One can identify the moment in 2022 when the Minnesota Republican Party’s fate in state elections was sealed.
It occurred in the afternoon of May 14 after the sixth ballot at the state GOP convention. Mike Murphy, the fervid MAGA Mayor of tiny Lexington, Minnesota defamed endorsement rival Kendall Qualls as a liar and threw his support to Dr. Scott Jensen for the convention endorsement.
Jensen’s endorsement and subsequent nomination, a pleasant outcome for the MAGA faithful, spelled doom for the party in state elections. The coming months saw Jensen reeling from attempts to qualify or walk back earlier positions, often in response to media attacks funded by the pro-DFL group, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota.
The catalogue of Jensen’s earlier positions made him a fat target for DFL messaging. He had claimed he wanted to “ban abortion” in Minnesota. Public education in the state was “a black hole.” He floated the idea of abolishing the state income tax. The state’s COVID vaccinations and restrictions, he claimed resembled the Holocaust. His running mate, Matt Birk, contributed societal messaging that women should have careers was wrongheaded.
From the GOP ticket, this was an astounding series of unforced errors.
The implications of these initial positions were not lost on swing voters. To many of them, these stands promised turbulence, uncertainty and possibly chaos. Abortion a crime, public education under assault, state taxation somehow transformed, COVID policies overturned, women encouraged to stay home.
[image_caption]Steven Schier[/image_caption]
Most horse race surveys never found Jensen coming close to Gov. Tim Walz in the race. As GOP pollster and analyst Kellyanne Conway observed on election night, a weak top of the ticket hurts the party further down the ballot. Republicans lost seats in both state legislative chambers and control of the State Senate and came up short in all statewide races.
That’s an extraordinary achievement in a state suffering from rising metro crime, high inflation, an epic Feeding the Future scandal and the aftershocks of historic uprisings in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
What produced this remarkable GOP disaster? The blame lies squarely with the state Republican Party’s candidate selection and fundraising. Its nomination process produced unelectable candidates in a year when electoral opportunities were promising. The party and its allies were woefully outspent by the DFL and its kindred groups by a margin of about six to one. Republicans were outspent in most electoral contests in the state.
The DFL is indeed a formidable adversary, enjoying big advantages in fundraising and voter mobilization. Ken Martin, the seasoned, effective DFL party chair now in his sixth term, has noted that the party can win in state politics by dominating in the Twin Cities and its suburbs. That they accomplished in 2022.
State Republicans are becoming a predominantly rural party, but rural Minnesota is becoming a steadily smaller share of the state’s citizens. The GOP’s messaging has no appeal in the core cities of the state, and limited appeal in the suburbs.
The future of state politics lies with the party that wins the support of the 44% of the state population living in those Twin Cities suburbs. Democrats have made steady electoral progress there.
The Democrat dominated state government will soon act to further boost the party’s electoral advantages. By legalizing marijuana – an action with costs to public health and safety – the DFL will flatten the two small pro-marijuana parties. That will ensure them the additional support of the state’s stoners, a population certain to grow with legalization.
Republicans, in the face of this, are a group of bystanders with little sense of how to broaden their electoral appeal. They have become less of an electoral force and more of a “performative” party, happy to present a controversial agenda that falls far short of voters’ support.
Any state benefits from a robust competition between two equally able and resourced political parties. Minnesota lacks two such parties and may for a considerable time to come.
Steven Schier is the Emeritus Congdon Professor of Political Science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
More deniers please! Line ’em up — vaccine, slavery, Holocaust, election, birthers, truthers, flat-earthers. Go back to fluoridation if you must, but bring them forward so we can knock them down again. Jensens, Birks, Crocketts gather ’round!
