Minnesota Emerges as the Definitive Experiment of the New Democratic Coalition

There were a number of election results that came as a surprise in the 2022 midterms, but one of the most stunning was that the light blue state of Minnesota not only maintained its Democratic majority in the state House, but also managed to pick up the state Senate by a 34-33 margin.  I went into the night expecting DFL Governor Tim Walz to be narrowly re-elected while both houses of the legislature would flip to the GOP.  Instead, the DFL swept the metro area Senate races that were in the realm of competitiveness while hanging on by their fingernails to two seats in outstate districts that have been trending Republican.  It was a stunning turn of events, particularly for Minnesota's Senate Republicans who sat on a huge and growing budget surplus last year thinking they'd have much stronger leverage on its distribution after the midterms.  In the end, they lost all of their leverage, and the Democrats had free reign to handle a historic surplus this legislative session.  Would Democrats take full advantage of their windfall of "political capital"?

Beyond my wildest predictions!  From paid leave to free college to nearly open-ended abortion rights and gender-affirming care freedom, Minnesota emerged from 2023 with a progressive policy agenda so muscular that it would make Vermont blush.  And on top of spending the entirety of a $17 billion surplus with only $260 rebate checks disbursed to residents earning less than $75,000 per year, they RAISED an additional slate of taxes on sales, gas, and deliveries.  I don't know what number to believe, but estimates of the tax increases range from $1.5 billion to a staggering $9 billion depending on who you listen to.  The budget increased from $53 billion in 2022 to $72 billion in 2023, a 38% spike in year-to-year spending.

I'll reserve judgment on whether this hyperaggressive leftward lurch will make for good public policy.  I've always leaned to the left and have believed that government should play an outsized role in countering the maldistribution of resources in a market-centered economy, particularly amidst the decline of labor unions that have historically acted as a necessary arbitrator, so I'm not viscerally opposed to an enlarged safety net if we can get away with it.  Still, considering that all of Minnesota's neighboring states are moving in the diametric opposition direction, the supersized enlargement of government is a colossal gamble in every sense.

Politically,  the Democrats have a long winning streak in the Gopher State, stretching back to 2006 when Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty eked out a 47-46 re-election margin in a three-candidate race. But the Democratic streak of the last 16 years is more a product of luck in "winning all of the close ones" rather than some California-style partisan domination.  Republicans are usually able to hold their losses to single-digit margins in even the most decisive Democratic victories, and the coalitions have been in dramatic flux for years now.  

The nature of Minnesota's current Democratic coalition is what makes the actions of the 2023 legislative session that much more electorally risky.  As recently as a decade ago, Democrats cobbled together statewide and legislative majorities in Minnesota with downscale outstate communities like Willmar and Grand Rapids representing the swing vote.  Those places have all realigned sharply Republican in the decade since, requiring a different demographic of voters to replace them to keep the Democratic coalition a majority.  Luckily for Dems, it's been upscale metro area suburbs--places that were the core of the GOP coalition in the years when Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman were scoring narrow wins--that have trended Democratic in the Trump era.  Places like Chanhassen and Maple Grove that used to be bedrock Republican strongholds are suddenly the kingmakers in statewide elections and in attaining legislative majorities.

Recognizing that the path to an electoral majority now runs through the toniest neighborhoods of the richest suburban enclaves in the state makes the imposition of a Bernie Sanders-style policy agenda complicated and politically dicey.  The very affluent households responsible for putting Democrats in charge will be paying through the nose for doing so, with higher taxes, expensive regulations on their businesses, and even managed to be exempted from the $260 rebate checks.  Considering that these voters were the most reliable Republican voters in the state as recently as nine years ago, is it out of the question that they will revert to the mean in response to seeing Democrats govern with take-no-prisoners progressive bravado?

Ever since the dawn of the Trump realignment, I questioned the sustainability of a Democratic coalition built on dominating margins from the kinds of voters who have historically been the most sensitive on taxing and spending concerns, and at the very moment when the Democrats have been taking a sharp left turn.  In Minnesota and elsewhere, it's an extremely safe bet that the noncollege white voters who could be counted upon for 40% or higher support for Democrats as recently as the Obama years will be a reliable 75-25 Republican bloc moving forward.  That cake is baked.  And because of that, it wouldn't take a considerable number of upscale suburban voters to flip back to the party they dutifully supported before Trump and Minnesota elections would look a lot different.  But the question very much remains open on whether they will....

The forces of cultural polarization may very well loom so large at this point that even the upscale center-right voters who are nominally pissed off about the party they just voted for taxing them even more and spending the money in communities other than their own.....will still decide that the other guys are even more untenable.  Does abortion rights loom so large after the Dobbs ruling that it will crowd out "kitchen table" issues among this demographic in perpetuity?  Will the same visceral opposition to Donald Trump that drove these unlikely voters into the Democratic column seven years ago continue to be their primary motivator in the voting booth, particularly with the likelihood that Trump will continue to be the face of the Republican Party for another four years?  

And perhaps most determinative of all, has the electoral alignment of the last three cycles created a cultural ecosystem where cosmopolitans have already associated themselves with the Democratic Party too thoroughly--as a point of contrast with the unwashed working stiffs from outside of city limits--to be broken?  Has the Democratic Party correctly deduced that, in less than eight years, they're now able to do whatever they want to the majority of tax-sensitive upscale voters and still be counted on for their votes?  In the abstract, it seems crazy to even consider, but the odds seem little worse than a coin flip that the latter scenario plays out.

It seems like a patently unsustainable arrangement to count on affluent voters to keep electing progressives who then redistribute the affluent voters' wealth to downscale demographics, a majority of whom have blood-boiling resentment for the very progressive elected officials who are taking rich people's money and giving it to them.  On the other hand, it seemed like an unsustainable arrangement for segregationists and civil rights leaders to share the convention floor of the same political party.  Eventually, that coalition did crumble, but it took two or three generations for it to happen....and it's not inconceivable that the current incoherent electoral coalitions could also last multiple generations before they fall apart.

Minnesota is always a good state to watch on election night as results are frequently at least a little surprising, but it should be more fascinating than usual on November 5, 2024, based on the 2023 legislative majority's incredibly high-stakes experiment.  There's a better than even chance that Donald Trump will once again be on the ballot, which could distort result trends, but will Republicans running for legislative races in upscale suburban districts outrun Trump, either marginally, modestly, or significantly?  And if Trump is not re-elected in 2024, the real test for Minnesota Democrats will come in 2026, when there will an open gubernatorial seat and the full legislature is up for re-election.  If Republicans still can't manage to break the DFL's streak in the Gopher State, we'll have our answer regarding the durability of upscale voters' allegiances.