The Sass’ is Back!

Been a while… Since my occasional anger at the Democratic Party and our ability to “grab defeat from the jaws of victory” motivated me to vent and maybe even produce some coherent writing. After our pack of great presidential candidates wisely stood down in the face of COVID-19 and deferred to everybody’s favorite cool grandpa Joe with the ‘Vette, Trump went full crazy and gave us a well deserved four year lease on the White House and we barely control the senate. Having fought and won the political battle of our lives, most of us have been taking a well deserved rest and rebuilding of our bank accounts and vacation day stashes.

I love political science, what little there is of it guides my campaign strategy, and I’ve found no empirical data whatsoever that off year campaigning improves our election results the next year. Granted, off year campaigning for caucuses, endorsement battles, and sometimes even primaries is a necessary evil and in the democratic urban strongholds the primary is the election, with the general election being a mere republican trouncing formality. But out here in rural Minnesota we have a hard time getting even one democrat to be the “sacrificial lamb” and run for office, and often on the last days of filing. Not surprising, given folks of both left and right political persuasion’s insistence on living surrounded by like minded neighbors, amped up even more by good ol’ gerrymandering. Cue the electoral map…

I live in the one white county (Lyon) in the sea of red in the lower left hand corner, nice rural living where $100,000 buys you a small mansion and it takes a conspiracy to cause a multi-vehicle accident. I am surrounded by counties even Amy, daughter of Klobuchar, kick ass prosecutor, and the winningest Minnesota politician since Hubert wasn’t able to win- That clump of red counties is about 3 state house districts that you may as well cede to the republicans already. The clump of white counties above that from Marshall through Willmar to St.Cloud is almost entirely (mis)represented by republicans now, but Amy won them proving that the perfect candidate backed by multi-million dollar campaigns and incumbency can win, and our local candidates have next to none of the above. The green counties around Moorhead are solid democratic, but not as much so as “the cities”. We’ve got another even bigger clump of red “lost counties”, and some white up around Bemidji- That’s a swing districts including the Red Lake Tribal Nation. Problem is, the republicans know it and will make ugly million dollar races out of it. That’s the synopsis of western Minnesota’s CD7 which will grow a bit larger but probably no more democratic with redistricting- A couple safe democratic state house districts, a couple more toss-ups, a half dozen long shots, and the rest the republicans won’t even need to gerrymander to win. Like the rural half of Minnesota’s CDs it’s R+ double digit, so for most of CD7 the only competitive races we’ll have in 2022 are the statewide races for Governor, SOS, Auditor, and AG. That means instead of getting a “three-fer” in a competitive district where the legislative, congressional, and statewide races are in play, in much of rural Minnesota the only races even halfway in play are the statewide races.

That’s not enough to get even a rabid democrat like me terribly excited to campaign in this off year, I’d be happy to do not even a handful of parades to test out the vehicular props and stay in practice. But sure enough this spring parades are being talked up, I put together a list, and after fits and starts seems like we’ve got a dozen parades scheduled. It gets worse… With COVID-19 at bay, the state Democratic Party has regressed back into their “door knock ’til you drop” mentality. Let me get this straight… Out here in rural western Minnesota’s 7th CD we’ve got 300,000+ doors to knock, you’ll find at best 20% home, and we have no idea which aren’t republicans so that means our little crew of maybe a hundred volunteers have a million and a half doors to knock… And that’s just the “first pass”! The empirical political science is that door knocking is magically effective in low turn out primaries, we don’t much have them out here.

Ain’t even election year, and I’m already feelin’ burnt out…