CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
– POLITICS
July 6, 2009 – 12:07 a.m.
Minnesota 3 Could See Another Brawl Around the Mall
By Matthew Weinstein, CQ Staff
Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District, which anchors the west side of the Twin Cities metropolis, is a model of Midwest suburbia, dotted with lakes, golf courses and shopping centers — including the vast Mall of America. It also is one of the nation’s most hotly contested partisan swing districts, a place where both parties will be focusing their attentions on the 2010 re-election bid by freshman Republican Erik Paulsen .
Paulsen, a longtime state representative before his election to the U.S. House, is a GOP centrist. He once was an aide to Jim Ramstad, the nine-term House Republican moderate whose retirement set up the open-seat race that Paulsen won in 2008.
But even as Paulsen defeated Democrat Ashwin Madia by an 8 percentage-point margin, the same voters favored Barack Obama by 6 points over Republican John McCain — making the 3rd District one of 34 in the nation that went Democratic for president but Republican for the U.S. House. District voters that same year gave an edge to Norm Coleman, the incumbent Republican senator, over Democratic challenger Al Franken in their hotly disputed statewide contest that was just decided in Franken’s favor on June 30 by a state Supreme Court ruling.
Paulsen, in an interview with CQ Politics, said residents in his unpredictable district “expect results” and “want someone who votes for what’s right, regardless of party.” He also described the district as having “a large and diverse employment base, which makes job growth, taxes and fiscal responsibility very important.”
Whether Paulsen is highly vulnerable as he prepares for the 2010 race on this competitive turf depends on the partisan prism through which you view the 2008 outcome.
To Republicans, Paulsen succeeded in deflecting the best shot ever for the Democrats, who had long claimed the 3rd District would be theirs for the taking whenever Ramstad stepped aside. He prevailed even though there was a strong current running against the Republican Party nationally, mainly a result of the unpopularity of President George W. Bush .
But Democrats point out that Paulsen fell short of a majority (48.5 percent of the vote, to be exact) in a race in which David Dillon of Minnesota’s Independence Party took 11 percent of the House vote. Paulsen’s vote share fell well short of numbers typically run up by Ramstad, who took 65 percent in each of his last two House races and often topped 70 percent in his earlier contests.
Members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, as the Minnesota affiliate has long been known, also note that they have taken over eight formerly Republican state House seats and two Senate seats in the area covered by the 3rd District over the past two election cycles.
And some Democrats attribute their disappointment in 2008 to their party’s decision to run first-time candidate Madia. An Iraq War veteran-turned-opponent, Madia was boosted to the nomination by the enthusiasm of the liberal activist wing of the party and ran a vigorous campaign, but could not overcome Paulsen’s greater name ID, campaign experience and ties to popular outgoing incumbent Ramstad.
The local Democrats opted for Madia over a candidate with more political experience, state Sen. Terri Bonoff, who is mentioned as a possible candidate for the 2010 race. Bonoff, known as an advocate for improved education standards, initially announced her candidacy for the 2008 race and received the endorsement of the influential Democratic group EMILY’s List, but ultimately yielded to Madia.
Neither Bonoff nor any other major Democratic figure has yet announced an intention to take on Paulsen in next year’s race.
Just Right or Too Far Right?
The degree to which Paulsen is viewed by voters as fitting the Ramstad mold will be a key factor in whether he faces a seriously threatening challenge in 2010.
The 3rd is one of the nation’s most affluent congressional districts, and its zeal for commerce is symbolized by the Mall of America, built on the former site of the Minnesota Twins’ baseball stadium in Bloomington, a suburb south of Minneapolis. The Mall has 4.2 million square feet of retail and office space, its own amusement park and employs more than 11,000 people.
So Paulsen in 2008 reached for the mantle of fiscal conservatism long worn in Congress by Ramstad. During his campaign, Paulsen ran on making permanent the tax cuts (PL 107-16, PL 108-27) that Bush pushed into law during his first term, and expressed support for the idea of an amendment to the Constitution requiring the federal budget to be balanced.
Paulsen maintained that posture in the early months of his freshman term. The GOP leadership validated Paulsen’s interest in economic issues by appointing him in January to the House Financial Services Committee, which is his only committee assignment. In June, he joined the Republican Study Sunset Caucus, a group that says its mission is to shrink the size of the federal government by repealing programs its members deem “wasteful.”
Paulsen also joined all other House Republicans in voting against the economic stimulus bill (PL 111-5) that was touted by the Democratic majority as necessary to combat the ravages of the nation’s deep recession and signed into law by Obama in February.
Paulsen describes the stimulus bill as “an example of what is wrong with Washington,” describing it as “a massive spending bill that has not created jobs and placed even more debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren.”
Joyce Peppin, a Republican who represents a state House District that overlaps with the 3rd District, said Paulsen’s vote was “fairly in line” with his constituents. She said that she hasn’t “heard too many people be pro-stimulus” in the district.
But Paulsen’s position is not without risk in a district that Obama carried just a few months earlier — something Democrats already are trying to drive home in the run-up to the 2010 campaign.
