Banning Menthol Cigarettes: Are They That Cynical Or Are They That Stupid?

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Thursday April 28, 2022 · 3:32 PM PDT

2022/04/28 · 15:32

For a generation now, we've had a long-winded national conversation about the human toll exacted by the prohibition on marijuana, particularly as it pertains to communities of color. After decades of debate, the consensus has been that maintaining this prohibition has come with far more drawbacks than advantages, and we’ve seen a steady progression toward legality in increasing numbers of jurisdictions. With that in mind, it’s jaw-dropping to contrast the endless discussion pertaining to legalized marijuana with an inverse proposal, freshly rubber-stamped by the FDA, to turn more than 10 million (mostly Black) American menthol cigarette smokers into criminals following a muted debate that’s gone on entirely behind closed doors with effectively zero public conversation about the consequences of trying to reinvent the prohibitionist wheel.

Somehow, the same racial justice advocates who persuasively made the case for legalizing marijuana (and in some cases, decriminalizing hard drugs) in the name of fighting racism were likewise at the forefront of the calls to outlaw menthol cigarettes, also in the name of fighting racism. The cognitive dissonance is so brazen that any person who applies a nanosecond of critical thinking to the dueling debates can only ask....are they that cynical or are they that stupid?

Prohibitions waged by the ruling class to teach a lesson to those they deem to be their moral inferiors are always odious, but this particular prohibition will impose even more wreckage than most given its direct impact on the Black community. A black market vacuum will inevitably fill the void left behind by the disparity between supply and demand, and like all black markets, it will be a lucrative draw for young people of color in socioeconomically vulnerable communities. Meanwhile, stores whose commerce is regulated will take a big hit. Many convenience stores say they're only able to keep their doors open based on the profit they make by selling cigarettes. In Black communities, many of those stores will close if the cigarettes preferred by most Black consumers are outlawed, putting the delicate ecosystem of their neighborhood economies in further peril. People of color who own and/or work in those stores will lose their livelihoods. Consumers who need those stores for everything from gas to produce will one day find themselves approaching a shuttered storefront door on their way to pick up groceries. Is it really worth this kind of hardship just for the thrill of wagging a scolding finger in the faces of smokers? Biden's FDA certainly seems to think so.

Tobacco has been a common denominator in many of the most high-profile encounters between police and nonviolent people of color that have ended in death, ranging from Eric Garner to Sandra Bland to George Floyd. Expect many, many more such encounters with Biden's FDA exploding the ranks of people of color reclassified as criminals for using or selling menthol cigarettes or flavored cigars. Large numbers of young Black people will go to prison because of what Biden's FDA is doing. Additional young Black people will be killed by police as a consequence of what Biden's FDA is doing. And the hands of Biden’s FDA will almost assuredly be covered in blood because of it.

The ruthless lack of intellectual integrity is stunning, and goes to prove that arguments about legalizing marijuana as a means of lessening criminal penalties on Blacks were always a gimmick and were never made in good faith. Anybody who was serious about reducing the law enforcement footprint on the Black community would never choose to hand over the menthol cigarette marketplace to the criminal underworld as these hypocrites are about to do.

Are they that cynical or are they that stupid? Apparently both.

The Most Horrific Takeaway of a Possible Bloomberg Nomination

Mark27

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Sunday February 16, 2020 · 10:58 AM PST

2020/02/16 · 10:58

I despise Mike Bloomberg. I always have. He governed New York City using the kind of naked patronage that would make a mob boss blush while fancying himself a messianic overlord willing to step over everybody's civil rights and personal freedoms to achieve his preferred ends. To whatever extent Donald Trump governs like a strongman, Mike Bloomberg gift-wrapped the playbook of how to govern like a strongman in America, only doing so without any imagination. He simply plowed over his dissenters and paid off the people who would be most likely to object to their being plowed over in the way only an oligarch can. It's possible Bloomberg's less of a clinical sociopath than Trump, but I'm not fully convinced of that either. Look at his record. He treats his constituents like chess pieces on the board of his own personal fiefdom, completely comfortable with the idea that his personal fortune entitles him to do so.

And now, Mike Bloomberg is taking his 12-year autocratic reign of New York City and going national with it, changing parties three times along the way to accommodate his soulless ambitions. And because of a combination of a messy series of events, the unbelievable good luck that has followed him every step of his career, and hundreds of millions of dollars of one-sided advertising that nobody else has the resources to counter, Bloomberg appears to be on a glide path to the Democratic nomination. The party that has assailed the rise of oligarchy and the risks associated with unbridled income inequality seems poised to sell its soul and start worshiping this golden calf in a moment of "whatever it takes to stop Trump" desperation. The ramifications for the future of our democracy are endless, and I will mostly focus on that in the paragraphs ahead.

I think just about everybody inside and outside of the Washington bubble underestimates the tremendous competitive advantage of one-sided advertising. Back in 2008, Barack Obama had a war chest of cash twice as large as Republican opponent John McCain, enabling him to campaign in states where McCain couldn't afford to play ball. For example, Obama advertised tirelessly in Wisconsin and Michigan months after McCain pulled out, and it's no coincidence that Obama dramatically outperformed the traditional Partisan Voting Index of Democratic Presidential nominees in both states. Ditto for Obama's one-sided 2008 advertising forays into Indiana, where he pulled off an unlikely victory, as well as North Dakota, Montana, and Missouri, which he lost but strongly outperformed any other Democrat in a generation.

With Obama's 2008 precedent, it should have been easier to predict that Bloomberg's strategy of swamping Super Tuesday states with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads that no other candidate could afford to counter would significantly move the needle. The collapse of Biden and resulting muddle of low-resource center-left alternatives scrambling for the same voters was less foreseeable but even if Biden had performed acceptably in Iowa and New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg's saturation advertising directed to low-information, low-intensity voters would still have had a tremendous impact on this race.

So what's the lesson here? It's a pretty obvious one. Billionaires get to create their own sets of rules in American elections. If Democrats aren't able to stop Bloomberg in the next two weeks, then every present and future oligarch realizes their cash enables them to circumvent a process carefully crafted to avoid this sort of thing. Up until now, the primary process has been reasonably effective in preventing resource-heavy candidates from simply buying the nomination, but it never had to contend with an oligarch quite as resource-heavy as Bloomberg. If his strategy works, it shows a dozen or so other multi-billionaires they can do it too. And regardless of whether any of the other dozen or so multi-billionaires is instinctively political, they are all ambitious. Knowing that a small fraction of their personal empire is all it would cost them to rule the free world for at least four years, rewarding their allies and punishing their enemies every step of the way, would be a deal almost none of them could refuse.

So I ask this question? If Bloomberg's gambit of buying the Democratic nomination--and potentially the Presidency after that--works, then how can ever avoid self-funding multi-billionaire major party nominees cycle after cycle? How could we stop the richest people in the nation from seizing their competitive advantage of endless saturation advertising to circumvent the nomination process in every election? Will we ever have a President who's not a self-funding multi-billionaire again?

