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WASHINGTON – While Rep. Angie Craig was considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the House, concerns about restrictions on abortion, partisan differences on who’s to blame for inflation and a higher than average turnout of young voters in the 2nd District helped propel her to re-election.
On Tuesday, Craig defeated Republican rival Tyler Kistner, 51% -46%. A Marijuana Now Party candidate who died last month, but whose name was still on the ballot, drew a little more than 3% of the vote and without that third candidate, Craig’s margin may have been broader.
She joked Wednesday that her margin of victory was “a landslide for the 2nd District,” which she says has equal number of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
Since she was first elected to Congress in 2018, Craig has had very narrow victories, including the one she eked out in a former race against Kistner in 2020.
What changed the dynamic this year, in which the GOP was expected to lay waste to Democrats in swing districts like Craig’s?
Several things. Perhaps the most important was that Democrats were able to hold onto their gains in the nation’s suburbs – the 2nd District is composed of both suburban Twin Cities and more rural areas.
A MinnPost analysis of Tuesday’s vote shows that Craig outperformed Kistner in Dakota County, running well ahead of him in Eagan, Apple Valley and Burnsville, while trailing her Republican challenger, but not by much, in Lakeville.
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Craig also won more votes than Kistner in Cottage Grove, West St. Paul, North, St. Paul and many of the district’s larger towns, while Kistner was the favorite candidate of voters in the district’s smaller towns and rural areas.
Craig won those areas of the district largely because that’s where Democratic voters are concentrated. But they are also home to independents, who in the midterm seem to have broken for Democrats. According to national exit polls, Democrats carried these independent voters by 49%-47%.
Craig said knew exactly when those voters started to swing her way – when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a decades-old decision that legalized early term abortions.
“The mood shifted just then,” Craig said.
The Democrat hit Kistner, relentlessly, on his “pro-life” stance, something that seems to have resonated.
A group of St. Olaf College students fanned out across the 2nd District on Election Day, something they have been doing since 2008, to conduct an exit poll of voters in 14 precincts. St. Olaf political science professor Christopher Chapp said his students chose to poll the busiest precincts.
The students found that 2nd District voters differed sharply on the most important issue in the midterm.
About 49% of Craig supporters said abortion was the most important issue, followed by inflation/economy, at about 16%. Then came election integrity, 13.6% and healthcare at nearly 11%.
Meanwhile, nearly 70% of Kistner’s supporters ranked inflation and/or the economy as the most important issue, followed by abortion (9.2%) and crime (7.6%).
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Evan Frost[/image_credit][image_caption]Rep. Angie Craig defeated Republican rival Tyler Kistner, 51% -46%.[/image_caption]
“But it had an enormous impact on 4 out of 10 voters,” Jacobs said. “For many voters it was the most important issue.”
Jacobs also said a “partisanship is a firebreak” that shielded Democrats like Craig from voter concerns about the economy and inflation. Even with President Biden’s low popularity ratings, Democrats were much less willing than Republicans to blame the president for economic ills or make them a major factor when choosing a candidate.
There are other indications that Biden’s unpopularity may not have impacted Craig’s race – at least not much. Amy Walters of the Cook Political Report has focused this year on a group of voters who she dubbed the “meh voters.”
Those voters are not happy with the job Biden is doing but were willing to support a Democratic candidate for Congress. According to exit polls, among those who “somewhat” disapproved of Biden, 49% voted for the Democrat and 45% voted for the Republican,” Walters said.
“Meh voters” who told exit pollsters that they did not think the economy was either “good” or “poor, but instead rated it “not so good” voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, 62%-35%, Walters said.
Help from young voters
Megan Peery, a student at St. Olaf College and a first time voter, is far from being a “meh voter.” The sophomore, who wants to be a social worker, said she comes from a politically engaged family who held an election watch party for former President Obama when he was first elected in 2008.
[image_caption]Megan Peery[/image_caption]
She said she voted for Craig because “I care about who is representing the country.”
St. Olaf College has won awards for the high voter turnout of its students, and nearby Carleton College students turned out heavily on Election Day, in the town of Northfield, where the colleges are located. Kistner received about 2,000 votes while Craig won more than 9,000.
But younger voters across the nation voted in greater numbers this year, helping Democrats like Craig.
Exit polls showed that 18 to 29 year olds, motivated by concerns about abortion restrictions, climate change and threats to democracy, were energized to turn out in greater numbers than usual for a midterm.
An Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll found that 63% of those young Americans voted for a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House, while 35% of young Americans backed Republican candidates.
“The kids hit it out of the park,” said Craig, who said she campaigned heavily on the campuses of St. Olaf and Carlton colleges.
Craig also burnished her moderate credentials in the race.
“I’ve always trusted the voters of Minnesota to want someone who could reach across the aisle,” she said.
However, not all moderate Democrats survived on Tuesday night. Craig was part of a wave of Democratic women who flipped Republican-held seats in 2018. Some of those women, including Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., and Rep. Cindy Axne, D-Iowa, were defeated.
