Unconventional Minnesota Political Wisdom and the 2020 Elections

Three conventional wisdoms pervade the 2020 Minnesota political landscape.  They are: 1) Donald Trump cannot win the upcoming Minnesota’s presidential race: 2) Ilhan Oman is safe to win re-election in the Fifth Congressional District; and 3) the DFL will hold the State House of Representatives and pick up control of the State Senate.  While all three of these scenarios are entirely possible and maybe likely, there are reasonable scenarios where all three could be wrong and that the Republicans have a good 2020 year in Minnesota.

            Consider first the case for convention wisdom.

            Minnesota is the most reliable Democratic Party presidential state in the country, with the last time a Republican winning its electoral votes was in 1972 with Richard Nixon.  Yes, Donald Trump got to within 50,000 votes of beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, but that was a fluke.  Clinton was a horrible candidate, was beaten badly by Sanders in the caucuses, and did not come back to campaign during the general election while Trump did, especially during the closing days of the election.

            No Republican has won state-wide office in Minnesota since Tim Pawlenty did it in 2006.  In 2018, Senator Klobuchar won 60% of the statewide vote, with Governor Walz nearly winning  54%, Senator Smith 53%, and Keith Ellison (for Attorney General), the weakest performing statewide DFLer at 49%.

            The DFL flipped 18 seats to retake the Minnesota House.  Had the State Senate been up for re-election, convention wisdom is that they would have flipped it too given that there are several vulnerable Republican senators located in suburbs that the DFL won in 2018 House  elections.

            In the Fifth Congressional District, Ilhan Oman won election with 78% of the vote. The last time the Republicans won Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District was 1960.  Since taking office Omar has acquired a national base and has already raised at least $800,000 if not now nearly $1,000,000 for her reelection.

            As of June 019, Trump’s approval rating in Minnesota was barely 40%.

            Conventional wisdom looks terrific for the DFL going in to 2020 given these statistics.  Trump’s low approval should help the DFL easily hold the state house, pick up the state senate, assistant Tina Smith win reelection, and perhaps allow the Democrats to pick up the First and Eighth congressional seats lost in 2018.  Given all this, this should be little hope for optimism among Republicans and that Minnesota is a lost cause for them. 

Yet Minnesota Republican party chair Jennifer Carnahan  and Donald Trump are optimistic the Republicans can win  the state in 2020.  Perhaps it is not so bleak for the GOP next year and that the conventional wisdom that DFL holds unto may not be correct.

Here is the counterventional wisdom.

Trump’s core base remains highly motivated and if anything, even more united perhaps that before.  Trump has consolidated support in Minnesota outside the Twin Cities metro region, especially in the Iron Range, which used to be a strong DFL center.  The Iron Range has been moving Republican for years.  Trump has indicated he wants to move Minnesota in 2020—the only Midwest state he did not win in 2016—and he plans to campaign  here a lot.

Evidence suggests that Minnesota was moving Republican even before Trump and that the DFL base may be contracting.  In 2008 Obama won  42 of the 87 counties in the state, in 2012 he won 28, and in 2014 Dayton won 34.  In 2016 Clinton wins only 9 counties.  In 2018, Walz wins only 22 counties, Smith 20, Ellison 14.  From 2008 to 2016, the GOP presidential vote increased 47,500, the DFL vote decreased 205,000.  According to CNN exit polls, the partisan voter identification for  the DFL was 37%, for Republicans 35%.  This was the narrowest gap between the two parties in decades for a presidential election, and the lowest partisan identification for the DFL in decades according to presidential exit polls.

In the Fifth District, Omar has made several moves that potentially could alienate voters.  He comments about Jews and Israel, even if not accurately reported, have created a storm of controversy among many voters for her.  With a congressional district with a high percentage of Jewish voters, this is a cause of concern.  Omar is also dogged by campaign finance violations, new allegations about her immigration and marriage status, and perhaps concerns about false tax  returns.  She has become a major foil of Donald Trump who constantly tweets comments about her when he comes to Minnesota, and it is clear that part of his 2020 Minnesota presidential run will be to make it a referendum on Omar.

