The Minnesota Two-Step

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Let's start with some stuff that is important to understand, although not enough people do:

U.S. senators are elected to six–year terms, and the terms are arranged so that one–third of the Senate is on the ballot in any given election. In 2018 the electoral map has few Republicans facing the voters as the senators who are up for re–election won their current terms in 2012, the year Barack Obama was re–elected. That was a pretty good year for Democrats.

If those senators were re–elected in 2012, their previous election would have been in 2006, which was a big year for Democrats. That was the year they seized control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a decade.

The Democrat senators who are on the ballot in 2018 had favorable winds at their backs the last two times their seats were on the ballot. Their party gained two Senate seats and eight House seats in 2012 — five Senate seats and 34 House seats in 2006.

The political terrain wasn't as favorable for Republicans in those years as it was in others, and fewer were successful. As a result, fewer Republicans hold the Class 1 seats that will be on the 2018 ballot.

Senate terms are also staggered so that no state must elect both its senators in the same election year — unless there is a midterm vacancy that needs to be filled.

Sen. Al Franken's stated intention to resign in January puts Minnesota in that comparatively rare category in 2018.

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's senior senator, is seeking a third six–year term in her Class 1 seat. Franken's seat is a Class 2 seat that would be slated to face the voters again in 2020, but because he is leaving the Senate, his appointed successor will be on the ballot in the next election. The voters will decide who will represent them until 2020 — at which time the winner of the 2018 race will have to decide whether to seek a full term.

Such two–fer Senate elections are rare — some states have never had one — but this will be the second time for Minnesota. The first time was 40 years ago — in 1978. Then, as now, both seats were held by Democrats.

Does that 40–year–old election have any relevance to 2018?

One of the seats had belonged to Sen. Walter Mondale, who was elected vice president in 1976. Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson resigned so his lieutenant governor could become governor and appoint Anderson to fill the Senate vacancy for the last two years of the term.

The other seat had belonged to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was elected to the Senate after leaving the vice presidency and then re–elected in 1976; then he died of cancer in January 1978. His widow was appointed to the seat until an election could be held later that year. The winner would hold the seat until 1982. Muriel Humphrey chose not to run, and Minnesota Democrats selected a rich trucking firm owner to be their standard bearer.

Minnesota has a reputation as a deep blue state in 2017, and it was quite blue in the '70s, too, although it did vote for Richard Nixon in 1972 and had voted for other Republicans for president in the first half of the 20th century; still it hadn't elected a Republican to the Senate since 1952.

Republicans used that to their advantage. They made the point that Minnesota's leading statewide offices were held by people who had not been elected to them — and the seats would all be on the ballot in 1978. That was the voters' big chance, the Republicans said, gleefully asserting that Minnesota's Democrats would face "something scary" in 1978 — "an election."

That wasn't entirely fair. Democrats had been elected to all those offices the last time they were on the ballot, and Democrats were appointed to fill the vacancies. It wasn't as if someone was circumventing the political will of the voters.

(The party affiliation may have been the same, but the philosophy wasn't always. That trucking firm owner who was nominated when Mrs. Humphrey decided not to run was more conservative than most Democrats were then or are now.)

In 1976 Minnesota gave the Carter–Mondale ticket nearly 55% of the vote. The voters knew that, if the ticket won the election, someone would replace Mondale in the Senate. They voted for the Democratic ticket, anyway. When Humphrey was re–elected that same year, it was no secret that he was sick; nearly three–fourths of Minnesotans voted for him, anyway.

What hurt the Democrats in 1978, though, was Anderson's blatant move to gain Mondale's seat. I suppose it hinted of entitlement to many, and the voters clearly didn't like that. Only 42% of them supported Anderson in November.

Muriel Humphrey, by her own admission, was no politician. She was a politician's wife, and she played that role graciously for decades, then dutifully kept the seat warm until the election. Would the magic of the Humphrey name have carried the day and kept the Senate seat in the Democrats' hands if she had not decided to step down?

We'll never know, but that businessman who won the party's nomination when Mrs. Humphrey declined to run only got 36% of the vote in November.

When the Senate convened in January 1979 Minnesota was represented by two Republican senators for the first time since the Truman administration.

Republicans completed the sweep by winning the governor's office as well, and the 1978 election came to be known as the "Minnesota Massacre."

Now, to an extent, voters throw tantrums in these special elections and vote contrary to their usual patterns. Like a fever, though, it passes, and voters return to their roots by the time the next election is held. We saw this in the early part of this decade when Massachusetts elected a Republican to serve the remainder of Ted Kennedy's term, then chose a Democrat when the seat was on the ballot for a full six–year term.

