The Minnesota Republican Party continued its 10-year statewide losing streak Tuesday, but party leaders are hesitant to accept any blame for the disastrous performance.
State Republicans lost up and down the ballot in both local and federal elections, losing races for the governorship, attorney general, secretary of state, state auditor, both U.S. Senate seats, and the Minnesota House. In fact, the only notable victories for Republicans Tuesday came in flipping Minnesota’s First Congressional District and Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District.
Apart from that, the party’s election-day performance verged on a “disgrace,” Powerline’s Scott Johnson recently wrote.
“The performance of Republicans statewide last night was pathetic. They were outspent and outgunned,” he added. “Soul-searching is always in order, but in this case it is mandatory.”
As Johnson notes, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party vastly outraised the state GOP by staggering margins. According to the state Campaign Finance Board, the DFL raised $13 million, but the state GOP raised $728,500 and is still in debt.
Campaign contributions to individual Democratic candidates reached $22.4 million, while Republican candidates received $17.6 million—just 43 percent of all donations.
The Minnesota GOP also failed to capitalize on early voting. According to early returns, the majority of absentee ballots had been cast in Hennepin County, Ramsey County, and Dakota County, which comprise the state’s metro area and are consistently Democratic strongholds.
The Republican Party hasn’t won a statewide election in Minnesota since Tim Pawlenty’s reelection campaign in 2006. Many thought a candidate like Karin Housley, who was running against a relatively unknown Democrat, could put an end to the streak, but she still ended up losing by 10 points.
Republican leaders, however, have said very little thus far about what went wrong with the Minnesota GOP, but instead seem to be casting blame elsewhere.
“We always see a pendulum swing and a loss of seats on a national level and unfortunately we incurred some of that here in Minnesota,” GOP Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan said during a recent interview. “So I think what we saw was not out of the norm. It was certainly disheartening and disappointing because we were hoping for different results this election cycle.”
Current House Speaker Kurt Daudt told reporters after the election that he doesn’t “think voters were sending us a message.”
.@kdaudt on #mnleg losses: “I don’t think voters were sending us a message, personally … We don’t think it was our message or our record that lost this election.”
— Kyle Potter (@kpottermn) November 9, 2018
“We don’t think it was our message or our record that lost this election,” he added.
Carnahan, meanwhile, will be up for reelection to her position in 2019, and is already starting to make her case.
“We didn’t have that big red sweep that we wanted. But it could have been a lot worse for Republicans. There’s no point in tearing the house down just because things didn’t turn out exactly as we planned,” she said recently, according to MinnPost. “I think it does a disservice to our party when we continue to have changes in leadership because when you have significant shifts at the top, it’s hard to continue to building out a long-term strategy and executing on that strategy.”
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kurt Daudt” by KurtDaudt.com.