For all of the endless boo-hooing about small unrepresentative states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina having an outsized role in picking our Presidents, Bloomberg's rise is Exhibit A of why that process is so important, or at least has been before Bloomberg was the first to test and perhaps exceed previously unforeseen limitations of that process. By putting a premium on retail politics and giving dark horses a chance, these four small states with relatively cheap advertising markets have kept would-be Bloombergs in check in the past. If Bloomberg renders them irrelevant moving forward and shows an oligarch can bypass the process entirely and buy it, rendering the intense efforts of less oligarchic challengers who can't afford to compete at their level meaningless, then American democracy will never be the same again. At that point, the outsized role of Iowa--and enraged cable news analysts apoplectic that caucus results weren't yet ready by 10 p.m. on election night to accommodate their live broadcasting--will seem like pretty quaint problems by comparison.

Two weeks. The Democratic Party has two weeks to stop this oligarchic strongman with a shady personal past and an unthinkable political past from buying the nomination. And on top of his record, he has not participated in the debates or had any of the kind of in-person scrutiny of Presidential candidate skill that a serious Presidential contender needs--and that voters deserve--to sufficiently determine if he's worthy of the job. Whether he wins or loses in November, nominating him would be a historic mistake, and a mistake with incalculable ramifications on the Democratic Party and democracy generally for generations to come.

Handicapping IA-04: What Will Scholten's Path To Victory Look Like

Mark27

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Sunday November 04, 2018 · 10:01 AM PST

2018/11/04 · 10:01

Here’s my handicap of IA-04 and a path to victory for JD Scholten…..

First and foremost, Scholten needs to win Story County by at least 20 points (and probably 25 points) with a robust student turnout in the college town of Ames. King’s old district lines in the 2000s consisted exclusively of western Iowa and was entirely unwinnable for a Democrat. It’s because of the addition of Story County in the district’s southeast corner that Scholten has a chance. Typically, the conservative rural areas of Story County report first and the deep blue Ames precincts come in last, so don’t fret if the county is 75% reported and King either leads or narrowly trails. Christie Vilsack won Story County by 15 points in 2012, with Presidential year turnout. Scholten needs to do a few points better. Scholten will need a decent number out of Boone County just west of Story as well, a working-class county that swung right in the last two cycles but has considerable Democratic DNA.

Next in importance is the I-35 corridor on the east side of the district, which has also been added since the 2011 reapportionment. Most critical is Cerro Gordo County (Mason City), a blue county and north Iowa population center that went for Christie Vilsack by nearly 20 points and was one of only two Iowa counties to vote for Jim Mowrer against King in 2014. Again, I’d say a benchmark of a 25-point Scholten win in Cerro Gordo County would be needed for a districtwide win. The rural counties surrounding Cerro Gordo are equally critical, with significant double-digit Scholten wins needed in Floyd and Chickasaw counties east of Cerro Gordo, and competitive, blue-tilting outcomes in conservative and rural Franklin, Hamilton, and Hardin counties, all of which lean Republican but narrowly went for Obama in 2008 when Obama got within two points districtwide. A couple of bellwethers on the district’s east side are Republican-heavy Hancock County and Butler County (Chuck Grassley’s stomping grounds). These are counties Democrats win only in blowouts (Harkin and Bill Clinton). If Scholten is winning these counties, he’s probably winning districtwide.

Next on my list of importance are the immigrant-heavy communities/counties. None is more important than Woodbury County (Sioux City), the most heavily populated county in IA-04 where there’s always been an intense polarization between Democrat-leaning blue-collars and Dutch conservatives. In 2012, Obama narrowly won Woodbury County while King narrowly won the House race against Vilsack. This kind of underscores the prevalence of immigration politics in the district as I suspect there were quite a few white working-class voters who were amenable to Obama’s economic message of 2012 but like Steve King’s hard line on immigration. Key to Scholten’s chances is whether King’s overt white supremacy is a bridge too far for them...and for some of the more middle-class Romney voters in Sioux City. It’s hard to handicap how well Scholten can or needs to do in Woodbury County because the Republicans probably have a high floor there. I’d say he needs to win the county by 7 points for a districtwide win.

Continuing with immigrant-heavy communities, perhaps the best bellwether for the entire district is Buena Vista County, home to majority-minority Storm Lake. Despite being a college town and a majority-minority town, the county still leans heavily Republican. Even McCain beat Obama here in 2008, a year which was as close to a perfect Democratic storm as we’ve seen in Iowa in the last decade. But the county has diversified quite a bit more in the last 10 years and may have reached a tipping point. It better have because I can’t see a path to victory for Scholten if Buena Vista County stays red. Another majority-minority town in IA-04 is Denison on the southwest side of the district. This county (Crawford) had more Democratic DNA in the past and went for Obama in 2008, but it’s King’s home county and I suspect he’ll have a homefield advantage there.

A few other counties that have gone Democrat in the past but have been trending red, yet are probably needed as part of a winning Scholten map, are the foursome of Emmet, Palo Alto, Kossuth, and Winnebago counties which hug the Minnesota border. All of them voted for Obama in 2008 but swung hard-right in 2012. Only Winnebago County didn’t vote for Steve King that year, and all four went for Romney. On the south side of the district keep your eye on Carroll, Greene, and Audubon counties, all 2008 Obama counties that leaned Democrat a generation ago. Depending on Scholten’s performance elsewhere, he may not absolutely have to win ALL of these counties, but he has little room for error if he loses any of them. More vital is Webster County (Fort Dodge), one of the district’s more populous counties with a mix of conservative farm territory and the shell of an old unionized industrial hub. It’s been heavily Democrat in the past but has taken a sharp right turn in the last two cycles. Nonetheless, the math of IA-04 makes a decent-sized win in Webster County (ideally 10 points) mandatory to Scholten’s chances.

Some heavily Republican counties that I would say are a must for King to stay in his column are Dickinson (home to the upscale Lake Okoboji area which could theoretically be one of the more promising places for Scholten to pick off votes), Clay County (decent-sized conservative town of Spencer, just south of Okoboji), and some more rural counties such as Cherokee, Sac, Calhoun, Wright, and Pocahontas. These are counties Democrats haven’t won since Harkin and if Scholten is winning any of them, it’s an excellent sign for him. Some of them are diversifying quickly which could prove to be a tipping point. The same could be said about Monona and Harrison counties in the district’s southwest corner, but they’ve been King country for so long it’s harder to see them flipping.

And lastly there are the Republican strongholds that will stick with King no matter what, but it will come down to margin. Foremost are the bright red counties in the district’s northwest corner, the heart of Iowa evangelical country and some of the most reliably red counties in the Midwest. The population center is Sioux County, which is majority Dutch conservative. But Sioux County also has two evangelical colleges in Orange City and Sioux Center where I think it’s possible to see some young people who find King to be a bridge too far. This softness amongst evangelical youth sort of happened in 2008 when McCain “only” won Sioux County by 60 points (!!) rather than the 70 points Republicans typically win by. Smaller in population but nearly as hard-core in their Republican allegiance are neighboring Lyon, Osceola, O’Brien, and Plymouth counties. King WILL win all of these counties, but it’s a matter of margin-shrinking. There are a handful of other rural counties in IA-04 with a similar profile….guaranteed King wins, but it will come down to margin.

In a district as rural with a population distribution as widespread as IA-04, it’s very unlikely to be a situation where a handful of blue counties with larger populations are capable of countering the rural vote. If Scholten is to win, it will require a lot of moving parts in every corner of the district. It can be done, as Bill Clinton and Tom Harkin proved, but if you’re looking at a county map of the district that isn’t two-thirds blue on Tuesday night, it won’t happen since King will have such a concentration of landslide support in the district’s northwest corner.