I suspect we will see that same phenomenon — albeit in reverse — in Alabama in 2020, when Democrat Doug Jones must decide whether to seek a full six–year term.

The dynamics were different in Minnesota 40 years ago, though. The Republican who was elected to complete Humphrey's term, David Durenberger, went on to win two full terms and then retired after 16 years in the Senate. Rudy Boschwitz, the Republican who defeated Anderson, was re–elected once.

If Minnesota threw a tantrum in 1978, it had staying power. It remains to be seen whether the voters of Minnesota will throw a similar tantrum in 2018.

Political tantrums require catalysts, and those catalysts vary from state to state. The circumstances that led to Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's seat in 2010 were different from the ones that propelled Doug Jones to victory in the race for Jeff Sessions' seat or led to the Minnesota Massacre.

At present there appear to be no storms on the horizon for Minnesota Democrats, but as I observed more than a year ago, in spite of voting Democratic in 10 consecutive presidential elections, deep–blue Minnesota wavered a few times and was a candidate for flipping to the other party in 2016.

It didn't, but it came close. A week after I posted that, Minnesota voted Democrat for the 11th straight time — but Hillary Clinton's share of Minnesota's vote was the smallest for a Democrat since her husband in 1992.

And Bill Clinton could point to the presence on the ballot of a credible third–party candidate who took nearly a quarter of Minnesota's vote.

Who knows which issues may emerge in 2018 to help or hurt Tina Smith, Franken's appointed successor? Smith, who was once regarded as a gubernatorial prospect, will become a senator as an indirect result of the emergence of sexual harassment as a political issue and a direct result of credible accusations that were leveled at her predecessor.

But what if not–so–credible accusations are made that cast a shadow over the issue? That could lead to voter backlash.

Are there any Tawana Brawleys lurking out there in Minnesota?

A Noteworthy Day in American History

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Today is the anniversary of two noteworthy events in American history.

They are noteworthy for different reasons — and, on the surface, appear to have little, if anything, in common. But bear with me.

Now, something has happened on every day in the calendar — even if it was nothing more than people were born on that day and people died on that day. For a long time I believed that nothing of note ever happened on the day of my birth — other than the fact that a few famous people were born on that day and a few died — but I later learned that there were some historic — albeit minor — events on my birthday.

There are 365 days in a year (366 in Leap Years); in a few thousand years of recorded history it stands to reason that something, however great or small, must have happened on each at some time.

Dec. 19 is the anniversary of two significant events in American history, separated by nearly two centuries, but they both speak to the purpose of America.

The first event was on this day in 1777. Gen. George Washington and his men began to set up their winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pa.

Even if you never learned the specifics when you were in school, you almost surely learned of the Continental Army's struggle to survive that winter. They had been engaged in a battle with the British in early December, and Washington sought some place where his men could spend the winter.

There were several considerations — Washington needed a location that would support wartime objectives. Valley Forge was far from ideal, but it was easy to defend and had plenty of timber that could be used to build huts.

Everything was in short supply — food, clothing, shelter.

As for shelter ...

It was on this day 240 years ago that construction of the first hut at Valley Forge began. It was completed in three days. By February, 2,000 huts had been built.

Having shelter against the elements helped, but it did nothing for the food and clothing shortages. Contrary to popular belief, Valley Forge had comparatively little snow that winter, but the conditions were still frigid, the men were ill–clothed and underfed.

Why did they endure such hardship? Because they believed in the concept of freedom.

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Fast forward 195 years.

On this day in 1972, Apollo 17 returned to Earth. It was a little more than three years since Apollo 11's historic voyage to the moon.

Consequently most Americans probably expected to see men walking on the surface of some other object in the heavens — even though Apollo 18 had been canceled more than two years earlier and no further space landings of any kind were on NASA's schedule. No such missions have been launched in 45 years, and no such missions are planned although the notion has been given plenty of lip service.

Most people probably didn't recognize it at the time, but America was in a truly transitional period. The idea of American exceptionalism had been taking a beating due to the Vietnam War and Watergate. There was a crisis in American confidence that continues to this day.

After Richard Nixon cruised to re–election as president in 1972, things began to change in American politics. In the next two decades, three incumbent presidents would be rejected at the polls by the voters (for comparison purposes, three incumbent presidents were rejected by the voters in the previous 80 years), and the only destinations for American space travelers were space stations.

If they could visit America today, the veterans of Valley Forge might wonder what has become of the country for which they sacrificed so much. What has happened to the courage that sustained them through Valley Forge and the seemingly impossible revolution against British rule? What has become of that "what's next" spirit of exploration that led Americans from the eastern shores of the continent to the western shores — and from there into space?

