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How Minnesota Democrats reversed their fortunes [1]

['More From Author', 'December', 'Doug Rossinow']

Date: 2022-12-20

Minnesota’s DFL party used to be sad. They lost five straight gubernatorial elections between 1990 and 2006, and they were a party in decay. I remember the pathetic election night interviews where Democrats would say, “Let’s wait for the Iron Range vote to come in.” Good luck with that.

So how did the DFL turn its fortunes around? While its newfound hold on all the levers of elected state power may be tenuous at some points, its position is the envy of its rivals.

The turnaround at the governor’s level is easiest to see, and came in 2010, when Mark Dayton beat Tom Emmer by 0.4%, in a year when Republicans nationwide were famously “shellacking” President Barack Obama’s party. The Independence Party (IP) nominee, Tom Horner, took 11.9% of the vote, perhaps hurting Dayton on net. Since then DFL gubernatorial nominees have won solidly — Dayton in his reelection in 2014, and Gov. Tim Walz in 2018 and 2022.

Dayton’s 2010 victory was presaged by Mike Hatch’s narrow loss to GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2006, during a great year for Democrats across the United States, amid the debacle of President George W. Bush’s second term in office. That year, the IP candidate for governor, Peter Hutchinson, got 6.4% of votes, probably DFL-leaners in the main. (Hutchinson had named Lyndon Johnson as his favorite U.S. president during the campaign.)

The withering of the IP — originally a vehicle for the establishment-smashing one-term Gov. Jesse Ventura — has been one factor in the Democrats’ success. Ventura — on the Reform Party ticket won with 38% of the vote in 1998, and Tim Penny had taken 16.2% as the IP nominee for governor in 2002. Ventura, Penny, Hutchinson and Horner look like potential giant-killers compared to Hannah Nicollet, the little-recalled IP nominee who took 2.9% of the vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election. The IP ran no candidate in the 2018 general election, and its nominee in the 2022 governor’s race received less than 1% of the vote.

The IP’s decline has been a symptom of our era’s dynamics, and a result of DFL voters’ increasing concern with electability. If Democrats had continued — after the early 2000s — to nominate candidates as weak as John Marty, Skip Humphrey, and Roger Moe, they might have continued to lose, either by giving the IP a new lease on life or by failing to appeal to most voters.

Dayton’s signature issue when he blew off the DFL convention in 2010 was his call to increase taxes on the state’s biggest earners. Democratic primary voters that year displaced the party convention’s choice, Margaret Anderson Kelliher — an inoffensive but ill-defined choice from the party establishment — in favor of Dayton’s clarion call, which also broke through to just enough general-election voters.

Dayton was neither a moderate nor a progressive ideologue, but he was electable. Previously he had promoted importing prescription drugs from Canada, addressing a widespread concern over drug costs in the United States. Dayton was like a walking advertisement for what too-clever-by-half analysts today call “popularism”: The idea that Democrats can win elections by embracing ideas that lots of people like.

There are still swing voters — sometimes moderates and sometimes simply anti-partisan — and Dayton got enough of them to beat Emmer. The “negative partisanship” of our current political era — the notion that Republicans and Democrats are both driven to vote and donate by intense fear of one another — brings leaners home. At the same time, “popularism,” especially if not delivered in highly partisan rhetoric, drains support from independent appeals.

DFL party activists got another shot at picking a gubernatorial candidate in 2018 and endorsed Erin Murphy after a protracted struggle. Her Twin Cities–centric appeal, Democratic primary voters surmised, would have been perilous for her party in a general election. DFL primary voters overruled their party’s insiders by picking Walz instead.

Walz, emphasizing unity between rural and metropolitan Minnesotans, had the wide appeal he had promised in the general election. He did not take the piercing issue-driven approach that Dayton had with his tax-the-rich campaign. However, Walz’s association with public schooling allowed him to capitalize on a broadly-shared priority in which Democrats had something of an in-built advantage — at least in those pre-pandemic days.

In terms of simple politics, increased pragmatism — from DFL primary voters, not party activists — has been fundamental to Minnesota Democrats’ improved results. Nothing wins like winning.

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[1] Url: https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/12/20/how-minnesota-democrats-reversed-their-fortunes/

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