Minnesota 2050 – Part V

History marches on.  After the great Eden Prairie riots (which occurred after a “police beating” in Blaine, for reasons that were chalked up to confusion among the “demonstrators”), more violence broke out in the ring of decrepid, desperate, DFL-dominated suburbs surrounding the city.

(The scare quotes around “demonstrators” will be explained later.

This takes us into the mid-2040’s.

———-

July 8, 2041
Burbs Still Cleaning Up After Cataclysmic Riots: Residents Demand Answers
Megan Megan Megan-Megan, Minnesota Codependent

The fallout from the Great Suburban Riots is still reverberating throughout the suburbs.

Eden Prairie, Blaine, Lakeville, Woodbury and Lino Lakes were all heavily damaged during riots after a pair of policemen were acquitted for assaulting a couple of local men.

The rebuilding effort is running into some obstacles.

“Part of the problem” according to Bluffy Sansevere, of “Suburbs Need Money” , a performance-art advocacy group, “is that homeowners aren’t moving back to the suburbs”.

“We’ve been trying to emulate the tactic that worked so well for the uncaring Republican inner-city – having all sorts of housing stock available for people to move into.  We even started a program putting people to work at government expense to bring these buildings up to full city, state, federal, emotional and ethical code, and passing the cost on to the uncaring Republican who buys the home.  But we haven’t had any takers”.

Another problem; the vandalism continues.  “We’ve actually rebuilt some houses – as high-density group homes, naturally – and they’ve been promptly burned down.  And there’s been nothing we could do about it, since the Plochman case”, says Annette Plover, DFL senator from Wellstone (formerly Minnetonka).  He’s referring to Plochman Vs. Inver Grove Heights, a Supreme Court case that affirmed that vandalism was a form of art protected by the First Amendment.  The case, which was handed down during the Obama Administration in 2018 by former Chief Justice Kucinich (appointed in 2011 by then-President Obama) has not yet been reversed.

“It’s like pushing a hose up a hill” she added.

In related news, “Hose Esteem” – a program that taught self-esteem by teaching troubled suburban teens to push hoses up hills – was cancelled due to excessive vandalism.

 ———-

September 6, 2044
Cities Abolish Property Tax: Residents Demand Answers
Achmad Epstein, Fraters Omnisciens

Mayors Trixie Coleman of Saint Paul and Bucky Prathanshaniam of Minneapolis met at the crown of the Marshall-Lake Bridge yesterday, and tossed a symbolic, bronzed property-tax assessment into the Mississippi River to mark the end of the property tax.

The tax – long a standard revenue-generator in the Twin Cities – became obsolete due to increasing sales taxes and user fees.

“These cities”, Mayor Coleman noted in her prepared speech “make so much money due to the whole ‘overheated economy’ thing, that morality demands we stop taking so friggin’ much of it!”

A thin film of protesters gathered at the Mall of America to demonstrate against the abolition.  “In the whole history of my family”, said Annabelle-Annaliese Fromholz-Bisbee of Elko, “nobody has ever been able to find Saint Paul – so we met here.  Anyway – this is money that should by all rights be going to the needy in Savage and Forest Lake!” 

———-

April 12, 2046
DFL Suburbs Unveil “Happy To Pay For The Great Leap” Plan
Mark 3, Generic News

Mayor Kim Jung-Bill of Maple Grove declared the first step of his five-year plan to revitalize Maple Grove “a complete success”.

“To help prevent ‘white flight’ – people moving farther out in the ‘burbs to avoid suburban blight and find more progressive policies – we’ve found that some of the traditional incentives, like taxing people and businesses that tried to move away, while useful, didn’t go far enough”. 

The “Human Severance Tax” Jung-Bill instituted in 2040 didn’t make a lot of money – but it did create a new revenue stream.  “People trying to leave Maple Grove started trying to load up trucks and move out under cover of darkness.  Arresting and fining them bough us some time, but Illlegal Emigration remained a seriously problem”

“Finally”, he adds, “we had to build The Happy To Live Here For A Better Maple Grove Wall”.  The controversial 15 mile brick wall, with gates at six key exits, has cut down drastically on emigration from Maple Grove.

“The standard of living, and government revenue, haven’t increased just yet.  But it’s right around the corner!”.

———-

Friday:  The conclusion.

