Editor’s note: With all of Minnesota’s political polarization since the 2010 elections, we decided to explore two possible “alternate realities” that could have occurred if relatively few voters had chosen “the other candidate.”
Second of two articles
Earlier: What if Tom Emmer had won the governor’s office?
A year ago, Gov. Mark Dayton was unveiling his first plan to tackle the state’s massive budget deficit.
Dayton’s initial plan called for the creation of a fourth income tax bracket. Couples earning $150,000 or more would have been taxed at a 10.95 percent rate. There also would have been a 3 percent surcharge on those making $500,000 a year or more.
The response of Republicans was predictable. They were outraged at the “epic” tax increases the governor was proposing — increases they said would put the Minnesota tax rate at the highest in the nation.
It was the responses of DFL legislators, however, that was more telling. They were silent. No DFL leaders embraced the governor or his plan.
That DFL silence underscores the differences between the what-if-stories we’re presenting.
Had Tom Emmer, or some other Republican, joined the Republican sweep to legislative majorities in 2010, a dramatic agenda would have sailed through the process.
Fate of Dayton agenda unclear
But the reverse isn’t necessarily true.
If the DFL would have maintained majorities in the House and Senate, Dayton still would have faced some difficult battles in setting an agenda.
Republicans, at least outwardly, sing from a common “less-government” songbook. DFLers, however, often can’t agree on either the songs or the book.
Either scenario — Republicans or DFLers in total control — was within handfuls of votes of happening.
With the GOP holding a 72 to 62 advantage in the House and 37 to 30 in the Senate, a swing in only few races would have changed control of the Legislature.
Look at how legislative majorities turned on Nov. 2, 2010 on close races like these: Rep. King Banaian, R-St. Cloud, defeated DFLer Carol Lewis by 13 votes. Rep. Kelby Woodard, R-Belle Plaine, defeated DFLer David Bly by 37 votes. Rep. Rich Murray, R-Albert Lea, defeated DFLer Robin Brown by 57 votes. Rep. Kirk Stensrud, R-Eden Prairie, defeated Maria Rudd by 107 votes. Rep. Debra Kiel, R-Crookston, defeated DFLer Bernie Lieder by 131 votes.
Nearly as dramatic outcomes were unfolding on the Senate side as DFLers watched their majorities slip away, vote by vote, seat by seat.
What might have been?
Rukavina’s blunt assessment
“We wouldn’t have been dealing with an agenda written by the Chamber of Commerce,” said Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia. “We would have had some fair taxes. We wouldn’t have lost so much on the homestead credit. We wouldn’t have had the highest cuts in higher education in state history. We care about people, not corporations.”
Those things are easy to say, but some of those actions would have been difficult to pull off, given the reality of the huge deficit faced by the governor and Legislature last session and the large splits among DFLers.
Look at the issues that divide the DFL: Urban environmentalists vs. job-hungry Iron Rangers. Suburban moderates vs. urban liberals. Wedge issues such as gun control.
That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t have been dramatic changes if DFLers were in control.
For starters, there would have been no amendments on the November ballot. No gay marriage amendment, no photo ID, no chance of making Minnesota a so-called “right to work”state.
Additionally, large bonding bills would have been passed. Construction would be under way on convention center renovations and expansions in Rochester, St. Cloud and Mankato. Likely, a new ballpark would be rising in downtown St. Paul.
There would have been a push by unions and such DFL legislators as Rep. Tom Rukavina to increase the minimum wage. (Instead, with Republicans in charge, there is a push by some Republicans to push the tip penalty, a provision that would allow servers who receive tips to receive less than the minimum. That surely would be vetoed by Dayton.)
But public subsidy of a new Vikings’ stadium and gambling expansion — other than electronic pull tabs — would be stuck in the same legislative muck they’re stuck in now.
Dayton’s agenda
In his heart, Dayton —- who constantly makes references to his first political mentor, former Gov. Rudy Perpich — identifies most closely with the old Rangers. That means, to the distress of some environmentalists, jobs, coupled with education, are the top priorities.
Despite his silver spoon upbringing, or perhaps because of it, Dayton also places a high priority on what he considers tax fairness, which comes down to his simple campaign slogan “tax the rich.”
Dayton also has a fundamental belief that government can do good. Minnesota moved ahead of the rest of the country, he believes, because of progressive government that was willing to “invest.’’ (In other words, tax and spend.)
