Republicans In The City: The Good News, Part 1

There may be few more frustrating jobs in American politics than being a Republican in the Twin Cities.

Minneapolis is sort of like Berkeley on the Lakes, while Saint Paul is a mini-Chicago on the Mississippi.  Both are one-party liberal gulags.  And Republicans in both cities continuously batter themselves against the unthinking masses of DFL droogs, year after year, with seemingly no result.  Good candidates?  Bad candidates?  It seems to make no difference whatsoever.

Years like 2012 are especially frustrating.  The GOP fielded some excellent candidates, and some hard-working campaigns in CD5 (Minneapolis) and CD4 (Saint Paul).  And all of that hard work and effort and occasional inspiration held up like a stream of pee in a hurricane on November 6, as the GOP efforts ran smack-dab into the anti-marriage-amendment tsunami.

On the face of it – expressed in terms of percentages – it looked as dismal as ever – like the cities in the Twin Cities were the same 70-30, or 75-25, cesspools they’d always been.

But if you dig into the numbers a little, things brighten up nicely.

I’m going to look at a couple of races in traditional DFL country, just to see what I come up with.

———-

Tony Hernandez ran a solid, spirited race against Betty McCollum in CD4 in 2012.  There were flaws in the campaign; fundraising was slow, among other things – but Hernandez worked hard, and he had a group of very hard-working volunteers.

So what happened?

Well, Betty McCollum won.  She won big.  Part of it was the votes siphoned off by a Ventura Party candidate that ran to Hernandez’ right.  Part of it was the fact that it’s CD4.  And a big part was the epic DFL turnout against the Marriage Amendment.

The first illustration shows that it’s nothing new:

The top two rows show the head-to-head vote totals between the GOP and DFL candidates in CD4 for the past seven cycles, back to 2000.  The bottom two present the results as percentages.  Note that some of the results will not match the Secretary of State’s numbers; I presented the numbers as DFL/GOP totals, leaving out third-party candidates.

And the news?  Well, it’s not news.  The 4th CD is a 70-30 district.

Right?

Sure.  But look at that top row – the number of GOP votes.  109,000 people voted for Tony Hernandez in 2012, which was a fair-to-middling Republican year (against a great base-burnout campaign for the Dems nationwide, and a huge “new-voter registration” campaign in Minnesota).

This chart shows two more sets of data:

The top two rows show how many more voters there were for each party in 2012 from the selected year.  In other words, in 2012 there were 10,723 more Republican votes than in 2008 (and 418 more Democrat votes).

Compare presidential years (which always have better turnout for both parties than non-presidential years).  Hernandez drew 10,000 more votes than in 2008 (even without the thousands of conservatives who voted for the uncharacteristically-conservative Independence Party candidate), which was not a great year for Republicans; he was up 4,000 from 2004 (a decent GOP year) and 25,000 from 2000 (a very good GOP year).

The interesting part?  The bottom two rows.  They show a “rematch” of the selected years’ races using Tony Hernandez’ 2012 GOP vote totals.  The 2012 match shows they actually exist (in part due to redistricting, although that wasn’t nearly as favorable to Hernandez as one might have hoped); this time, they  happened to exist against the backdrop of an epic DFL turnout.

But what if those Republicans could be inveigled to turn out against a more prosaic DFL turnout?

Hernandez’ numbers against BettyMac in 2008 (which was also a great DFL year – notice the fact that the epic 2012 turnout only added 400-odd votes to McCollum’s 2008 totals?) makes it a 66-33 race.  Against her 2004 numbers (blah year for Democrats, base-turnout year for Republicans) it was 60-40, which is a whole world apart from 70-30.

And against 2000 – a good GOP year with a functional state party and average DFL turnout – Hernandez’ numbers make it a nine point race.

And against off-year DFL turnout?   If the GOP were to pull off a miracle and generate presidential-year turnout against off-year DFL turnout, it’d be a ten point race.

Which still isn’t victory.