“That’s an extraordinary achievement in a state suffering from rising metro crime, high inflation, an epic Feeding the Future scandal and the aftershocks of historic uprisings in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
It surprises me that a political scientist would actually still consider these specious Republican talking points to be or have been Democratic weakness. Clearly voters rejected the idea that Walz could be responsible for riots triggered by MPLS police officers, much less a nationwide crime wave. Likewise incoherent notion that Democrats somehow caused “inflation” and that Republicans would tame it obviously found no purchase among voters. And of course fraud and scandal within a federal program that Donald Trump initially rolled out is impossible to pin on MN officials, who by the way were the ones who reported it to the feds. On the contrary… it would have been quite bizarre to have seen MN voters turn Democrats out of office based on false claims and specious grievances like these.
It’s particularly weird to see Professor Schier reference this trifecta of false claims as some kind of de facto advantage for Republicans in an article that otherwise recognizes their incoherent politics of hostility and grievance. Yes… absolutely Republicans lost the day they nominated Jensen… precisely because he embraced a bizarre campaign organized around false claims weird grievances.
Not giving up on that false claims thing, are you? “a state suffering from rising metro crime, high inflation, an epic Feeding the Future scandal and the aftershocks of historic uprisings in Minneapolis and St. Paul” are all facts.
How would you phrase it? “A state celebrating high crime, high inflation, etc.”?
Homicides are actually down 20% year on year in Minneapolis
https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/dont-look-now-but-homicide-is-actually-down-in-minneapolis/
“robberies, stolen property and weapon offenses are all down a smidge. Sex offenses are down by close to 10%, gunshot wounds have fallen 11% and calls for shots fired have dropped by 16%.”
You are cherry-picking. The article you site is far more even-handed: “The city is still living through a period of unusually high crime overall.” And, “Assault, burglary, theft and other property crimes are all higher than last year’s already high numbers.”
The bottom line is in this election crime was on everyone’s minds, as Prof. Schier points out. I’m not sure why partisans have to deny the obvious. Yes I am. Any criticism must be ferociously opposed. The heck with facts.
Ms. Wicklow,
Obviously the election outcome reveals the FACT that crime wasn’t the ubiquitous and all engrossing concern Republicans expected it to be, nor even the primary issue polls seemed to indicate. And/or voters decided that Democrats were more likely to deal with crime effectively than Republicans, at the very least voters rejected the facile claim that Democrats are responsible for crime. You seem to keep forgetting that FACT that Republicans LOST on this issue.
Ms. Wicklow, you consistently fail to grasp the basic premise of my observation, perhaps I’m speaking with excessive subtlety? Let me clarify: The “manufactured” grievance I’m referencing here isn’t crime waves, inflation, or scandals… no one denies the existence of these issues, you waste your time documenting these issues.
The manufactured grievance is the is the idea that current Democratic office holders are responsible for these developments. The suggestion that Walz and Ellison somehow promoted crime, inflation, or a scandal in a federal programs is simply facile. And please, don’t repeat AGAIN the flat out lie that Walz tried to “defund” the police. The idea that Republicans would somehow better manage crises is likewise ridiculous. In fact we can actually trace these development back to Republican policies if we want to. One thing Democrat’s have consistently proven over the decades is that Republican policies don’t work even when Democrats implement them. Law and order, fiscal austerity, and private sector worship are among such policies that contributed to the issues at hand here.
Clearly the facile attempt to blame Democrats failed to sway voters. My point is that this author’s apparent assumption that the mere existence of “problems” somehow give’s Republicans an edge of some kind is a flat out weird assumption. I know why he makes that assumption, but it’s not a solid evidence based rationale.
You called these facts “falsehoods” in the previous thread, forcing me to cite. You call them “false claims” in this, saying the author is negligent for even mentioning them. The word for this isn’t excessive subtlety. More like excessive partisanship.
The falsehood is that Democrats promoted or created crime, inflation, and fraud; and that the mere existence of these issues give Republicans an advantage of some kind. Yes, these are false claims, and I’ve explained that several times now.
You called these issues “manufactured grievances”. Now you’re saying these issues are indeed real, but not applicable.
