Everyone, this day after Minnesota's primary election, is expressing "surprise" over the result of the governor's race on the GOP side of the ballot, where Jeff Johnson defeated--clobbered--the former two-term governor and presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty. To my mind, though, the big story is the disparity in the vote, by party, in the two gubernatorial primaries. On the DFL side, where Tim Walz won, there were a total of more than 570,000 votes cast. Meanwhile Republican candidates for governor received a total of only 320,000 votes. Sixty-four percent of all ballots cast for a gubernatorial candidate were for a Democrat. The DFL's advantage in the raw vote exceeded a quarter million. Though Johnson defeated Pawlenty handily, his vote total would have put him in third place on the DFL side, behind both Walz and Erin Murphy. Pawlenty got fewer votes than the third-place Democrat, Lori Swanson.
These were both contested primaries with the outcomes in doubt, so it seems fair to compare the total votes on the two sides. And Republicans were swamped. Can they catch up in the general election? Well, according to conventional wisdom, the most reliable voters, the ones who can be counted upon to show up even for a primary, tend to be older and whiter and more Republican than the general population, and Democrats therefore lean on more occasional voters to pull through in the fall. Another way to put it: people who made it to their polling place for the primary election aren't very likely to stay home for the general, in which case, statewide, it appears Republicans will in the fall have to carry nonprimary voters by something like 250,000 ballots.
Moreover, the DFL ticket in Minnesota will now be headlined by Walz and Amy Klobuchar. Their counterparts on the Republican side are Johnson, who lost the governor's race four years ago to Mark Dayton, and the virtually anonymous sacrificial lamb opposing Klobuchar. Republicans should be worrying about the down ballot effect of such a lackluster ticket, especially since in Minnesota this year there are, besides statewide races for governor and both US Senate seats, four competitive races for US House, including two in which Republicans are hoping to win formerly Democratic seats. These are in the first congressional district, which Walz vacated in order to run for governor, and the eighth, where the retirement of Rick Nolan gave Republicans a shot at another open seat. Trump carried both districts by fifteen percentage points, and the Democratic retirements should probably be attributed to pessimism about the direction of the local political winds. The other two hot House races are in the second and third districts, where Republican incumbents Jason Lewis and Erik Paulsen will be trying to hold on in suburban territory that's trending Democratic. After last night, you'd have to say that Lewis and Paulsen look more vulnerable than before, while the Democrats' chances of prevailing in the incumbent-free first and eighth district races likewise ticked upward.
Pawlenty's loss points up the dilemma that Republicans face, in Minnesota and elsewhere. I don't agree with him about anything, but, in the political talent department, TPaw is miles ahead of Johnson, a straightforward and unexceptional ideologue. It's now the party of Trump, however, so when Republicans choose between two candidates the Trumpier one always wins. Of the various available explanations for Pawlenty's sorry showing, the best must be that he was punished last night for having said, during the 2016 campaign, that Donald Trump was "unsound, uninformed, unhinged, and unfit." (I shouldn't have said that I don't agree with him about anything.) You can't say that and win a Republican primary, but half the population knows it's true, and the prospect of saying so at a polling place functions on us like a jolt of norepinephrine.
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