Minnesota 2050 – Part IV

While the shocking sea change in Minnesota politics – the inversion of political power in the cities and the suburbs due to the free-market politics of St. Paul’s Mayor Lopez (joined, in 2017, by Republican Minneapolis Mayor Anatolii Dolokhov, elected after Green Party mayor Loaf Beziers was indicted for attempting to donate an entire Minneapolis neighborhood and its residents to Greenpeace) and the growing DFL-centricity of the suburbs – snuck up on Minnesota, the events of 2039 came more suddenly – and were more shocking.

———-

August 22, 2039
Blaine Cleans Up After Riots
Tylenol Harris, Minnesota Democrats Exposed On IMax

The city of Eden Prairie is cleaning up after three days of the worst rioting in Minnesota history.

Some say the emotional damage will take a lot longer to clean up.

The streets of this troubled southwest metro suburb exploded in rage after Eden Prairie Police Sgt. Thai O’Riordan and Patrolman Jeff “Lumpy” Al-Khalid were acquitted in the beating of Justin Prince-Adddams and Tylenol Lundgren.

“For the millionth time”, says defense attorney Cassandra Blodgett, “It wasn’t a beating.  It wasn’t a beating.  It was NOT A BEATING!”.

Blodgett notes that the video seems to confirm the officers’ defense – that they merely pushed the men up against the side of their squad car after they were caught huffing paint and butane while skateboarding with bags of stolen clothing.

However, a new Eden Prairie law didn’t allow police to touch suspects; the seven-member Eden Prairie City Parliament, which had been merged with the 75-member School Board, had passed a law to adopt school disciplinary rules for the city as a whole.  As a result, the officers were not legally allowed to impart physical force in arresting suspects.  A Grand Jury refused to indict the officers on charges of Sexual Abuse and Molestation, but returned charges of Aggravated Assault and Larceny of Self-Esteem.

Community groups started posturing long before the trial began.  White liberals complained of systematic discrimination.  “Look at where we live!”, exclaimed Fidel Klempfer, leader of “Eden Prairie Needs Money For The Children”.  “Moldy McMansions!  Man-made lakes lined with tenements!  Streets crawling with unemployed anthropology majors, social networking life coaches and vegan consultants!  This city needs help!”

“There are two Minnesotas” proclaimed Ed Johnson of “Give Us What We Need” “The part of Minnesota that won life’s lottery, and the part that is still waiting at the track for their number to come up”.

As the verdicts were read, Eden Prairie riot police stood by, awaiting the worst.

They got it.

As the “not guilty” verdicts trailed out, one by one, the gathered crowd fell silent.

Then, someone in the gathered crowd from the Barrista’s Union threw a brick, hitting someone from “Vegans For Emotional Justice”.

“That was all it took”, said Lieutenant Phong Leung of the State Patrol.

What started as a scuffle between Vegans and Barristas morphed into a city-wide riot, as other disaffected overeducated young white liberals crowded mass transit to get to the city.

At the end of three days of rioting, 4,000 houses and businesses were burned.  Anderson Lakes Parkway – the epicenter of Eden Prairie’s drug trade – lay in ruins.  Eden Prairie Center, a former shopping center than had been converted into a Kabbala center and had lain vacant for a decade attracting drug addicts and intellectual navel-gazers, became a charnel-house before it collapsed.  Hundreds were injured.  Police reported no injuries to law-enforcment; “Oddly”, said Lt. Leung, “Police weren’t targeted.  They were all going after each other.  Like crabs in a pot, pulling in the ones that tried to get out”.

Standing in the ruins of William Kling High School, School Board/Parliament member Alabassah Mortenssen shakes her head.

“There were signs of a rebirth in Eden Prairie; last fall, we actually beat back some free-market, low-tax challengers!  This time, we coulda done it, but for those damn Republicans!”

She shakes her head.

And the barristas”.

———-

Tomorrow – as Eden Prairie rebuilds, Minnesota tries to heal in that way that places with big nasty political divides always “heal”. 

Minnesota 2050 – Part III

On Friday, we looked into the ragged, rough beginnings of Minnesota’s renaissance, back in the 2020’s.

Today – well, we’ll take a walk through the dingy side of Minnesota’s political transformation, see how the children are doing, and…well, we’ll indulge in some foreshadowing.

———-

January 3, 2033
Decaying Housing Stock Causes Big Worries In ‘Burbs
Tim Plott, Minnesota Utterly Dependent

Father PZ Myers III has inherited a real mess. And he thinks he knows why.

The new priest at Saint Ignatius Church in Chanhassen – one of a wave of churches built during the huge rush to the suburbs in the 1990s – inherited a lot of problems that would have baffled his predecessor.

