A breakdown of the gubernatorial election in Minnesota.

Minnesota holds its elections for statewide constitutional officers this year.  This post will focus on the gubernatorial race, as it is at the top of the ballot this year and the other races appear to be in hand for the incumbents.  The contestants in the gubernatorial race are former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton (Democratic-Farmer-Labor), State Rep. Tom Emmer (Republican), and former Republican strategist Tom Horner (Independence).

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) comes into this election with a long losing streak.  The last DFL candidate to win the governor’s race was incumbent Gov. Rudy Perpich, who defeated State Rep. Cal Ludeman (IR-Tracy) with 56 percent of the vote to Ludeman’s 43 percent of the vote (for those not familiar with Minnesota politics, the Independent-Republican Party was the Minnesota affiliate of the GOP from 1975 to 1995).  Perpich would lose a close race in 1990 to State Auditor Arne Carlson, who earned a place on the ballot after the nominated candidate, businessman Jon Grunseth, who was caught up in a sex scandal when it was revealed that he had gone skinny dipping with his daughter’s teenaged friend nine years earlier.  In any case, the defeat in 1990 was the beginning of a losing streak that has stretched into the present day.

The Electoral Map in past elections

Minnesota.

Map of Minnesota Counties.

The two above maps of Minnesota does not really describe much to those that are not from the state other than counties, cities, towns, and highways, so let me attempt to break this down for you as much as possible.  The Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) are the most liberal areas of the state.  Other solid DFL areas are northeastern Minnesota (Duluth, Cloquet, and the Iron Range, which includes Virginia and Hibbing), the southeastern Mississippi River region (Winona), and the northwestern part of the state (Thief River Falls, East Grand Forks, and Roseau), and parts of west central Minnesota (Ortonville and Benson).  The reliably Republican areas are the far southwestern and western Twin Cities suburbs and exurbs (Hutchinson is the only one that is on this map, but also Delano, Annandale, and Chaska), the southwest corn belt (Worthington, Marshall, Luverne), and parts of west central Minnesota (Alexandria and Fergus Falls).  In these areas, it will be primarily about turnout and limiting the Independence Party vote (more on that later).

The swing areas of the state tend to be central and north central Minnesota (St. Cloud and Brainerd), the northern, eastern, and near western Twin Cities suburbs (Anoka, Blaine, Woodbury, Eden Prairie, Minnetonka), the Rochester, Albert Lea-Austin, and Mankato areas, and parts of west central Minnesota (Morris and Granite Falls).  These are the areas in which I will focus.  I will be taking the data from the last three gubernatorial elections, since those were pretty close and the most relevant to what we are looking at this year.

The 1998 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Results.

This is from the 1998 election where Jesse Ventura was elected Governor with 37 percent of the vote.  There are a couple of exceptions here (Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, which contain the Twin Cities, and Carver, McLeod, Scott, and Dakota Counties, which form the southern and southwestern Twin Cities suburbs), but the counties which were won by Ventura are still swing areas today.  You can where the pattern breaks down pretty much as I described elsewhere (for these sets of maps, the creator has chosen to use Red to represent the DFL and Blue to represent the GOP, as it was prior to the 1960s).  In this race, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman finished second with 34 percent of the vote, and DFL nominee Hubert H. Hmuphrey III finished third with 28 percent of the vote.

The 2002 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Results.

This is from the 2002 election where State Rep. Tim Pawlenty (R-Eagan) was elected Governor with 44 percent of the vote.  As you can see, the reliable areas of the state fall as I described above.  Southern Minnesota is the notable exception because Independence Party candidate Tim Penny once represented that area as a DFL congressman from Waseca.  You see that the swing areas were all racked up by Pawlenty and Penny, enabling Pawlenty to take the win.  In many of these areas, the presence of Penny on the ballot tended to hurt Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe, the DFL candidate.  In this race, Moe finished second with 36 percent of the vote, and Penny finished third with 16 percent of the vote.

The 2006 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Results.

In this election, Gov. Pawlenty was re-elected by a 21,000 vote margin and 47 percent of the vote.  This time, you saw Hatch carve into some of these swing areas, winning the Albert Lea-Austin and Mankato areas in southern Minnesota.  However, in what has seemed to become a pattern in Minnesota gubernatorial elections, the Independence Party candidate, former Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent and former DFLer Peter Hutchinson, siphoned off crucial votes in areas like Park Rapids, Brainerd, western Hennepin County, and Anoka from the DFL nominee, Attorney General Mike Hatch.  Ultimately, however, it may have been the late gaffes by his running mate (Judi Dutcher, a former State Auditor, did not know what E85, a corn-based ethanol was even though its presence is ubiquitous in Minnesota) and Hatch himself (calling a reporter who asked him about said gaffe a “Republican whore”) that sealed the DFL ticket’s fate, as they lost areas of the southwest that were only in play due to the heavily Democratic wind nationally.  Hatch finished second with 46 percent of the vote, and Hutchinson finished a very distant third with six percent of the vote.

2010

That brings us to 2010.  This year, there are a couple of things that are different, and they all have to do with the candidates that are running.

The Republican nominee, Emmer, is very conservative.  In fact, he may the most conservative candidate to run statewide since the days of Govs. J.A.O. Preus and Theodore Christianson in the 1920s.  He has cut his conservative credentials as the Minority Whip in the Minnesota State House.  In that capacity, he went out and campaigned against six Republicans who overrode Gov. Pawlenty’s veto on a gas tax increase to fund transportation projects in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse.  Of those six, only State Rep. Jim Abeler (R-Anoka) remains in the Legislature.

