Just got a missive from Democratic Farmer Labor Party HQ telling me to keep quiet the first couple days after the new district maps are announced while they sort out the stats with their Texas Instruments calculators and formulate a uniform response for our chorus to follow. They neglected to tell me not to comment before the maps are revealed…
Change mode: Attempted Sarcasm
For background, let me refer you to David H. Montgomery’s excellent data analysis for MPR: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/02/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-minnesota-redistricting
If like me you’re already all too familiar with how redistricting (sometimes) works, scroll on down to the maps and bar graphs and such. I live over there in the lower left corner of Minnesota in what is now Congressional District (CD) 7 and will probably remain so. Ya, I know the Torkelson map puts me in a strangly twisted CD1, but it and the Murphy map are just posturing by the legislative caucuses and weren’t even submitted to the Judges who will draw the lines after the legislature fails with or without drama to do so. Every one of the four maps that matter keeps me and my DFL neighbors in CD7 for another decade of misery at the bottom of the partisan part of the ballot. Now take a look at the Biden vote percentage in the current district (35%). It get’s worse- The four maps at the bottom that are actually under serious judicial consideration drop that DFL vote by as much as almost 2%. And that last map which leaves us the same miserly 35% of the vote, which bears the name of GOP legislator Anderson, hacks up minority voting blocks so bad it’s (hopefully) DOA. So CD7 starts out the most republican district in Minnesota, and it gets worse… A popular phrase best describes our plight: “We Are So Screwed!”
Now conventional “wisdom” from the DFL party is that our response to a dearth of democrats in our district should be to campaign even harder, in the worst “Doorknock ‘Til You Drop” tradition. Then the same DFL party, it’s caucuses, and outside donors forget us and put almost all their energy and $$$ into districts that are at least around 48% democratic. I call BS!
CD7 DFLers: When (redistricting) gives you lemons, make lemonade!
It’s a tough job, but CD7 DFLers have to do it: We are Minnesota’s biggest republican vote and $$$ sink!
We are political guerrilla fighters… We can scare the republicans into spending millions in the expensive MSP media market in fear of losing the exurban women’s vote while we earn media with video of them expressing solidarity with nazis and secessionists along the Dakota frontier. Just as we wore out the nazis in WWII with cardboard tanks and plywood warships, we can panic the republican campaigns with photoshopped B-Roll bait of wrapped buses, billboard buyouts, and broadcast ready videos were just “testing” on YouTube. If the republicans are going to beat us by 30 percent, let them waste 30 million dollars to do it!
That’s just the start… Our “progressive” counterparts in the Minneapolis and St.Paul are doing their best to scare every suburban “Karen” and their racist husband clear outa the metro, and they’re ain’t much we rural democrats can do to stop them. No point in bucking that headwind, let’s run with it- If. a few hundred thousand republican voters want to escape the ‘burbs and enhance our democratic majorities there, let them sink their republican votes in the political wastelands of CD7 for the next decade!
And heck, we can profitably “monetarize” the metro republicans migration to the frozen bogs and windswept Buffalo Ridge of CD7! While leaving behind their suburban homes to immigrants and minority folks and easing the metro housing crunch, our friend the “Oracle of Omaha” and his corporation can retool their mobile home factory in Redwood Falls to mass produce the mini-mansions republicans love. For the not so wealthy (dumb) republicans, we’ll be happy to profitably sell them all the empty old houses now worth ~5x annual taxes and the swampland we inherited a decade ago. That’s just the start- Those mini-mansions seem to end up on hilltops far from water and sewer lines, so we charge them hundred dollar and hour and up metro rates to clear their two story snow drifts and install hundred thousand dollar septic systems to deal with all their crap…
Work this plan, and in a decade all but one CD in Minnesota will be solidly democratic and that unlikely CD7’s democrats will be rich. Then just in time for the 2032 redistricting, we give in to annexation and let the Dakota’s fight over them…
With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Dyna Sluyter
Sassy Democrat 