“It’s sort of a perfect storm of problems. For starters, most of the McMansions built in the 1990s were, to put it in terms I think the good Lord himself would understand, pieces of crap. Shoddy, poorly built, just garbage.”

“And then”, Myers continues as he walks through the cots at the homeless shelter the parish has set up in its basement, “between that and the fuel costs in the ’00s, the collapse of the transit system, the growth of the telecommuting service economy and the revival of the city, pretty soon all the middle class families that used to keep places like Chanhassen and Chaska going fled for places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Or, since telecommuting is so ubiquitous, far far outstate.”

Myers pauses, exhausted at the parade of misery he sees around him. “It might have worked”, he said, “except that – well, some of the people that moved out to the ‘burbs didn’t help things one bit”.

“No”, he adds hastily, “I’m not talking about the poor. I’m talking, frankly – and I do hate to get political – but I’m talking about the DFLers that flocked out here when the Southwest LRT started running. That was…”

He looks about the rows of cots, full of men who’ve staggered off the dismal, blighted streets of Chanhassen. The train station that used to carry suburban government workers from homes in Chanhassen and Chaska to jobs in Edina and St. Louis Park is now sodden with grafitti. Crack dealers terrorize the area at night. Vacant blocks of houses, some collapsing on themselves, bear mute witness to an experiment that failed, and failed badly.

Father Myers shakes his head. “That was when our problems started”.

But others see opportunity.

“What you have here”, says Gretel Lackey-Grotnick-Willey of “Homes And Money”, a non-profit advocacy group based in inner-suburban Lakeville, “is a situation where rich Republicans took all the good, solid, inner-city housing stock after the foreclosure crisis in the ’00s, leaving the poor out in the shoddily-built “mcmansions” in places like Lakeville and Eden Prairie. They had the connections to know that with gas prices rising, homes near work would be vital. This disenfranchised the poor, who, lured to the ‘burbs by artificially low prices and massive, publicly-subsidized public transit, got into the transit trap”.

“The key”, asserts Lackey-Grotnick-Willey, “is to completely fund the Aid to Local Governments And Environs program”.

Andrea Loang, professor of Suburban Pathology at the University of Minnesota’s Strom School for Public Policy, agrees and disagrees. “Homes and Money is right about construction techniques – but that’s about it. ALGAE was an organized subsidy of failure and poverty – basically, paying failing suburbs to get it wrong, and keep getting it wrong. The renaissance of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and outstate Minnesota show us that the free market not only works, it kicks ass”.

Lackey-Grotnick-Willey remains undeterred. “We need to start getting affordable housing in the city. The government needs to give these people dreams, too”, she says.

———-

January 3, 2034
Morales Goes To Nationals
Local Girl Dominant Yet Again
Buffy Moltke, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakotas Public Radio

For the third straight year, Phuong Morales of Saint Paul has won the state High School Combat Marksmanship title.

A senior at Margaret Thatcher International Charter Academy in Minneapolis, Morales held off a late surge by junior Ahmad Szarkowski of Hibbing with a rolling double-tap bullseye in double-overtime.

Morales victory continues a six-year tradition of inner-city shooting sports dominance at Reagan, where Tad Haukeboe had a three-peat before Morales’ string.

Morales will be attending Texas Tech next year on a combat shooting scholarship, and plans to major in nuclear engineering.

But the Morales dynasty seems likely to continue; younger brother Chuck placed fifth in state, after winning the state Junior Varsity last year.

The rise of high school pistolcraft programs, which only started a decade ago, has been astounding. Critics say the competitions “send the wrong message”, and emphatically deny any link between armed teenagers and the recent descent of crime rates in the Twin Cities prosperous inner-city to less than measurable levels.

And this one – which seemed fairly innocuous in context: 

———-

July 9, 2039
Trial Begins In Eden Prairie Beating Case
Belton Farouk, Network Of The Moderate Left

The trial of two Eden Prairie police officers accused in the beatings of Eden Prairie teens Jarrod Mondale and Bentley Pogemiller begins today at the Department of Public Esteem in Eden Prairie.

The officers – Sgt. Thai O’Riordan and Jeff “Lumpy” Al-Khalid – are charged with holding the two teens against a car during a paint-huffing bust last summer.  The case has stirred up passions in this troubled city which, in recent years, has not shared in the prosperity of the city to its northeast and the rural area to its southwest.

“This bit of brutality shows the community that it’s us against them”, says Celine Murchisson-Koblecki, leader of “Eden Prairy’s for Justice”, a group formed to protest police brutality in the wake of the alleged beatings.

