Daily Reformer: Landslide

Contra Tip O’Neill, all politics is national. Minnesota Democrats, whose midterm prospects looked mediocre a year ago after a rolling river of stories about fraud in safety net programs, got a massive boost from President Donald Trump. He’s been terrible for Minnesota, and the electorate across the country decided he’s been terrible for them, too. He wanted Americans to think he was on the ballot, and Americans said, “Sure thing, boss.” 

Gov.-elect Amy Klobuchar, our state’s first woman governor, ran a flawless campaign. According to elections analyst Aaron Booth, her margin of victory is the biggest for a non-incumbent candidate for governor in 44 years. She immediately tackled the fraud issue head on, making it her first policy speech and distanced herself from Gov. Tim Walz repeatedly. Her counterintuitive closing pitch — “I’ll clean up the mess” — was apparently what Minnesotans wanted to hear. 

The most unabashed progressives running statewide and the pair seen as most vulnerable — Sen.-elect Peggy Flanagan and Attorney General Keith Ellison — were badly underestimated. They got some help from the national mood and lackluster opponents, but Flanagan’s margin of victory wound up close to Klobuchar’s. 

Money doesn’t matter as much in politics as people think, evidenced by the GOP’s spending advantage here this year. You could say without the massive cash infusion from their oligarchs, the Republicans would have done even worse. But how much worse could it be? The endless parade of cheaply made negative ads had little effect, at least here.

Once the dust settles and the 2028 presidential campaign begins, the Dems’ factional infighting will resume, and fiercely. But the party looks vastly different than it did Monday. Our Gen Z immigration reporter Madison McVan is from the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and she kept blurting out the astounding election returns from red Texas counties, having never witnessed a single Democratic statewide win in her lifetime. The most startling gains were in red or formerly red states, like the Lone Star State, the Carolinas, Iowa, Kansas and maybe even Mississippi. (And Minnesota’s own 1st Congressional District, where Jake Johnson has declared victory against U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad.) These new governors and members of Congress will likely be cautious given their constituencies, comprising many swing voters, including lots of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. I’m not saying it’s permanent, but the power of the left flank of the party has been numerically diluted, if only because the party just got a lot bigger. That said, many of those red and purple state Democrats ran on economic populism. Listen to Sen.-elect James Talarico sounding like Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power.” 

Geographic polarization is terrible for Minnesota and terrible for America. Rural Minnesotans were getting a distorted picture of the cities, while the Democrats’ ideas for improving the lives of working people in Greater Minnesota never got an airing. A metro-centric DFL majority, cocooned from the rest of the state, wasn’t healthy either. The DFL’s success outstate is good for the party, but it’s even better for Minnesota. 

Governing: It’s important! The nation’s been locked in an endless socio-cultural-political war over Trump and MAGA, while problems are piling up. Social Security, the deficit, healthcare costs, AI regulation, corruption. Closer to home: Safety net programs, education, childcare, housing, clean energy all need fixing. The DFL, which will have robust majorities in the Legislature next year as they craft a two-year budget, should focus on measurable progress in making people’s lives easier: That’s the job. 

Last, but certainly not least, interviews of voters in Cedar-Riverside conducted yesterday by our contributor Atra Mohamed were at times quite moving. In the face of the most bigoted campaign in recent memory, Somali Minnesotans were fiercely determined to vote. For instance, here’s one that didn’t make our story: Halima Elmi, 53, a healthcare worker and mother of four, said during Operation Metro Surge she and her daughter went to a rental car company and encountered ICE agents in the parking lot. Masked men jumped out of a black van, grabbed them and pushed them into the van. She said they didn’t even give them a chance to produce their documents. “We screamed, and the rental car staff who were expecting us came and told them this was private property and that they were not allowed to pick up people here. In the meantime, we produced our passports, and they finally left us alone.” 

Elmi spent a lot of time volunteering, taking people to the polls this cycle, she said. Go figure.