How Did Minnesota Stay Blue in the Midterms? By Embracing, Not Running From, Progressive Values
Minnesota bucked the nationwide swing to the right. The national Democratic Party could learn a few things from how they did it.
In the land of Lake Wobegon, progressives still reign.
Republicans gave Democrats a national wholloping during Tuesday’s midterm elections, seizing the Senate, expanding their lead in the House, and gobbling up governors’ mansions in Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois.
But Minnesota bucked the rightward trend. In the upper Midwestern state known for progressive politics, Scandinavian sensibility and high voter turnout, Al Franken easily held onto his U.S. Senate seat (winning 53 percent of the vote), Governor Mark Dayton convincingly won reelection (by 5.5 percent), and the Democratic-Farm-Labor Party (DFL) held onto five of its eight Congressional seats.
Franken’s and Dayton’s landslide victories were particularly noteworthy because each of them had to endure statewide recounts in their initial runs for office. Franken won in 2008—a “wave year” for Democrats—by only 312 votes. (He later jokingly called that “the most efficient Senate race in history.”) Dayton won his first gubernatorial election in 2010 by less than 9,000 votes.
Republicans did regain control of the State House by ousting 11 DFL incumbents, mostly in rural Minnesota: they now have a four-seat majority (Democrats control the State Senate, which was not up for reelection this year). But the GOP failed to win seats in all but one of the first-ring suburbs of the Twin Cities, despite several tight races. In typical midterm election years, House seats in the suburbs of Eagan, Edina, Shoreview and Minnetonka would typically swing red. This year, they all remained blue.
The DFL’s successful defense of the suburbs around Minneapolis and St. Paul, and convincing victories for Dayton and Franken, could offer valuable lessons for progressives nationwide as they lick their wounds and try to develop an effective political strategy for 2016.
How did Minnesota Democrats do it? By focusing on women’s issues, fair pay and raising the minimum wage, and by championing—not running away from—progressive accomplishments such as workers’ rights and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
The community organizing group TakeAction Minnesota has focused much of its attention on building infrastructure and forming relationships in those first-ring suburbs, and bringing conversations about economic inequality and gender inequity to people’s doorsteps…