Handicapping Minnesota House Battlegrounds: Districts 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8

Mark27

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Friday September 28, 2018 · 5:38 AM PDT

2018/09/28 · 05:38

Based on the available polling data and my expectations of the parochial tendencies and recent localized voting patterns in Minnesota, I figured I’d take a stab at handicapping what I think the most realistic path to victory looks like in the four primary House race battlegrounds in the state as well as the 7th district which is not expected to be a battleground this year but wasn’t in 2016 either yet ended up being a five-point race. Without further adieu, let’s get rolling…..

MN-01 (Dan Feehan vs. Jim Hagedorn)

I’ve stated before that I think Democrat Dan Feehan, a political novice who moved to southern Minnesota since the 2016 election to run for office, seems to be a strong political talent but is probably suffering right now from a name ID disadvantage against his Republican challenger Jim Hagedorn. There’s a month left for Feehan to raise his profile, but Hagedorn begins this race with a couple of advantages. Despite being considered too conservative for the district, Hagedorn has run in the past two cycles and overperformed expectations both times, especially in 2016 when he came within a point of winning. His father was a Republican representative in the central portion of the district in the 1970s and that legacy surname clearly moved some votes even when Hagedorn was challenging the incumbent Walz. With a lesser-known Democratic challenger on the ballot, it’s reasonable to believe the Hagedorn surname will move even more votes, particularly in the district’s western counties.

So we’ll start with the defensive posture counties for Feehan. I expect Hagedorn to do at least as well as he did in 2016 in counties such as Brown, Martin, Faribault, Watonwan, and Jackson, which are more rural counties in the western and central portions of MN-01. Most of these are politically elastic counties but Hagedorn likely moved thousands of votes away from Walz there in 2014 and 2016 because they were part of his father’s district, and I expect he will take away a significant number of would-be Feehan votes in 2018 as well. And while I expect Feehan to win, and perhaps decisively, in Blue Earth and Nicollet counties in this same region which make up the immediate Mankato area, it’s still reasonable to believe his margins will be weaker than they would be if not for Hagedorn’s familial legacy representing the area.

Moving east, Presidential year turnout in Rochester and the college city of Winona was the difference in Walz keeping his job by about 3,000 votes in 2016, and Rochester and Winona will be integral in a path to victory for Feehan too. Rochester has the kinds of upscale demographics that could really see a shift towards Democrats this cycle, but it’s still optimistic to believe that in a midterm cycle, Rochester can itself make up the number of raw votes in Feehan’s favor that Hagedorn’s parochial advantage in the greater Mankato area will produce for him. Feehan almost certainly needs more than Rochester if he’s gonna win district-wide.

Traditionally Democratic and union-heavy Freeborn County (Albert Lea) and Mower County (Austin) voted for Walz in 2016 but with softer margins than usual. If this race ends up competitive at all I suspect Feehan will win in those counties, and probably better than Walz did in 2016.

That brings me to the five counties which I suspect will be the epicenter of the 2018 battleground. Four of them are in between Mankato and Rochester, with little to no influence from Hagedorn’s legacy vote….

The first two, and in my opinion the counties that will likely decide the winner, are Waseca County (Waseca) and Steele County (Owatonna). Steele County in particular has a significant number of voters while Waseca is the more rural of the two but still highly relevant. Both are German-settled and ancestrally Republican, but have shown signs in the last decade of becoming more bipartisan. Walz won both in 2014 while losing them both by five points in 2016. I don’t think Feehan has the luxury of narrowly losing them in 2018 and still prevailing, which makes them the election night bellwethers I’ll be checking out on the November 6th map. If Waseca and Steele counties are blue on election night, Feehan probably wins. If they’re red, my money’s on Hagedorn.

The next pair of bellwether counties I’ll point to are just north of Waseca and Steele…..Le Sueur County and the non-Northfield portion of Rice County. MN-01 inherited these two counties in 2012. Unlike Waseca and Steele, they were historically Democrat-tilting but have grown more conservative as they’ve transformed to exurbia in the last 20 years. Walz narrowly won the two counties in 2014 but they shifted hard to Hagedorn in 2016. I’m inclined to think Hagedorn wins them both again this year, but Feehan probably needs to shave those numbers down from the 10+ point victories for Hagedorn in 2016. If either of them does go Feehan, it’s hard to imagine Hagedorn is winning district-wide.

The final bellwether to watch is Nobles County in southwestern Minnesota, which is outside the orbit of Tom Hagedorn’s old Congressional district, and is ancestrally Democratic and Irish Catholic heavy, with a population center of the meatpacking town of Worthington which is majority-minority. Walz won Nobles County in 2014 and Hagedorn won in 2016. Without having any parochial biases and a generally elastic and wave-prone electorate, Nobles County is very up-for-grabs this year.

MN-02 (Angie Craig vs. Jason Lewis)

Minnesota was full of surprises on November 8, 2016, and one of the biggest was the victory of conservative firebrand Jason Lewis over his Democratic challenger in a race where “Hillary’s coattails” were considered certain to push Craig over the finish line. Instead, Lewis won the district by a wider margin than Trump, although he got a major assist from a third-party candidate not on the ballot this year who I suspect played the role of the spoiler. I remain pretty confident that with the district’s demographics and Lewis’ position of weakness from the outset that it’s ripe for a decisive mid-to-high single-digit victory. Let’s break it down….

Dakota County is the center of gravity in this district with about half of its population and three distinct political identities. The northern portion of the district (South St. Paul, Inver Grove Heights) is blue-collar and traditionally Democratic, but saw a slight shift in Trump’s direction in 2016 as most WWC-heavy areas did, but I still expect it to come out soundly for Craig this year. The central portion of the county (Eagan, Burnsville, Apple Valley) has always been its primary political battleground, with a moderate and upscale profile and has been trending Democratic for several cycles now. Hillary outpaced Obama’s margins in this part of the county and I expect Angie Craig to really boost her margins compared to 2016. The exurban southern portion of the district (Lakeville, Farmington) has always been Republican and much of it shifted a little further towards Trump in 2016 but coming out even stronger for Jason Lewis. The southern portion of Dakota County is by no means it’s most heavily populated region, but it’s definitely not a small number of voters we’re talking about either, which is why Craig won the northern and central precincts of Dakota County soundly in 2016 yet only prevailed by 2 points countywide. I’ll predict a slight shift towards Craig in this portion of the district coupled with more considerable movement towards her in the northern and especially the central part of the district, leading to an Angie Craig win of more than 10 points in Dakota County.

Bordering Dakota County to the west is Scott County, which has somewhat similar demographics to Dakota yet far more conservative politics, being the GOP voter base of the 2nd district. It was Jason Lewis’ best of the six counties in 2016 and I fully expect him to win it again in 2018. But particularly in the more moderate and educated quasi-suburbs Shakopee and Savage in the northeastern part of the county, I expect considerable shift towards Craig. If Lewis only wins Scott County by single digits, which I figure is a real possibility, then he’s definitely toast district-wide.

The small portion of southern Washington County in MN-02 is working-class and Democrat-leaning, but probably won’t produce the deciding margins of the election unless it ends up being really close. The Rice County portion of MN-02 includes the very liberal college town of Northfield and will be Craig’s base as it was last time. But I don’t see her netting too many if any more votes out of Rice County than in 2016, since she probably tapped out the college vote in a Presidential year.

