The race for the Senate is real in Minnesota.
Former Rep. Jason Lewis, who lost his suburban House seat in the Democratic wave election cycle of 2018, has returned, this time for a Senate seat in Minnesota, challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Tina Smith.
“When I started thinking about 2020, I knew 2018 was an outlier,” Lewis told the Washington Examiner. “Those blue-collar Democrats, the working men and women who built this state and this country that helped almost give President Trump a victory here in 2016, did not vote with the same enthusiasm that they did in 2016.”
Lewis explained his reasoning for running for the Senate seat. “I decided that those forgotten voters needed to hear what a conservative in the Senate would mean for them, that they had someone in Washington that has their family’s and community’s backs, someone who understood their issues firsthand and would go to bat for them for those issues.”
The race in Minnesota is the sleeper Senate race of a campaign season full of drama-filled, nationally scrutinized contests. RealClearPolitics said the race leans Democrat, with four September polls giving the incumbent Smith an average 8.7 percentage-point lead. In August, however, a poll from well-respected Emerson Polling showed Smith leading Lewis by just 3 percentage points, with 7% saying they are undecided. But the race is more complicated than polling suggests.
Smith, then the lieutenant governor, was first appointed to the Senate in 2018 by Gov. Mark Dayton. The appointment was to fill the Senate seat vacated by Sen. Al Franken, who resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. She served less than a year before facing and defeating her Republican opponent Karin Housley by 10.6 percentage points in a 2018 special election.
Pundits endlessly discuss the narrow upset wins Trump scored throughout the Great Lakes states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and his vulnerabilities because of those thin margins. But at the same time, the narrative should go both ways since Trump only narrowly lost in Minnesota. In 2016, Trump came within 45,000 votes of upsetting Hillary Clinton in this Democratic stronghold. The same could be argued about New Hampshire, where he lost by less than 3,000 votes.
Smith, a former state Planned Parenthood executive, still struggles with a broad political presence. Everyone in Minnesota knew who Franken was, everyone knows who Amy Klobuchar is, and Lewis is also a known commodity for the syndicated radio show he had in the state before he ran for the House in 2014.
Like Wisconsin, Minnesota is a state that has been incrementally trending red for several cycles in the rural, suburban, and exurban areas. The anchor that keeps it in the Democratic column has been the deepening blue islands of the Twin Cities, which are larger and more populated.
For Lewis and Trump to flip the state may not be as Herculean a task as it seems, even though the last time the state sent its electoral votes in for a Republican presidential candidate was 1972. Outside of the cities, both Trump and Lewis are looking for oversized rural turnout, as well as just enough suburban votes, to overcome Democrats’ strength in the Twin Cities.
The voters are complicated as well. One cannot assume where any of their votes are going because of the emotional complexities of this race. It’s not just about jobs, social justice movements, or the coronavirus. It is also about localism, schools, security, government overreach, government incompetency, and which candidate shares their values.
A Republican victory here is not that different than what Republicans are attempting to do in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. In 2016, suburbs in those states went for Trump, but in 2018, those suburbs went for Democrats. It seemed likely in 2020 that suburban voters would stay with Democrats, but the world has changed several times over this year.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, protests were widely supported. Popular culture institutions in sports, business, and entertainment quickly joined in, and it appeared as though Democrats would benefit in the shift toward social justice becoming front and center for voters in this election cycle. In June, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 64% supported the recent protests against police violence, including 86% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and 36% of Republicans.
In the past three months, as the riots, looting, fires, harassment, and destruction have continued, support for the protests has cratered in polling in states across the country and nationwide.
It’s unclear whether Minnesota’s move to the right in recent elections is sustainable or how much the coalitions of both parties have changed in the last four years or how riots destabilizing city life will make a difference.
Lewis said he is spending time talking to voters in rural and suburban areas to maximize turnout.
Two weeks ago, Lewis announced after a business roundtable that he had earned the support of the Iron Range region’s Democratic Party mayors: Mayors Larry Cuffe of Virginia, Robert Vlaisavljevich of Eveleth, and Andrea Zupancich of Babbitt. The group also announced it was endorsing Trump at a “Workers for Trump” rally held by Vice President Mike Pence in Duluth, Minnesota.
“Historically speaking,” Lewis explained, “the Iron Range of Minnesota, the Duluth complex, where they discovered iron ore, which basically provided 85% of our steel industry and won World War II by building tanks and armaments, that’s obviously traditionally been trade union country — steelworkers, other unions. Democrats, instead of being pro-range, pro-energy logging and mining, have decided to go this sort of trust-fund, wealthy, special-interests direction here that expects Democrats to still vote for them while they take away their jobs.”
“You have Elizabeth Warren come here to Minnesota and say, ‘No mining in Minnesota,’ and these voters are like, ‘Are you kidding me? No mining in Minnesota?’ That is the Iron Range. There’s a reason they call it the Iron Range. Now, we’ve got the largest reserves of copper and nickel up there, and they’re saying, ‘Nope, can’t get at them.’ And then [Rep.] Betty McCollum, the uber-liberal St. Paul representative, drops a bill that would effectively ban mining on the range. Does Tina Smith, my opponent, pledge to block it? Nope, nary a peep,” Lewis explained.
“That is the reason these traditionally Democrat constituents are saying, ‘You’re leaving me. You’re telling me that my way of life on the range is a bad thing. It put my kids through school.’ Well, those voters are coming to us in droves,” he said.
Lewis admitted that he still needs to earn the suburban vote, at least part of it, something he did do in 2016 and did not do in the 2018 Democratic wave. “So, I did win them previous to that cycle, so I’ve got a little bit of an opening in the suburbs. You add to that the fact of the riots, the fact that the hard Left, the antifa Left, which is trying to make the argument that one injustice ought to be compounded by another injustice, riots and going after cops … has clearly put the suburbs even in more play,” he said.
His wife, Leigh, is a former St. Paul police officer.
“We’re very, very optimistic as we go around the suburbs,” Lewis said. “And that’s where I live as well; that will put us over the finish line, and the polls are showing that.”