A critical realignment may place many of the large Twin Cities suburbs in the hands of the DFL for a long time.  This does potentially suggest DFL state senate pick ups there.  But as several 2019 special elections demonstrated, the DFL is vulnerable in rural and greater Minnesota.  The Senate currently is 35-32 GOP.  There may be about four vulnerable suburban GOP senators, but  there is an equal number of DFL ones in greater or rural Minnesota.  For the Democrats to capture the state senate  they may need to flip six or more seats in order to offset losses.

A counterventional GOP strategy begins with Trump campaigning heavily in the state, strengthening his support in rural and greater Minnesota areas.  Democrats did well in 2018 because Trump himself was not on the ballot and with him now actively campaigning in Minnesota it will energize the GOP even more.    Nationally, if Minnesota has become a swing state, it competes for Democrat dollars that could also go into Ohio or Florida, much richer and perhaps even more critical electoral vote states (Yet if Democrats nationally lose Minnesota or have to really defend it, they are in trouble in the 2020 presidential race).

As part of Trump’s 2020 Minnesota campaign, he and other Republicans ratchet up the attacks on Omar.  If her political and personal problems continue to mount, Omar because a potential problem for state Democrats who need to distance themselves from her.  Within her district, while very popular, it would not be impossible to beat her.  Scenario one:  Within a DFL primary someone challenges her.  In the last week reports have been that Minneapolis Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins’ name is being polled as a possible candidate.  In a district where identity is important, Jenkins could split DFL support, giving voters who dislike Omar’s political views and personal problems an alternative.  Scenario two:  Someone like Jenkins opts not to challenge in the DFL primary but go to a general election instead.  Possibly splitting the DFL vote and picking up the GOP in the district elects her.  Scenario three:  In a three way race featuring  Omar, Jenkins, and a centrist pro-Israel Republican, the latter sneaks in to win the Fifth.

Whether the counterventional wisdom or even the strategy is viable is a matter of much debate.  However, it does suggest that the DFL  may not have it easy in 2020 and that there are avenues for the GOP to do well in 2020.

Minneapolis Residential Discrimination: Why Eliminating Single-Family Housing with Neo-Liberal Zoning will Fail

The spatial distribution of housing in Minneapolis and all of the Twin Cities metro area is a

product of race and class.  Yet curing this discrimination does not reside in the elimination of single-family housing through changes in zoning or a comprehensive plan.  Such an approach, call it neo-liberal zoning, is destined to achieve the same results in land use that neo-liberalism achieved economically over the last 40 years domestically and internationally.
Residential housing patterns are the product of discrimination.  Private discriminatory preferences coupled with market decisions were enabled by racial covenants, government redlining, and zoning to produce the segregation patterns we see today. Countless books, such as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s classic American Apartheid, tell this story well.  Nearly 25 years ago at the Institute of Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, I helped author a study pointing to the Twin Cities Metro region being the third most segregated urban area in the nation.  More recently, the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity located  persistent segregation in the placement of low income housing and education policy choices that concentrate low income people of color in specific neighborhoods and schools.
Fixing this segregation demands a metro-wide solution.  Yet Minneapolis has acted on its own via its 2040 comprehensive plan to address this problem.  It solution mostly includes elimination of single-family zoning, believing that intensification of land use along with market incentives will encourage the building of more housing.  Presumably this market-driven approach will mean more housing in more places, thereby fixing the economic and racial residential discrimination.
Both the New York Times and current Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson laud this market-driven fix.  Unfortunately, this approach will fail, exacerbating existing problems.
The Minneapolis approach to liberating the market to address its housing woes is neo-liberal zoning.  Neo-liberalism is the term used to describe a series of US domestic and international economic policies that begin with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (in the UK)  and continued through Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and into the present with Donald Trump.  Neo-liberals believe that a return to market fundamentalism–cutting government regulation and business taxes along with globalization in free trade–would rejuvenate domestic and world economies.  The reality, as many economists such as Thomas Piketty, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz have described and statistics show, is that neo-liberalism has produced the greatest gaps between the rich and poor in the US since before the Great Depression.  The rich have truly gotten richer, with the middle and lower classes gaining little.  Maybe we are overall richer as a nation as a result of neo-liberalism, but the externalities of these policies have produced powerful economic inequities that overlap with race.
The elimination of single-family zoning to encourage intensified land use across the  city rests on a similar logic that will yield parallel results.  In theory the breaking up of  large single family houses in South Minneapolis will produce more housing, but it is doubtful it will be low income or affordable.  Conversely, permitting the break up of existing homes in North Minneapolis into multi-family units or their demolishing and replacement with multiple units too will not guarantee affordable housing in integrated neighborhoods.  This is a recipe for gentrification as developers will enter areas, buy homes, and dislocate current residents by building  more high end units. 
The Minneapolis comp plan fix ignores the realities of how housing markets  work.  While there may be a local demand for affordable housing, housing is also a national market  sensitive to price, profit, and cost issues that often are not local.  Developers have few incentives to provide affordable housing, and Minneapolis’s neo-liberal zoning amounts to no more than government sanctioned market red lining.
Beyond the fact the neo-liberal zoning will not fix the segregation problems, elimination of single family zoning will produce additional problems.  One, there is an inherent value in preserving  a mixture of uses both from a historic preservation perspective, but also in terms of how a multiplicity of uses, ages, and styles of buildings and residential options appeals to the widest variety of individuals.  As Jane Jacobs, perhaps the greatest 20th century scholar on cities wrote in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, cities are generators of diversity, it is that which makes them interesting and centers of commerce.  Two, phasing out single family zoning does not eliminate a demand for these types of units and people seeking them, often middle class and those starting families, will flee to the suburbs. Three, for many, single family homes represent a sense of community, connectedness, and stability that are worth preserving.  Finally, given how interconnected  residential and education discrimination are, tackling one without addressing the other dooms solving both problems.
Minneapolis’s population is exploding and more housing is needed to address that demand.   This housing needs to address all income levels and needs, and be spatially distributed in a way that is economically and racially fair.  Unfortunately, Minneapolis’s neo-liberal zoning policies will do little to address these issues.

