Speaking of the upcoming titanic tilt for governor, I mentioned in passing yesterday something that Minnesotans know but that surprises outsiders who view Minnesota as the land of Humphrey and Mondale -- namely that Minnesota has not elected a Dem (or DFL) guv since Rudy Perpich in 1986. (Just to be clear, that'll be 24 years or six guv terms by Election Day 2010.

So, for the fun of it, I did some googling and listing and counting and here's that up with which I came.

During the same 24 years, the DFL has won four of seven U.S. Senate elections (and no, I'm not counting Franken/Coleman, but odds are that the DFL percentage could improve slightly, pretty soon, don't get me started.)

The unhistorically minded might be surprised to know, in addition, that there has NEVER been an era of Dem domination of the guv's office in Minnesota.

Minnesota came into the union in 1858 as solid Republican state, gave its electoral votes to Abe Lincoln in its first two elections, and never voted for a Dem for president until FDR in 1932.

But even after MN became a solid blue state in presidential elections (current nation-leading streak of nine straight), it never translated into domination of the guv's office.

Of the 28 men who have served as governor of Minnesota (yes, all men), just eight have been either Democrats (four) or DFLers (four). But 16 have been Republicans (or Independent Republicans if you recall the period when our R's styled themselves IR's).

That leaves three Farmer-Laborite governors, plus Jesse Ventura of the Independence Party.

If you go by total elections (disregarding that the guv's term used to be two years, then became four years in the 1960s), there have been 64 MN guv elections of which Dems and DFLers combined have won just 13, compared with 46 for Repubs, four for FLers and one for Independence.

The longest stretch of uninterrupted Dem or DFL control of the guv's office was just eight years, which occurred twice, 1971-79, (Wendell Anderson and a little bit of Rudy Perpich) and then 1983-91 (Perpich's two elections). A streak of two straight hardly qualifies as domination.

By contrast the Repubs won 19 straight guv races, spanning 1860 to 1898 and covering 38 years.

None of this disproves that since the D and FL merger of 1944, Minnesota politics has been dominated by DFLers. But not as dominant as our national reputation would suggest and -- even during the decades since D-FL merger -- it has not translated into dominance of the governor's office.

If you start the clock at 1944 when the DFL first put up a candidate for governor, the DFL has won 13 out of 22 U.S. Senate elections, but the Repubs have won 13 guv races compared to just eight for the Dems (plus one for Ventura).

Even if you start the clock at the most advantageous possible moment for the DFL -- 1954 when Orville Freeman became the first DFLer elected, and served for six straight years -- the DFL has still won just eight of the last 16 guv races.

None these statistics are large enough to sustain a great deal of quantitative analysis. A few flukey outcomes -- if Mike Hatch had held his temper for one more week, if the Supreme Court hadn't allowed Arne Carlson's name on the ballot at the last minute in 1990, etc -- may exaggerate the power of the trend.

And we should note that it is not really unusual for blue states to elect red guvs (Massachusetts has been governed by a Repub for 30 of the past 50 years). And the Minnesota case is further complicated by the presence of the only enduring three-party system over recent history. DFLers generally believe that the presence of IP candidates has helped Repubs more than Dems.

But there you are. If you want to look at who all those MN guvs have been, it's right here. If you have an interesting theory about why the DFL performance in Guv races lags its performance in other statewide races, please feel free to share it in the thread. Have a nice weekend.