Okay. But increases in crime, inflation, and fraud are not issues any incumbent wants. They can and typically are used to an opponent’s advantage. You stand alone in thinking otherwise.
“They spent weeks and months explaining what they really meant about all these matters.” Actually, it seems they spent weeks and months trying to explain that what they said then isn’t what they meant now. Voters didn’t fall for that – which is good.
But as we seem to be seeing nationwide, if the MAGA crowd fails with bat-shit crazy extremists, their solution is more and crazier extremists. We’ll see how that works out in 2 years.
I do not understand why Minnesota Republicans don’t nominate state-wide candidates like 12 Republicans in the Senate yesterday who voted for the historic Same-Sex and Interracial Marriage bill. A pro-choice/socially liberal but fiscally conservative/tough on crime Republican might do rather well in the suburbs and possibly better in the urban core. Most of my relatives are Democrats however the ones that are Republican are very much social liberals and conservative on everything else.
Historically Minnesota has the highest turnout in the nation and like the saying goes when “the higher the turnout the more Democrats (usually) win”. So if they want to win here they are going to have to try something very different.
“What produced this remarkable GOP disaster? The blame lies squarely with the state Republican Party’s candidate selection and fundraising. Its nomination process produced unelectable candidates in a year when electoral opportunities were promising.”
Perhaps a followup essay might dig into who controls the process & whether they have options that would promote more electable candidates. Do ‘they’ even want to?
Actually, no state in the union possesses “two equally able” political parties in the sense Schier means, since the manifest ideological weakness and appalling extremism of the MN GOP is present (in even stronger doses!) in the Repub parties of every state. Hell, the MN version of the GOP likely isn’t as toxic as the FL version, or the TX version, or the abusive WI version.
The difference is not really in the “abilities” of the two parties; it’s in the wildly diverge “abilities” of the respective bases of each party. And in the increased common sense and educational attainments of MN independents over those found in, say, the decaying morass of FL, or the hellhole of TX.
A succinct version is that the GOP (nationally in in Minnesota) has long ago given up any pretense of governing and runs on pure culture-war grievance. As long as that is the case, they have little chance of getting a plurality of votes.
In regards to Jenson and Birk trying to walk back some of their earlier positions on abortion, education, taxes, women’s rights, etc, I keep going back to Maya Angelou’s quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them THE FIRST TIME.” (Emphasis mine)
All good points, but what I found most surprising about Professor Schier’s piece was the total and complete absence of any mention of the Dobbs decision at the SCOTUS. I don’t know the exact percentage of the state’s voters who are female, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it’s in the neighborhood of half, and a sizable proportion of those female voters are, to be delicate, not especially enthused about forced birth. I try hard not to pay attention to political ads during election season, but it was hard not to notice that the DFL and whatever super-PAC was funding their ad campaign was beating Jensen over the head with two issues, especially: “I’m gonna do away with abortion;” and “Education funding is a black hole.” Control of their own bodies in that reproductive context, and public funding to educate their children, are both issues that resonate powerfully with an awful lot of women, be they urban, suburban or rural. Too many males (especially rural, older ones) in the Minnesota GOP remain unwilling to listen to – or take seriously – the opinions of the state’s women.
Ray,
I think it bares mentioning the fact that the “disciplines” of political science, economics, and survey design and analysis, are male dominated fields. I’m not sure it’s surprising that these guys would assume that crime and inflation are more important to voters than women’s rights… they’ve actually been making that assumption for decades, that assumption was simply never tested so long as Roe was intact.
When you combine that institutional sexism with near collapse of survey reliability you get these garbage predictions. I don’t know about anyone else around here but I’m surrounded by women who support abortion rights and are WELL aware of the damage male dominated health care regimes and practices regularly inflict on women… the emergence of this voting block came as no surprise in THIS house.
The more I look at this “analysis” the more I recognize an attempt to simply preserve a status quo narrative.
