Minnesota Trendlines in Election 2008

As is my tradition after evaluating specific numbers statewide, I will offer my detailed final thoughts on the 2008 election in my home state of Minnesota.  From a broad standpoint, it’s hard to say the outcome in Minnesota this year wasn’t slightly disappointing at every level.  The Democrats had the potential to pick up two House seats and a Senate seat and have fallen short on at least two of them, with the Senate seat looking increasingly in doubt as of this writing.  Minnesota’s worthless Independence Party has inarguably denied us two of those three seats, increasing an already lofty Democratic body count at the bloody hands of the largely center-left IP.  Even with the IP noise aside, I’m still struck that Minnesota saw the least improvement in Democratic margins called to all four of its neighbors.

I’ll begin with the Presidential race.  As predicted, the 2008 county map for Minnesota most closely resembled the 1988 Dukakis county map, with a broad coalition of western farm counties joining traditional DFL strongholds and a couple suburban counties to give the Democratic candidate a 9-10 point margin of victory, even as the modestly populated but growing counties in central Minnesota remained red.  

But as a rule, outstate Minnesota margin bumped up only a few points for Obama over Gore or Kerry.  This is contrast to Iowa and Wisconsin where Obama scored across-the-board gains, as did North and South Dakota.  The easiest factor that one can attribute to Minnesota’s relative stagnancy is the advertising gap.  Minnesota was never taken seriously as a battleground state by the Obama team and thus didn’t spend much in the way of advertising dollars there, whereas McCain held on in the hopes of an unlikely upset and clobbered Obama there with ads well into the early fall.  For that reason, it’s unsurprising that the counties where Obama saw the greatest improvement were counties in the Fargo, Grand Forks, Sioux Falls, and La Crosse advertising markets where it was Obama with an outsized advertising presence.  There are some other factors I will outline in my more detailed district-by-district evaluations a little further in.

The Senate race lived up to its hype as an unpredictable barnburner with so many wild cards that even most the most seasoned political hand couldn’t effectively handicap the race.  With that said, the final result produced a statewide map that was virtually identical to the 2004 Presidential map, a map that generally represents the realignment we can expect to see in the foreseeable future in close statewide races.  Kerry and Franken both won 24 Minnesota counties, only one of which was unshared (they swapped the Kerry county of Fillmore in southeastern Minnesota for the Franken county of Aitkin in northeastern Minnesota, both of which have roughly the same population).  In individual precincts, Barkley loomed large, and while in most places he clearly denied victory to Franken, there were still large numbers of precincts where Barkley clearly denied victory to Coleman…almost to the point of cancelling each other out.

Now for more specific breakdowns of performances district-by-district….

District 1–It’s been amazing seeing how fast Rochester, Minnesota’s third-largest city and formerly known as “the heart of soul of the Minnesota Republican Party, has changed.  The first signs of GOP softening came in 2000, with a Mark Dayton victory over Senator Rod Grams and a soft four-point margin for Bush over Gore.  After several cycles of shifting, Rochester completed it’s transition to a Democratic-leaning community having voted for Barack Obama by nine points.  Considering that most of the rest of the district has been more politically competitive, having the population anchor of the district trending Democrat gives MN-01 a decidedly blue tint, at least unless the Republican party moves back towards the kind of political moderation that was the hallmark of the state GOP in decades past and was embraced by Rochester.

Tim Walz mowed down third-rate competitor Brian Davis even more lopsidedly than I could have imagined.  Walz won all 23 counties in the district, a feat I wouldn’t have imagined possible this year given that Pipestone and Rock Counties in the southwest corner are shut out of the Minnesota media market (and thus tend to vote party line on essentially every non-national race) and have populations that are more than 20% evangelical that vote so overwhelmingly Republican that it makes nearly any Democratic victory unattainable.  I think Dick Day had the potential to mount a stronger challenge to Walz had he won the primary, but still would have likely fallen far short.  Walz’ rock-solid 30-point victory gives me confidence in his ability to weather more defensive political cycles that may emerge in the years ahead.

