| The breadth and depth of President-elect Barack Obama's victory last week is still resonating across America.
But here in Minnesota, something didn't go quite right -- we had several competitive races at the federal level, two of which resulted in frustrating losses and another which is still being figured out. The DFL won five state legislative races, but lost three others, gaining just two seats in their quest for a veto-proof majority.
It's become clear that Democratic campaigns in Minnesota underperformed the rest of the country -- but why?
Read on after the break.
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 First, the numbers. What you're looking at here is the difference between John Kerry's vote percentage in 2004, Barack Obama's in 2008, and the difference between the two. The colors indicate which way the state went in each election, red for George W. Bush and John McCain, blue for John Kerry and Barack Obama.
The data is ordered by the Obama/Kerry difference, and the greyed-out states indicate states that may exhibit unusual vote totals due to being the home of one of the major players -- Massachusetts for Kerry, Arizona for McCain, Alaska for Sarah Palin, Delaware for Joe Biden, Illinois and Hawaii for Barack Obama.
In 43 states, Barack Obama improved upon Kerry's showing. However, among states that voted Democratic in both 2004 and 2008, Minnesota experienced the lowest gains other than Massachusetts, which had a native son on the ballot in 2004 -- just a 3-point gain over 2004.
The result: no coattails for candidates further down the ballot.
There are several factors in play here. - Excitement over the historic nature of Obama's candidacy certainly stole some of the oxygen from congressional and State House races. With so many ads on TV and radio, people probably started tuning out earlier than in previous years
- Lack of focus -- Minnesota may have been taken for granted by Democratic operatives, given its historic Democratic lean and the general trend nationwide -- perhaps it was simply seen as safe enough not to put too much emphasis on it.
- The field plan probably (and I would have to confirm this before really identifying it as part of the problem) focused on turnout in the Twin Cities and the Iron Range as a major component of building a statewide majority.
- Third-party candidates played a potentially deciding factor in three major races.
Those last two elements deserve more analysis, I think. The DFL has a Coordinated Campaign program to link successful candidates to each other up and down the ballot and encourage straight-ticket voting. That program appears to have failed badly outside the Twin Cities. In the Third and Sixth congressional districts, there were quite clearly many ticket-splitting voters, and many of those voters notched votes for Obama for the White House and an Independence Party candidate further down the ballot, whether Dean Barkley, David Dillon, or Bob "Who?" Anderson.
At a certain point in the campaign, it's all about GOTV. That's great, we have to get as many voters to the polls as possible. But the groundwork MUST be laid long before GOTV time to ensure targeted voter identification, even in the suburbs where the DFL is still in a growth phase.
Unfortunately, Ashwin Madia and El Tinklenberg suffered the consequences of those growing pains. But they also fell victim to the Independence Party's tendency to show up in tightly contested races and screw over the Democratic candidate.
More analysis to come on this. |
