Election Nostalgia
No matter how tuned out I am from politics during the summer months of nonelection years, there's nothing like October to get me back in the mood. Just as was with the case at this time in 2005, autumn's arrival has brought back election year nostalgia hot and heavy and I will spend the weekend reviewing my videotape of election night 2000, indisputably the most exciting U.S. election of all-time. I'm even a little excited about next Tuesday's limited election contests in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, not because I'm confident of my side's success, just because I'm jonesing to crunch some new election returns after an election-free 51 weeks.
Next year's midterms look like a shellacking in the making, particularly in the South where I expect nearly every Democrat outside of a majority-black district to be unseated. So rather than look forward, I prefer to look back, in this thread at previous Senate contests in my home state of Minnesota going back to the first one I remember in 1988.
1988--Two-term Republican incumbent Dave Durenberger was going for a third term against Democrat Skip Humphrey, son of the former Vice-President and the sitting Attorney General. Durenberger, a very moderate Republican and generally affable guy, had always been in good standing with Minnesota voters until a minor corruption scandal in the waning days of his final term. Even the Humphrey name, at that time still political royalty, wasn't enough, particularly with the usual blah campaign that the junior Humphrey ran. Durenberger ended up winning by a better-than-expected 15 points even as Dukakis was winning Minnesota by nine points. I was only in fifth grade at the time and wasn't paying particularly close attention to the details of the Senate race, but accepted it as a foregone conclusion in the final weeks of the race that Durenberger would handily win...which he did.
1990--Another "popular" Republican incumbent....but a much different outcome. Only a few months earlier, slimy two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz was rated as the safest incumbent in the nation. The Democrats had difficulty finding a credible challenger and ended up selecting a flamboyantly liberal activist and college professor named Paul Wellstone, who Democrats privately feared would be so weak that he would hurt other Democrats down the ticket. But sometime around Labor Day, something happened. The penniless Wellstone campaign was starting to generate some buzz with its colorful candidate and his humorous and offbeat TV ads. Boschwitz was caught flat-footed and reacted with a panic, making a megagaffe a week before the election when it sent out a letter to Jewish supporters citing Wellstone as an "improper Jew" because he married a Christian woman. Meanwhile, the energy surrounding Wellstone was explosive and contagious. I was in seventh grade and barely tuned in, so it wasn't until the final couple of days of the campaign that I began to seriously entertain the idea that Wellstone could win....but he did exactly that, winning by three points (and victorious in 27 of Minnesota's 87 counties). It was not only the most exciting Minnesota Senate race of my lifetime, it was one of the biggest upsets in American political history.
1994--The retirement of scandal-plagued Republican Dave Durenberger, with an approval rating around 25%, left an open seat that should have produced a very viable pickup opportunity for Democrats, but it was 1994....the worst year for Democrats in at least a half century, and Minnesota was no exception. Making matters worse, the Democrats nominated a lousy candidate in Minneapolis legislator Ann Wynia, a cantankerous older lady who managed to be boring and bitchy at the same time, which is not an easy task. Thankfully for her, the Republican candidate, one-term suburban Congressman Rod Grams, was also quite weak and the race turned out to be entirely uninspiring. In traditional cycles, a race featuring two weak candidates would mean an advantage for Democrats, but in the GOP landslide of 1994, Grams pulled off a fairly decisive five-point win, holding Wynia down to nine county victories and becoming the most conservative Senator Minnesota has sent to Washington in my lifetime.
1996--Now this was more like it. Ever since his surprise defeat in 1990, former Senator Rudy Boschwitz had been salivating at the prospect of a rematch with Democrat Paul Wellstone. Wellstone's outspoken liberalism left him theoretically vulnerable, but thankfully the same piss-poor Boschwitz candidacy of 1990 returned in 1996 with cartoonish (literally) ads trashing Wellstone that seemed incredibly unserious. It became easier as the fall pressed on for Minnesotans to see Wellstone as the rational adult in this race, and Boschwitz compounded his problems with another ninth-inning gaffe, this time blindly accusing Wellstone of burning the American flag when he was younger without any evidence and looking like a complete ass when Wellstone unequivocally denied it. Come election day, Clinton's 20-point landslide reelection in Minnesota carried some coattails and probably helped inflate Wellstone's winning margin of nine points (scoring victories in 43 counties), but there was no way Wellstone was gonna lose this race.
