| The mistake waiting to happen is Democrats trying to target the Third as a super-competitive district in 2010.
Don't get me wrong, I would like nothing more than for a great candidate to appear, raise a ton of money, take the fight to Paulsen, and convince 10% or so of the electorate that they made a bad decision in 2008. But a look at the numbers tells a not-so-optimistic story about 2008.
A look at the regular old Partisan Voting Index, or PVI, for the Third would indicate a groundswell of Democratic support -- after looking at some of the preliminary numbers, it appears that Barack Obama's performance in the Third tracked his performance statewide, at about 53% to John McCain's 44% (or thereabouts, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me). That number alone might make a DCCC or DFL official think "hey, with the right candidate, we could take this thing."
And they could. With a LOT of work at the local level. Consider that Ashwin Madia got 41% in that same environment, and Al Franken trailed even that number. In Madia's case, even if we took the entire 10% that went to third-party grenade-tosser David Dillon and give it to Madia, and then assume that zero of Madia's votes also included a vote for McCain (so that ALL Madia votes are also Obama votes), there's still a gap between Obama's number and Madia's.
What does that mean? There was a non-trivial number of Obama-Paulsen voters in the Third district. That probably means that there are plenty of voters in the Third who
- Consider themselves Republicans
- Either couldn't stomach a vote for another Republican presidential candidate, or
- liked Obama enough to vote for him, but not for Democrats down the ticket
That represents a structural problem for DFLers going forward. It's one that can be changed -- obviously these voters are not so partisan that they won't vote for any Democrat under any circumstances, as evidenced by their Obama vote -- but it's still a long road ahead.
There's certainly evidence for it happening already. The DFL now controls a majority of the state legislative seats covering the Third. Maria Ruud has increased her winning margins in each of her three victories in 42A, as John Benson has done in his two victories in 43B -- for Minnetonka to go blue like that locally is mighty impressive, considering its history.
But there's still a LOT of work to do to convince Third district voters that voting not just Obama, but voting *Democratic is the way to go every November. And that work is going to fall on local activists, the Coordinated Campaign, the DFL's suburban operations staff, and other local figures, because the DCCC simply cannot help, and may do considerable harm with nasty independent expenditure ads.
More on that later in the week, and a look at the status of the Senate recount later in the day. |
