Shocking as it may be to see an expression of optimism from me, I’m gonna do exactly that regarding Minnesota’s political future for Democrats. Particularly now, less than a week after the DFL supermajorities were transformed into Republican majorities in the state legislature, this may seem counterintuitive, but having crunched the numbers over the past five days, I feel as though the condition of the state’s politics is less troublesome that it may look from an outsider’s perspective.
Bad news first. The DFL got vaporized in the legislative races. This is effectively the fourth wave election out of five with the current legislative district lines and to an extent, should have been predicted. Back in 2002, after months of feuding over redistricting between the DFL Senate, the Republican House, and the Independence Party Governor, the stalemate was broken when the process was handed over to a nonpartisan panel of judges. They drew up a genuinely competitive map that proved to be very volatile to the political mood of the time. In 2002, shortly after the Wellstone memorial debacle, the GOP scored a supermajority in the House and came within two seats of taking over the Senate. In 2004, in a generally neutral political climate, Democrats shocked everybody and gained 13 seats, one short of a majority. In 2006, a Democratic tsunami hit Minnesota and they ended up with massive and unsustainable gains deep into red territory. With just the House up in 2008 and the wind still at the their back, Democrats gained a few more seats.
We were overdue for a correction in 2010, but it was largely than even I suspected. Looking at the breakdown of legislative races, however, it really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise. With the current district lines, the vast majority of terrain in rural and suburban Minnesota consists of districts that fall somewhere between the range of 52-48% DFL advantage and 52-48% GOP advantage. Just the slightest of breezes is enough to trigger dramatic change, and this year’s Republican tide was far more than just a slight breeze. As a result, there were few surprises among the legislators that were felled, and as usually happens in wave elections, just about all the close races went to the party on the winning side of the wave.
The unfortunate and obvious downside is that the Republicans will now commandeer redistricting. Dayton, likely the next Governor, will veto anything too overreaching, provided Pawlenty doesn’t follow through with his “martial law” gambit while the Republicans delay a recount. I wouldn’t be surprised if the end result is another nonpartisan judge-drawn redistricting plan, most likely resulting in another 10 years of dramatic swings from left to right and back in Minnesota’s local politics. Sadly, however, we blew our chance to get rid of Michele Bachmann as the new legislature will never agree to a map that doesn’t keep her safe in her exurban cocoon.
So what gives me cause for optimism? There were four statewide races in Minnesota this year and the Democrats won all of them, even with a weak-performing Mark Dayton at the top of the ticket. Three of the four races were close, and frankly I’m surprised the DFL held onto both the Secretary of State’s office and especially the Auditor, but they stayed in the Democratic fold because population centers Hennepin and Ramsey Counties continue to harden for Democrats. I’ve always considered second-ring Hennepin County suburbs Bloomington and Minnetonka to be Minnesota’s bellwethers. If the DFL candidate wins them, they win the state. All four statewide DFL candidates were victorious there in a year where conventional wisdom was they’d lean Republican. When Democrats are winning Hennepin County by more than 15 points and Ramsey County by more than 25 points, as occurred this year in every statewide race, it’s a herculean lift for Republicans to make up that much elsewhere.
Aside from Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, two other places stand out as cause for Democratic optimism. The first is suburban Dakota County in the southeastern metro area and the third most populous county in Minnesota. It’s historically been a swing county, became more Republican than the statewide average last decade, but now seems to be slowly moving back to the center. Republicans did win here in 2010, but by nowhere near the size of the margins they did back in 2002. In the close Mondale vs. Coleman Senate race, Coleman won Dakota County by 16 points. In a similar close race this year, Emmer was only able to win Dakota County by 9 points, which is comparable to what both Pawlenty scored in his 2006 re-election and what Coleman beat Franken by in the 2008 Senate race. Largely due to the rising ethnic diversity in Dakota County, it now seems as if the Republican ceiling in the county is a nine-point victory, and in the other three statewide races, the Democrat won there in the Attorney General’s race, and the Republicans were victorious in the other two with four-point margins. It’s almost impossible to win statewide in Minnesota as a Republican if you’re only winning Dakota County by four points.
