Would Wellstone Have Won In 2002?

It seems like a good time to avoid the poisonous discourse infecting the national dialogue and look in the rear view mirror for some retroactive electoral analysis.  It's not that 2002 was necessarily "a more innocent time" being on the eve of the biggest foreign policy mistake of my lifetime, but election outcomes felt a little less existential and the coalitions were vastly more interesting and less predictable.  Counterfactuals are usually fun and I haven't done a deep on the 2002 Minnesota Senate election...until now.    Simple question:  if Paul Wellstone hadn't died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, would he have won a third term?

The conventional wisdom about this election has endured for nearly a quarter century, particularly in the minds of Democrats.  The general breakdown of the CW is that Wellstone and Republican challenger Norm Coleman had been effectively tied for most of the year, but when Wellstone cast his vote against the resolution for military force in Iraq in October, Minnesotans respected his integrity and migrated in his direction.  Wellstone was poised to win before he died, but when voters perceived his televised memorial service to have turned into a tasteless campaign rally, they recoiled in disgust and censured the Democratic Party by voting for Coleman.

I've never fully bought this conventional wisdom for a number of reasons.  Foremost among them, I'm skeptical of the weight of individual events in generating wholesale transformations in voters' decisions.  My skepticism about campaign missteps and media-fueled controversies moving voters in meaningful numbers has only hardened in the Trump era, but I suspect it was quite relevant in 2002 as well.  The polling suggested Wellstone got a five-point bounce after casting his vote against military action in Iraq....and the election night tally suggested Coleman got a five-point bounce in the closing days of the election.  Few people seemed to consider that the common denominator may have been questionable polling samples rather than dithering voters.

And far as I can tell, most of the narrative surrounding the momentum shifts was tied to a single Mason Dixon poll released by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in mid-October.   Previous samples had shown Wellstone and Coleman deadlocked, but the poll released after Wellstone's Iraq vote showed him leading by 6 points.  It was a relief to those of us on Team Wellstone but there was scant polling data beyond that backing up the premise of Wellstone pulling away.

Following the exasperated responses of local and national media, as well as then-Governor Jesse Ventura, to the tone of Wellstone's October 29 memorial service, Democrats were nervous that there would be fallout.  They were relieved when the poll released the Sunday before the election, taken entirely after the memorial, had replacement Democratic nominee Walter Mondale leading by 5 points.  The only problem:  it was the same pollster (Mason Dixon on behalf of the Star Tribune).  If there was additional reliable public polling backing up Mason Dixon's findings, I wasn't aware of it then and am struggling to discover any record of it now.

So were Minnesota voters really this fickle in October and early November 2002?  Did they really flock to Wellstone to reward his courageous vote against invading Iraq only to do a heel turn back to Coleman in response to Wellstone's memorial service?  That seems less likely to me than Mason Dixon simply having polling samples that were too friendly to Wellstone (in October) and Mondale (in November).

No shade is intended to Mason Dixon if they did because it was a hard race to poll, with an unusually dynamic Minnesota electorate diverging in unpredictable ways.  Wellstone's campaign was upfront that the only reason they were hanging in there against Coleman was Wellstone's strength in rural Minnesota.  The Coleman campaign telegraphed the same dynamic as they were on the airwaves with ads lobbying hard to cut Wellstone's rural advantage and were funding full-page color ads about the "death tax" in weekly rural newspapers to further land a foothold among voters who were ambivalent toward him.

Anecdotally, I was observing the same thing working at the time as a farm reporter in southwestern Minnesota.  Wellstone's decades of advocacy on behalf of farmers and workers had broken through and he won considerable crossover support from otherwise rock-ribbed conservatives in farm country in a race against the former mayor of St. Paul.  Given the trajectory of ideological loyalties in the generation since, it seems all the more remarkable that a Senator as unapologetically progressive as Paul Wellstone put together such a comprehensive downscale coalition in a Midwestern state.

Every indication is that this rural advantage transferred to Mondale, who also punched above the DFL's weight in the majority of farm and factory towns throughout the state and across media markets.  Mondale's coalition looked very similar to what Wellstone's campaign teased that they expected their own coalition to look like.  There's no way of knowing if the familiar Mondale name increased that outstate Minnesota advantage by a tick or if Wellstone's absence on the ballot compelled some pro-Wellstone Republicans back to the GOP, but it's reasonable to assume the difference was negligible.

Whatever the case, the real action was going on in the metro area, which saw a massive swing to Coleman.  The Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and exurbs experienced both blistering population growth and a political realignment in the late 90s and early 2000s.  It was hard to get a good read on this realignment in 1998 because of the third-party factor with Jesse Ventura, but it was harder to ignore when George W. Bush managed double-digit gains in nearly all of the Twin Cities collar counties.  Senator Rod Grams scored margins nearly identical to Bush that cycle, prevailing in every suburban and exurban county even while losing decisively statewide.  It was a worrying pattern for Democrats that seemed likely to persist in 2002, but the magnitude of the GOP suburban advantage come election night was genuinely shocking even to those expecting the worst.

The double-digit swing toward the GOP in suburban Minnesota in 2000 was matched by another double-digit swing in 2002.  And this one wasn't limited to the collar counties.  It touched every corner of the metro area, with wimpy margins (slightly less than 2-1 Mondale) even in the city of Minneapolis.  And all this in a midterm with a Republican President!  What in the hell was going on in Minnesota in 2002?

Whatever it was, it seemed significantly bigger than backlash to Paul Wellstone's memorial service.  The arithmetic was fuzzy because Wellstone had already banked thousands of votes before he died and it's not clear how many of his absentee voters cast another ballot, but the final outcome was by no means extremely close.  Coleman beat Mondale by nearly 50,000 votes and a margin of 2.2%.  Furthermore, turnout was high at 64.9%.  That's a higher turnout percentage than any of the five midterm cycles since then.

Does it seem credible that Wellstone's memorial had THAT big of an impact?  Did it promote a metro-specific turnout surge that went overwhelmingly to Coleman, a surge that didn't touch adjacent outstate counties in the same media market where Mondale outperformed Gore, and in most cases outperformed Dayton, two years earlier? 

I mean...maybe.  But it seems more likely that this cake was baked before Wellstone died and the polls showing him with a comfortable mid-single-digit lead three weeks before the election were just as wrong as the polls that showed Mondale with a mid-single-digit lead three days before the election.  It seems more likely that polling models weren't accurately gauging the magnitude of suburban shift toward Coleman and the GOP that year.  It seems more likely that Minnesota was on the tipping point of becoming a red-tilting state until Bush's misadventures in Iraq triggered a reversion to the Democrats beginning in the 2004 cycle.

I have 23 additional years of election nights and poll-watching under my belt since 2002, and they've led me to conclude that Norm Coleman would more likely than not have won this election against Wellstone just as he did against Mondale.  The notion that backlash to the Wellstone memorial alone cost the Democratic Senate nominee scores of thousands of votes--almost all of them specific to a dozen counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area--is too far-fetched to accept in retrospect.  The far more believable scenario is that those massive Coleman margins in the suburbs were gonna happen anyway.