{"id":14233,"date":"2010-10-10T11:54:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T16:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=14233"},"modified":"2011-10-20T10:33:16","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T15:33:16","slug":"everything-you-believe-about-minnesota-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=14233","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Believe About Minnesota Is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post was largely written for the national audience at Hot Air’s Greenroom, where it is posted<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

My radio colleagues Ed Morrissey (with the A-squad Hot Air<\/a>) and King Banaian (of SCSU Scholars<\/a>, also found in the Green Room) will post on occasion about politics in Minnesota, where the three of us live, work, blog and do a bit of talk radio.<\/p>\n

And when we do write about Minnesota – especially its freaks of electoral fate, like Al Franken and Jesse Ventura – we get a long string of similar comments; “What do you expect from Minnesota?”,\u00a0 “That’s those crazy Minnesotans” and, when the Emmer\/Dayton gubernatorial race comes up, “I don’t have a whole lot of hope for Minnesota”.\u00a0 We were the only state that never voted for Reagan – although to be fair, the state voted for Walter Mondale, a native son, in 1984 (a year before I moved here).<\/p>\n

If that’s what you feel, you’re wrong, and you need to re-think things.\u00a0 And I’m going to try to start that rethinking right now.<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong.\u00a0 Minnesota is <\/em>a strange place, in a lot of ways.\u00a0 It’s an adopted home for all three of us; Ed’s from LA, King was born in New Hampshire and arrived in Minnesota via California among a few other places, and I grew up in North Dakota (and moved here 25 years ago as of this coming Wednesday).\u00a0 And I think we’ve all scratched our heads, agog, at some of the political weirdness this state has spawned.<\/p>\n

Everyone recalls the bizarre 2008 election, where former comedian and failed talk show host Al Franken beat incumbent Norm Coleman in a race that Coleman led by 200 votes on election night – and Franken won by 300 after eight months of recounts and legal maneuvering, exposing many flaws in Minnesota’s electoral system (like the law allowing people to vote without showing ID, but being vouched for by another registered voter).<\/p>\n

More infamously, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, running for Minnesota’s “Independence” party, which was essentially a vanity offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Party, won the 1998 gubernatorial election, beating Hubert Humphrey’s son Skip and…Norm Coleman.<\/p>\n

Minnesota has had plenty of electoral weirdness in the past; the Democratic\/Farmer\/Labor Party <\/a>(the “DFL”, as we call Democrats here) had long ties to the far, far left; Stalinists were a powerful force in the party until Hubert H. Humphrey managed to purge them in the mid-forties; former Eighth District congressman John Bernard, of the antecedent, radical-left “Farmer\/Labor” Party, cast the sole vote in 1938 against embargoing arms to the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War. Gus Hall, long-time head of the Communist Party USA and one-time perennial presidential candidate, was a Minnesota native, who cut his teeth as a radical organizing the mines of Northern Minnesota.<\/p>\n

There are reasons Minnesota is an odd place:<\/p>\n

Culture: <\/strong>Minnesota’s dominant culture in its formative years was immigrants from rural Scandinavia, especially Norway and Sweden.\u00a0 Both nations have long histories of being poor, and developed communitarian traditions to cope with the grinding poverty of life in the Norwegian mountains, the endless woods of Sweden, and the motti <\/em>of Finland. These communitarian traditions were easy to co-opt for political ends.<\/p>\n

Institutions:<\/strong> Minnesota’s prosperity over the past 100 years has been built around several key institutions:<\/p>\n