PS:  David Schultz is Hamline University Professor of Political Science.  He is a former city director of code enforcement, zoning, and planning and  a former housing and economic planner.  He also served on the St. Paul Housing Board of Appeals, appointed to it by then Mayor George Latimer.

Kellyanne Conway versus the Law: What is the Hatch Act and Why Do We Have It?

Note: I have written four books and at least seven articles that have discussed or examined the Hatch Acts.

Kellyanne Conway serves in her official capacity as White House counselor to President Donald Trump. She  has been accused by the Office of Special Counsel of violating the Hatch Act and should be dismissed from office.  Most people have not heard of the Hatch Act, yet the Act, actually several Acts, are important federal public administration laws.  They are part of a cluster of federal laws and Supreme Court decisions going back 150 years seeking to limit the ability of the president or his staff from using federal office or resources for partisan
At the end of the nineteenth century public administration scholars such as future president Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, and other reformers sought to clean up the federal government which had become corrupted by the patronage or spoils system.  The spoils system gave the president to politicize the federal bureaucracy and use it for partisan and political gain. The argument of the reformers was that the administration of government should be separate from politics.  Public administrations should be guided by the public interest, not partisan politics, and no one should be allowed to use their position for personal or party interest.
This move to separate politics from administration and prevent the president from politicizing the federal government began in 1876 when Congress passed a law that prohibited all members of the Executive branch who had received Senate confirmation from "requesting, giving to, or receiving from, any other officer or employee of the government, any money or property or other thing of value for political purposes."  In Ex Parte Curtis, 106 U.S. 371 (1882) the Supreme Court upheld the Act.
Second,  the 1883 passage of the Pendleton Act  initiated the creation of the federal service.  This Act and its extensions placed the employment of most federal employees under a merit system that limited the ability of the president to make hiring and firing decisions based on partisanship.
Third in United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 397 (1929) the Court upheld a 1925 Corrupt Practices Act that made it illegal for officers and employees of the United States to promote their candidacy or reelection in a party primary.  Justice Holmes, writing for the Court, ruled that Congress could provide measures that would limit the political pressure that employees might face to contribute money if they were to retain employment.   In both the Curtis and Wurzbach cases, the First Amendment rights of workers could be limited in order to encourage political neutrality and abate potential political corruption.
Fourth, starting in 1939, Congress passed a variety of acts that sought to place limits upon the ability of the Roosevelt administration to use the federal bureaucracy for political/partisan purposes. The Act, bared employees and officers of the executive branch from taking any active part in political management or in political campaigns.  It also barred them, while on government time or in their official capacity, from using their office for partisan purposes.  “Partisan purposes” includes among other things, making endorsements for candidates, working for them, using government resources, or in a way, shape or form using public office, position, or resources for partisan purposes.  The Hatch Acts make clear which government agencies and officials are covered by the law, and it also  makes it generally clear the type of permitted and prohibited political activity.
The primary purpose of the Hatch Acts was to depoliticize the federal government so that no president, subordinate, or political party could use the government for partisan benefit.  Twice the US Supreme Court was asked to adjudicate the constitutionality of the Hatch Acts, and the laws were upheld as not a violation of the First Amendment.
First in United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947) and then again in United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. 548 (1973)  the Court upheld against First Amendment challenges  the political activity bans in the Hatch Act.
