Is Minnesota House up for grabs in ’24 election or will DFL hold it?

“These 5 states are the most likely to see legislative chambers flip in November,” says Politico, with the Minnesota House included along with one or both chambers in Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. 

Related | MinnPost’s 2024 Minnesota House Races to Watch

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, based at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, includes the Minnesota House among seven chambers it calls “toss-ups.” And Pluribus News has Minnesota among just a handful of battleground legislative states.

National attention shouldn’t surprise DFLers, who have successfully navigated a narrow four-seat majority for two years, a majority many thought was out of reach leading up to the 2022 election. The dreaded first midterm is when the party of newly elected presidents historically gets hammered. In addition to that history, crime and inflation were the top-line issues — both favoring Republicans.

It didn’t happen as DFLers feared and Republicans hoped. The impact of the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court the previous spring that ended a federally guaranteed right to abortion swept through the suburbs and decided a handful of close races in the DFL’s favor. It also likely helped the party reverse a one-vote minority in the state Senate, leading to the partisan trifecta heard ‘round the world — or at least around the country.

“We were expecting to have a very rough night,” Hortman said of Democratic legislative leaders across the U.S. “We were prepared for a very depressing evening where a bunch of lovely people would lose because it was a Biden midterm. But Dobbs changed that.”

Abortion will be an issue again this fall, with Democrats tying Trump to the Supreme Court ruling, because his court appointments tipped the balance. 

As much as Republicans lamented that partisan control came from just a few hundred votes in a few districts, and that DFLers should have given Republicans more of a voice, a majority is a majority. DFL leaders — Hortman and then-Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic — kept their caucuses together to pass a sweeping agenda alternatively called transformative and “bonkers.”

That agenda is more popular in some parts of the state than in others, and in those places where it isn’t, it provides campaign mailer material for GOP challengers of some of the House members who voted yes.

“What has been resonating is that we want to bring balance back to St. Paul,” said House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth, a Republican from Cold Spring. “One-party Democrat control has been quite damaging to our state.” Demuth cited the spending of the state surplus, raising spending by 40 percent, new mandates on public schools and businesses.

“I still have people that will say, ‘What happened to that surplus? Why didn’t I get my money back?’” she said. Two recent audits by the Office of the Legislative Auditor on irregularities in the pandemic-era “hero checks” program and the failure to block the $250 million Feeding Our Future child nutrition fraud are also resonating with voters, Demuth said.

The DFL is happy to run on its record, though, because 1) most caucus members are happy with the results and 2) there’s not much of an alternative. The same issue that Republicans cite as an example of DFL overreach and increased costs for employers and employees — the paid family and medical leave insurance program — Hortman calls the thing she is most proud of.

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Divided government, Hortman said, led to gridlock and prevented progress for a decade in Minnesota. And she said the tenor of GOP lawmakers has changed over that time, from what she termed chamber-of-commerce Republicans to Tea Party Republicans and now Trump Republicans.

“They don’t believe that they are here to govern. They believe they are here to obstruct,” Hortman said. “In contrast, what you have are Democrats who came in and we produced.” She mentioned school funding, worker protections and child tax credits for lower income families.

“We really improved the state of Minnesota,” she said.

Skimpy list of swing districts

Looking at the map of Races to Watch in 2024 shows just how skimpy the number of swing districts is.

“I think it is way more predictable than it was 10 years ago, 12 years ago and certainly a generation ago,” said Todd Rapp, a public affairs consultant and political analyst who is president and CEO of Rapp Strategies. “We’ve just become so homogenous from a geographic perspective in how we vote.

“We have fewer districts that are in play because Democrats aren’t winning any farm districts and Republicans aren’t winning any developed suburban districts,” he said. “We used to put 30 to 35 races on the list and narrow it to 15 to 18 by October. Now, the 15 or 18 are very predictable.” 

So most House seats are safe for the party that holds them. Of the 134 House seats on ballots in November, no more than two dozen are in play this election. Of those that are, 14 are where most of the attention and most of the money likely will be paid. And two of those are not likely to be held by the party that won them two years ago — 7B on the Iron Range and 3B near Duluth. While 7B is currently held by former Aurora Mayor Dave Lislegard, it is the only DFL-held seat in Minnesota in a district won by Donald Trump in 2020. Republican Natalie Zeleznikar beat DFL incumbent Mary Murphy in 3B by 33 votes, while the district’s voters were giving sizable majorities to Biden and all four statewide elected officials.

They’re on the MinnPost list of races to watch, not because they are true battlegrounds but because they are likely flips.

The rest of the 14 races to watch are mostly in the Twin Cities suburbs, with one each in Winona and Mankato and two around St. Cloud. The lack of true toss-ups and their locations reflect the great partisan transition in Minnesota. Iron Range districts that were solid DFL became toss-ups and are now solid GOP. The mirror-image phenomenon is happening in the suburbs. 