The governor made a reference to his belief in his State of the State speech earlier this month.
“When this magnificent Capitol opened in 1905, Minnesota was a very different state,” he said. “And not nearly as successful. Our citizens’ per-capita income was below the rest of the country’s and it dropped to only 85 percent of the national average by 1920. There it floundered for the next 25 years, before beginning a gradual climb to parity with the rest of the country in the 1960s, rising above the national average in the 1970s and continuing to improve thereafter.”
The keys to that rise, Dayton went on to say, was based on the state’s willingness to invest in such things as education.
Investment means spending, and spending means taxes. And when it’s taxing the rich, that is a message that plays well, especially in the old DFL bases of northern Minnesota and the cities.
But there is this reality. Those old Rangers, such as Rukavina, are a diminishing breed because the population there is declining. The size of the Iron Range delegation in St. Paul will shrink again with the state’s new redistricting map.
It’s in the suburbs and exurbs that the population is on the rise, and that creates a new genre of DFLers.
That means new messaging for the party. “Tax the rich” calls make suburban DFLers wince. “Hmm … Are couples earning a combined $150,000 really rich?’’
By the time Dayton had refined his “tax the rich” slogan to include only those 7,000 or so people in the state making $1 million a year or more, there was more comfort among DFLers about his message. (It didn’t hurt that polls showed that the final Dayton tax plans were supported by a substantial majority of Minnesotans.)
Still, when legislative campaigns start heating up this summer, you won’t hear many DFLers campaigning on Dayton’s tax-the-rich theme. Instead, the DFL focus will be on the “middle class.”
For every time House Speaker mentions “the business community,” House Minority Leader Paul Thissen mentions “middle class” about three times.
That means a focus on such things as property taxes, funding for K-12 education and the high costs of higher education.
That desire to focus on such things as higher education is one of the reasons so many DFLers bristled at the high payout the University of Minnesota’s new president, Eric Kaler, made to departing athletic director Joel Maturi.
It doesn’t matter that the money being used to soften Maturi’s departure comes from a special president’s fund,and it doesn’t matter that Kaler argues that Maturi will raise far more money than his departure salary. What matters is the symbolism.
If the University budget has been “cut to the bone,” how does it happen that there’s more than $400,000 to pay Maturi’s salary and benefits for a year after he steps down?
Symbolism matters — if only to a small portion of voters. And as 2010 proved so convincingly, only a handful of voters can make a huge difference in the direction the state heads.
It’s never as simple as it seems
This has been a good, if brief, series. “Alternative history” often provides opportunities to think about events from a different perspective, and that intellectual exercise is often useful all by itself.
One of the things that strikes me from reading both parts of the series is that – political rhetoric to the contrary aside – socioeconomic class still matters, and in some ways it matters more than anything else. The fissures within DFL ranks provide interesting illustrations.
I claim no real expertise here, but it seems plausible, at least, that the more “united front” of the GOP stems from a greater socioeconomic coherence within the party itself. Republicans of color are not nonexistent, but they’re rare. I’ve been here 2-1/2 years, and don’t recall coming across any substantial amount of publicity about a minority Republican leader. Really poor Republicans are similarly rare.
DFLers have a much less coherent message and agenda, perhaps, because the DFL itself is a less coherent group. In socioeconomic terms, it certainly seems much more diverse than the GOP, and that kind of diversity very nearly requires a similar diversity in terms of political ideas and strategies.
And, it should be said, socioeconomic groups largely practice self-protection, so it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that, when the greatest growth in both population and prosperity is in the middle-class suburbs, those areas and populations want things to go their way. Without boring readers with details, I’ll just say that a little experiment I ran in my Western Civ classes every year – when we reached a unit on political revolutions in conjunction with the American and French Revolutions – demonstrated rather conclusively that when people acquire the power to make rules for the society as a whole, they make rules that benefit themselves. We’re all going to be self-serving to some degree if we get the opportunity to do so. Suburbanites are no different from rural or urban dwellers in that regard.
I confess I’ve not paid very much attention to the total numbers, but am a little confused by this sentence: “With the GOP holding a 72 to 62 advantage in the Senate and 37 to 30 in the House, a swing in only few races would have changed control of the Legislature.” Is the Minnesota State Senate actually twice as large as the Minnesota House of Representatives, or were the figures transposed at some point in putting the article together?
Legislature
Figures were transposed; however, we have the largest state senate in the nation with 67 members.
