Minnesota Public Radio rebuts Jennifer Carnahan:
Minnesota Republican Party Chair Jennifer Carnahan claimed Thursday night that the state’s 2020 election showed “extreme abnormalities and statistical variations from Minnesota’s historic voter trends.” But her examples are either off-base, vague or flat-out wrong.
Carnahan begins with a general claim: It’s “unusual” that President Donald Trump did worse in Minnesota in 2020 than 2016, despite putting much more effort into winning the state this year. This is relatively vague, so it’s hard to firmly prove or disprove.
Still, while it’s true Trump put a lot more effort into Minnesota than he did in 2016, it’s also true that Joe Biden put more effort here than Hillary Clinton did. Combine that with a national collapse in support for third-party candidates, and national polling indicating that Biden as a Democratic candidate was more popular than Clinton was, and the idea that Biden might do better isn’t absurd.
MPR goes on with some discussions of long term trends, but, really, Carnahan and MPR are ignoring one signal event.
The 2018 election.
And all you really need to know are the names of these Representatives: Omar, McCollum, and Craig. These three women comfortably won their races, and for Craig, it was an achievement greater than simply oustering back-bencher Republican Rep. Jason Lewis. Minnesota’s Second Congressional District had been held by Republicans all the way back to 2000, which is far back as Ballotpedia goes.
And it wasn’t that Lewis had any new scandals attaching to him. It was that the Second District voters had had enough of the risible incompetence of President Trump, and Lewis did nothing to disassociate himself from Trump. He was a Trump adherent, having ridden in on Trump’s coattails in 2016, following the retirement of Rep Kline (R-MN). Craig’s win in 2020 indicates the continuing disgust with Trump present in the Second District.
The Twin Cities is the key to state-wide races, and Minneapolis & St. Paul had, by and large, become appalled by President Trump’s decisions and behavior. It made it easy to reject him by a large margin, as MPR points out.
Carnahan’s remarks may signal her strength of commitment to the Trump cult, but that doesn’t mean much when the cult leader is a pathological narcissist, and it gets worse when the realities of 2018 are resolutely ignored by Carnahan.
The MN GOP should immediately and forcefully require her resignation for its own good. And if it can’t bring itself to do that, it should take that as a signal that it is a broken and possibly irremediable organization, doomed to flounder more and more as the years pass and voters realize that their magical thinking does no one any good.
