Were it not for the gentle suburban curve to the street, one could probably see Mark and Melissa Hortman’s house from Xp Lee’s Brooklyn Park home. Lee, a Democrat and former city council member, said he would often chat with the couple when they walked their dog in the neighborhood.
Those talks wouldn’t turn to politics, Lee said. But last year, Hortman did want to talk shop with Lee: He was coming off City Council and she wondered if he was interested in other local races — perhaps mayor, or county commissioner.
“She just wanted to catch up and see what my plans were,” Lee said.
Now, just months after the Hortmans were killed in their own home in an assassination that shocked the country, Lee is in the awkward position of being on the precipice of moving his political career forward — and into the seat occupied by Hortman for more than two decades.
Lee (whose first name is pronounced like the letters X-P, short for Xiongpao) and his Republican opponent, Ruth Bittner, are in the final weeks of a campaign that shouldn’t be happening right now. But it is, and the two candidates are carefully making their case even as the shadow of the assassination looms.
“Everyone knows it’s there,” Lee said.
The candidates, however, said not every voter in Hortman’s district has made the connection between Hortman’s death and the special election happening now, in September of an odd year, so they often have to explain it themselves. A Minnesota Star Tribune reporter tagged along with Lee and Bittner on a recent evening while they separately knocked on doors in the district.
“At first it was very, very sad,” Bittner said. “And I would say now that I feel like people have kind of accepted it more. And so we’re able to realize that somebody’s got to take the seat.”
