Call it the Mod Con. And rhe song remains the same: from the Minneapolis Star Tribune .
Klobuchar pitches moderation in governor’s race, rebuffs redistricting push for Minnesota.
The Star Tribune reports,
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar declined Friday to embrace Gov. Tim Walz’s suggestion that Minnesota could try to redraw its congressional districts to create an advantage for Democrats if their party wins full control of state government in November.
It’s the latest sign that Klobuchar intends to chart a more moderate course than Walz if elected governor.
From memory, the above passage is word-for-word, verbatim, taken from the Washington Post coverage of Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s run last year for Virginia governor as a “moderate” Democrat, uninterested in the subject of redistricting. Once elected, Spanberger’s first act was to push a new congressional redistricting map, flipping a 6-5 D-R map to 10-1. Only a timely intervention of the state Supreme Court stopped the effort (for now).
If Minnesota voters fall for the moderate act and return Democrats to full power in Minnesota, look for Klobuchar to immediately back a 7-1 map to replace the dead-even 4-4 one currently in place.
Some of you will recall that Walz himself, back in the day, ran as a “moderate” Democrat, a meaningless modifier in the modern age.
But this whole exercise strikes me as quaint: it assumes a world where “elections” are decided by “issues” where competing candidates vie to win over skeptical independent and centrist “voters.” In the real world, only ballots are counted, never voters.
Elections in Minnesota are basically decided on the one hand by how bountiful this year’s per-acre yield is in the ballot harvest and how many illegal aliens, automatically registered to vote by the DMV, show up to the polling place.
On the other hand, Republican chances for victory hinge on turning out the low-propensity voters in their base in an election year where Trump is not on the ballot. It worked out better for Republicans in 2016-2020-2024, and less well in 2018-2022.
All of this appears to reinforce the maxim that you really can fool most of the people, most of the time. The Star Tribune is counting on it.