And certainly worth keeping an eye on are the more rural Goodhue and Wabasha counties on the district’s southeast side. They lean Republican and went strongly for Lewis, but are also quite elastic and if Craig ends up really pulling away in the end, it wouldn’t surprise me to see either or both of Goodhue and Wabasha going blue as well. Al Franken won Wabasha in 2014, after all. If either of them do go blue, it’s certainly game over for Lewis, but my guess is the baseline here will be in central Dakota County. If Eagan goes Craig by more than 15 points, while Burnsville and Apple Valley go Craig by more than 10 points, and maybe throw in a narrow Craig win in Shakopee, then I think she’s a safe bet for victory.

MN-03 (Dean Phillips vs. Erik Paulsen)

I will have quite a bit less to say about this race than most of the others I’m profiling because the district’s demographics are uniform enough that I expect it will largely swing pretty evenly from precinct to precinct in the Democrat’s direction if the polls are right and Paulsen is in as big of trouble as it seems. One of the reasons Paulsen has been so hard to beat is that the Democrats have very few reliable strongholds in MN-03. The eastern half of Bloomington and the majority minority city of Brooklyn Park are it, and a decade ago even they were quite a bit more competitive. But they’ve trended Democratic and I suspect have a lot more room for Democratic growth as evidenced by the degree to which Hillary dominated Trump there in 2016.

Beyond that, I predict the swing in Phillips’ direction to be fairly consistent from a PVI standpoint whether we’re talking about Democrat-leaning Minnetonka, Republican-leaning Maple Grove, or the tony lakefront suburbs on Lake Minnetonka which have always been staunchly Republican but don’t fit the demographics of Trump’s Republican Party. Even Chanhassen in Carver County, the brightest red county in the metro area, is very likely to go for Phillips if the early polls prove correct. The only exceptions where Paulsen might hold up better compared to his past wins include his long-time home base of Eden Prairie (leaning Republican but anti-Trump), the more working-class Coon Rapids across the river in Anoka County which actually bucked the district and flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016, and the exurbs on the western fringe of Hennepin County like Rogers and Medina, which make up the core vote that keeps Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson on the Hennepin County Board. Barring a huge polling error or a late-breaking disqualifier against Phillips, I suspect the MN-03 race will closely reflect the 2016 Presidential outcome.

MN-07 (Collin Peterson vs. Dave Hughes)

Nobody expected Collin Peterson, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, to be at any risk in 2016 against his fourth-rate GOP challenger Hughes….but nobody expected he’d be facing a headwind of 2-1 Trump in what had previously been a Republican-leaning but competitive district in western Minnesota farm country. It seems less likely that Peterson will prove as vulnerable in this environment but I figure it’s worth analyzing to point out his 2016 weaknesses and where the potential lies for him to get back to the kinds of dominating margins he posted in the district during the Bush years.

Peterson’s base going back 30 years and then some is the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota, home to a lot of sugar beet and wheat farms along with the Minnesota side of the Fargo-Moorhead and Grand Forks “metro areas”, and I suspect he’ll get his strongest support there in 2018 as he has in the past. As for the southern half of the district south of I-94, Peterson inherited most of that turf after 2002 and has never had quite the connection to that part of the district as he has in the Red River Valley, but has still prevailed in most of southwest Minnesota’s thinly populated farm counties, even in 2016. It’d be surprising if he didn’t get better numbers than in 2016 or even 2014 this year.

Part of the reason MN-07 is such a tough nut for a Democrat to crack is because its most heavily populated counties (Otter Tail, Douglas, Stearns) are its most Republican. Even though Peterson won the district by more than five points in 2014 and 2016, he still lost these three counties both times. It’ll be interesting to see if he wins them back this time. My guess is he does, but I suspect Douglas (Alexandria) will be the least likely of the three as for some reason he’s always underperformed there. The biggest shift away from Peterson in 2016 came from the counties in the southeastern portion of the district, and since they’re also among the more populated counties of the district, the impact was felt in the overall margin districtwide. Already Republican McLeod County (Hutchinson) went narrowly for Torrey Westrom in 2014 but Dave Hughes won it by 15 points. Meeker County (Litchfield) went from Peterson +4 in 2014 to Hughes +10 in 2016. And Kandiyohi County (Willmar) went from Peterson +9 to Peterson +3. I’ll be curious to see if those counties swing back Peterson’s direction this year.

My best guess is that Peterson wins decisively, somewhere between 15 and 20 points. I’d love to see him crest 60% again and it wouldn’t completely blow my mind if he did, but I feel like there’s been some conservative consolidation in this district since the Bush years and that the days of 2-1 Peterson victories are likely over. I hope he holds off retirement until 2022 though, ensuring the Republicans don’t have an incumbent heading into the next district configuration, whatever happens with that.

MN-08 (Joe Radinovich vs. Pete Stauber)

I suspect of all the battleground House races in Minnesota, Democrat Joe Radinovich in the open seat in northeastern Minnesota has the narrowest and most complex path to victory. In the last two cycles, Democrat Rick Nolan eked out narrow victories to hang onto a seat that was a Democratic stronghold only a decade ago, but there are significant fractures in the coalition that made Democrats so formidable in the district for decades. In particular, the heavily unionized mine and steelworkers on the Iron Range are trending Republican for some general reasons and some very region-specific reasons, even as the areas of MN-08 seeing population growth are heavily Republican and getting more so.

With that in mind, I think Democrat Radinovich is gonna lose quite a bit of the support Nolan got in St. Louis County, particularly since his challenger is a county commissioner who has scored a number of endorsements from DFL mayors on the Iron Range. Nolan won St. Louis County by 23 points in 2016 while Hillary won it by 12, mostly on the strength of Duluth. And Stauber’s county commissioner district is actually in the portion of the county surrounding Duluth, meaning he’ll likely overperform near Duluth as well as the Iron Range. My guess is Radinovich’s margin in the county will fall somewhere between the margin of Nolan and Hillary, but probably closer to that of Hillary. I’m betting a 15-point Radinovich win in St. Louis County.

If I’m right, Radinovich needs to make up votes elsewhere in the district to make up for lost votes on the Iron Range. His best bet is the upscale and heavily populated Brainerd Lakes area. Stewart Mills, the Republican nominee in 2014 and 2016, was from the Brainerd area and scored strong margins there. If Trump fatigue is gonna be felt anywhere in the otherwise demographically favorable MN-08, it’s likely to be among the McMansions around Brainerd. The fact that Radinovich briefly held a House seat in this area gives him a competitive advantage that could prove very handy in peeling away some of those Mills voters from 2016.

Another option for Radinovich to outperform Nolan is the Twin Cities’ northern exurbs in Isanti and Chisago counties. These are ancestrally Democratic counties whose population has more than doubled with mostly conservative transplants in the past generation. The problem for Radinovich is that Nolan was already unusually strong in these counties, performing well above the recent Democratic baseline. Nolan won in 2014 and 2016 largely because he didn’t completely collapse here in MN-08’s southeast side. It’s expecting a lot to believe Radinovich will outpace Nolan here and net too many additional votes from 2016.