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While it is true that President Donald Trump recently signed Space Policy Directive 1, which provides for a return to the moon — and beyond — Ethan Siegel writes for Forbes that ain't happening.

"With no plans for adequate, additional funding to support these ambitions," Siegel writes, "these dreams will simply evaporate, as they have so many times before."

Perhaps Siegel is right. Perhaps the objective needs to be more targeted. The scattershooting approach of returning to the moon then jumping to the next goal (Mars) and beyond may not be the way to go, as Siegel suggests.

"If we want to go to Mars, we should make that our goal and invest in it," he writes. "If we want to go to the Moon, we should make that our goal and invest in it. Pretending that one has anything to do with the other is a delusion."

Maybe so. But it also seems to me that the spirit of Valley Forge has taken a beating since the days of Apollo 17.

What Does It Mean?

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Barring a reversal by recount, it appears that Democrat Doug Jones has defeated Republican Roy Moore in Alabama's special election to fill the Senate vacancy left by Jeff Sessions' appointment as attorney general.

Jones did not win a full six–year term. He was only elected to finish the unexpired portion of Sessions' term. If he chooses to seek a full term, he will have to do so in 2020.

In that regard, he is much like Republican Scott Brown, who won a special election in Massachusetts in 2010 to complete the term of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Kennedy died in office in August 2009, and Brown was elected to serve the last two years of his term.

The dynamics of the elections differ, but the overriding similarity is the fact that both states elected nominees from the parties that had not been successful in those states for a long time. It was especially shocking in Massachusetts, I suppose, since that Senate seat had been held by Kennedys for more than half a century — and Massachusetts had given nearly 62% of its vote to Barack Obama in 2008 — but it is no less shocking in Alabama, where Donald Trump received 62% of the vote in 2016.

Pundits are looking for clues to the political future, just as they did in 2010. I am inclined to reach the same conclusions now as I did then.

In 2010 I wrote the following: "I see no way that yesterday's election will not be a factor in all the other races that will be held this year." I feel that way today — but I have no more of an idea of the extent than I did then.

The circumstances could hardly be more different. A cloud of controversy hung over Moore in the last month of the campaign; the extent to which that contributed to his defeat remains to be determined, but its influence cannot be denied. There was no such cloud hanging over Martha Coakley when she lost to Brown in 2010; apparently she simply took victory for granted. She tried unsuccessfully to correct her shortcomings a few years later when she sought the governor's office and lost to the Republican nominee. Was Coakley the problem? Or was the party the problem?

The same question could be asked about Moore and the special election in Alabama.

As a harbinger of things to come, the Massachusetts election may have given Democrats — who had been anticipating seizing full control of the government after Obama became the first black man to be elected president and they achieved filibuster–proof status in the Senate with the election of Al Franken in Minnesota and Arlen Specter's party switch in Pennsylvania — a glimpse into a grim future.

The Democrats didn't lose control of the Senate in 2010, but they came close. Going into the election, the party held 58 seats (which, when combined with two independents who caucused with them, provided them with their filibuster–proof status) and emerged from it with 51 seats — still a majority but greatly diminished — and fully vulnerable to a Republican filibuster.

The 2010 midterms are not remembered in history for the outcome in the Senate races, though. What is remembered is the fact that Republicans turned a 79–seat deficit in the House into a 49–seat advantage. They have held the majority in the House ever since.

As a harbinger of things that may be yet to come, the Alabama election may have done the same thing for Republicans. The question is whether the GOP will be wise enough to heed its warning.

I don't know if Democrats can be competitive in enough House districts to pull off the kind of wave the Republicans achieved in 2010. Based on what I have seen, they may be fortunate to grab a narrow majority if they claim one at all.

Republicans don't need to lose as many Senate seats in 2018 as Democrats lost in 2010 to lose control of the chamber — and, as I have mentioned before, the historical tide of midterms runs against the party in the White House.

But until Tuesday, the Democrats faced an uphill struggle in trying to capture the Senate. Only one–third of the senators are on the ballot in a given election year — unless a special election has been called because a senator died or resigned before his/her term was completed. In this cycle, the vast majority of senators whose seats are on the ballot in 2018 are Democrats. Of those senators whose seats must be defended in 2018, only one incumbent Republican senator comes from a state that voted for Hillary Clinton whereas 10 incumbent Democrats must face the voters in states that supported Donald Trump.

With their upset victory in Alabama Democrats need only two more seats to claim a majority in the Senate for the last two years of Trump's term. That is more plausible now — but not necessarily more probable.