Other thoughts…..Worthington, formerly a Democratic stronghold in southwestern Minnesota that has been trending Republican in the last couple of decades, had another pretty good year for Democrats, following an upwardly mobile 2006.  College towns Mankato and Winona saw dramatic improvement for all Democrats on the ballots.  Traditional Republican strongholds like New Ulm and Owatonna were, for the second election cycle in a row, softer than usual across the ballot.  That leaves Fairmont as the district’s only population center that remains unflinching in its allegiance to the GOP.

In District 2, I was struck by how much improvement Obama saw in the southern suburbs.  Back in 2002, I looked at this district as easily being the state’s most Republican under the new district configuration and questioned embattled incumbent Democrat Bill Luther’s decision to run in this district rather than challenge Republican Mark Kennedy for the northern suburban/exurban district.  I’ve definitely changed my mind in the years since as I’ve seen the southern suburbs soften and the northern suburbs harden towards the GOP.

The big population prize in MN-02 is Dakota County where Obama was victorious.  Obama still didn’t get within double digits in the GOP epicenters of Carver and Scott Counties, but he avoided the 20-point drubbings that were assured four years ago.  Carver and Scott performed as strongly as usual for Coleman over Franken, but I honestly I expected the margins to be even worse for him there.  The rural/exurban counties on the south side of MN-02 were more disappointing.  It’s easy to blame suburban sprawl on the lack of Democratic growth in the previously Democratic-leaning counties of Le Sueur and Goodhue as well that still-Democrat-but-much-less-than-it-used-to-be Rice County, but all of those counties continue to produce significantly stronger margins for DFL candidates in statewide downballot races.  It’s always been a politically unpredictable trio of counties, but in the most consequential federal races, they seem to be letting us down more often than not.

Steve Sarvi performed about as predicted in his kamikaze race against John Kline.  Hard to see how Kline can be taken out in this district even in a perfect set of circumstances.  We’re 10 years away from being genuinely competitive in this district.

In District 3, I honestly thought Ashwin Madia was the odds-on favorite of winning this seat and am a bit startled by his eight-point drubbing by a man who is very clearly too conservative for the district.  It appears that my original hunch may have been right that the DFL was too cocky in nominating Madia over the more conventional pick of Terri Bonoff.  Sure, Bonoff will probably give it another go, but the odds of victory decrease with an incumbent in the mix.

The good news is that even as the residents of Bloomington, Minnetonka, and Plymouth were voting for Erik Paulsen, they were also continuing the district’s trendline towards Democrats elsewhere on the ballot, with Obama winning the district comfortably and expanding blueness even into turf like Eden Prairie, the McMansion-land that is Paulsen’s hometown.  Even Franken did better in MN-03 than I would have expected, losing the population center of Bloomington by only a half percentage point.

Nothing too significant to report in either MN-04 or MN-05 other than the fact that Obama managed to overperform the Kerry numbers from four years ago that I previously considered a Democratic highwater mark brought about only with near-unanimous urban turnout unlikely to be repeated.  Instead, Minneapolis increased it’s margin of victory for Obama to 81% from Kerry’s 79% while St. Paul improved from 73% to 76%.  Taking out the Barkley noise and comparing a strictly a Franken v. Coleman faceoff, Franken’s numbers were about on par with Kerry’s four years ago.  The fact that Franken was performing this well in Minneapolis and St. Paul but still narrowly trailing Coleman statewide is unprecedented.

MN-06 is easily our most serious long-term trouble spot.  Michelle Bachmann would probably not have been re-elected without spoiler candidate Bob Anderson cannibalizing 10% of El Tinklenberg’s potential vote, but the fact that Bachmann was able to score 47% of the vote here only three weeks removed from calling for McCarthyism 2.0 underscores the challenge we’re facing.  She remains too conservative for the district and is such a ticking time bomb that I suspect she goes away at some point (expect a Marilyn Musgrave-esque gradual acceptance of her vileness), but Bachmann is merely the public face of a much more serious problem in this district, which 15 years ago could have been described as center-right at worst.

