Minnesota Under the National Spotlight

This election season was a big win for the Democrats. But I don't expect to see a sweeping move of progressives into positions of power in government. Instead, all the signs suggest both sides will swing towards the center in preparation for the 2008 presidential election.
Minnesota has attracted attention as one of the new swing states, a purple state since the Reagan revolution took hold. Both parties looked closely at Minnesota for it's national convention. But the Republicans committed first. Minnesota's Governor Pawlenty is one of the few Republicans to survive in states where Democrats surged. Pawlenty is considered a front runner for a Vice Presidential offer from presumed Republican candidate McCain.
Now, political pundits are watching the internal workings of a state legislature, having swung control to the Democrats, politics in general have been pushed to the center. The New York Times is beginning a series analysing Minnesota politics from time to time, expecting to learn something about national trends as we head towards 2008. This could be a very interesting two years in Minnesota.

Money, policy and tactical choices are all in play: how best to spend a $2 billion surplus and address what both parties see as a mandate for improving public education, health care and transportation and for making taxes more fair.


[...]But if Minnesota’s capital, with all of its local quirks and traditions, shows where the election’s wave may lead, it also confounds much of what may be expected.


The Democrats won big here — taking the House for the first time since 1998, expanding their majority in the Senate, winning the secretary of state’s and attorney general’s offices and nearly defeating Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican.


But they emerged divided, too, owing much of their surge to newly elected moderates from the suburbs who are unlikely to embrace a pure liberal agenda. The Republicans lost big, but were pushed toward the center as well, led by Mr. Pawlenty, who has said since the election that many of his second-term priorities will overlap with those of the Democrats he fiercely battled in his first four years.


And those pincer forces, both pushing toward the political center, will set the stage for everything to come when the Legislature convenes in January, elected officials and political experts here say. In the first Pawlenty term, a $4.5 billion budget shortfall was resolved through deep cuts in spending for health care, education and other programs, capped by a bitter shutdown of the government in 2005 when Mr. Pawlenty and the Legislature could not agree.


The fight of 2007 will revolve around restoring some of the cut programs, and how far to go beyond that in pushing what both parties say is pent-up demand for property tax relief and for spending increases on education, health care and transportation.


One of the first tests could be a Democratic Party plan to extend health care benefits to 70,000 low-income children not covered by the MinnesotaCare program. That alone would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. MORE