More promising for Radinovich is the northwest side of MN-08 which remains Democratic and went narrowly for Nolan in 2016 despite flipping decisively for Trump at the top of the ticket. Koochiching County (International Falls) is thinly populated and won’t net too many votes, but Itasca County (Grand Rapids) could theoretically net more if Radinovich scores numbers consistent with the Democratic baseline. There’s an Iron Range influence in Itasca County, however, that is a wild card.

Duluth is the largest city in MN-08 but it seems unlikely that Radinovich can net more votes in the heavily Democratic city than Nolan did in a Presidential cycle and as I said before his ties to Duluth are more likely to result in Stauber inroads in the area. Ditto for the other counties on the north shore of Lake Superior. Carlton County south of Duluth has significant potential to become bluer, however, and could nudge Radinovich incrementally closer to the finish line.

This is the race I’ve been by far the most bearish about amongst the Minnesota battlegrounds. It strikes me that there will be a lot of moving parts needed for Radinovich to eke out a win as the Democratic Party attempts to squeeze out the last drops of residual strength it has to salvage a seat slipping away from them before the next round of redistricting. Even if they win it in 2018, it’s a tall order to hold it in 2020. Maybe I’m overestimating how much Democratic bleeding we can expect from the Iron Range, however, as they surprised me with how well they held up in 2014. If Radinovich did as well as Nolan did in St. Louis County, then he would quickly become the favorite in this race. That will be far from easy against Stauber though.

And an update thanks to the reminder from commenter “angry marmot”, but Radinovich has an additional obstacle on his path to victory from Independence Party candidate Ray “Skip” Sandman, a perennial candidate from the left in this district who ran with the Green Party in 2014. Sandman’s candidacy was a headwind for Rick Nolan in 2014 as the 4.3% of the vote that Sandman score very likely came at Nolan’s expense, and it was extremely lucky for Nolan that Sandman didn’t run in 2016 because he would probably have been the difference in such a challenging cycle for Democrats. Sandman’s candidacy is exactly what Radinovich does not need this year as it likely means thousands of diverted votes far more likely to go in his column than in Stauber’s.

I will likely be back next month with another diary handicapping Iowa’s battleground House races.

Screw It! Let's Just Raise EVERYTHING To Age 21!

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday March 11, 2018 · 1:26 PM PDT

2018/03/11 · 13:26

I went to the Minnesota Public Television website this afternoon to watch the weekly public access series “Minnesota Almanac”. Much of the hour was dedicated to middle-aged public officials decreeing that young adults’ legal rights should be hijacked. First, a Minnesota legislator was on proposing a statewide increase in the legal age to purchase tobacco to 21...I guess because three decades of giving criminal records to tens of millions of young adults over the purchase and/or consumption of alcohol has worked so well. And then would-be U.S. Senate candidate RIchard Painter came on applauding the new anti-gun legislation out of Florida and calling it for it to be enacted nationally. He made a specific point to casually dismiss the lawsuit suggesting that untethering young adults from what the court has interpreted as their rights under the Second Amendment represents anything worth taking seriously.

I have been enraged for quite some time at the seemingly infinite implications of a cherry-picked desecration of legal rights for young adults, and the rising tide of the cherry-picking in recent years by special interests seeking to redefine legal rights only on goods and services for which they don’t personally approve. But you know what….you’ve convinced me! Let’s raise the age of everything to 21! Leaving any stone unturned in our quest to infantilize young adults would simply be unethical.

Let’s raise the age of signing legal contracts to 21! We can’t very well have children signing contracts.

Let’s raise the age of consent for sex to 21! After all, if we’re decreeing young adults are children, then consensual sex with a college junior is necessarily child rape, isn’t it?

And certainly let’s raise the age of military enlistment to 21! How on Earth can we trust the young adults deemed as children when it comes to the purchase of the firearm to be trained to use those firearms to defend the nation? That would be child abuse!

And I recognize a constitutional amendment exists declaring the legal age to vote as 18, but I will personally write my Senators and Congressman in support of raising that legal age to 21 if current trends continue. Any politician receiving votes from those unworthy of being recognized as adults has no business being in office.

And for that matter, it seems like teenagers and college-age students are often on the front lines to advocate for the erasure of their own legal rights and those of their peers. You want to be treated like children that badly….we’ll give you what you want. But then shut your fucking pieholes you little brats and retreat to the playground jungle gyms where you belong. Let the adults talk and we’ll pat you on your heads and remind you that children are to be seen and not heard.

And last of all, let’s be more aggressive in locking up young adults who dare to attempt to exercise the same legal rights their parents were afforded. Let’s dispense with the facade of “criminal justice reform” and spend tens of billions of dollars on new prisons (or in this case….juvenile detention centers) for the millions of new young adults whose activity we’ve reclassified as criminal by surrendering their legal rights.

Perhaps some of you will suggest a compromise and take some inspiration from the Jim Crow era decreeing that young adults are three-fifths of a person when it comes to legal rights. I won’t settle for that. I’ve been convinced that young adults and children are the same thing. The era of 18-20-year-olds being treated as adults in any way needs to end.

Who’s with me?

Are 20-Year-Olds The Same As 2-Year-Olds?

Mark27

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Sunday February 18, 2018 · 5:43 PM PST

2018/02/18 · 17:43

Democrats have been quick to point out the flexible and situational values of conservatives in the Trump era, abandoning policy positions and moral touchstones they had previously claimed to hold as bedrock principles all in the interest of tribalism. It's a very fair criticism, but liberals need to look at their own reflection on occasion as well, and one increasingly common theme on which the left is losing its mind is the growing consensus that adulthood doesn't begin until 21. Worse yet, the left's new love affair with infantilizing young adults appears entirely cherry-picked, isolated only to things they don't like and thus lacking any kind of legal or ethical consistency.

Before I get into the gun issue, the newest frontier of the left's push to reclassify young adults as children, it's an interesting reminder that this movement began with Ronald Reagan, who in the mid-1980s, leveraged highway fund allocation as a means to strong arm state legislatures across the country to raise the age to purchase and consume alcohol to 21. The argument was that 18-year-olds were buying alcohol for younger kids in their high schools, an argument I consider dubious generally and even if accepted it at face value, it would only justify raising the legal drinking age to 19.

The consequences have been disastrous for young adults, with millions of 18-20-year-olds having been funneled through the legal system over the last 30 years simply for consuming a product legal for those 21 and over. I'm no fan generally of alcohol and don't touch the stuff, but giving criminal records to nonviolent adult consumers is insanity. My sophomore-year college roommate in the late 90s was a whip-smart pre-law student who partook in some alcohol consumption on weekends, and was always paranoid about getting an underage consumption charge that would deny him entry into law school. I always think back to him and how insane it was that our laws on harmless college campus alcohol consumption could derail a promising 20-year-old college student's future, and always hoped sanity would prevail and the legal age for drinking would drop back down to 18, the same age that we've set as a legal threshold for adulthood on every other matter.

