A Rural Survival Story: How Three Democratic Congressmen From Rural Minnesota Overcame The Trump Wave

Having grown up in rural Minnesota, I had a feeling Hillary Clinton would play poorly there and that Donald Trump had the potential to do well.  Some of the internals in the few quality Minnesota polls suggested Hillary was struggling a little more than the typical Minnesota Democrat outstate, but as the election got closer, I anticipated the numbers would get even uglier on election night.  But even I wasn’t prepared for the historic blowout Hillary was handed in virtually every corner of rural Minnesota, with counties that have been Democratic strongholds for decades suddenly going for Trump by 20 points and several swing counties that went for Al Franken just two years ago going more than 2-1 for Trump.  The wave took out several Democratic members of the state House and Senate in outstate Minnesota as well, two years after the first round of rural Minnesota casualties in the Legislature.

Rural Minnesota’s three Democratic members of Congress were not immune to this Republican tidal wave either, but all of them narrowly avoided being washed away by it.  Long-time western Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson held on by 5 points, while southern Minnesota’s Tim Walz was elected to his sixth term by less than 1 percentage point and northeastern Minnesota's Rick Nolan, the only one of the three who was considered vulnerable leading up to the election, also prevailed by less than one percentage point.  Having looked at the precinct returns in-depth, I thought I’d offer some insights on how the three of them survived even as Trump was winning all of their respective districts by double digits….

MN-01—This was the district I grew up in, and a few weeks before the election, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of the race between Tim Walz and GOP challenger Jim Hagedorn.  Nothing to see here, I assured him.  Hagedorn was penniless and running a barebones campaign against a popular Democratic incumbent.  Hagedorn gave Walz a pretty good run two years ago but there was little indication he had built any momentum since then.  I told my friend that perhaps with the right challenger and the wrong political climate, Walz could be beaten but that Hagedorn wasn’t the guy and this year wasn’t the year.  If about 1,500 people had voted differently, I’d have been forced to eat a giant plate of crow over that prediction.  This result, along with so many others this year, has been an excellent reminder to never be overconfident about anything in American politics.

So how did Walz get such a close shave?  I think the biggest factor the led to Walz’s vulnerability was MNSure, Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, which saw the highest premium hikes in the nation in the individual insurance market only weeks before the election.  Farmers, small businessmen, and the self-employed—groups that are a disproportionate share of the population in rural southern Minnesota—were the ones impacted by the MNSure premium hikes and Tim Walz was the only of the three Minnesota Democrats who voted for the Affordable Care Act, making him especially vulnerable to the sour sentiment at that snapshot in time.  Another friend of mine back home, a small business owner, volunteered to me after the election that he thought the fresh sting of those premium hikes contributed greatly to the anti-Democratic mood.

There was more going on though.  Republican challenger Jim Hagedorn’s father Tom Hagedorn was a GOP Congressmen in the old MN-02 when it covered south-central Minnesota back in the 1970s, and his legacy surname carried some weight in the rural counties surrounding Mankato even in the more friendly Democratic environment in 2014, and he managed to hold Walz to a single-digit win districtwide based largely on his competitiveness in the western half of the district.  This year, Hagedorn crushed Walz in those western counties, winning most of them by 20 points or more.  Even in city of Mankato, Walz’s hometown and his long-time base, there was some obvious erosion in Walz’s numbers as Hagedorn’s father represented Mankato back in the day as well.

But Walz’s weakened numbers were hardly limited to the western side of the district as he lost a handful of medium-sized counties in the eastern half of the district as well, including Waseca, Steele, Dodge, Le Sueur, and Rice, all of which he won in 2012 and 2014.   Walz still won the blue-collar union legacy counties of Freeborn and Mower, but his numbers took a big hit there.  In fact, Walz was ahead by only 30 votes with all but one county reporting in the middle of the night after the election, and that was Mower County which I figured would come in for Walz and did, but certainly not by the 25-point blowout that Democrats can typically count on in Mower County on Presidential election years.  Walz’s bacon was saved by Presidential turnout in Rochester and Winona.  Walz’s numbers weren’t up to par in those counties either, but the number of raw votes in urban Rochester and the college town of Winona were substantial enough to rescue him in a way they wouldn’t have in a midterm cycle.

Clearly, the national Republicans were caught napping here or else they’d have funded Hagedorn enough for him to run a semblance of a campaign.  Had they done that, Hagedorn would probably be a Congressman-elect right now.  Furthermore, popular southern Minnesota House Republican Tony Cornish was flirting with the idea of running for this seat two years ago but then backed away.  Had Cornish run, with the full backing of the party or possibly even without it, he may well have won as well.  Walz got a very spooky wake-up call in a state where this sort of unpredictability and last-minute reversals of momentum seem to happen a lot.  Southern Minnesota’s population centers have been trending Democratic so heading into future cycles where Trump’s GOP is at the top of the ticket, one would think Walz would have an advantage again, but Walz is in his sixth term now and MN-01’s last two representatives (Tim Penny and Gil Gutknecht) have sailed away after their respective sixth terms, through retirement in Penny’s case and being voted out in Gutknecht’s case, so history isn’t necessarily on Walz’s side heading into 2018.