Marge Hoffa, the DFL’s 3rd District chairwoman, said that the stimulus vote was an example where Paulsen could have taken a stand to “step back from the bosses in his party who insist on saying ‘no’ to every proposal President Obama and House Democrats have put forth.” Hoffa went on to say that Paulsen should consider Obama’s success in the 3rd District during the 2008 presidential contest “to be a great argument for a bit more flexibility in his voting patterns in the House.”
Gabby Adler, the Midwest regional press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the DFL will choose a candidate who “fights for Minnesota priorities over partisan politics.” Adler predicted that a Democratic candidate “who is willing to work with his or her colleagues on both sides of aisle on common-sense solutions will be embraced as a sound alternative in 2010 to Erik Paulsen ’s unwavering commitment to the Republican obstructionist agenda.”
Democrats also are calling Paulsen out as more conservative on social issues than his GOP predecessor. Paulsen, unlike Ramstad, is not a supporter of abortion rights and has opposed efforts to expand stem cell research and gay rights.
Paulsen, unlike some of his House Republican colleagues, is not an outspoken advocate on these issues, but he has weathered some controversy. He voted against a House bill that would define assaults based on sexual orientation and gender identity as hate crimes, prompting some students at St. Olaf College — his alma mater — who opposed his position to stage a silent protest when he gave a commencement address in May.
Paulsen is preparing as though the 2010 race will be another pitched partisan battle. His report to Federal Election Commission for the year’s first quarter showed he received a hefty $225,000 in contributions and had $191,000 in cash on hand. A fresh set of numbers for fundraising activity through June 30, the end of the second quarter, is due to be filed by the July 15 deadline.
Paulsen already proved his fundraising muscle in the 2008 race, when he spent more than $2.7 million. But the Democrats’ targeting of the race helped first-timer Madia almost match Paulsen, spending just $33,000 less on his campaign.
So GOP officials are leaving little to chance. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ campaign unit, has made Paulsen one of 10 House freshmen enlisted in its “Patriot Program,” which aims to provide financial and logistical support for the party’s most vulnerable districts.
Comments
Random comments from the MN 3rd District Paulsen, since his election (and before), comes across as a fairly conventional Republican hack, and--all other things being equal--he'd be vulnerable in 2010. But if he's a bit too far right for the district as a whole, it's not by much. The sort of strong centrist candidate who could take on Paulsen with high confidence is not the type who gets nominated by either party. Bonoff, mentioned as a possible candidate, would not be that strong centrist opponent. There's good reason she didn't get the nod to run in 2008. She's a somewhat Palinesque figure, who hews to quack psychology as Palin does to the Bible. Her support for the unpopular stadium subsidy being rammed down the county's throat at that time says little for her integrity, and much about the source of her funding. And the behavior of her supporters won her no friends. Bonoff was elected to the state senate in 2005, defeating a Republican candidate who had proclaimed that she thought there might be something to creationism. LIberal or conservative, the district is too well educated to move in the direction of Kansas. Ramstad, the district's retired hero, is representative of the general moderate nature of the district. But this is not necessarily true of his individual causes, positions, and talking points. Instead of a coherent approach to issues, he had a patchwork of sometimes contradictory positions from either side of the conventional battle lines. A successful centrist might well differ from him on many of those issues--and a centrist successful in the 3rd District could well be a bit to the right of him on many. The Independence Party, which kept the major party candidates to a minority in the elections of both Paulsen and Franken, is another puzzle. Their platforms tend to resemble the Democrats', minus some of the more extreme urban vote-buying and flagrant corruption. The question is how much their platforms have to do with the number of votes they get. The IP (unlike the fringe third parties) is mainstream enough draw protest votes regardless of its positions. True believers who actually like that sort of platform would be apt to vote straight Democratic tickets. But there are plenty of true believers who are so dim about the issues that they don't see how close the platforms are, and think the IP is a real alternative. The question is how many. The real center is unexplored territory, in Minnesota as in the rest of the country. Whatever the political situation elsewhere, an IP candidate who targeted it (wishful thinking...) might win in a three-way election, the way Jesse Ventura did. But the real determinant for the 2010 election will be whether there's a backlash against Obama, and how bad it is if it happens. (And, as always, how badly the Republicans insult the intelligence of the electorate.) With Sotomayor on track for the Supreme Court, and mandatory purchase of health insurance from private insurers likely for the future, the Democrats are already on track for a stinging reminder that Obama's victory was not necessarily the party's, and that many in the electorate know better than to leave either party in control. This is particularly true of the 3rd District. It may be that the 3rd District will be forgotten in 2010, as the Democrats devote their resources to damage control rather than expanding in swing districts. In Minnesota there may well also be a backlash against Franken, who got 42.5% of the vote, barely defeating an equally despised opponent in a contest over who smelled worse. "But Democrats point out that Paulsen fell short of a majority (48.5 percent of the vote, to be exact) in a race in which David Dillon of Minnesota's Independence Party took 11 percent of the House vote." Funny how they never mention that about Franken. Will their election planners show the same tunnel vision as their propagandists? The 3rd District did, after all, find Coleman less odorous than Franken in 2008. Also, Ramstad may run for governor in 2010, and it would take a stronger centrist opponent than he his likely to face to defeat him. Paulsen would be the first to ride on his coattails. And pah-leeeze--the Mall of America is no symbol for the 3rd District. It's off in a corner of the district, in an area nothing like the rest.
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