MINNEAPOLIS – US Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison has won the Democratic primary election for Minnesota attorney general on Tuesday night, and so he will be the party’s nominee in November.
“We had a very unexpected event at the end of this campaign that happened,” Ellison told supporters at Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis, Star Tribune reported.
“I want to assure you that it is not true and we are going to keep on fighting all the way.”
Ellison emerged as the victor in a crowded, five-person primary race, which included former Ramsey County Attorney Tom Foley, state Rep. Debra Hilstrom, attorney and former state Supreme Court clerk Matt Pelikan, and former state Commissioner of Commerce Mike Rothman.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who knocked the doors, made the phone calls, and carried this campaign through the finish line tonight. Onward to November!” Ellison wrote on Twitter shortly after declaring the results of the vote.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who knocked the doors, made the phone calls, and carried this campaign through the finish line tonight.
Onward to November! pic.twitter.com/5WII6XyYLe
— Keith Ellison (@keithellison) August 15, 2018
Winning DFL primary for Minnesota, Ellison will face Republican Doug Wardlow in the November election.
Wardlow is a former one-term state representative from Eagan, and has been an attorney at the conservative Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom for the past several years.
Ellison was seen as a rising Democratic star, a progressive who understood the Democratic Party’s shifting center.
In 2017, after the party’s shocking loss in the 2016 presidential election, he became the national party’s vice chair.
He viewed the attorney general position as a way to stand up to the Trump administration through the courts.