It’s simple really
Principle matters. Republicans are people from a broad socioeconomic background who share common principles.
– The government that governs best, governs least.
– The Constitution is the greatest governing document in the history of man.
– The role of government is to protect your constitutional rights.
– A free society is preferable to an equal society.
– The greatest economic system in the history of the world is capitalism because it’s based on the power of free markets and consumer choice.
It’s relatively easy to devise and agree to legislation that are consistent with common principles.
Democrats are people from a broad socioeconomic background who share membership in one or more groups defined by race, gender, and/or ethnicity, their preference for collectivism versus individualism and their belief that the role of government is to equalize society so that they get their “fair share.”
It’s harder to agree to legislation when the goals and visions of one group may conflict with the visions of another group.
Actually, I agree
When you reduce the world to a childish simplification of its true nature, it does make it easier to agree on what to do.
Great point
When your campaign slogan is “Tax the Rich” it makes it much easier to communicate your priorities to your constituency.
The difference
is between an entire worldview and one policy suggestion.
Oh, also, you forgot something.
– The government that governs best, governs least. * ** ***
* Except when it comes to regulating what goes on in peoples’ bedrooms. Then there’s some governin’ to do!
** Or invading oil-rich countries. As much as we like governing the least, we need to fund the world’s largest military ten times over so we can do that if need be.
*** Also, it doesn’t count as “governing” if we use tax money to pay a private company to do it.
Fixed that for you.
Ziggy, too!
And we can intervene in the free market if it benefits billionaire owners of professional sports teams. The we forget hard and fast “principles” in favor of emotion.
I’ve never heard Grover Norquist spend much energy on that issue!
“The government that governs best, governs least.”
So why add more government bureaucracy on top of the voting process?
We don’t have to wonder
There is already one state out there playing out this “what if” scenerio. Here is a wonderfully succinct compilation of what happens when leftists run a state unchallenged:
http://bit.ly/dcvBXx
Prop 13?
Do the words “Prop 13” mean anything to you? California’s system of direct governance, epitomized by the ridiculous Prop 13, has left their state in a shambles.
It has nothing to do with the Democrats.
California is not a representative example
This is for the reason that they can pass referendums for more services, but the legislature needs a 2/3 majority to raise more funds. No matter what your political leanings, this is a clearly a recipe for fiscal disaster.
I wouldn’t wander into comparisons of states run by “leftists” and those by not, since the standards of living in states run by “leftists” are universally better.
Prop 13 and ignoring the voice of the people
Prop 13 was a response to an out of control, leftist government; it was hugely successful, but incomplete. 13 took care of the taxing side of the equation, but it wasn’t until the passage of Prop 25 in 2010 that the spending side was addressed.
Now the Democratic majority is working feverishly to find an unglued seam in the law, not only to keep the spending spree going, but to make sure they don’t get their paychecks docked as per the law.
I won’t deny that some of the remenants of the old, busted, pre-Tea Party GOP were perfectly capable of spending like a Democrat (vis GWBush), but in California they never got the opportunity to prove themselves.
Don’t forget, BTW; when I say “leftist control”, I mean to include the majority electorate. There is a very good reason California is called the “Left coast”, and they prove it every year as they drive employers out and their economy into the ground.
It’s lefty paradise.
Oh really???
Readers should consider that California has the largest GDP of all fifty states and about a seventh of the GDP of the entire nation.
If that’s what you call running our California “economy into the ground”, we’re simply proud of it and pleased as punch!
We may get a chance to find out
after this fall’s election.
I hope MinnPost will dig into some of the proposed (Republican) legislation to see how Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman would govern Minnesota if they had the chance. A world view that talks about “opportunity” while doing its best to make higher ed too expensive for most students significantly reduces opportunity. And one that believes health care is a commodity to be provided at ever-higher cost and profit for insurers and drug companies — except for a modest state “contribution” that leaves thousands of dollars in deductibles, copays and penalties for people of modest means to pay — reduces access to quality preventive and curative care. And there is so much more — voter i.d. to reduce access to our constitutional right to vote while pretending fraud is actually a problem; no right to marry for persons who don’t happen to have been born heterosexual; requiring a super-majority to raise any tax, thus preventing the state from raising enough revenue to keep it from falling apart.
I REALLY hope we get a chance to defeat all this mean-spirited, corporate-written-and-friendly legislation starting at the beginning of next year’s session so we can return our state to fiscal health and steady improvement the quality of life for all our people.