2000--I had just finished college and was without a job, so I had plenty of time to obsess about this reasonably intriguing race, which featured a long list of Democrats vying to face off against imminently vulnerable one-term Republican incumbent Rod Grams. Thanks to his personal fortune buying up all kinds of TV ads, sitting State Auditor and 1982 Senate candidate Mark Dayton won the September primary. He only had about seven weeks to wage his general election campaign against Grams, but was a favorite the entire campaign, running up double-digit leads in the majority of polls against the staunchly conservative Grams, who had pushed forward policies that were unpopular by a variety of different demographic groups. Were it not for Grams' glaring weaknesses, Dayton's own campaign weaknesses would have been far more noticeable, but in the end Dayton prevailed fairly handily, winning by six points and scoring 38 county victories. Two factors contributed to a smaller-than-expected margin: Al Gore's weak two-point victory at the top of the ballot and a well-spoken Independence Party candidate named James Gibson who pulled in a better-than-expected 8% of the vote, mostly at Dayton's expense.
2002--It was arguably the marquee Senate race of the nation and Minnesota airwaves were saturated with ads already in March, a full eight months before the election. Paul Wellstone vs. Norm Coleman. And what a race it was shaping up to be, with Wellstone weaker than I expected through much of the campaign, tied in most polls and suffering from the nationwide surge in Republicanism in the months after 9/11. Still, Wellstone held strong and began to open up a modest lead by October. I had never been as excited (or nervous) about a Senate race as I had this one. Of course, that's when tragedy happened that infamous gloomy Friday 11 days before the election when Wellstone's plane crashed in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale admirably stepped up to the plate to fill in for Wellstone, but the raucous memorial service turned off independents and killed the sympathy vote. I knew the next day that Coleman would probably benefit from the memorial service/political rally even though polls continued to show Mondale with a microscopic lead. As I feared, election night was a living hell as not only Coleman pulled off a two-point victory, but Republicans crushed Democrats all the way down the ballot. A total shellacking, particularly in the suburban counties, and at the time I had concerns we saw the first stage of a permanent realignment of Minnesota into the GOP column. Usually I stay up all night on election nights, but that night I crashed at about 2 a.m. in a deep funk.
2006--I knew unpopular one-term incumbent Mark Dayton made the right decision to retire from his seat and allow another candidate to be the Democratic Party's emissary, but I would have never realized in February 2005 when Dayton announced his retirement just how perfect that decision would be as it opened the door for Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar to be the Democratic candidate. Klobuchar was a very polished candidate, but her opponent also seemed to be a worthy adversary, at least at first. Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's resume and political geography suggested an epic Old Minnesota vs. New Minnesota dogfight that, as a political scientist, gave me goose bumps to contemplate. But the race didn't play out at all like I expected. With the help of a strong Democratic tide nationally along with her own political skills, Klobuchar ran a pitch-perfect campaign while Kennedy too often looked like a bumbling fool. Never in my wildest dreams, however, could I have imagined the 21-point shellacking Klobuchar served to Kennedy in November 2006, winning 79 of Minnesota's 87 counties. It was the first genuine Democratic landslide in a statewide race that I got to observe, and it was a pleasure to witness.
2008--Here was a race that was always exciting to observe from a political scientist perspective but nonetheless one I had a hard time getting particularly excited about for one big reason. I simply couldn't imagine a scenario where comedian Al Franken could topple one-term incumbent Norm Coleman, as statistically weak as Coleman was. How could the stoic Scandinavians of Minnesotans ever take Franken seriously, I continued to ask myself. So imagine my surprise as summer passed by and Franken was in contention, thanks to two factors. First, Coleman was saturating the airwaves with some of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen and managed to make Franken look like the adult, which was no easy task. Second, an independent candidate with high name recognition was pulling in double-digit support from voters disgusted with both Franken and Coleman, but at least in theory seemed to be taking more from Coleman. We all know how the tick-tight race unfolded complete with the monthslong recount and an ultimate margin of victory for Franken of only a couple hundred votes. The outcome was favorable, and I'm starting to think Franken could end up being a pretty good Senator.