MN-07—If Tim Walz’s challenger Jim Hagedorn was a third-rate challenger on paper, then Collin Peterson’s GOP challenger David Hughes was fourth-rate, with no media presence at all and less than $100,000 in his campaign coffers.  Peterson got his first serious challenge in two decades in 2014 from State Senator Torrey Westrom, and prevailed by a surprisingly robust 8-point margin.  The size of Peterson’s victory and the fact that Westrom’s Senate seat came up again in 2016 scared him away from running again, but I’ll bet Westrom and the Republicans generally are kicking themselves for giving Peterson a pass given that one of this cycle’s most hopelessly invisible candidates (Hughes) fought Peterson to within 5 points, all thanks to the headwinds of Donald Trump who won Peterson’s conservative district more than 2-1.  Last spring, Peterson, the most conservative Democrat left in Congress, raised some eyebrows when he endorsed Socialist Bernie Sanders for President, but seeing Hillary’s disastrous performance in his district on November 8th, I think we now see why.

All of the demographic challenges that faced Tim Walz this year in southern Minnesota were even more intense in Peterson’s vast rural district which doesn’t have the Democratic-leaning larger communities that MN-01 does.  In fact, with the exception of Clay County (Moorhead), most of MN-07’s population centers are its most conservative redoubts.  Looking at the county map of MN-07 and seeing where Peterson won and what percentages he got in them, you’d figure it was a Peterson blowout given the number of blue counties and how substantial his margins were in them, but Peterson has always done best in the thinly populated farm counties on the North and South Dakota border, and most of these counties have fewer than 2,500 voters (and losing) meaning even those counties where he wins more than 60% add up slowly when he’s either losing outright in the more populated Otter Tail, Douglas, Stearns, and McLeod counties or barely winning the larger population county of Kandiyohi or his home county of Becker.

There weren’t substantial changes in Peterson’s path to victory this year compared to 2016, although Peterson did substantially better in the thinly populated west-central Minnesota counties that are home to Westrom’s Senate district, particularly Grant and Stevens counties which shifted 5 and 10 points, respectively, in Peterson’s direction.  Peterson’s numbers slipped a little in his long-time base among the Red River Valley counties in Minnesota’s northwest corner, but not substantially.  The same could be said about the counties in southwestern Minnesota, most of which Peterson won.  Where Hughes made substantial gains versus Westrom was in the southeastern portion of the district.  The aforementioned Kandiyohi County, home of the large-for-this-district city of Willmar, Peterson dropped from a 9-point margin of victory two years ago to less than 3 points in 2016.  Neighboring Meeker County to its east went from a 4-point Peterson win to a 10-point Hughes victory, and McLeod and Sibley counties, which both went Westrom by small margins two years ago, went for Hughes by margins in the mid-teens this year.

Peterson’s relative close shave on November 8th underscores how big of a challenge it will be for Democrats to hold this seat when Peterson retires, provided he does so before 2022 when the district stands a good chance of being triaged.  In order to eke out even a narrow victory, as Al Franken did there in 2014, a Democrat has to score huge margins in dying Scandinavian-settled farm counties that are otherwise trending GOP, while holding down losses to far less than usual in the district’s growing German-settled lakes-and-cabins areas.  Minnesota Democrats did have a pretty decent bench with which they may have been able to pull that off before the last two cycles when the majority of them got booted out of office in the Minnesota Legislature.  With that in mind, Democrats had better hope Peterson sticks around three more terms.

MN-08—The most expensive House race in the nation was home to the most improbable Democratic victory in 2016.  Mills Fleet Farm scion Stewart Mills was inundating the airwaves early and often last summer, long before Nolan was able to afford to do the same, giving a second shot at taking down an old-school Democratic Congressman in a district that’s becoming more challenging for the Democratic Party.  I was struck in 2014 by the softness of Nolan’s winning margins in what should have been his strongest area—Duluth and the Iron Range.  In fact, Nolan hung on in great measure because Mills underperformed in the conservative southern half of MN-08, an exurban Twin Cities area that’s been deluged with NRA types in the last 20 years and driven the entire district considerably to the right.  I knew Nolan couldn’t count on better-than-expected margins out of Isanti and Chisago counties, or the general Lake Mille Lacs area, to save him every two years, so I had cause for serious concern about this race heading into the fall.