In Mitchell the Court stated that "the interference with free expression is seen in better proportion as compared with the requirements of orderly management of administrative personnel” (94)   For the Court, several factors contribute to the need to limit the political activity of workers in order to promote good administrative management.  First, it notes how if political activity of federal workers hurts the civil service, its damage is no less than if the activity occurs after work hours (95-6).  Second, the Court indicated how free speech rights had to be balanced against the needs to protect a democratic society against the evils of political partisanship in the federal service (95-6).  The Court, in citing public administration scholarship as authority (97), argued that there was a need to limit political activity in order to promote "political neutrality for public servants as a sound element for efficiency” (97). Elsewhere, the Court also noted how an "actively partisan governmental personnel threatens good administration” (98), hurts political neutrality and that, overall, partisan political activity is a threat to efficiency, political neutrality, and discipline.
United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers was also a challenge to Section 9 of the Hatch Act and again the Court upheld the Act.  The Court stated that "federal service should depend upon meritorious performance rather than political service, and that the political influence of  federal employees on others and the electoral process should be limited” (548)  The basis of this claim rested in the majority's recounting the 19th century reforms directed against spoils and in their agreement that "partisan political activities by federal employees must be limited if the Government is to operate effectively and fairly” (547)  Political neutralization is thus required by the First Amendment.
The Hatch Acts decisions stated that the political neutrality of federal employees was dictated by the First Amendment.  Taxpayers had a right not to have public officials use public resources for  partisan purposes. However, the Hatch Acts need also to be read in conjunction with five Supreme Court decisions that also sought to depoliticize the federal bureaucracy, promote political neutrality, and respect the First Amendment rights of taxpayers and employees.
The patronage decisions (Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976); Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507 (1979); Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, 497 U.S. 62 (1990); Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668 (1996); and O'Hare Truck Service Inc. v. City of Northgate, 518 U.S. 712 (1996)) placed limits upon the government using political affiliation as a factor in hiring, firing, and promotion decisions.  In these decisions the Court engaged in extensive debate concerning the merits of patronage with arguments over the supposed contributions that spoils had to the maintenance of democracy, political parties, public accountability, and administrative control.  These debates made significant reference to political science and public administration scholarship on these topics.  These debates were framed within the rhetoric of the neutral competence.  In all five of these decisions the Court finds that the consideration of partisan affiliation or party activity in the hiring, firing, promotion, or letting of contracts was a violation of the First Amendment.  It did so by declaring the use of partisanship or party preference is not a compelling governmental interest in employment decisions. In all of these decisions, the Court also appeals to the ideology of neutrality and neutral competence.
If one reads the patronage, Hatch Act, Wurzbach, and Curtis cases together, they demonstrate  a commitment to taking the partisan politics out of public administration and service.  These laws have been instrumental and important tools in abating government corruption and promoting neutral government.  If, as the Office of Special Counsel has shown, Kellyanne Conway has made repeated  partisan statements in her official government capacity, she has clearly violated the Hatch Acts, as well as nearly 150 years of growing norms to prevent this type of abuse of government position or authority.  Should Trump not dismiss her it would be yet another example of how his administration has simply disregarded the law and norms governing America, seeking to limit presidential power.