In Minnesota, four years makes a big difference

Personality might also be part of the answer to why this race is where it is.

Greeting Kennedy at a St. John’s College football game on Saturday, one of his supporters Tom Brodmerkle, said that Kennedy’s new TV ad is effective partly because he looks right at the camera.

His previous ads, Brodmerkle said, made some people wonder “Is he so shy?” He said people have an image of Kennedy being “smart, and a little reticent.”

But it may also be that Kennedy’s difficulties indicate the Republican hopes for a realignment of this state were too optimistic.

“This is a state that has reached its limit of classic liberalism and it’s adjusting to a politically competitive state,” said Pawlenty two years ago. “The great thing about the Minnesota Democrats, from a Republican standpoint, is that they are incapable of Clintonizing. They just will not allow themselves to go to the center; they won’t embrace centrist Democratic approaches.”

But Klobuchar has used a strategy of calling for generic “change” and urging tax increases only on the top echelon of Americans. She’s not in any way the firebrand Wellstone was.

Kennedy’s lack of traction may mean that this is a state that has reached its limit of conservative Republicanism.

Asked about this possibility this weekend, Pawlenty – who’s in his own difficult battle for re-election, told me that Minnesota “is not shifting back (to the Humphrey era). It’s not a Republican state; it’s more of a mainstream state that it used to be, it’s not like it was 30 years ago,  robotically liberal… but in this year, with the difficulties in Washington, there’s a little more headwind for Republicans if you’re going to win in Minnesota.”

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