I submitted this column a couple days before driving down to St. Paul to register as an official candidate for Congress. This will be my last official column until I am out of the race.

Most experts expect that Welty will be out of the race Tuesday, Aug. 9, when the primary results for the 8th Congressional District are in. I have 69 days to turn that prediction on its head.

While you are reading this a few of you should be getting my first mailing. It suggests that Americans should expect their Congressman to stand by their oath of office to defend our democracy from violent attempts to overturn a legitimate election.

I’m pointing my finger at Congressman Stauber. I intend to beat Pete with the help of Democrats, Independents and outraged Republicans voting on the Republican side in our open primary.

One of the four buddies I mentioned a few weeks ago just called me out of the blue and told me I would only get 8% of the vote. As If I cared about losing!

I’ve got 16 losses under my belt. I may well lose but it won’t be with an 8% vote.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the million dollar donors behind Pete Stauber are nervous about his chances in an open primary state. When the Koch brothers or the National Rifle Association put big bucks behind somebody, they don’t want to lose. Like me they have been watching Democrats registering as Republicans, not because they want to but to prevent the worst Republicans from getting to the general election.

In Deep Red Nebraska 20 percent of Democrats registered as Republicans. Minnesotans don’t have to switch parties in our open primary. They can change to stripes for a day and then go back to polka dots.

I often mention my delight at discovering that today’s Democrats revere Abraham Lincoln the way my Republican parents and grandparents did. To my way of thinking they are closer to Republicans than the descendants of segregationists who brought state’s rights into the Republican Party.

I know how state’s rights worked before Lincoln was elected. A Southern- dominated Supreme Court took away northern state’s rights to keep slaves south of the Mason-Dixon line in Dred Scot.

Today in Republican clothing they want abortion and loose gun regulation nationalized by the Supreme Court. So what if 65% of Americans disagree? Tough titties!

Democracy is on the ballot in this primary. If I beat Pete in the primary and then win the general election

I will go to Congress and reintroduce the “Great Emancipator” to the party he founded.

Republicans need to be reminded that when Lincoln ran for a tough reelection he chose a Democrat to be his vice presidential running mate. I understand. I like Democrats.

I don’t see how a Republican party whose candidates compete to hate Democrats more than anybody else can possibly hope to run the nation except through brute force.

I cast my first votes in 1972 when I became a Republican who voted for the Democratic Party’s underdog Presidential candidate George McGovern. Watergate was my vindication. Most baby-boomers wanted political parties, to be polar opposites so that they could see the difference. I hated that idea.

Ironically, the man who helped bring black and white to our politics by imitating segregationist George Wallace in 1968 once offered a much saner argument for political parties to fight for the center of the Chess board. In 1959 Vice President Richard Nixon was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment, like the one that Trump engineered.

Nixon answered, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.”

He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”

Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.”

Everyone today who pines for the Andy Griffith show should understand it came with politicians who all said pretty much the same thing. We won two world wars with parties like that. We are losing the peace today and much more without a little Lincoln in the GOP.

I aim to bring him back.

If and when I take the oath of office to preserve and defend America I will mean it.

Everything Harry writes that is not about the imminent destruction of Earth as we knew it is superfluous. But, he does prattle on at lincolndemocrat.com.