There is no Minnesota Senate race in 2010, which I'm grateful for given the political climate that looks to be coming. But there is a Governor's race next year. In my next post, I'll take a look back at the Minnesota gubernatorial contests of my lifetime.
Next year's midterms look like a shellacking in the making, particularly in the South where I expect nearly every Democrat outside of a majority-black district to be unseated. So rather than look forward, I prefer to look back, in this thread at previous Senate contests in my home state of Minnesota going back to the first one I remember in 1988.
1988--Two-term Republican incumbent Dave Durenberger was going for a third term against Democrat Skip Humphrey, son of the former Vice-President and the sitting Attorney General. Durenberger, a very moderate Republican and generally affable guy, had always been in good standing with Minnesota voters until a minor corruption scandal in the waning days of his final term. Even the Humphrey name, at that time still political royalty, wasn't enough, particularly with the usual blah campaign that the junior Humphrey ran. Durenberger ended up winning by a better-than-expected 15 points even as Dukakis was winning Minnesota by nine points. I was only in fifth grade at the time and wasn't paying particularly close attention to the details of the Senate race, but accepted it as a foregone conclusion in the final weeks of the race that Durenberger would handily win...which he did.
1990--Another "popular" Republican incumbent....but a much different outcome. Only a few months earlier, slimy two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz was rated as the safest incumbent in the nation. The Democrats had difficulty finding a credible challenger and ended up selecting a flamboyantly liberal activist and college professor named Paul Wellstone, who Democrats privately feared would be so weak that he would hurt other Democrats down the ticket. But sometime around Labor Day, something happened. The penniless Wellstone campaign was starting to generate some buzz with its colorful candidate and his humorous and offbeat TV ads. Boschwitz was caught flat-footed and reacted with a panic, making a megagaffe a week before the election when it sent out a letter to Jewish supporters citing Wellstone as an "improper Jew" because he married a Christian woman. Meanwhile, the energy surrounding Wellstone was explosive and contagious. I was in seventh grade and barely tuned in, so it wasn't until the final couple of days of the campaign that I began to seriously entertain the idea that Wellstone could win....but he did exactly that, winning by three points (and victorious in 27 of Minnesota's 87 counties). It was not only the most exciting Minnesota Senate race of my lifetime, it was one of the biggest upsets in American political history.
1994--The retirement of scandal-plagued Republican Dave Durenberger, with an approval rating around 25%, left an open seat that should have produced a very viable pickup opportunity for Democrats, but it was 1994....the worst year for Democrats in at least a half century, and Minnesota was no exception. Making matters worse, the Democrats nominated a lousy candidate in Minneapolis legislator Ann Wynia, a cantankerous older lady who managed to be boring and bitchy at the same time, which is not an easy task. Thankfully for her, the Republican candidate, one-term suburban Congressman Rod Grams, was also quite weak and the race turned out to be entirely uninspiring. In traditional cycles, a race featuring two weak candidates would mean an advantage for Democrats, but in the GOP landslide of 1994, Grams pulled off a fairly decisive five-point win, holding Wynia down to nine county victories and becoming the most conservative Senator Minnesota has sent to Washington in my lifetime.
1996--Now this was more like it. Ever since his surprise defeat in 1990, former Senator Rudy Boschwitz had been salivating at the prospect of a rematch with Democrat Paul Wellstone. Wellstone's outspoken liberalism left him theoretically vulnerable, but thankfully the same piss-poor Boschwitz candidacy of 1990 returned in 1996 with cartoonish (literally) ads trashing Wellstone that seemed incredibly unserious. It became easier as the fall pressed on for Minnesotans to see Wellstone as the rational adult in this race, and Boschwitz compounded his problems with another ninth-inning gaffe, this time blindly accusing Wellstone of burning the American flag when he was younger without any evidence and looking like a complete ass when Wellstone unequivocally denied it. Come election day, Clinton's 20-point landslide reelection in Minnesota carried some coattails and probably helped inflate Wellstone's winning margin of nine points (scoring victories in 43 counties), but there was no way Wellstone was gonna lose this race.
