By 13 votes, perennial candidate Sharon Anderson — a political gadfly who once compared St. Paul and Minneapolis to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah– eked out a win in the Republican political primary for House District 67B, which represents a majority of St. Paul’s East Side.

Anderson, who defeated fellow GOP candidate AJ Plehal 52% to 48% on Tuesday, will challenge state Rep. Jay Xiong, a DFLer, who is up for re-election on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Tuesday’s primary victory isn’t the first time the political winds have puffed at least lightly in her favor across some 50 years of political races.

Anderson, who is in her 80s and claims to have run for office almost every year since the early 1970s, made national news as a St. Paul mayoral candidate in 2013 in a four-way debate featuring then-Mayor Chris Coleman, the incumbent. Her colorful remarks included comparing the Twin Cities to the doomed, sin-wracked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. Anderson, who wore oversized sunglasses to the evening debate, also compared the then-novel Green Line light rail to Nazi train cars carrying Holocaust victims.

In 1994, she won the Republican nomination for state attorney general. Embarrassed, the state GOP attempted without success to have her removed from the ballot for the general election, in which she lost to Hubert Humphrey III.

In 1988, Anderson declared her Summit Avenue home to be her church and thus exempt from property taxes, though the tactic did not save her from eviction. She would go on to continue to use the address across decades of election filings, though she hasn’t lived there in 36 years.

Fast forward to 2019, when Anderson was one of five candidates to run on the ranked-choice ballot for the Ward 2 seat on the St. Paul City Council. Fellow candidate Bill Hosko challenged her residency status in court, claiming she had no proof she lived in the political ward, which encompasses downtown St. Paul and parts of surrounding neighborhoods.

Hosko’s legal petition to halt voting and get thousands of ballots reprinted fell apart in court as a judge questioned whether he had properly served Anderson notice of his lawsuit. Anderson went on to receive 244 votes out of more than 7,000 cast in the Ward 2 election that year, in which Council Member Rebecca Noecker handily won re-election.

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