Yet Jacobs said the 2nd District is becoming slightly more Democratic and more hospitable for candidates like Craig.
“Angie Craig is moving much more into a more moderate-Democrat trending direction,” he said.
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One would hope what “saved” Craig was simply coherent voting. If you voted for Biden and Craig in 2020 (as a majority of Minnesotans in the district did), you got a huge number of campaign promises enacted. Thus it would be irrational to now vote against Craig (and by implication, Biden) after they did what they campaigned on, and what you (supposedly) wanted. Plus, despite the tsunami of intentionally false and misleading Repub ads blanketing the airwaves, most people figured out that (as usual) “conservatives” are all complaints and no plausible solutions. Their extravagant “promises” are empty, since they are a party of grievance, not governance. Indeed, they have to lie to win.
Add in that there was no compelling reason to throw out a three term moderate Congressperson for a young conservative zealot slated to be a backbenching nonentity, and the coherent vote was for Craig. That Kistner was (of course) an anti-abortion extremist was the final straw.
Yes, but you assume midterm voters are the same as potus election year voters. It seems that what the prognosticators & GOP missed is that, this time, midterm voters more closely matched potus voters.
Where that gets more interesting, to me, is looking forward. Younger voters have been participating more in recent elections than in the past. That is a trend worth watching.
Well, there are always new voters every election, as energized young people and immigrants enter the ranks of the democracy. And yes, MN had a midterm turnout of 61% rather than 79% two years ago. But I would guess the vast majority of Tuesday’s voters also voted in 2020.
I was trying to imagine what could be going through the mind of a Biden/Craig voter who now contemplated voting for the young conservative instead. Nothing very sensible, I’d say.
A tip of my hat to Mr Anderson’s eloquent wrap-up of the race.
Still, I also wonder if Craig’s late ads attacking Kistner’s misrepresentation of his military service cost him votes.
I hope so.
Maybe a tiny bit, but not enough to sway voters motivated by abortion or the economy. Still, it’s an unforced error on Kistner’s part. Hard to imagine a voter thinking “I’m not going to vote for the veteran who served competently and received an honorable discharge–unless he saw combat.”
“I’m not going to vote for the veteran who served competently and received an honorable discharge–unless he saw combat.”
True
The message of the ads were:
“Don’t vote for the guy who lied on his resume”
Whether he saw combat or not was irrelevant. What WAS relevant was his lying about it. Bottom line for me was that if he’s willing to lie about something that’s so easily checked, what ELSE is he willing to lie about? And yes, it DID hurt him IMHO. IFAIC, his political career in this region of the state is over. He tainted himself with his fake combat claims.
He didn’t lie about being a veteran, he lied about seeing combat, that’s a big lie.
I agree that it’s a big lie. But it’s just completely nonsensical to tell such an easily verifiable lie. I just cannot see who he was trying to sway. People who liked him for being a veteran would already be voting for him regardless of combat experience.
It’s like Herschel Walker claiming he graduated in the top 1 percent of his class even though he dropped out to make millions of dollars playing football – a move that even his most ardent opponents would agree was the absolutely correct decision.
In my opinion, the only reason for lies like these are to see exactly how much gaslighting they can get away with. I find it baffling.
I agree with all you wrote, Mr Day, but would also like to add in the component of megalomania. These damaged people can’t help getting carried away with self-praise and imagined grandiosity. They actually imagine that their lies are reality, or at least “close enough”. They came close to combat, so they were “in” it. They talked to someone in combat, so they were “in” it, too. Etc. It always blows up in their face, but they can’t help themselves.
And there are gradations, of course. Kistner is at one end of the spectrum and crackpots like Trump and Walker are at the other. The far end engages in a torrent of verifiable lies about their imaginary accomplishments, the more hyperbolic, the better.
The critical point, however, is that these Repub liars have seen that no number of verifiable lies about themselves matters to the Repub base that they are playing to. So if they indulge in their fantasies about their past “triumphs” and the media reports the falsity of the claim, they don’t suffer any opprobrium and ignominy; they don’t lose 10 Repub votes!
Trump is a lying phony through and through. He has never said one truthful thing about himself. Walker is an obviously brain-damaged ignoramus, perhaps the most unqualified senate candidate run by a major party in 50 years. But it doesn’t matter to the Repub base, they will vote for these (easily proven!) liars like automatons…
One word
trump
I had the impression that Kistner wasn’t in meaningful control of his campaign. Most of the ads I saw were paid for by outsiders. It’s as if donors didn’t trust him. I also thought his campaign was almost completely without substance; it was all attack on Angie. I have questions of Republican candidates for Congress. Would they continue Biden’s policy in Ukraine? Would there be circumstances under which they would support the impeachment of the president? Would they oppose using the debt ceiling for political advantage? Questions like that never seemed to be asked in this campaign, or indeed any campaign.
Abortion was a wholly unexpected and almost unbelievable gift to the Democrats. A guaranteed red wave was somehow averted. Just like Covid, which cost Trump a second term, abortion arrived just in the nick of time.