2000--I had just finished college and was without a job, so I had plenty of time to obsess about this reasonably intriguing race, which featured a long list of Democrats vying to face off against imminently vulnerable one-term Republican incumbent Rod Grams. Thanks to his personal fortune buying up all kinds of TV ads, sitting State Auditor and 1982 Senate candidate Mark Dayton won the September primary. He only had about seven weeks to wage his general election campaign against Grams, but was a favorite the entire campaign, running up double-digit leads in the majority of polls against the staunchly conservative Grams, who had pushed forward policies that were unpopular by a variety of different demographic groups. Were it not for Grams' glaring weaknesses, Dayton's own campaign weaknesses would have been far more noticeable, but in the end Dayton prevailed fairly handily, winning by six points and scoring 38 county victories. Two factors contributed to a smaller-than-expected margin: Al Gore's weak two-point victory at the top of the ballot and a well-spoken Independence Party candidate named James Gibson who pulled in a better-than-expected 8% of the vote, mostly at Dayton's expense.
2002--It was arguably the marquee Senate race of the nation and Minnesota airwaves were saturated with ads already in March, a full eight months before the election. Paul Wellstone vs. Norm Coleman. And what a race it was shaping up to be, with Wellstone weaker than I expected through much of the campaign, tied in most polls and suffering from the nationwide surge in Republicanism in the months after 9/11. Still, Wellstone held strong and began to open up a modest lead by October. I had never been as excited (or nervous) about a Senate race as I had this one. Of course, that's when tragedy happened that infamous gloomy Friday 11 days before the election when Wellstone's plane crashed in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale admirably stepped up to the plate to fill in for Wellstone, but the raucous memorial service turned off independents and killed the sympathy vote. I knew the next day that Coleman would probably benefit from the memorial service/political rally even though polls continued to show Mondale with a microscopic lead. As I feared, election night was a living hell as not only Coleman pulled off a two-point victory, but Republicans crushed Democrats all the way down the ballot. A total shellacking, particularly in the suburban counties, and at the time I had concerns we saw the first stage of a permanent realignment of Minnesota into the GOP column. Usually I stay up all night on election nights, but that night I crashed at about 2 a.m. in a deep funk.
2006--I knew unpopular one-term incumbent Mark Dayton made the right decision to retire from his seat and allow another candidate to be the Democratic Party's emissary, but I would have never realized in February 2005 when Dayton announced his retirement just how perfect that decision would be as it opened the door for Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar to be the Democratic candidate. Klobuchar was a very polished candidate, but her opponent also seemed to be a worthy adversary, at least at first. Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's resume and political geography suggested an epic Old Minnesota vs. New Minnesota dogfight that, as a political scientist, gave me goose bumps to contemplate. But the race didn't play out at all like I expected. With the help of a strong Democratic tide nationally along with her own political skills, Klobuchar ran a pitch-perfect campaign while Kennedy too often looked like a bumbling fool. Never in my wildest dreams, however, could I have imagined the 21-point shellacking Klobuchar served to Kennedy in November 2006, winning 79 of Minnesota's 87 counties. It was the first genuine Democratic landslide in a statewide race that I got to observe, and it was a pleasure to witness.
2008--Here was a race that was always exciting to observe from a political scientist perspective but nonetheless one I had a hard time getting particularly excited about for one big reason. I simply couldn't imagine a scenario where comedian Al Franken could topple one-term incumbent Norm Coleman, as statistically weak as Coleman was. How could the stoic Scandinavians of Minnesotans ever take Franken seriously, I continued to ask myself. So imagine my surprise as summer passed by and Franken was in contention, thanks to two factors. First, Coleman was saturating the airwaves with some of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen and managed to make Franken look like the adult, which was no easy task. Second, an independent candidate with high name recognition was pulling in double-digit support from voters disgusted with both Franken and Coleman, but at least in theory seemed to be taking more from Coleman. We all know how the tick-tight race unfolded complete with the monthslong recount and an ultimate margin of victory for Franken of only a couple hundred votes. The outcome was favorable, and I'm starting to think Franken could end up being a pretty good Senator.
There is no Minnesota Senate race in 2010, which I'm grateful for given the political climate that looks to be coming. But there is a Governor's race next year. In my next post, I'll take a look back at the Minnesota gubernatorial contests of my lifetime.
posted by Mark at 9:37 PM
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