Instead, the trend is the other direction, expanding the scope of legal pastimes on which young adults will be reclassified as criminals for partaking in, with the left leading the charge to finish what Reagan started. Most prominently--and most cynically--the left has been pushing hard in the last couple of years to raise the legal age to 21 for their biggest bugaboo of all, tobacco. All critical thinking goes out the window on anything related to tobacco and is replaced by ends-always-justify-the-means equivocating. Just last week I read a stomach-churningly craven editorial in the Seattle Times mindlessly advocating for criminalizing tobacco use by young adults with an insultingly thin argument that surrenders the principle of legal rights of 18, 19, and 20-year-olds with a degree of breeziness that should insult everybody's intelligence. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/raise-smoking-vaping-age-to-21-and-save-lives/ This editorial could have replaced cigarettes with anything one doesn't like, from pornography to abortion, and make the same idiot argument with no consideration of the mockery it makes of how the law applies to young adults.

And while that narrative is convenient when it comes to the left's culture war against tobacco, it's jarring that they appear comfortable maintaining the existing prohibition against their preferred form of smoke when it comes to young adults. Even with marijuana legalization gaining momentum in jurisdictions across the country, buoyed by arguments about the insanity of cycling users through the criminal justice system, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that continuing to make criminals out of 18, 19, and 20-year-old marijuana users is a dumb idea as the legal age to purchase and consume marijuana has been 21 everywhere it's legalized. What could possibly justify this distinction? Why should any 20-year-old still be arrested and be branded with a criminal record for using a legal product?

Which brings us to Dianne Feinstein's proposal in response to the latest mass shooting at a Florida high school to raise the age for purchasing a rifle to 21. Political leaders, even in an environment where Democrats retake the reins of power, would have very limited capital when it comes to the issue of gun control. A proposal like Feinstein's needlessly dirties the pool and makes other efforts that much harder. It's an unwinnable argument tactically that an 18-year-old can deploy overseas and learn how to master a weapon serving his or her country but then be forbidden from returning home at age 20 and buying a rifle of their own. But even if the argument was winnable, it's still a dumb idea that further redefines young adults as children.

The principle seems to be the same as what drove Reagan to muscle through an increased legal age for alcohol consumption in the 1980s and is driving the left to do the same thing with tobacco today....that raising the age of purchase would prevent young adults from shooting up their current or recent high schools. But consider Virginia Tech where the mass shooter was a college student. There are students older than 21 at college. So do we next raise the purchase age for rifles to 23 to keep guns entirely of campus? Or possibly 35 to account for all grad students? Ditto for alcohol and tobacco. By raising the drinking and smoking age from 18 to 21 to "keep it out of high schools", it moves the goalposts to where the same argument could be made to keep raising the legal age to "keep it out of colleges". Do we ever get to the point where adults are considered adults if we take this mindset to its logical conclusion?

I was amused at the irony watching "Real Time with Bill Maher" this weekend and listening to a couple of his guests muse how the voting age should be lowered to 16, arguing that the kids couldn't do worse in selecting our elected officials than adults. Now I can't know for sure if the panelists making this argument about trusting the wisdom and judgment of 16-year-olds to make adult decisions when it comes to complicated choices of how the country runs also believe that these same 16-year-olds should spend five additional years being treated with the same legal rights as two-year-olds when it comes to the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or firearms, but given the cherry-picking of the left on these matters in recent years, it would surprise me if they didn't.

I'm sure some will think this is a tone-deaf argument to make in the days after a mass shooting where 17 people died, but remember that a lot of really bad choices were made in the interest of "security" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks too. Using this tragedy as a backdoor means to weaken the legal rights of young adults is shameless and deserves to be called out as such. How do we as a society reconcile decisions by young adults regarding sexual activity, financial investments, and the signing of legal contracts, all of which have tremendous short-term and long-term consequences but which are currently legally permissible for 18-year-olds? Should we take those rights away from them too? With criminal justice consequences for those who dare to defy a legal system reclassifying them as children?

I can only circle back to the left getting their inspiration here from Ronald Reagan, the architect of the modern "adulthood starts at 21" movement. Was he right? Should there no legal difference between college students and toddlers? Some good-faith critical thinking by the left could go a long way here, but I'm not confident that it's coming

Marijuana's Cultural Stock Is Soaring And Tobacco's Is Plunging....But It Will Cycle Back Again

Mark27

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Saturday April 22, 2017 · 8:42 PM PDT

2017/04/22 · 20:42

One of the more popular nonfiction books of the last generation is “Freakonomics”, and rightfully so as it connected a lot of data points that ultimately came to fascinating and often unexpected conclusions. One of the most intriguing chapters chronicled the life cycles of first names in American culture, noting that the most popular names almost never repeated from one generation to the next. The data suggested that the origins of popular names tended to begin in hipper, upscale households, and once the names went mainstream, tended to be copied by downscale parents. And once downscale households co-opted those first names popularized in upscale households, they soon fell out of favor with upscale households. Apologies to any readers with the first name “Amber” or “Kayla”, but they were singled out in the book as the names that were considered “past peak” in terms of their cache. Just about everything in our culture has an expiration date. What is on top of the world today will be considered a joke tomorrow.

With that context in mind, consider the changing fortunes of two vaguely similar consumer products in the last several years….marijuana and tobacco. A poll released in advance of “4/20” shows that a record 61% of Americans now favor the legalization of marijuana, a more than 20-point increase just since 2000 and a threefold increase from two generations ago when marijuana’s public approval numbers were in the toilet. Marijuana has clearly become the cool kids’ drug of choice in the 2010s. Five years ago, no American states allowed legal marijuana consumption. In 2017, eight states do, with more than a dozen more allowing medical marijuana. The sky would seem to be the limit from this point forward. Some regions of the country are probably a decade away from accepting legalized pot, but it seems inevitable given the trendline. And given that all of public policy is about getting momentum and running with it, I expect even the most ardent pro-legalization advocates to be stunned by the degree of normalization we’re heading for, with many of the same jurisdictions that were first in the country to institute smoking bans for tobacco voting to legalize marijuana usage in bars and restaurants. You won’t even be able to take your kids for a meal at Applebee’s without getting a marijuana contact high, justified on the grounds of “people being able to take their medicine whenever and wherever they want to”.

By contrast, the once prolific-nearly-to-the-point-of-majority product of tobacco has fallen on massively hard times in the court of public opinion. In a world where “marijuana gummi bears” are deemed perfectly acceptable—and the young children who end up in emergency rooms thinking mom or dad’s “edible” is candy are dismissed as collateral damage on the road to cannabis freedom—while menthol cigarettes are about to be banned in San Francisco and Oakland, on the grounds that menthol cigarettes that have been around for 50 years “target children”, undoubtedly with a tidal wave of other jurisdictions to follow. Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council stand poised to raise the already insanely high $10.50 per pack NYC cigarette tax to $13 a pack (just in taxes!!!!), despite a very tangible straight line between New York’s artificially overpriced cigarettes and the death of loose cigarette black marketeer Eric Garner at the hands of craven police officers serving as violent collectors of the city’s blood revenue. A small city in Massachusetts even sought an outright prohibition on tobacco sales a couple of years ago that was rejected following some surprisingly strong resistance in the community. If you’re a tobacco user in America today, the hits absolutely never stop coming. The cool kids continually come after them with the same relentless tactics of a schoolyard bully who succeeds in extorting his first pocketful of lunch money.