As other’s have already pointed out, any position that begins with the assumption that we have a rational two party regime with equally responsible Parties is simply incoherent. The idea that otherwise rational and responsible Republicans just went off the rails THIS TIME is an expression of some kind of selection bias in terms of analysis.
Logically, the exact same moment has been the moment of defeat since Pawlenty left office because that’s the same moment Republicans have chosen all the subsequent losers, and every other loser ever. This is a mundane observation pretending to be insight. Likewise, we know that the Republican embrace of polarization, grievance, and wedge politics was adopted back in the 1970’s… this isn’t something that just happened las May. Sure, Jensen el al were particularly crazy, but that’s been the trend for decades, let’s not pretend it could have been otherwise, this is clearly baked into the Republican DNA at this point.
To partially repeat a previous comment, the assumption that crime, inflation, and scandal should or would give an advantage to Republicans is simply facile bias of some kind. In point of fact it has been the bipartisan embrace of the Republican Law and Order regime that militarized and brutalized law enforcement in the US, thus triggering the current crises. Obviously the Republican police regime failed to prevent the crime wave, why blame the Democrats for that? Likewise the notion that government deficits create inflation is nearly comical from an economic perspective, but those deficits have been a Republican specialty since Reagan, so I don’t why voters would assume that Republicans would manage them or reduce them better than Democrats. As for scandals… the party behind Trump simply has no credibility in this regard, it’s a non-starter.
Here’s the thing, we actually know these issues are fails because Republicans ran on them and lost, clearly the assumption that these issues gave them an advantage was wrong. Furthermore, and more importantly, we know that Republicans can’t win elections on these issues, AND we know that Republicans on some level know they can’t win elections because their “base” isn’t big enough. We know this because it’s the reason Republicans started launching voter suppression initiatives over a decade ago. They’ve actually admitted that they’re trying to suppress votes in order to win elections, they know their agenda and policies can’t carry the day, they have to con their way into office, and they’re more than willing to that. In States where they’ve managed to suppress votes, they’ve won.
So no… Republicans didn’t lose this election back in May of this year… they lost it back in the 1970’s when they decided that abortion is the wedge issue they can use to polarize the nation. The only reason they’ve won elections since then is we have/had a bipartisan regime that legitimized that agenda while marginalizing any popular agenda, policy, or candidates as “extremism” of some kind.
Here we have a political “scientist” who seems to be suggesting that we’re drifting in and out of the “center” as if Jensen was some kind of “outlier” rather than the new normal first personified by Newt Gingrich? As if prior to last May we had a rational bipartisan regime? Bushwa!
I know this is all anecdotal, but I’ve been turned off by the tone of the GOP for a long time. Thirty years ago I always made sure I voted for some candidates from both parties. I live in the Metro but spend time in outstate Minnesota, and it seems to me the GOP has a hate problem that prevents them from examining issues constructively. In the Metro I generally see bumper stickers and t-shirts about issues – women’s rights, the environment, health care and people flying rainbow flags in their neighborhoods. Essentially they are policy positions. In rural areas I’m much more likely to see people, especially men, have bumper stickers that express hatred of Joe Biden, wear their discolored American Flag T-shirts and fly their “Lets go Brandon” flags. I believe metro voters are more likely to be concerned about issues that affect their lives, rural voters are more likely to be motivated by antagonism toward Democrats and the “the liberals”.
The Republican Party has tied their fortunes to the tone of this rural base, and as long as they do that, they won’t be able to promote policies that have a broader appeal.
Earlier this week the Governor announced grants to small cities in rural Minnesota. But I bet few constituents in those areas will change their thinking about who they vote for. It seems to me the DFL is more likely to take to heart Paul Wellstone’s saying that “We all do better when we all do better.” The tone of the GOP seems be more like “We don’t care if we do better, and we especially don’t want the Metro area to do better.”
This pretty much says it all. Thanks!
Absolutely right. Fewer whackadoos and more moderates. Both parties need to redo the primary system and go straight to a ballot vote with a separate event for the platform. It is a sad state of affairs, our best and brightest are not running and Americans are the losers.
