Since I was up until 3:00 A.M., I’m hoping I have some semblance of coherency writing this post. My father and I spent the evening with our State Representative Greg Davids with other supporters of his (kudos to Bonnie for being such a great hostess). We’ve been doing this since election night in 2006, which unfolded like a horror movie as the Democratic tsunami took Greg and most of the other state Republicans out of office. I imagine that was the feeling in many a DFL victory party last night that turned into funerals when both the state house and senate went from veto proof majorities for them to Republican majorities.
I refused to make any solid predictions this year when asked by friends and political activists because at some point I realized none of the data coming in fit anything I’d seen before. Combined that with a very strange atmosphere of smoldering resentment toward all politicians that I found amongst the average citizen of the area and I concluded this was going to be a strange election. Even the political activists didn’t have much passion, aside from some of the Tea Partiers. I knew the Republicans would win and win big nationally, but Minnesota looked bad.
Thanks to Mark Ritchie’s incompetence (or is it something more sinister?) at managing the Secretary of State office, results for our local counties of Fillmore and Houston trickled in very slowly if at all on the SoS website. That meant phone calls and trips to the local county courthouses to find out what was going on. Houston County was forced to email results in because the line for the counting machines to the state capitol was dead. That made for a long evening watching national and statewide races seesaw back and forth.
In the end, we saw the voters of the United States punish the Democratic Party for their ignoring the will of the people and following an extreme left wing agenda. That agenda is over, even though Republicans only took the U.S. House. The gains in the U.S. Senate were large enough to make things very difficult for certain Democrat Senators to toe the party line when they are looking to get re-elected in 2012.
The bigger news is that many state legislatures and governorships flipped to the GOP. Why is this bigger news? 2010 is a census year and that means federal and state redistricting of voting districts. With their penchant for gerrymandering, the Democrats had to hold on to everything they had to keep those districts or tamper with Republican dominated ones. Now Republican dominated legislatures will control the redistricting in many critical states and Minnesota. Never thought I’d see that!
I’m pleased to say Houston County went completely red this election.
On to some specific races:
Greg Davids won HD-31B outright despite having two opponents. Steve Kemp (DFL) and Al Hein (Ind) split the liberal vote but even that didn’t matter as Greg won 53% of the vote for a clear knock out. Surprising, I thought it would be tighter.
Rhett Zenke put up a good fight but Gene Pelowski HD-31A will never be knocked out as he is the last of the conservative Democrat breed. At least Rhett won in Houston County and I hope he sticks around after redistricting.
Jeremy Miller upset Sharon Ropes in SD-31 which surprised many. This one didn’t surprise me, I knew Miller would win a close race and it was very close. Congratulations on winning and securing the state senate for us, Jeremy!
Randy Demmer made it close against Tim Walz in CD-1, but enough people buy into Walz’s phony moderate act to keep him in office. There was a poisoned atmosphere the unfairly hurt Randy that originated in the 2006 endorsement campaign that I think affected things. But the biggest problem is that unless we find a multimillionaire to self finance, Walz will always have a ridiculous money advantage. The union money borders on the infinite there.
The governor’s race is going into automatic recount with Emmer trailing Dayton by half a percent. This race went bad because “moderate” Republicans decided to go out and get Horner elected. His 12 % didn’t come from Dayton like some activists insisted, but mostly from Emmer. But this gets uglier. Hennepin County managed to have 180,000 more ballots cast than there are registered voters when there was only 58% turnout statewide. This stinks of voter fraud and I predict the recounts will get ugly.
Those 180,000 votes would be enough to change the outcomes of the state constitutional offices as well. As it stands, they all remain in the hands of the DFL.
That leads me to point out a problem that Minnesota has – we don’t have clean elections and haven’t for some time. The corruption and fraud in the Twin Cities has spilled out to affect smaller cities in the state as well. Voter fraud is extremely hard to prove because there are very few safeguards against it in the system. Voter ID is desperately needed here and would prevent it up front.
Finally, a comment on two races that gained national attention. In Nevada, Harry Reid won when he shouldn’t have. In Delaware, Coons destroyed O’Donnell easily. Both those candidates were poor choices and in O’Donnell’s case, became a litmus test for purity amongst some conservatives. Those who pointed out her Grand Canyon sized flaws were shouted down and accused of being RINO’s. Quality of character matters and should matter to those of use who are conservatives. Just because someone says things we want to hear doesn’t make them a good candidate or trustworthy. That lesson needs to be driven home before November 2012 comes around.
Why? Because the American public hates Republicans almost as much as they hate Democrats. Republicans have to come through on fiscal issues or else they will be dumped out of office too. I expect the electorate to fragment over the next few years and there will be growing instability if the GOP screws up again. Hostility toward the federal government is growing in proportion to the expansion of it. Big government has been rejected along with Barack Obama’s radical agenda. All newly elected Republicans better keep that in mind because the public is watching.
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