Hortman describes that transition using her own district, now labeled 34B and centered on Brooklyn Park. 

“As the state has become more suburban and more diverse, the state has become more Democratic,” Hortman said. The state’s demography tracks very much the demography of Hortman’s district from 1998 to 2024 — it used to be a very white, very Republican district and now it is a very diverse, very Democratic district.

Rapp speaks of “pulsating lines” between DFL, swing and GOP areas of the state. That is, the demarcation moves back and forth on a yearly basis as it trends in a single direction over time.

“Wherever you draw the line, that’s where you see Democrats protecting districts and Republicans protecting districts and where the battles are,” Rapp said. DFLers are looking at the two open GOP seats in Washington County and maybe White Bear Lake and maybe Lakeville, he said. Republicans hope that line moves a few miles to make them more competitive around Coon Rapids, Blaine, Chanhassen and Shakopee.

It is most striking in the Twin Cities suburbs but similar lines surround other population centers in the state — Winona, Rochester, Mankato, Moorhead, St. Cloud and Duluth. It isn’t coincidental that those are also where significant colleges are.

Rapp cited three other factors that could determine which party wins House battleground seats — two relate to the top of the ballot and the other is the organizational advantage that the DFL has. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has run well in her previous re-elections, often against little-known and underfunded Republicans. There is evidence that she helps DFL candidates beneath her — with the DFL winning the Legislature each time she’s been leading the party ticket.

Rapp also thinks the strength or weakness of Donald Trump will be a barometer. If Trump is within three percentage points or less of President Biden, districts thought out-of-reach for the GOP come into play, he said. If Biden runs ahead by somewhere in the five to seven percentage-point range, those races are likely safe for the DFL.

Finally, the financial and organizational strength of the state DFL party could add two or three points to Democratic candidates. The DFL and its affiliates outraise Republicans significantly, and that buys TV and radio, staff and a house-to-house ground game. 

“There is a factor there of the investment that they’ve made, and they can keep going back to great data and really good outreach,” he said of the state DFL organization. “But if people don’t start falling in love with Biden again, that organization might not matter much.”

Party caucuses look at their election lineups in two parts — defense and offense. The DFL has a list of potentially vulnerable incumbents as well as open seats won by the DFL last election. Most of those same seats are on the GOP list of possible pickups.

The converse is true. The list of vulnerable seats the GOP needs to defend are targets of the DFL campaign. Many are districts that elected Republicans despite going for Biden in 2020. Because the DFL has held the majority for six years, it has more incumbents to defend, explaining why there are nine DFLers on the Races to Watch list and only five Republicans.

A four-vote majority is narrow, but having larger cushions has not guaranteed success in the past. DFLers entered the 2014 election with a 12-vote majority and lost it; Republicans entered the 2018 election with a 20-vote edge and lost it. Still, should the GOP gain three seats, the House is tied (something that last happened following the 1978 election); gain four seats and Demuth is likely the next speaker of the House, the first Republican woman to hold that post.

What about the Senate?

State Sen. Kelly Morrison, a DFLer from Deephaven, has already resigned her seat and is the DFL favorite for the open congressional seat being vacated by Dean Phillips. Whichever party wins the special election for Morrison’s District 45 seat controls the Senate next year.

Morrison timed her resignation to assure that the elections to replace her coincide with the state primary and general election. So while it is likely to attract a lot of money — especially from independent expenditure campaigns — the political fundamentals of the district favor the DFL. Morrison won it with 56.3 percent of the vote in 2022, the same year Tim Walz carried that Lake Minnetonka-area district by 16 percentage points over Scott Jensen, the same advantage that Biden had over Trump. Even Auditor Julie Blaha, the statewide DFL candidate with the closest margin of victory in 2022, carried the 45th by 5.2 percentage points.

Said Rapp: “It’s gonna get a lot of money. It might be the first (state Senate race) to hit $3 million because it is winner-take-all, and in that environment, anything could happen.”

Former state Sen. Ann Johnson Stewart is the likely DFL nominee in a three-person primary. Kathleen Fowke, who won 43.7% of the vote against Morrison last election, is the sole GOP candidate.

Each party caucus also has a “reach” list — districts not likely in play but could be if partisan waves become possible (or they have money to invest in long shots). For the GOP, those could include seats now held by Rep. Kristi Pursell of Northfield (58A), Rep. Jessica Hanson of Burnsville (55A), Rep. Nathan Cha of Woodbury (47B), Rep. Brion Curran of Vadnais Heights (36B) and Rep. Kristin Bahner of Maple Grove (37B).

For the DFL, the reach districts are now held by Rep. Jeff Dotseth of Kettle River (11A), Rep. Danny Nadeau of Rogers (34A), Rep. Jeff Witte of Lakeville (57B) and Rep. Roger Skraba of Ely (3A).

Editor’s note: Peter Callaghan wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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