{"id":8108,"date":"2010-01-26T13:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T18:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8108"},"modified":"2011-09-01T07:43:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-01T12:43:47","slug":"the-cd3-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8108","title":{"rendered":"The Thin Blue Stain"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the one hand, there’s no such thing as a “safe seat” for Republicans in Minnesota.\u00a0 Between a mercurial population given to flights of bizarro fancy (Jesse Ventura?\u00a0 Al Franken?\u00a0 Hello?) and a deep messianic liberal streak running through the population (Paul Wellstone?\u00a0 Aaagh!), no Republican should ever get too complacent.<\/p>\n

One of the bright spots in the dismal ’08 election was Erik Paulsen, who ran to the right of conventional wisdom (the district was supposed to be much more purple than Paulsen, after nine terms of Jim Ramstad).<\/p>\n

But Derek Brigham at the Dogs and True North warns against complacency:<\/a><\/p>\n

Today I got a request from Katie Nadeau and Sheila Kihne who are heading up the GOTV effort for CD3 this year. They wanted me to make a map to illustrate the reality of just how blue CD3 had become to help dispel the myth that CD3 is an easy territory for the Republican party.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a>

Image by Derek Brigham<\/p><\/div>\n

I took the 2008 Minnesota House election results map showing the winning party by precinct and enlarged the northwest metro area. Next I cut out all the areas that were not in CD3 (there are a few flaws I left in like SD45 so I did not have to cut off the names). The results?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You see the results on Derek’s map.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how many people believe that CD3 is “safe” for the GOP, although I think Paulsen is an excellent incumbent to have in place; he’s to the right of what the “conventional wisdom” said could win, but he’s crafted a pretty careful message to his very mixed district.<\/p>\n

Derek goes on to note that there are infinite variables – it’s looking to be a better year for the GOP than ’08, for starters – but now’s no time to relax.\u00a0 If you live in the Three, and you care about the future of this nation, you need to get out and help not only keep Paulsen in office, but flip some of those baby-blue State House districts to red.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the one hand, there’s no such thing as a “safe seat” for Republicans in Minnesota.\u00a0 Between a mercurial population given to flights of bizarro fancy (Jesse Ventura?\u00a0 Al Franken?\u00a0 Hello?) and a deep messianic liberal streak running through the population (Paul Wellstone?\u00a0 Aaagh!), no Republican should ever get too complacent. One of the bright […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8108"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22265,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8108\/revisions\/22265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}