But Hernandez – running an underfunded all-volunteer campaign with no outside funding to speak of, endorsed by an intensely-dysfunctional party Congressional District unit of a state party that sat out the 2012 election completely, against a cash-sodden union juggernaut and a media praetorian guard that seems sworn never to mention the great unspoken secret (that McCollum is one of the dumbest people in Congress), “aided” by a redistricting that seemed designed to be as benign as possible to the incumbent, and attenuated by a conservative third-party candidate – turned out more Republicans than the 4th has seen in decades.  He had the bad fortune to do it into the teeth of a DFL GOTV wildfire.

So if he’d had $500,000 instead of less than a tenth of that?  If he’d had a state party that could help, and a CD committee that could help marshal support?  If he’d had experienced management, and maybe a full-time field staffer?

Just saying – not only are there grounds for optimism, but they may be stronger than we thought.

So that’s Hernandez against history.   How about in the Fifth CD?

We’ll look across the river tomorrow.

Yes, I know – I’m comparing pre-and-post redistricting numbers.  But I don’t think it’s especially invalid; redistricting didn’t change the Fourth all that much; the judges seemed, indeed, to have bent over backwards to keep it that way.

22 thoughts on “Republicans In The City: The Good News, Part 1

  1. 1994
    x-Bruce Vento Dem 115,638 55%
    Dennis Newinski GOP 88,344 42%
    Dan Vacek GRP 6,211 3%

  2. The old joke is (Hitler, the devil, Jeffery Dalhmer) could run for office as a Democrat in (Mpls, St Paul, Madison, Chicago, Detriot) and win.

    But when you look at the extremely strong candidates that have run as a Republican in St Paul and Minneapolis, against a low intelligent clown (Betty McCallum) and a National of Islam extremist (Ellison), and not even come in close….

  3. But I will say it again…..the lack of diversity in St Paul hurts Republican efforts. The residents are never exposed to other viewpoints and facts.

    I am guessing those 35% who are Republicans, sit quietly in their homes. They watch FNC. Listen to Garage Logic, read SITD, maybe even tune in to Rush or Jason Lewis or Glenn Beck.
    But the left controls the schools. The various councils. The city committees. How do you make inroads when your views are silienced?

  4. In 2010, Reid Johnson ran against SD45B (Crystal, Robbinsdale, part of Golden Valley) representative Lyndon Carlson. Carlson’s been in that seat since 1972. He won by a margin of like 61-39%. Reid talked to THOUSANDS of people during his campaign and came across very few who outright told him they were voting for Carlson no matter what.

    Flash ahead to 2012. Carlson gets redistricted to the west half of SD45 and the seat for SD45B now is wide open. Reid runs again. A 1 or 2 term city councilman from Golden Valley, Mike Freiberg, throws his hat into the ring for the DFL endorsement. I’d never heard of the guy and I was fairly politically active locally from 2010 until mid-last year, so I’m reasonably sure a lot of SD45B population probably hadn’t heard of him. He beat Reid by an even higher percentage than Carlson did in 2010. That tells me that this district is solid D from a demographic standpoint, in addition to a mindset standpoint. No amount of campaigning will change that for at least the next 1-2 generations. Given that the complete governance of DFL foolishness is slowly driving liberals with a modicum of SOME financial acuity out of Mpls into the 1st and 2nd ring burbs, but they bring their liberal voting habits with them, I don’t see this changing any time soon.

  5. Bill C, the shocker was Tearse Collete losing by a large margin to Betty. We run a smart, educated, pro-business but not rightwing, constitutional law professor against….Betty “a bunch of angry teabaggers” McCallum. Ms Collete campaigned hard. Ran a good, positive effort. Went all out. And we lose 62-38.

  6. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. As long as we have same day registration in this state with vouching in lieu of proof of residency, the redistricting process always favors the DFL, I don’t see the GOP winning anytime soon. Even with the stupidity that their economically illiterate elected heroes are foisting on them, the useful idiots will still vote for them.