Regardless of whether Democrats can seize a Senate majority next year, even a short–term one, the Republicans' agenda is in jeopardy. If American politics has made anything clear in the last decade or so, it is that the voters want a change; as Republicans seemed to offer what they wanted, the voters gradually turned over the levers of government to them.

But the political pendulum is always moving in America. The Republicans' already slim majority in the Senate will shrink in January when Jones is seated, which gives them a few weeks to accomplish whatever they can with the seats they currently hold. Given their track record this year, though, getting anything done seems unlikely.

Voters seem to have developed a rather limited tolerance for political performance in recent years. Nonperformance may fare worse.

Until Tuesday, I had not seen anything in any of the special elections that surprised me. All the House seats that were vacant because their representatives had been appointed to positions in the administration were in red states. Democrats made a lot of noise about being competitive in those districts, but ultimately they lost every special election.

Then in November the first statewide races in the Trump era were held — in New Jersey and Virginia, states that elect their governors in the years immediately following presidential elections. After decades of voting for Republicans, Virginia (where governors are prohibited by law from seeking re–election) has been trending blue. Three of its last four governors have been Democrats, and it has voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential elections. Even though Republicans put up a good front about being competitive in the governor's race, I wasn't surprised when the Democrat won.

Nor was I surprised when the Democrat won in New Jersey. Term–limited Republican incumbent Chris Christie is about as popular as Richard Nixon was just before he resigned the presidency, and the Republican nominee had to carry that toxic baggage. No, I wasn't surprised by the outcome there, either.

But Tuesday's special election in Alabama did surprise me.

I realize that the circumstances had a lot to do with it. The decades–old charges of sexual harassment against Moore appear to have done enough damage to permit Jones to win by about 20,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast — even though no charges were substantiated and most were suspect.

Perhaps, as conservative commentator Ann Coulter observes, this outcome opens the door for Rep. Mo Brooks to reclaim the seat for the Republicans in 2020.

That wouldn't be unprecedented. Two years after Brown won Kennedy's seat, he was defeated in a bid for a full six–year term — by Elizabeth Warren, who is now considered a leading contender for the Democrats' next presidential nomination.

I'm not saying Brooks is a future presidential prospect. But in 2020 he would have Trump's coattails to ride in the general election — and that will almost certainly help in Alabama.

O, Captain, My Captain

When I was in college, it was my honor to study reporting under a professor who truly lived the adage that journalism is the first draft of history.

His name was Roy Reed, and he once worked for the New York Times; in fact, he was there when the landmark Times v. Sullivan decision was rendered, and he enthralled us in class with stories of that time. He also worked for the Arkansas Gazette before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas.

He was on the front lines of history in the 20th century.

He covered Orval Faubus at the Gazette. In the Times job he covered the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s.

I will always remember the stories he told in class about covering marches that were led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — and how he feared for his life when he and the rest of the reporters came under the hate–filled glares of the whites who watched the marches from the sidewalks of sleepy Southern towns.

The folks at the Times didn't think that was hazardous enough, I suppose, so they sent Roy to Northern Ireland to cover the Protestants and the Catholics.

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After doing that for awhile, life in Fayetteville must have seemed positively placid by comparison. I never saw anyone as completely happy as Roy was when I was enrolled in his class. He had lived a life to which many — myself included — aspired, and he told us all about it — the good, the bad and the ugly. He was paying it forward, as they say today, sharing the things he had learned in a lifetime in the profession with the next generation.

He didn't give away A's in his class. You had to earn them. And it has always been a source of pride for me that I earned an A in Roy's reporting class. It isn't exactly the kind of thing you can put on a resume. But I'm proud of it, and I carry it with me.

Roy had an aneurysm yesterday and died at the age of 87.

As I understand the sequence of events, he lapsed into a coma on Saturday and was kept alive for a time, but life support was removed today and he passed away.

Roy's life was all about communication and information — so it was fitting that it was through social media, which didn't exist when I was in Roy's class but is the method for spreading information in the 21st century, that I learned of his death. There is a Facebook page where my friends and former colleagues post news of interest, and the tributes to Roy have been pouring in over there.

We all have our own memories of Roy. For me, there are too many to count, but one stands out. I was in his class in an election year, and he recruited several of us to do volunteer work at the county courthouse on Election Night. I suppose many, if not all, of us were motivated by the lure of extra credit, but I was genuinely interested in participating in the process on an Election Night — which, in those days, required us to spend most of the evening on the phone taking down vote totals from precincts by hand and passing along the totals to others, who would compile them. When all the precincts had been heard from, the numbers were passed on to the secretary of state's office in Little Rock.