The Independence Party has been a thorn in the side of DFL campaigns for twelve years.  Many argue that the Independence Party has acted as a foil for the Republicans, as the 2002 and 2006 elections were likely to have gone the DFL’s way had there not been a moderate to strong Independence Party presence on the ballot.  In both cases, the IP’s candidate for Governor were former Democrats.  Giving further ammunition to this argument is the fact that the IP endorsed John Edwards when he ran for President in 2004.  However, this dynamic has changed this year, as Horner was a chief 0f staff to former U.S. Sen. David Durenberger (IR-MN).  Will this change the votes that are up for grabs?  It remains to be seen, since Emmer is running further right than any Republican has in 80 years.  This could mean that Horner will either take moderate Republican votes that would have normally gone to a slightly less conservative candidate, like a Tim Pawlenty or Marty Seifert (the candidate that Emmer defeated for the GOP nomination), or take independent votes away from Dayton that he would have normally won in a two-way race against such a conservative candidate.

As far as Dayton is concerned, the DFL might have its most progressive candidate since John Marty in 1994.  Marty lost in a landslide to the popular Carlson, but Dayton has an eminently better shot in 2010.  The first thing that Dayton has going for him is the candidate that he is running against.  Marty faced off against one of the most popular Governors in Minnesota history in a re-election bid.  Meanwhile, Emmer has a net negative approval rating, and he has already committed a number of early gaffes, the biggest of which being the “Waitergate” imbroglio.  Also, while some of the swing areas in Minnesota have trended Republican in recent elections, we must compare the candidates.  Coleman and Pawlenty did not run as particularly conservative candidates; they instead hewed to the right bank of mainstream opinion.  Once Pawlenty became Governor (and Coleman became a U.S. Senator), they moved further right than they had campaigned.  Emmer may be too conservative for a lot of Minnesotans in these areas.

Not that Dayton does not have his own flaws.  He was infamously named as one of “America’s Five Worst Senators” by Time Magazine in 2006, and chose to retire from the Senate instead of face an almost certain rejection at the polls (Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar won in his stead).  He once gave himself an “F” for his performance in the Senate, although it should be pointed out that he also gave the Senate as a whole an “F” as well.  He has stated that he has suffered from alcoholism and depression, and that he had a lapse of the former while he was in the Senate.  While I do not expect that to be an issue in this election, it is still worth mentioning.  People have also questioned his commitment to serving given that he only served one term as State Auditor and one term as a U.S. Senator.

Results

It is difficult to prognosticate this election.  Neither of these candidates are the type to play it safe, so there are many things that could happen between now and election day.  However, one thing that is certain is that this one could keep us up all night.  A couple of other things are certain as well:

• Dayton is still popular amongst older Minnesotans. Whether it be because of the identification of the man with the store that once bore his name or the famed bus trips to Canada for prescription drugs that he sponsored when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2000, Dayton’s winning margins came from voters over 55+.  This fact is key, because without their backing, he would find himself in the same dire straits that many other Democratic candidates find themselves in this year.
• If it comes down to the Iron Range and northeast Minnesota, DFLers will not have reason to be disappointed. How many times have you watched a close election as a DFLer, only to hear your statewide candidate du jour say something to the effect of, “We may be down now, but we have some of the best precincts that you have ever seen coming out of the Range”, and then still manage to lose the election?  Well, with State Sen. Yvonne Prettner Solon (DFL-Duluth) on the ballot as Dayton’s running mate, we might have reason to believe that this is the year that the Iron Range does not disappoint us.  Winning a broad swath of northern Minnesota will be the key to victory, and Dayton’s LG pick will help to make that a reality.
• The Independence Party candidate is a former Republican this time. Again, I cannot know exactly how this will affect the race because candidate Emmer is so much more conservative than candidates Pawlenty or Coleman were, in addition to the fact that the Republican U.S. Senator that Horner worked for, Dave Durenberger, is generally thought to be in the moderate to liberal wing of the Republican Party (or what I call the old IR).  However, his policies should hew closer to Emmer’s than to Dayton’s, and this may benefit the DFL for the first time in over a decade.  FInally….
• More DFLers are actually satisfied with their candidate in 2010 than in previous elections. The whole reason that the Independence Party has been able to attract so many votes from the DFL is because of general dissatisfaction with DFL gubernatorial candidates.  This year, the party appears to be more unified behind Dayton than it was for Hatch, Moe, or Humphrey.  This should either keep the loss of votes to the Independence Party to a minimum or push the voter loss to the IP over to the Republican candidate.

I expect that the election will come down to the Iron Range, but I expect that Dayton will pull out the victory.  As far as numbers are concerned, my (highly subject to future events) prediction is this:  Dayton 45, Emmer 41, Horner 13.  I think the fact that the two parties have nominated two candidates that are diametrically opposed to one another (although Dayton is not as liberal as Emmer is conservative, but fairly close) will allow there to be some space in the middle that Horner can appeal to.  But it appears that Horner is content to seem “above it all” and garner only 13 percent of the vote, so I think that his background and appeal could be to constituencies that are traditionally more likely to favor Republicans, like businesspeople and suburbanites.  The final magin will not be as large as the polls are now indicating, but I do not see a recent history of Minnesota backing conservative statewide candidates, so it is Dayton with the win.

This will be a fun race to watch, and I will definitely be tuned in.