———-

We’ll follow up tomorrow.

Another One Of My Hypothetical Flights of Fancy

Sort of like “Secession Diaries” and Minnesota 2050. 

Really.

The harassment of delegates came as organized protests continued to draw thousands of people. The Still We Rise march by advocates for social issues was peaceful, and a Poor People’s March, a column several blocks long, proceeded from the United Nations to the Madison Square Garden yesterday after the police decided to let it go ahead without a permit.

When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.

The heavy police presence at the Garden apparently inspired the coordinated plan by anarchists and other radicals to strike out at the delegates at their hotels, breakfasts, parties, and on the streets.

The incidents are the result of months of planning by opposition groups, who report that they have obtained copies of plans and addresses for delegates’ parties, caucuses and other gatherings outside the Garden.

OK, I’m not making it up.  It’s what happened in 2004 in New York.  With all the talk about all the arrests that were dismissed over allegedly-excessive zeal on the part of the NYPD, you’d have a hard time realizing that there really was any low-level, non-lethal (hey, the cop on the scooter lived!) domestic terrorism going on at the last RNC.

The Twin Cities’ police are officially fairly sanguine; they’re taking a fairly low-key approach (which isn’t a bad thing; there’s no need to feed the anarkids’ need for drama). 

Anyway, no need to worry; “Scottsdale Woman” assures us that it’s really the GOP delgates and their sympathizers that’ll be causing the problems.

More later.

Minnesota 2050 – Part II

Yesterday, we looked back on 42 years of reforms in Minnesota.

But how did the state get to that point?

Today, we start at the beginning.

———-

September 21, 2021
A Tale Of Two Schools
Molybdenum Priestley, StarTribuneSunVillager Weekly Shopper

Willow Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, age ten, is in her third school in five years.

“Daddy keeps moving us farther and farther out”, says Ms. Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, a fifth-grader at Fidel Castro Middle School in Annandale. “He says we need to stay at least two tiers of suburbs away from the ‘scum'”, she adds, doodling in a notebook.

Ashley Brockley-Mauer, 55, a life coach who works for the State Department of Health in downtown Minneapolis, drops Willow off at school before getting on the train to go to her job in downtown Minneapolis. Her life partner, Ian Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, 58, was recently laid off from a position with the Minneapolis Department of Green Enforcement. He’s seeking a position with the Stearns County Lifestyle Patrol – but things look dismal. “There were two hundred applicants for one opening”, he notes. “But I look at the interregnum as a bit of a growth experience”.

Annandale, once a Republican stronghold, has had its politics switch drastically in recent years. When the city was connected to the Northstar Line, the city was inundated with Minneapolitans. Drawn by an excellent school system, low housing costs and low crime, the urban expats – 99.8% white, registered DFL members – quickly put their imprint on the town.

“Once we took control”, recalls Ms. Brockley-Mauer, “thanks to Instant Runoff Voting, we instituted rigorous Green environmental standards and sustainable growth practices on regional businesses, and outcome-based juvenile justice and corrections practices. We gave the teachers and public employees unions voting seats on the City Parliament, and instituted the “FairBallot” for all city spending votes, abolishing the non-progressive secret ballot. We also put a price cap on local homes to make sure housing would remain affordable, and established a living wage ordinance for all jobs. We also began the “Diversity Through Unity” program at the school system”. She nods with satisfaction. “It was about then that Willow was born”.

Despite the improvements, problems started cropping up. Crime rates inexplicably rose, student achievement dropped, and the available housing stock, mostly built in the 1990s, wasn’t being renewed. A wave of business bankruptcies rapidly followed, and area unemployment zoomed upward.

“Temporary hiccups on the great progressive leap forward”, Brockley-Mauer asserts. “We’ve kept DFL legislators in office in this district for the past ten years, so things are bound to improve.”

The troubled-but-cozy suburb has its share of controversies, of course. Malcolm X High School briefly instituted a Junior ROTC Program imported from Saint Paul to help bolster achievement among troubled suburban teens.

“It was great”, recalls Justin Yetterboe, 17, of Waite Park. “Before JROTC, I was a shiftless, paint-huffing skate bum. Sergeant Xiong – the JROTC leader – changed all that. He taught me some pride in myself. He made me reach for more.”

But the program was cancelled last year amid a flurry of controversy. “This was the sort of thing we left Minneapolis to try to escape”, says Mr. Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, a key activist in getting the program scrapped. “Halliburton Bushitler Chimpy Chimp”, he adds, reprising his closing argument at the public meeting that led to the cancellation of the program and the public burning of all its course materials.