Adding to the challenge for Nolan, the ancestrally Democratic Iron Range is growing very impatient with state Democrats over a controversial new copper nickel mining project hanging in the balance that most metro area Democrats consider too much of an environmental risk to proceed with.  Trump’s promises to rebuild America’s steel industry made his candidacy right in the wheelhouse of these voters and Nolan acknowledged his internal polling had Hillary losing in the district, and not by a small amount.   Survey USA came out with a poll in September showing Trump 12 points  ahead in MN-08 and Mills 4 points ahead.  Survey USA has not had a good track record with polling northeastern Minnesota in the past so I dismissed it saying that if Nolan is really running 8 points ahead of Hillary in the district then he will surely win.  Nolan did win, but the spread was even wider than the SUSA poll indicated, with Trump winning districtwide by 17 points and Nolan winning by a half-percentage point, down from the 1.5-point victory Nolan scored over Mills in 2014.

How did Nolan do it?  A cluster of places moved incrementally his way to cancel out the areas that moved away from him.  As expected, those southern counties in MN-08 went stronger for Mills this year, particularly bright red Morrison County, Trump’s best county in Minnesota, and the entire Mille Lacs area in east-central Minnesota, where most of the counties moved several percentage points in Mills’ direction.  Interestingly, exurban Isanti and Chisago counties at the far southern end of MN-08 still came in less strongly for Mills than I’d have expected.  Even in far north-central Minnesota, long-standing Democratic strongholds Koochiching County (International Falls) and Itasca County (Grand Rapids) softened a couple points for Nolan and he eked out low-single-digit victories there.  The heat was on for Duluth and the Iron Range to deliver, and they did by just enough….

The four MN-08 counties that held out for Hillary saw Nolan’s margins grow.  Tiny, touristy Cook County in the state’s far northeastern corner was Nolan’s best while blue-collar Lake and Carlton counties increased by more than a percentage point each for Nolan compared to 2014.  The motherlode of MN-08 Democratic votes always come from St. Louis County, however, and Nolan increased by 2 points compared to 2014 and won the county with 61%, reminding me of the old adage that a 60% victory in St. Louis County is hard for a Republican to overcome.  That’s becoming less true as St. Louis’s population stagnates and the conservative portions of MN-08 grow, but the rule still held up this year.  It also needs to be said, however, that MN-08’s second most populous county—Crow Wing—also contributed to Nolan’s survival simply by not getting any worse for him.  The upscale Brainerd Lakes area has always leaned Republican and is the home base of the Mills family’s Fleet Farm empire.  Nolan also lives in the area, however, and negated some of Mills’ advantage.  In the end, Mills’ 18-point advantage in Crow Wing County in 2014 was locked in place in 2016, contributing to Nolan’s near-miraculous 2,000-vote victory.

One other contributor to Nolan’s victory was the lack of third-party competition.  In 2014, a Green Party candidate named Skip Sandman got like 3% of the vote and almost certainly took most of his votes from Nolan.  Had Sandman or another third-party candidate been on the ballot this year, it seems unlikely Nolan could have prevailed over Mills.  When it comes to Walz and Peterson, I’m more inclined to believe they’ve weathered the storm of a brutal political climate and can expect smoother sailing in coming cycles should they choose to run again.  Whether that’s true or not, I’m almost certain that Nolan will face more stressful cycles ahead, particularly as the growth in his district seems to be coming from conservatives while an unfavorable outcome on the PolyMet mining project at the hands of Democratic-appointed state regulators, an outcome I think more likely than not, would be very bad news for the Democratic Party’s prospects of continued strength in a region that was for decades the backbone of Minnesota Democrats, responsible for the margin of victories for Dem candidates ranging from Walter Mondale in 1984 to Paul Wellstone in 1990 to Governor Mark Dayton himself in 2010.  Despite Nolan’s extremely impressive win, the Democrats have some ambitious young legislators on the Iron Range who may be better suited to weather the storm moving forward as the region is extremely parochial and would probably be most inclined to vote for one of their own amidst sinking prospects for the party upballot in the region.

Encouraging as it was to see these three Democrats prevail despite the top of the ticket losing by double digits in all three districts, the laws of political gravity nonetheless portend problems ahead.  It’s too early to know how a President Trump will govern and be received in these parts.  Hillary Clinton seemed to be uniquely untenable as a candidate here as I’ve never in my lifetime see any Democrat in any race do as badly as she did in outstate Minnesota, but the pattern of incremental shifts to the GOP was ongoing long before either Trump or Hillary came along, with the very Democratic World War II generation dying off and taking the Democratic base with it in the farm and factory towns.  Union participation has dramatically shrunk while farms grow into agribusinesses, and the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the Democratic farmers and union stewards have either moved out or lack the same perspective, all leading to a party base that gets smaller every year in the places where Minnesota’s progressive tradition was born.  It’s all a pretty bleak picture, but at least for this snapshot in time in 2016, following a devastating national election, still provides a glimmer of ongoing Democratic relevance in demographically unlikely places to hold up as blueprints for party survival.