Just in case anybody hasn’t picked up on it, I’m skeptical about marijuana….and fiercely critical about those overcorrecting on tobacco. With that said, I’m one of the 61% who support marijuana legalization. I think people should have the right to put whatever they choose to in their bodies unless it’s hurting others. But I don’t come to this decision lightly based on my personal associations. For better or for worse, all of our worldviews are colored by personal associations, and my associations with marijuana have been infinitely worse than those of tobacco. I am not now nor ever have been a regular tobacco user and have never touched marijuana, so I have no personal vested interest in either two, but the life trajectories I’ve seen for marijuana users in my more than 20 years of adult life have been grim. And that’s why I’m astounded at the level of breezy acceptance and indifference afforded to the normalization of marijuana, and the obvious recognition that said normalization will result in vastly expanded usage that will ultimately condemn millions of promising young minds and athletes to a lifetime of greatly reduced productivity.

Nonsense, you say! Reefer madness! I’m a well-adjusted young professional who gets high regularly without any tangible consequences, you say! Fair enough. It may well be a majority of regular marijuana users who get through life without spiraling into the stereotype of a “burnout”. But an honest discussion of legalizing marijuana should account for the significant number of young honors’ students and athletes who will consume this product and check out of life, having no greater priority than their next high, blowing all their college money on pot, and ending up working at a gas station. There are many such people now, and there will be more of them with the normalization that will come from large-scale legalization.

After all, whenever the topic turns to tobacco usage, the singular focus always ends up with the inverse personal association….the “beloved grandma who died a painful death from smoking her whole life”. Statistically this is not the norm, as more than 60% of people who smoked over the course of their lives quit before a demonstrable health impact, and fewer than half of current smokers’ deaths are attributed to smoking. So why, if any discussion of public policy over tobacco use invokes dead grannies hooked up to oxygen tanks, should it be off the table to discuss the young people whose ambitions are lost to marijuana usage? Both are the serious consequences for a minority of consumers of the given products, so why do marijuana advocates shrug off the seriousness of the latter?

And therein lies the most disproportionate contrast in any argument about the two. The consequences of tobacco use are almost entirely long-term, the dark fate of decades of heavy cigarette usage. The consequences of marijuana use are most likely to be near-term, corrupting intelligence and ambition in one’s formative years and coming with vastly higher personal and societal costs. Yet amazingly, at this snapshot in time, the public has been convinced that their children face greater danger from the backloaded consequences of cigarette use decades into the future than the frontloaded consequences of marijuana use today. It’s a genuinely stunning spectacle to behold and it bears some serious speculation on how we got here and how long we’re likely to stay here.

The cliff notes version is that we’re following the trajectory of “Freakonomics” generational name cycle theory, beginning before most of us were born when government cracked down on the growing of hemp and turning strongly against marijuana in the 1930s, not coincidentally at the time when tobacco use began to soar. Tobacco clearly had a better and more organized block of defenders and apologists who succeeded in undermining a potential product rival. With the help of big money, public sector support, and a very effective propaganda campaign, tobacco was up and marijuana was down.

And tobacco had a pretty good run before the house of cards its corporate peddlers built for itself with decades worth of lies about the nature of the product faced its inevitable collapse in the 1990s, setting in motion a full-frontal assault on tobacco that somehow manages to ensure guaranteed market-share preservation for the existing giants in the industry responsible for all of the sins in exchange for a lucrative profit-sharing arrangement with federal and state governments that represents government at its absolute most cynical. Accompanied by a rent-seeking “Big Anti-Tobacco” industry bankrolled with taxpayer money that spreads venom and intolerance towards smokers on public airwaves while loudly advocating for a rising tide of “smoking bans” and soaring tax increases and it was pretty clear cigarettes would ultimately become the consumer item equivalent of the names “Amber” and “Kayla”, falling out of favor with the cool kids and relegated to a downscale legacy demographic that the cool kids find unsavory.

While I’m sure much of the insurgence of marijuana over the same timetable as tobacco’s fall has been organic, the timing certainly was convenient and I’m sure long-suffering marijuana legalization advocates knew that they’d never get a cleaner opening than when all the media and government daggers were pointed obsessively at tobacco. And their promotion of marijuana has been an unqualified success. Just like with gay marriage when that issue got momentum, the tide of support for legal marijuana grew quickly. And here we in are in 2017, where a supermajority of Americans are good with it. So how long can it last before we reach “peak pot” and the cycle starts its inevitable reversal spiral?

My guess is pot’s time at the top of the pyramid will be considerably shorter than tobacco’s was, for one reason above all others…..even its promoters and enablers have conceded a tobacco-style business model complete with a cynical profit-sharing arrangement with government and predatory “sin taxes” imposed on the product’s consumers. It took decades before tobacco products were subject to this kind of business model and a level of taxation that amounted to more than pennies, but once it started, the vicious cycle didn’t take long to hit critical mass. The taxation led to reduced usage, which led to government demanding even higher taxes to fill every imaginable budget hole or item on the public spending wish list, and the insatiable demand for justifying even more sin tax blood revenue in the future led to the emergence of Big Anti-Tobacco, which succeeded in securing a sanctimonious environment of shame and judgment towards “sinners” where the “sin taxes” kept rising but also further reduced usage as the cool kids lost interest and associated tobacco use with “those people”. It’s very hard to imagine this same trajectory failing to play out with marijuana as it did with tobacco, except under a much more compressed timeline given that marijuana’s starting point as a legal product has public coffers depending upon its robust revenues.

So if I’m right, and 25 years from now, marijuana’s surge has played out, what happens next in terms of (temporarily at least) socially acceptable smokeable vices? I suppose it’s entirely possible something new could emerge to replace marijuana, but the speed at which e-cigarettes/vaporizers lost their cache was neck-snapping, with sales already past peak and government quickly rising to kill their competitive advantage so as not to find themselves behind the curve with a replacement to tobacco that doesn’t give them a quick and easy cut of the action financially. My guess is…..as soon as tobacco hits bottom (and it ain’t there yet), its comeback will begin. As the cool kids get the pending message that marijuana is passe and primarily becomes the domain of those awful downscale people, somebody extremely hip and “open-minded” and “tolerant” will put tobacco on the glide path to being cool again. Policymakers are slow to embrace change to the status quo, but usually come around to co-opting the cool kids’ priorities no matter how counterintuitive and/or senseless they may be. And in their effort to secure the comeback, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the concept of “medical tobacco” be born and embraced in my lifetime, premised on past studies suggesting tobacco alleviates symptoms of mental illness and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

I’m 39 and expect this to happen before I die….and then after my time the cycle will probably spin on its axis yet again the other direction. Maybe even the names “Amber” and “Kayla” will become cool again! But the one thing that’s certain is that it won’t take long for policymakers to game the rise and the fall of all of the above for maximum cynical self-interest just as they’ve done so impressively well with tobacco, particularly in the last 20 years.

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

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 27, 2016 · 5:22 PM PST

2016/11/27 · 17:22

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.