Did the author really just refer to those supporting legalization of marijuana as “stoners”? I thought Schier was a serious political analyst. What’s his next opinion article on, advocating a return to “reefer madness”?
Again, I think it bears repeating: On some level Republicans KNOW that this politics of resentment and grievance can’t rack up the votes they need to win popular votes- this is why they’ve been trying to suppress voters for over a decade now. Rather than win urban votes, they think they can just block people in the cities from voting. This is an inherently antidemocratic and Fascist program based on lies and misinformation. Anyone who actually paid attention to Kiffmeyer’s campaign for voter ID witnessed a breathtaking level of dishonesty and deception that permeated the entire campaign and it’s supporters.
And it bears repeating, I know because I was there… Democrats had to be dragged into the voter ID debate kicking and screaming because they didn’t recognize it for the attack on democracy that it was. MN Democrats were ready to concede the policy because they didn’t want to waste political capital trying to defeat it. We saw the same trend with LGBTQ and abortion rights.
The problem for Republicans is that the voter suppression campaign, as antidemocratic as it may be, actually cannot deliver the votes they need. For one thing, short of a Fascist coup like the failed Jan 6 attempt, too many people will find a way to vote. Second, the campaign itself won’t succeed everywhere, it’s failed here in MN and elsewhere for instance. Unfortunately for Republicans these facts won’t dissuade them from pursuing their efforts because: A) Fascists gotta be Fascists… like the scorpion that stings the frog. B) They’ve been practicing stupid and ignorance for so long that they simply no longer have the intellectual or moral skill sets they need to reverse course on toxic and unpopular agendas.
Our ongoing problem is that even small numbers of angry, ignorant, well armed people, can nevertheless do a lot of damage.
Dissecting the voters is an inaccurate “science” at best as the above dialogue demonstrates. It is apparent the Republicans should have had a landslide but didn’t for numerous reasons mentioned already. I am hoping the era of extreme candidates from both major parties is over and officials really look at issues important to voters.
An issue not mentioned was how disconnected many state and federal elected officials are from their constituents and I would include the city of St Paul in this as well. Many voters are disgusted how the state did not pass any major bill and sat on the money doing NOTHING! That issue was not even mentioned. In St Paul Carter is spending like it is going out of style and raising property taxes in double digits AGAIN.
I do think both parties will need to deal with crime constructively. Not sure anyone has the will to do what President Clinton did in 1994 in dealing with crime in either MN or on the federal level. Crime to me is not partisan and safety is the primary or most important issue for elected officials.
Finally, it would be nice to see MN deal with issues that are not partisan for starters like crime, transportation, etc….
I agree with all the posters but I think some things are left out. I live in the cities so what do I really know? At least what I have read is most rural residents and more working class voters in general have seen their wages and quality of life in decline for the past 40 years. Democrats and republicans alike for the most part have done very little about this- both parties are funded by wealthy donors to a large extent. So rural voters have been willing to support Trumpists who claim the problem is the blacks, immigrants, the gay, women, urban residents etc. Maybe nothing gets better for you but at least someone is given the blame. So if anything is going to improve for everyone rural, urban, or suburban government is going to have to help all of us that aren’t wealthy. Here’s hoping.
Just as Jensen / Birk was good news for MN Ds in 2022, we will see the same from Ron DeSantis in 2024.
Consider the countless surveys of voter concerns in the 2022 run up: Inflation, crime, immigration, abortion and many others.
And where has DeSantis planted his priority flag? Stopping wokeism and the spread of CRT. And that plays well in FL, but only registers nationally with the Trumpiest of Trumpers. Trump has no political future and those who think they can replicate his secret sauce do not have one either.
Just as the MN Rs will find an unelectable candidate for Governor in 2026 national Rs will do the same in 2024; Culture warriors like Trump, DeSantis, Pompeo, Pence and their like will not win a majority without tricks and cheating.
And Kim Crockett won’t be around to help…