“We moved out here to get the life we wanted, and we will have it”, he nods with emphasis.

———-

Fifty miles east-southeast, 13 year old Anna Strachan and 14 year old LaKeisha Morris sit at computers in the rough-hewn looking but cozy classroom at Phil Krinkie Academy, a charter school in Saint Paul.

“The teachers here preach one thing only – your life is your responsibility, and you’re the only one who can live up to it. So have some self-respect”, says Morris, the daughter of Shondra and DahnDre Morris of Saint Paul.

“We built this school ourselves, from the ground up, once we took over the old building”, recalls DahnDre Morris of the school’s early years after it took over the former Arlington High School, off Rice Street in Saint Paul. “I didn’t want my kids going through what I did”.

“No kidding”, adds his wife. “The only thing I remember learning in four years of high school was that I needed self-esteem. But I never did learn why!”

Parents of four kids ages six through 17, the couple is used to hard work. DahnDre is a CNC machinist with PowerTec, a precision parts manufacturer in Saint Paul. Shondra runs a soul food restaurant on Rice Street. “Rice used to be a wasteland, just empty storefronts and crappy bars”, Shondra remembers. “Now, the biggest problem is finding space for the new businesses that are moving in”.

The couple, newly-married and with a baby back in 2005, tried moving out to suburban Burnsville to raise their young family. “It started out well”, DahnDre explains. “The schools and the city were pretty free of some of the inner city BS”.

But then, about the time of the great Mortgage Meltdown of 2008, things started changing.

“As the inner city got more run down and torn down”, DahnDre starts, “and about the time gas prices rose up so that I couldn’t drive to work, more and more of the white, middle class types started leaving the city – for pretty much the same reason we did. Lower taxes, better schools, etc, etc.”

“But”, Shondra interjects, “they brought their politics with”.

Taxes zoomed. School achievement started dropping. Crime skyrocketed.

The final straw came in 2017. “The school called and said they’d caught DeShawn, our oldest, huffing paint. They suspended him…”, DahnDre reports, eyes wide with amazement he still visibly feels “…not for huffing, but for skipping Gay Pride class. They called it a “hate infraction”. Can you believe that?”.

(Burnsville school district Diversity supervisor Poppy Fleeber declined to comment on the case).

So the Morrises moved back to Saint Paul, drawn not only by the ample cheap housing, but by a subtle but intense change in atmosphere.

“After some of the scandals that happened in the late ’00s and early teens – the Saint Paul Land Grab, the Minneapolis Atheism Accord, the Met Council Sex Ring, that sort of thing, people took a look around. And they saw it was time for a real change”.

The turning point was the 2013 election of Mayor Annaluisa Lopez, the first Republican elected mayor of Saint Paul as a Republican since the mid-1900s.

“I led quite the coalition”, Lopez recalls via phone from her office in Washington, DC. Sworn in last January as Minnesota’s first Latina Senator, Lopez led a motley collection of supporters – Asian free-enterprise activists, Afro-American education reformers, Hispanic social conservatives, and Eritrean and working-class white crime hawks – against a phalanx of traditional DFL constituencies. “Everyone predicted we’d lose and lose big”, Lopez reminisces. “The turning point was when Garrison Keillor called me Tija Tomasina (broken spanish for “Auntie Tom”)”. The outrage filled Lopez’ electoral sails – she beat incumbent Chris Coleman 51-49$ in the ’13 election, despite Council President Dave Thune’s call for Governor Pogemiller to declare martial law, famously claiming “A Republican Mayor would be a natural disaster”.

She slashed taxes and city bureaucracy, and instituted a “homestead” program for vacant housing and commercial property, privatized public housing, and instituted a citywide “Smack Down Crime” program, giving cash prizes for the most creative capture of criminals by civilians. “Some liberals from Lake Elmo called it “vigilante justice”. We just called it fun!” Lopez remembers.

Lopez rode to victory in 2017 by a 60-40 margin over DFL challenger Marcy Piffle, a middle school teacher, performance artist and pro-Palestinian poet.

“That”, says DahnDre Morris, “was the first time I voted Republican in my life”.

“I told you so!”, Shondra laughs, nudging him. Shondra voted for President Palin in 2012, and a framed picture of Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall of her restaurant. “Some of the old timers give me guff about it. But not much”.

DeShawn, their oldest, has turned things around since his run-in in Burnsville. He graduated from the Krinkie Academy last fall, and just started attending the Naval Academy a few weeks ago.