Next on my list of causes for optimism is Rochester, now Minnesota’s third largest city. It’s a city that is historically the Republican stronghold of the state but in the past 10 years, demographics have been pushing it to the left. It’s population is exploding with young educated professionals as well as ethnic minorities, and is now pretty close to being a 50-50 town. Now old-school GOP moderates can still do very well here, even among the newcomers, but as the Republican Party continues its deranged march to either social conservatism or economic Know-Nothingism, Rochester won’t be around for the ride, at least not with the numbers it has been historically. Tim Pawlenty represented this decade’s high-water mark for Republicans in Olmsted County, winning the county by 17 points in 2006. Emmer won it by 10 points. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but in a Republican year, I would have expected Emmer to overperform Pawlenty’s numbers in a Democratic year. Furthermore, I haven’t yet crunched the numbers exclusive to the city of Rochester, which is typically several points less Republican than Olmsted County at large. Based on the numbers I’ve seen in Greater Olmsted County, I’m betting the city of Rochester itself was no better than a five-point win for Emmer. And like Dakota County in the last paragraph, if a Republican is winning Rochester by only five points, an inside straight is required to come up with the votes in the rest of the state necessary to win a statewide election.
Exurbia continues to be a big problem for Democrats in Minnesota, but less of a problem than I anticipated it to be in 2002 and 2004 when it looked as though the growth in exurban Minnesota would be endless and the raw numbers of new Republicans would ultimately swamp Democrats. Since 2004, however, the housing bubble has burst and the blistering growth rates in these Twin Cities collar counties have slowed. And with the slowed population growth has come a stalled Republican insurgency. Emmer is the perfect exurban candidate if there ever was one. He’s from the heart of Michele Bachmann country out in Wright County and espouses the “we got ours…to tell with the rest of the state” ethos articulately. Yet he didn’t overperform Pawlenty in these areas, at least not by much. And the Republican margins in the other three statewide offices were on par with traditional voting patterns even in a strong Republican year. Unless these counties become even more Republican and restore their growth rates from the early part of the decade, the GOP’s ability to win statewide races will be diminished.
Outstate Minnesota was pretty much split again this year, although leaning towards Republicans perhaps a little more than usual. The 2000 election was the ugliest showing outstate Minnesota gave Democrats in my lifetime, with Bush burying Gore in counties where Democrats frequently win by double-digit margins. Nowhere did we see Democratic candidates perform that poorly in 2010, and if Democrats are performing generally on par with recent trendlines this year, it bodes well that rural Minnesota is not gonna undergo the same rightward transformation that rural Missouri did anytime soon.
I can’t finish the diary with commenting on the state of affairs in northeastern Minnesota, one place where I maintain some pessimism. As I feared, a perfect storm finished off Jim Oberstar. His district has been slowly trending Republican for a generation now but has still been virtually impossible for a Republican to win even in the most perfect situation up until now. With that said, Oberstar underperformed all four statewide DFL candidates in the 8th district, all of whom won the district. In Dayton’s case, his victory is the direct result of overperformance in northeastern Minnesota. With MN-08’s growth zones becoming more Republican by the day and it’s Democratic strongholds losing population, it’s not a good sign for the Democrats’ prospects in snuffing out Oberstar’s successor Chip Cravaack. The great white hope is legislator Tony Sertich, but he’s a native Iron Ranger who will run with the baggage of the Minnesota Legislature and is a native Iron Ranger which isn’t gonna be an asset in the south side of the district. State Senator Tony Lourey from further south in the district might be a better bet, at least demographically. Either way, it’s an almost certainty that the district will inherit even more Republican areas after redistricting, so it could well take a Democratic wave to install another Democrat in the Congressional seat, and his or her hold on the seat will most likely be far tenuous than was Oberstar’s.
Generally speaking, the Democratic Party looks poised to have the upper hand in Minnesota, although by far narrower margins than in its 1970s and 1980s heyday. But interestingly, as the state becomes less lopsided in its Democratic advantage, it’s strangely harder for a Republican to win a statewide election than it was back in the days when Dave Durenberger and Rudy Boschwitz were winning handily. In the very long-term, if my predictions of a political realignment almost exclusively on generational and ethnic lines comes to pass, then all bets are off and majority white Minnesota could very well turn crimson red. For the foreseeable future, however, I like my odds running as a Democrat in Minnesota much more than I would running as a Republican.