/* Written 7:48 AM Nov 6, 1998 by jdoug@ix.netcom.com in igc:labr.all */ /* ---------- "MN Gov. race" ---------- */ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:21:44 -0700 (MST) From: ANDERSON DAVID
An analysis of the Minnesota governor's race from Andy English, a union activist and member of the Labor Party (a small third party mostly from left-wing of the labor movement which has yet to become electoral).
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Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 20:07:17 -0800 (PST) From: Andrew English
A question was asked on the Labor Party list about the meaning of Tuesday's election of Reform Party candidate Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor of Minnesota. As a new resident of Minnesota, I'll try to fill people in on what is going on here.
Ventura won the race with 37% of the vote. The other two candidates were Republican Norm Coleman and Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate Hubert H. Humphrey III (son of the former vice-president). (The Democrats are called DFL here because in 1944 the Farmer-Labor Party, which had held the governorship during most of the 1930's, merged with the Democrats). Coleman got 34% of the vote and Humphrey got 28%. The upset was a surprise. Earlier polls of "likely voters" during the summer and fall had shown Humphrey in the lead with Ventura getting around 15 percent of the vote. In the last two weeks of the campaign, Ventura began moving up, and Humphrey started slipping.
Ventura benefited from several factors. First of all, he was already a well-known celebrity prior to announcing his candidacy and had high name recognition. He was famous as a professional wrestler (his birth name is James Janos, but he legally changed it to what he thought was a better stage name when he became a wrestler). He later appeared in action movies like "Predator". A few years ago he was elected mayor of a Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb. Then up until three months ago, he had a radio talk show. (He had to take a leave from the show when the campaign season got started).
Ventura has cultivated the image of being a regular working stiff (despite being a millionaire from his entertainment career). He was a Navy SEAL. He is a football coach. He still has a pro wrestler's physique and shaves his head. He has a gravelly voice and a lot of charisma. He ran as someone who was not a career politician, as someone who would say whatever he thought and let the chips fall wherever. He has a very "populist" style. Ventura's upset is seen here as a poke in the eye to the establishment -- that someone who is not born rich or into a political family, and who doesn't talk like a lawyer or career politician, can be elected governor. He bragged that he was the only candidate who was a card- carrying union member -- in the Screen Actors Guild.
Ventura political positions can be chacterized as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal". He calls himself a "centrist." He's pro-choice on abortion and support domestic partnership benefits for gay couples. He's also called for considering the legalization of drugs and prostitution. He attacks "big government", and calls for unspecified tax cuts to refund all the budget surplus to the taxpayers. (Since Tuesday's election, however, he's admitted the states $1 billion annual budget surplus has already been spent by the last legislature in the form of new programs and already enacted tax cuts, and says his "refund" statement applies only to future surpluses). His other big issue was reducing class sizes, which he claims can be done without providing any additional money to schools -- he says school districts of mis-spend state aid ( in Minnesota, the state redistributes a large amount of funds to compensate for imbalances in taxable property in different school districts) targeted for class size reduction on other things like teacher salaries. Other positions he's taken include opposing state subsidies for day care and increasing state aid to college students. He was very popular among college students and young people generally despite the latter position.
Minnesota provides public financing of candidates who get more than 5% of the vote. Because Ventura was getting much more than that in the polls, he was able to get a bank to loan him $300,000 so he could run TV ads in the last two weeks of the campaign. He hired the same guy who did Senator Paul Wellstone's ads in 1990, who known for doing humorous and effective political ads. People probably heard about the one showing two kids playing with the "Jesse Ventura action figure" who does battle with the "special interest" man.
He did another one in which he is wearing nothing but a pair of shorts sitting in the position of Rodan's "The Thinker" while the narrator talks about Jesse "The Mind" Ventura's positions, and then it ends with a close up of his face where he winks at the camera. He's now calling himself "The Mind" because he "making a living now with his mind rather than his body." Prior to running the TV ads, Ventura relied on some radio ads and free media stemming from his celebrity status as "The Body."
None of the other Reform party candidates drew more than 15 percent of the vote. The Green party candidate got just under 7,000 votes and the SWP candidate got about 2,000. Ventura got 770,000, Coleman got 715,000, and Humphrey got 586,000.
Also in Tuesday's election, the Minnesota House shifted from slightly DFL to slightly Republican majorities. The House here has been DFL for about 20 years, except for one 2 year period in the mid-80s. The Senate, which isn't up for re-election until 2000, is heavily DFL. So now we have a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and a Reform party governor.
Ventura's support was concentrated among young blue collar new voters, especially males. He won among all age groups under 60 (Humphrey won the over-60 group) and among all income groups under $100,000 year (Coleman won the rich). Ventura won 50% of the self-identified liberals, and 1/3 of the conservatives and moderates. He drew votes from both Republicans and Democrats and independent voters.
As I said, Humphey was leading up until the last few weeks of the campaign. The polls measured the likely voters which underestimated the new voters who turned out for Ventura. Minnesota laws allow people to register at the polls, and many people who had never voted did.
Ventura had no get-out-the-vote apparatus, but the major parties and the unions all mounted big GOTV drives, which probably turned out lots of people who voted for Ventura at the top of the ticket and who voted their party affiliation or union-endorsed candidates for the lower end of the ballot.
The conventional wisdom was that Ventura would draw votes away from Coleman -- Humphrey insisted that Ventura be included in all of the debates. But Ventura drew support from both major party candidates. Neither of the major party campaigns treated him as a serious threat, nor did any of the political pundits.
Humphrey was and is well-liked in this state (he has been attorney general for 16 years and recently beat the tobacco companies in a big lawsuit), and of course has a famous name. But no one was excited about him and he was a boring speaker. In the primaries, most of the unions supported another DFL candidate, but solidified behind Humphrey when he was nominated.
The feeling in the labor community was more anti-Coleman than pro-Humphrey. Coleman is mayor of St. Paul and has been a notorious basher of the city workers unions, trying to slash retiree health benefits. Coleman used to be a protege of Humphrey and worked in the attorney general's office. He was elected mayor as a DFLer, but then switched to Republican. He's always been anti-choice, and has increasingly courted the religious right, taking anti-gay positions. As mayor of St. Paul he's started pushing for privatization and also pushed through hundreds of millions of dollars in new city debt to build a new hockey stadium and subsidize other corporate welfare projects (although some of the building trades have supported Coleman because of the construction that resulted from his deals). He also opposed the city's living wage law. His main campaign message was to paint Humphrey as a "tax and spend" liberal. Coleman is now close to the "Center for the American Experiment" which is a local right-wing think tank similar to the Heritage Foundation. Because of his party switch, Coleman is widely seen as an opportunist. But he is good-looking, polished, and young and the Republicans grabbed on to him as their ticket to keep control of the governorship.
To sum up, Ventura's election stems from several factors:
1) a celebrity candidate capable of sustaining a working class populist image;
2) he struck a chord among young disgruntled blue-collar voters, but also appealed to a wide range of other voters;
3) the other candidates agreed to include him the debates, further legitimizing his candidacy; and
4) he was able to get financing based on the expectation that he would get at least 5 percent of the vote and be eligible for public campaign funds after the balloting, which allowed him to get on TV in the crucial final two weeks.
However, Ventura's "populism" is more style than substance. He is now saying that he will retain many agency heads from the outgoing Republican administration of Governor Arne Carlson. Its expected that his cabinet will be a mixture of Democrats and Republicans.
-Andy English Twin Cities, Minn. |