To the editor:
Rep. Erik Paulsen will not be getting my vote this autumn for three big reasons.
First, his recent town hall was only the first such event in seven years. That’s right: until the three town hall events he hosted in May, Paulsen hadn’t held a real town hall in seven long years – and my neighbors and I won’t forget that.
Second, while he positions himself as a moderate, he votes in line with President Donald Trump over 97 percent of the time, according to political data site FiveThirtyEight.com. But Trump and his radical policies don’t represent Minnesota; that’s why he lost our district by 10 points in 2016. And I don’t want anyone who votes like Trump representing me in Washington.
Finally, despite re-imagining himself as an environmentalist in his recent TV spot, in which he claimed to love the outdoors, Paulsen’s record on environmental issues has been abysmal. He holds a 16 percent score from the League of Conservation Voters, and when he was asked in 2008 if humans were contributing to climate change, he said he was “not smart enough to know if that’s true or not.”
If he wasn’t smart enough to know that humans are driving climate change, then he’s not smart enough to deserve my vote now.
Joseph Rapacki, Edina
Edina Sun-Current, August 2, 2018