  7. Older, whiter, less educated, more religious — that sounds like winning demographic profile for the future.

  8. All you need to look at is Saturday’s state central committee convention which you wrote about in an earlier post. I suspect Mr. Downey must have looked pretty hard for an African-American and Hispanic in that group.

    I’ll try to be more concise: demographics

  9. Emery wrote: “I’ll try to be more concise: demographics”.

    Emery: If you want *real* “marriage equality”, you’ll get polygamy – then watch the Somali population in Minneapolis. All those future Muslim voters against “same sex marriages” can never procreate and secular couples who don’t have large families.

    Whiter, more educated, more secular, less likely to reproduce — that sounds like winning demographic profile for the future.

    I’ll try to be more concise: demographics. We’ll find out if you *really* value diversity. Whether you like it or not.

  10. Less educated, Emery? Oh, yea! You elitist liberats always think that you’re the smartest people in the room!

  11. @ bosshoss429

    I would like to see the GOP endorse Cam Winton for the mayoral race in Mpls (please refer to Mr. Berg’s previous post regarding Mr. Winton). Perhaps the GOP should reconsider doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

    The GOP candidates should appeal to the folks they are attempting to persuade. Do you want to win, or do you want ideological purity?

  12. To reiterate:

    Emery wrote: “I’ll try to be more concise: demographics”.

    Emery: If you want *real* “marriage equality”, you’ll get polygamy – then watch the Somali population in Minneapolis. All those future Muslim voters against “same sex marriages” couples who can never procreate and secular couples who don’t have large families.

    Whiter, more educated, more secular, less likely to reproduce — that sounds like winning demographic profile for the future.

    I’ll try to be more concise: demographics. We’ll find out if you *really* value diversity. Whether you like it or not.

    Moral of the Story(tm): What goes around, comes around.

  13. Emery,

    We’ve talked about this before. I do value your point of view in my comment section – but it’s my policy to honor peoples’ requests for pseudonymity unless they abuse it.

    Which Nachman does not – but you kinda do, when you keep on dinking with a personal policy I’ve already told you about at least once.

    Please see to this in the future, and use another forum for any “outing” you’d like to do.

    Thanks.

  14. I suspect Mr. Downey must have looked pretty hard for an African-American and Hispanic in that group.

    The GOP doesn’t need to import blacks and Latinos.

    It needs to persuade blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants that liberalism is holding them all back – which in fact it is.

    After years of asking GOP candidates to come to the city and address charter school parents, I’ll be the first to tell you the GOP has dropped the ball. But it’s working on it.

    BTW, Ken “Don” Martin leads a less-diverse executive team than Downey does, if skin color is your measure of diversity.

  15. Pingback: Republicans In The City: The Good News, Part 2 | Shot in the Dark

  16. Mitch I hadn’t gone to shot for a couple of days. Something I noticed that you didn’t. If you look at the 4th and the 5th district races there was a huge jump in votes for the DFL in 2012 in the 5th which the fourth didn’t see.

    And throw in one other factor which I think you can see in 2016. With Obama not on the ballot the number of blacks voting could dramatically go down.

    Betty M is looking more vulernable then you’re letting on.

    The only thing that might save her until 2022 was the gift district which she got in redistricting.

    My dream district. The city of Minneapolis and Saint Paul add up to one congressional district in population. Just combine the fourth and fifth into one district.

    Walter Hanson
    Minneapolis, MN

    Walter Hanson
    Minneapolis, MN

  17. Walter – I did notice it, although I highlighted a different angle (“2012 turnout only added 400-odd votes to McCollum’s 2008 totals”).

    But yes, you are correct. BettyMac is a lot weaker than her tenure in office might lead one to think.

  18. /The GOP doesn’t need to import blacks and Latinos./
    Although I agree there is some persuading that needs to be done. My point was that the so-called party base is not very diverse.

  19. Mitch Berg said: “if skin color is your measure of diversity”

    Emery said: “My point was that the so-called party base is not very diverse”

    And apparently he does measure diversity that way, but doesn’t think that’s racist.

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