“I shudder to think what would have happened had we stayed out there in Burnsville”, DahnDre shakes his head. Then, eyes wide open in disbelief, he jumps to his feet. “I gotta show you this!” he bellows.

“Oh, yeah”, says Shondra. “This is hilarious”.

DahnDre returns with a letter on Burnsville City letterhead. “It’s a demand that we move back and be happy to pay for a better People’s City of Burnsville!”

———-

Monday? Well, not every part of Minnesota fared as well as Rice Street.

Minnesota 2050 – A Look Back

This looks like it’s going to be a rough election for Republicans, in Minnesota and nationwide. While I think Mac has a decent shot in upending the Messiah in the stretch, here, I think Congress is going to be just brutal. As I’ve said in the past, I think that if the Democrats come up with less than an 80-20 majority in the Senate, and less than 340 seats in the House, it’ll be tantamount to a defeat. It’s been pointed out that that is technically impossible – there aren’t that many seats up for election this year. That is technically true, and still false; the electoral debacle should prompt the requisite number of Republicans to resign, or be impeached, or attacked and carried from office by mobs with pitchforks and torches. 80 and 340, or bust, Democrats.

And yet, being a conservative, I temper my pragmatism about people and temporal trends with unshakeable optimism for the future.  As such, I’m not merely pondering the “future” this November. I was looking waaay off into the great wide open.

Someone – I think it was either Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill – said “the best way to learn about the future is to look back on it”. 

So I decided to do just that.  I took a little dig through the archives of the future.  I wondered – given the long-term trends that are just starting to poke their noses into the public consciousness, what will Minnesota – especially the Twin Cities metro – look like in 2050?

And the message?  Well, it was surprising.

———-

November 2, 2050
Nguyen In Landslide:  Third-Place DFL Ponders Future
Ozriel Phamagagides, Hot Air (Saint Paul Bureau)

The outcome of the top of the race was never in much doubt; Conservative Republican John F. Nguyen won his second term as governor of Minnesota.  The Nguyen/Moss ticket’s 56% majority was two points stronger than the election-eve Rasmussen/Hajib/Lepkowitz poll predicted, indicating that the generation-old conservative powerhouse in Minnesota politics continues unabated.

The only real question was would the DFL – at one time Minnesota’s dominant, supermajority party – hold on to second-party status. 

“We think the results are more optimistic for us than some predicted”, said State DFL Chairbeing Starfish Bronkhorst-Rabbit, referring to a late prediction on the ultra-left HuffingtonPod that “the ground will open up and swallow the DFL”. 

But the results still don’t bode well.  The statewide votes for all Legislative, Constitutional and Local offices, according to the Secretary of State’s office, broke out like this:

GOP: 51%
Independence Party:  19%
Democrat/Farmer/Labor:  16%
La Raza USA: 14%

Bronkhorst-Rabbit is undeterred.  “I think we’re well-positioned for a comeback.  I think Minnesota is more ready than it’s been in years for the DFL’s message”.

Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota isn’t so sure.  “Look – the DFL finished third behind the conservative GOP, the pragmo-moderate Independence Party, and barely ahead of the ultra-social-conservative, pro-legal-immigration, hardline-anti-illegal La Raza.  That says something; that the party of Hubert Humphrey isn’t what it used to be.”

“I think the DFL faces two big questions.  First:  do the people of Minnesota still want a party whose platform of returning to the long-rejected Factory School model, economic shrinkage, a state parliament, institutionalized state guilt, catch-and-release sentencing, unrestricted immigration, socialized medicine, union featherbedding and open-ballot intimidation, and forced reparations to gays, the handicapped and the mentally ill in power?  And, second, given that the party’s entire base of support is concentrated in the third through fifth tiers of suburbs, and is nonexistent in the inner city and outstate Minnesota, will they even be able to retain major-party status?

Duffy Shabazz, four-term GOP representative from Thief River Falls, agrees.  “Given that they barely even beat La Raza in their own former home turf, really, what future is there for the DFL?”

The biggest question for many DFL rank-and-file, today, is “how did we get to this point?”

How, indeed?

With that in mind, I’m going to devote some time on this blog to a series, “Minnesota 2050”, in which we will look back on the next 42 years of Minnesota history.  And while this look will be both satirical and speculative, I’m correct in pointing out that all of my frighteningly accurate predictions started out as satirical swags.

Shot in the Dark – blurring the line between satire and secular prophecy for 78 months.