A rare day when I largely agree with you. Except when you speak of the “guaranteed” red wave being “somehow averted”, as though this occurrence was an inscrutable mystery.
I will explain it: the deeply desired red wave was averted by substantially increased midterm turnout in many jurisdictions. Turnout very likely caused by the unprincipled decision of the Repub Supreme Court to finally realize the dream of all American Evangelicals and white conservatives: the overruling of Roe, with the time-honored cry, “Send abortion back to the states!”
Well, now the issue is back in the states. Wonder how “conservatives” like the results?
And this democratically-illegitimate Repub Court can be expected to issue many more such politically unpopular rulings as the six rightwing extremists masquerading as justices work to reshape America into an (unsought) “conservative” paradise. And hopefully this terrible Repub Court will become a catastrophic albatross around the neck of the “conservative” movement.
The SCOTUS abortion decision, amazing mg others, made liberals feel like they were the party out of power.
That’s because in a country that actually has Government by Judiciary, they are!
I think there were a number of things going. I am a poll skeptic and critic in a lot of ways, but in particular these days, I don’t know if polls are able to take into account the long period of time in which we now vote. Abortion, for example, seemed to me an issue that cooled down over time. Also, there are crisis issues and everyday issues. We don’t always need an abortion, but we drive by gas stations every day, and the price of gas is visibly posted. We go the grocery stores frequently. Crime can be a constant concern. I think this is reflected in a certain imbalance in our politics. For most of us, for most days, things get along okay. On those days, we don’t perceive a need for government and the anti government party seems a reasonable choice. But as we have repeatedly learned in the last few decades, disasters occur, and Republicans are horrible at handling disasters. They, in fact, don’t believe they should have to handle disasters, that it is someone else’s job, or that it’s our own fault, or really that what we perceive as a disaster, isn’t really happening at all.
When I went to bed with Kistner in front be so little with only the Rice, Scott and Washington county parts of the district recorded, I felt confident that Angie would win. I knew that she was dominant in the county north of Hwy 46, and besides Lakeville, there wasn’t enough population south of the hwy to make up the difference.
The fact that Rep. Craig was running against a weak opponent cannot be overstated. She beat Kistner in 2020, and he had nothing new to offer: no public service, no business history, no reason for voters to change their minds about him. It’s as if he had been in cold storage for two years. All he could say, when he deigned/was allowed to speak on his ads was that he would block President Biden’s agenda. He said nothing positive about a platform or agenda, just that he would be a negative voice in Congress.
The independent ads against Rep. Craig were also not just misleading (at best), they were lurid to the point of being amateurish. Why the “independent” Republican campaign arms entrusted the ads against a vulnerable incumbent to the firm of Howard, Fine & Howard is beyond me.
News commentators have made a big deal about inflation and how it should hurt Democrats without actually discussing what causes inflation (apparently due to ignorance). Eco 101 tells us as that inflation is due to too much money chasing too few goods for which the basic cause is the Fed artificially increasing the money supply. It does this to cover the Federal government deficit which has increased under EVERY administration since Clinton. Bush because of the Iraq war. Trump because of a huge tax cut without a corresponding decrease in government spending. And also Obama and Biden for excess spending (thank you Manchin for trying to keep it down a bit!). (Biden claimed a reduction in the deficit, which is probably true w.r.t. Trump, but it is still a deficit…. what we need is a surplus!) So both Parties are to blame for inflation (and I would argue the Republicans more than the Democrats). Many of us who have been around for a while know this …. probably enough to not make it the number issue in our voting.
As an aside, when the Fed says their Goal is 2% inflation per year, they are baking inflation into our future because they know the government doesn’t know how to control their spending/tax ratio. We need people in office who want to generate some surpluses and reduce our overwhelming national debt.
We dumped a lot of money into the economy because we were afraid with the huge job losses resulting from the pandemic we were afraid the economy would collapse. It is certainly arguable, and many people do argue that we dumped too much money into the economy particularly in the first year of the Biden administration whe n we now know with the benefit of hindsight that the threat of the pandemic was receding. Inflation was always a risk associated with these monetary policies but it was a long term risk we were willing to assume to fend off the short term disaster we saw lying ahead. Keynes famously observed that in the long term, we are all dead, but what he left unsaid is that a lot of people die in the short term as well.
Inflation was an issue in the recently concluded campaign, but it was used as a label and a weapon, not as something that need to be analyzed and as a problem to be solved in the coming years. Now is a peculiar time in our political cycle. One election is over and the next election is as far away as it will ever get. I always think this is a good time to put partisanship aside and have a candid discussion among all the parties about what we can do better going forward. For example, inflation is the price were willing to pay so that the economy would survive. What price in terms of immediate prosperity are we willing to make to quell inflation? Those are tough choices people are unwilling to make in political seasons. This season is as unpolitical as anything ever gets. Are we willing to examine those problems now?
Answer to the headline question: Money.