Minnesota progressives getting impatient, might challenge incumbents

Kenza Hadj-Moussa, a spokeswoman for the progressive group TakeAction Minnesota, told me last week that no decisions have been made about recruiting challengers to take on veteran DFL lawmakers in the 2020 election, especially in the Senate.

Still, she offered a less-than-subtle hint: "If I were an incumbent, I would be looking out for progressive challengers," she said.

None of the longstanding metro DFL lawmakers on the potential target list stray far from progressive orthodoxy. But that's not the point.

"We're close to taking back the [state] Senate, but if the Senate is not going to be bold in its approach, then we're not making much progress," she said.

Hadj-Moussa cautioned that decisions would ultimately come from the grassroots membership. If they go ahead, this wouldn't be the first time TakeAction Minnesota supported a challenger against a longstanding progressive stalwart.

The group backed a Minneapolis City Council policy aide named Ilhan Omar in 2016 against then-Rep. Phyllis Kahn, who was in her fifth decade of service.

If all this feels vaguely familiar, it should. After the 2008 landslide, the Republican Party took a sharply ideological turn, with restive conservatives taking over state parties around the country and putting up insurgents who knocked off GOP incumbents with decades of experience.

But a decade later, look at the results of the GOP's turn toward conservative populism: Republicans stopped most of President Barack Obama's legislative agenda, won more than 1,000 state legislative seats in the intervening decade and wound up with full control of the national government in the 2016 election.

For decades, progressives were willing to accept the incrementalism and relative moderation of politicians like Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama as a necessary sacrifice for winning in a country that still seemed shaped by Ronald Reagan's hold on American politics.

No longer.

A new generation of progressives — many of them women and people of color — are burdened with college debt and health care, housing and child care costs. They've been further radicalized by President Donald Trump.

And they are impatient.

Bob Hume, a senior adviser to former DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, is about as establishment DFL as they come these days.

But he said there's no reason to fear primaries, which can help sharpen candidates. Think of the 2018 DFL race for governor, a long campaign in which Gov. Tim Walz had to up his game for more than a year.

More broadly, Hume said: "Primaries are good for democracy."