If not for the college town of St. Cloud and the more moderate southeastern precincts in this district (Washington County), Obama would have seen no growth at all from Kerry’s numbers in MN-06.  The more yuppie-oriented young conservatives in the southern suburbs/exurbs proved mildly persuadable this cycle and last, but not the less affluent, megachurch attending social conservatives that now populate Sherburne, Wright, and northern Anoka County.  The Star Tribune did a report earlier this year on the “ghost towns” of brand new subdivisions in fast-growing Wright County, documenting the magnitude of the foreclosure crisis in exurbia.  I went into this election expecting some notable softening in the region, but Coleman defeated Franken by margins similar to his 2002 blowout over Mondale, and Obama’s Wright County margin narrowed only two points from Kerry’s, and the growth came almost completely from the precincts that have the longest-standing settlement rather than the growth zones hit hardest by the housing crisis, some of which became even redder this year.  Consider MN-06 a VERY long-term project.

Rural MN-07 is arguably the state’s most complex district as there are nationally low-profile issues such as sugar subsidies that loom very large here.  Furthermore, there are six different media markets operating here (Grand Forks, Fargo, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Mankato, Sioux Falls, and Watertown, SD) which will present a serious challenge to Collin Peterson’s successor who tries to hold the seat.  Underscoring what a tough district it is, Obama won 19 of the district’s 34 counties (and lost two more by less than two points) yet still lost the district by three points.  The Democratic counties are thinly populated farm counties, while the population centers are less agricultural and more Republican.

Obama nonetheless saw by far the most significant growth in MN-07 compared to other districts, but still didn’t max out on Democratic performance potential in the region.  For whatever reason, the most die-hard DFL counties in west-central region of the state (Lac qui Parle, Swift and Chippewa) saw little or no growth for Obama compared to Kerry.  These counties are capable of significantly higher numbers, and combining that with a few other things going right and the Democrats can hold this seat in Peterson’s absence and win future Presidential elections.  After the next reapportionment, I suspect St. Cloud could be back in MN-07.  That insertion would largely be a wash politically, but in high turnout years it could prove beneficial for Democrats with the surge of youth in an otherwise gray-haired region.

MN-08 was a disappointment.  Only in a few counties did we see significant improvement.  The zero-growth Iron Range and Arrowhead regions responsible for this district’s Democratic tilt seems to have maxxed out in turnout in 2004 as the needle barely moved at all up there.  The region is socially conservative and its history suggests there may have been racial resistance towards Obama in some otherwise true blue circles.  The numbers were not necessarily “concerning”, but do suggest a slow erosion of support is likely imminent here given the continued population decline and aging of the area.  The college town of Duluth is of course the exception and overperformed Kerry’s 2004 margin, thus providing Obama’s tiny margin of growth in St. Louis County (this was the first time in 25 years of tracking Minnesota elections where St. Louis County was not the most Democratic Minnesota county in every partisan contest….Ramsey County narrowly edged it out).  

The southern half of the district was most troubling though.  Obama saw virtually no movement in the counties in and around the Mille Lacs Lake area.  Most of this area was solid Dukakis and Wellstone turf in years past, but has been changed by the gun issue and exurban sprawl (the latter particularly in Isanti and Chisago Counties) to the point where McCain and Coleman were winning by double-digits in places like Kanabec County.  Most of these counties are still winnable, or at least closer, in downballot statewide races, but have become predictably GOP in higher-profile Senate and Presidential contests.  Certainly the right kind of pro-gun, socially right-of-center Democrat can continue to win by healthy margins here, but the Democrats really need to choose wisely when selecting a replacement for Oberstar upon his retirement, because it’s not out of the question that a Republican could win here.

Interestingly, the disparity between Obama and Franken was smallest in District 8.  At first I was suspicious of Franken’s ability to connect with northern Minnesotans, but relative to other regions, it appears he did okay here.

Sorry for the long-windedness of this diary but when I start talking about Minnesota politics I tend to ramble on.  Hopefully someone else considers it a good read as well.