After I graduated from college, I participated in similar work for newspapers on Election Nights to come. Whenever I did I always thought back to that night during my college days. Among other things I owe that to Roy.

He influenced so many of us — and he will never be forgotten.

This Isn't a Party Problem; It Is a People Problem

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It is a lesson we insist on learning over and over again.

These sexual harassment cases that have been flooding the airwaves in recent months are merely manifestations of the latest symptom of something that was stated clearly and eloquently many years ago:

Power corrupts — and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And that is what these cases are really about, isn't it? Power. Who has it and uses it.

That is the thing all these cases have in common. People with power feel entitled to things, even if (or, perhaps, especially if) that sense of entitlement tramples on someone else's rights.

Today the subject is sexual harassment. That — or a variant on that subject — has been a recurring theme over the years, but in the past the subject has also been racism, religious intolerance and anything else that offends people.

Sometimes the offense du jour is silly, but other times it is not and should not be treated as if it is. This is one of those times — although I will admit that sometimes it threatens to veer off in that other direction. That is something that every American should hope we can avoid. If we do not, it will trivialize and demean a serious matter that has long deserved a serious public examination and discussion.

It is certainly not funny when reprehensible behavior forces someone to pay a heavy price — as it has with Sen. Al Franken, the former Saturday Night Live funnyman who resigned from the U.S. Senate today amid allegations of sexual harassment. It is a tragedy for Franken and his family.

But neither is it funny when a false accusation destroys someone's life. Thus we must exercise due diligence in such cases.

One thing we need to stop doing is treating matters like these as if they are party problems. They are not. Neither party has a monopoly on offensive behavior. And neither party is morally superior to the other.

If these recent revelations have proven nothing else, they have proven that there are offenders in both parties. Yet I have seen many examples of people who were clearly willing to overlook such offenses in those with whom they agreed on issues but all too ready to condemn those with whom they disagreed.

Even Franken indulged in some of that in his farewell speech to the Senate today.

"I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony," Franken said, "that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has preyed on underage girls is running for the Senate with the full support of his party."

Sexual harassment is wrong; those who are willing to overlook it in their friends but condemn it in their foes take their position entirely because of politics. It has zero to do with defending victimized women and men.

The Crystal Ball Is Foggy

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I have observed this year's special elections to fill vacancies created by Trump administration appointments with a kind of amused bewilderment.

The special elections were all billed as referendums on the president — but all the vacancies were in clearly red states with red voting histories in good years and bad. I suppose if any of those races had gone for a Democrat, that would have been big news. But the fact that no Democrat won a special election is non–news. Kind of a "dog bites man" story. When the man bites the dog, that's news.

The same is true in reverse of the gubernatorial elections that are traditionally held in Virginia and New Jersey in the odd–numbered years following presidential elections.

At one time Virginia had the longest streak of support for Republican presidential nominees in the entire South. It was the only Southern state that voted against Jimmy Carter in 1976, but shifting demographics led it to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. Today it is regarded as dependably Democratic.

Thus, while polls in this year's gubernatorial race suggested the Republican nominee might have a chance at an upset, it was no surprise when the Democrat won.

Nor was it a surprise that a Democrat won in New Jersey. The outgoing Republican incumbent was extremely unpopular, and New Jersey has a history of shifting political allegiances. No, that wasn't a surprise.

Now the scene shifts to Alabama, where a special election will be held next Tuesday to choose a successor for Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate. Republican Roy Moore has been beset by sexual harassment charges that narrowed the gap between him and Democrat Doug Jones — for a time. Recent polls suggest things are returning to form in Alabama, and Moore's lead, while closer than one usually sees in Alabama elections, is expanding.

I know there are still some Democrats, perhaps many, who believe Jones can pull off an upset, but what they fail to comprehend is that Alabama is a really red state — not pink or purple like some states but deeply red — and polls suggest that the voters in Alabama are gravitating toward issues now. My guess is it would take a sexual bombshell eclipsing everything that has come before in order for Jones to win this race.

One issue in particular seems to be driving Republicans and independents who had been wavering — abortion. Jones holds a liberal position on abortion; Moore's position has been more in line with average Alabama voters

Many folks up North like to belittle Southerners as backward, ignorant, uneducated. But that is an unfair stereotype, and the voters in Alabama are smart enough to know what the margin in the Senate looks like. They know which party and its candidates hold positions closer to their own and which do not, and this, one of the reddest of the red states, is not likely to send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in a quarter of a century.

I know Democrats are eager to seize control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, but they would be better advised to pin their hopes on races in more centrist states.