Philadephia's New Soda Tax: Everything That's Wrong With Modern "Liberalism"

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday June 26, 2016 · 10:42 AM PDT

2016/06/26 · 10:42

For the last two decades, we've been seeing one of the most dramatic resortings of political coalitions that the republic has ever experienced. It couldn't have been more clear in the World War II era until the dawn of the Clinton era.....young professionals voted Republican and steelworkers and coal miners voted Democrat. The flipping of these coalitions has been playing out at a healthy clip over the last quarter century but is really accelerating in the Trump era, with many of the arguments that used to be made by Republicans now being made by Democrats and vice versa. We've seen it play out a great deal this weekend in response to a majority of British voters who cast a ballot in favor of leaving the European Union. Conservatives at home and abroad are cheering on the kind of populist peasant uprising based on the principles that used to be attributed to liberals....while liberals are looking down their noses at the disproportionately working-class demographics who chose to rebel against the "too big to fail" elites who have wired the global economic spider web in a way that is working for fewer and fewer people. It would be harder to know who the good guys are right now if one side wasn't being led by a puerile, demagogic huckster of the highest order like Donald Trump, but moving forward beyond 2016 I really see self-identified "liberalism" continuing to move away from people like myself who are interested in public policy that lifts up the working class rather than sees their life choices and priorities as a pox on society that has to be civilized and neutered by the "enlightened".

But there's been one sphere of public policy where liberals have made great strides in recent years, and that's recognizing the ruinous effects of growing income inequality. There have been a number of proposals put out there to help ameliorate this growing chasm--most prominently higher minimum wages that force profitable companies to spread their own wealth to their workers rather than pass on the costs to taxpayers vis a vis public assistance--but the same subset of policymakers are also staining these efforts with regressive proposals that are as contradictory to the goal of reducing income inequality as they are monstrously cynical. And the best encapsulation of this trend so far this year occurred in the city of Philadelphia earlier this month, where the city council voted 13-4 to separate disproportionately low-income residents from the City of Brotherly Love from $91 million a year of their money.

That's right....the same policymakers who have made income inequality the centerpiece of their policy platform have decided that the poorest residents of one of America's largest cities who have limited access to supermarkets with healthy food alternatives should pay $1.02 more for a two-liter of root beer and $2.16 more for a 12-pack of ginger ale. And the Mayor originally proposed a soda tax twice this high! The proceeds from this scheme were originally intended to pay for education in general and more specifically universal pre-K, creating a perverse incentive curve where adequate funding for worthy education goals is dependent on robust sales of the very sugary beverages we're told are such a scourge on society. But lo and behold, at the last minute before the vote, the cynical assholes of the Philadelphia City Council decided they could raid this new pinata full of blood money for general fund purposes if they so desire as well. Charming.

There are so many things wrong with this brand of policymaking it's hard to know where to begin, but my most fundamental takeaway is the degree to which society's elites deem their own constituents' lifestyle choices are censure-worthy, something to be preyed upon for their own ends. It wasn't so long ago that the political left was aghast at the "religious right" for attempting to commingle public policy with social engineering to cleanse the unwashed masses of their sins, but when it comes down to it, the consensus opinion of the left is little different, albeit on a different subset of issues, weaponizing public policy in the most regressive possible way to keep the misbehaving proletariat on a short leash. Yet for all for their embarrassment at the lifestyles of these peasants, they are desperately hoping the embarrassing lifestyles continue so their universal pre-K is fully funded.

Tobacco users have been on the receiving end of this treatment for generations, and particularly in the last 10 years or so. My home state of Minnesota was arguably even more cynical than the city of Philadelphia, with its pseudo-"liberal" legislature and Governor of 2013 bankrolling a new welfare stadium for billionaire Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wilf through a massive cigarette tax paid for by the low-income workers, abuse victims, and mentally ill that make up the primary demographics of modern tobacco users. It was only a matter of time until tobacco taxes yielded diminishing returns and cynical policymakers moved onto new "naughty" pastimes of the working-class to prey upon for path-of-least-resistance blood revenue streams, and the Philadelphia City Council marks the official transition to the public's dietary habits as a way for the state to impose financial punishment.

It's obviously hard to draw a straight line from the peasant uprising in Britain on Thursday and the City of Philadelphia's soda tax, but it's hard not to miss the tone-deafness of elitist policymakers facing their comeuppance at the hands of the people who they are not only failing to deliver a higher standard of living for, but are wagging a righteous finger at for being the cause of the problems. Neither a soda tax or a cigarette tax--or whatever their next incarnation may be (fast food tax, cookie tax, ice cream tax, Mr. Freeze tax)--will individually elicit the kind of peasant uprising seen in Britain, but the success of Donald Trump in tapping into the frustrations of the downscale is indicative that there's a collective boiling point that at some point in the not too distant future will be reached. If the left wants to get there more quickly, nickel and diming micromanagement on every minutia of the lifestyles of an already agitated voting public seems like a fantastic way of doing it. Whether it be a peasant rebellion of the existing economic order in Britain or resistance to poor people paying double what they used to for a two-liter of Pepsi, the political left would be well advised to figure out that blaming downscale voters for everything that's wrong in society is not a wise course.

Election 2000: The Most Realigning Election of My Lifetime

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday July 14, 2015 · 5:43 AM PDT

2015/07/14 · 05:43

I remember back to July 2000, almost exactly 15 years ago and before the era when the results of new political polls were readily available on election websites moments after their release online. I was looking through my hometown Minnesota newspaper and seeing a story on a series of polls from every state between respective party nominees Al Gore and George Bush before their party's conventions. Bush was out to an early lead both nationally and in the individual states, but the performances of two states really stand out to me looking back. Back in July 2000, Bush had a 17-point lead in Oregon and Gore had a 4-point lead in Louisiana. Now these may very well have been junk polls with terrible methodologies, but if we saw polls like this today, we would immediately discount them as laughable outliers. But in the summer of 2000, these results seemed within the realm of the possible. For all intents and purposes, it could be argued that 35 states were credibly part of the Election 2000 "battleground" four months before the election, all places where either Gore or Bush could have won in November. The public was disengaged and open to persuasion in a way that had defined most prior Presidential elections in the generation that preceded it. Any outcome seemed viable moving forward, but I doubt many could have predicted the formation of the long-term realignment with rigid geographic fault lines that have defined American political life ever since.

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday November 10, 2014 · 4:48 AM PST

2014/11/10 · 04:48

When looking at the dreadful national maps chronicling last Tuesday's election results, it's hard to miss the island of blue in the middle of the country that is Minnesota. Whether it be the Governor's race map, the Senate race map, or the national House district map, Minnesota avoided the Republican wave last week with the lone exception of the state House flipping to the GOP. There is no definitive reason why Minnesota Democrats so dominated their Republican counterparts last week, although I think the badly battered state Republican Party run into the ground a few years back by mismanagement has failed to offer their candidates sufficient support. This may have led to would-be top-tier candidates resisting calls to run, knowing the state party is too weak to back them up. Whatever the case, the GOP was left with two duds at the top of the ticket that was the baseline for their mostly miserable showing last week. Below I will profile all of the statewide races, House races, and a general profile of the state House races where the DFL underperformed the statewide baseline. More below the fold....

Mark27

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 16, 2014 · 12:15 PM PST

2014/02/16 · 12:15

A new poll came out this morning showing Minnesota's Democratic Governor Mark Dayton well positioned for re-election in November. The Koch Brothers haven't gotten their claws into the voting public yet with a barrage of attack ads, but even Dayton himself acknowledges that if and when they do, he expects his approval numbers to drop and his re-election contest to tighten. Looking over the comments section of the article about the poll results, one poster suggested a potential Dayton vulnerability being the passage of the largest cigarette tax in American history. Another fired back calling that unlikely because "I don't know anybody who smokes anymore", meaning the issue wouldn't resonate with enough of the population to swing an election.

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"I Don't Know Anybody Who Smokes Anymore!"...