Sept. 2, 2008
The Fight For Minnesota
States To Watch In '08: McCain Will Try To Snap The State's Blue Streak
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First lady Laura Bush, left, and Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., address the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Monday, Sept. 1, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
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In much the same way the Democrats went to Denver with thoughts of recapturing Colorado, the Republicans are in St. Paul with hopes of finally snapping Minnesota’s blue streak: for eight consecutive Presidential elections, Minnesota has voted Democratic.
Recent state elections make Minnesota look like it could be a swing state this year. In 2002, Minnesota followed a national Republican tide and voted Republicans Norm Coleman into the Senate and sent Tim Pawlenty to the Governor’s Residence; then it went for Kerry in 2004, and in 2006 gave Democrat Amy Klobuchar a Senate seat. Democrats gained a Congressional seat in the rural 1st District that year, too - at the same time Pawlenty won re-election.
That Pawlenty victory not only got him short-listed for the Vice Presidential slot, but it also shows John McCain the electoral formula for contesting the state. Pawlenty ran extremely well in the suburbs in and around the Twin Cities media market - the swing area that will probably decide Minnesota in 2008.
McCain’s Opportunity: The Suburbs
The ring of suburbs and exurbs that surround the Twin Cities are growing and willing - but not guaranteed - to vote Republican. Consider three key counties: Dakota, Scott and Wright. They added a whopping 50,000 voters between 2000 and 2004; another 50,000 since. Today they hold more than 370,000 voters - or 12% of the state’s electorate, a slight increase from their percentage share in 2004.
George W. Bush won them in 2004, improving in them from 2000- a Presidential trend that’s good news for McCain. The successful Pawlenty won them comfortably en route to victory, building even higher percentages than Bush.
Yet just as those vote patterns might have cemented these as Republican counties, Democrat Amy Klobuchar won two of them (Dakota and Scott) in her Senate contest even as Pawlenty was claiming them for the GOP in his Governor’s race. In the largest of them, Dakota, she more than reversed Pawlenty’s percentage.
The bar is high for McCain, though: vote margins matter a lot in these counties, especially for Republicans. Bush won them, but didn’t rack up enough votes in doing so to win the state. Pawlenty ran up very large victories and that, combined with his large margins in smaller, wealthy, solidly GOP counties nearby like Carver and Sherburne, helped him win. So it’s Pawlenty’s performance, not Bush’s, that McCain hopes to emulate.
However, Obama will certainly look to challenge in these areas. Dakota, Wright and Scott are predominantly white collar, professional, and higher-income, not unlike a lot of the exurban areas that boomed nationwide in the 90’s and early 00’s.
In Minnesota, that’s the topography of a battleground. Statewide in 2004, Kerry edged Bush among college-educated voters (doing better among them in Minnesota than he did nationwide) and won post-grads easily, while Bush won those with $100,000-plus incomes. Throughout the 2008 primaries, Democrats and Independents with higher incomes and education levels were a key component of Obama’s coalition. He’ll need them again in the General to hold off a McCain challenge here.
To the east and north of the Twin Cities, the suburban and slightly more blue-collar counties of Washington (about 150,000 voters, 5% of the state) and Anoka (185,000, 6% of the state) shape up as tightly-contested. Neither candidate figures to build a large enough vote margin there to wash away problems elsewhere, but McCain probably needs to either win these counties or keep them close.
Pawlenty did well (carrying about 54% of the vote) in these places, but not as well as in Scott and Wright where he topped 60%. George W. Bush very narrowly beat Gore in 2000 in those counties, but opened up comfortable wins in 2004. Democrat Klobuchar won them comfortably in 2006.
McCain’s Challenge, Part 1: Key Demographic Groups.
By Anthony Salvanto and Mark Gersh.
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