demand does not apply to labor. "Sanctuary" cities means sanctuary for law breakers--those who violate our immigration laws. They do not deserve sanctuary any more than any other law breakers do. Every nation has a right to control its borders and the U.S. is no exception. I would ban sanctuary cities and fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrants.[2] |
” |
| —Mike Winter's campaign website (2022)[3] | ||
2021
Mike Winter did not complete Ballotpedia's 2021 Candidate Connection survey.
See also
2022 Elections
External links
|
Candidate Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota |
Footnotes
- ↑ City of Minneapolis, "Common questions about filing for office," accessed September 10, 2025
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Hugh McTavish for Governor of Minnesota, “Issues,” accessed October 29, 2022
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