Neglected: The path to winning rural Minnesota votes

Before former DFL state Rep. Doug Peterson retires from the presidency of the Minnesota Farmers Union at year's end — and before the F (for Farmer) in DFL fades into oblivion — I invited him to offer a few pointers on how to keep this state from splitting into warring metro and rural political tribes.

Peterson agreed to meet at a Twin Cities restaurant that obtains vittles from regional farms. That befits the founder of my favorite State Fair food event, Minnesota Cooks, the tastiest illustration I know of the enduring interdependence of Greater and metro Minnesotans.

I'd barely landed in my seat when he started schooling me on his party's failures in the Nov. 8 election.

"The Democrats didn't have a message for rural people!" an animated Peterson said. "They didn't feel they had to come to the rural areas and talk to us! You can't win elections in Minnesota without rural people!"

Actually, Hillary Clinton just demonstrated that a candidate can get trounced in rural Minnesota and still carry the state. But this election also showed that the DFL cannot hold majorities in the Legislature with a statewide victory as skewed to the Twin Cities, Rochester and Duluth as Clinton's was.

Democrats didn't just lose by a little in Greater Minnesota. They saw a massive voter exodus. Some telling numbers, courtesy of DFL vote tally wizard Brian Rice: Clinton chalked up 457,000 votes in Greater Minnesota's 80 counties, compared with President Obama's 609,000 in 2012. That's the loss of one of every four voters who favored the Democratic candidate for president four years ago.

Further: Seven of the eight state Senate seats that switched from DFL to GOP control were in Greater Minnesota — while two suburban seats that Republicans had held switched to the DFL.

Political scientists might call that a rural realignment to the Republicans. But Minnesota's quirky fascination with third-party candidates complicates the analysis. Donald Trump got 83,000 more votes in Greater Minnesota in 2016 than Republican candidate Mitt Romney did in 2012 — and third-party candidates got 70,000 more than their ilk did four years ago. Those third-party voters are bound to figure prominently into both parties' designs in 2018 and beyond.

DFLers were banking on gains in the suburbs, where Clinton polled well all year, and where Trump scored 80,000 fewer votes than Romney had. They didn't anticipate the hemorrhaging outstate. Quite a few of them seem baffled about why that happened, let alone about how they might reverse the red tide.

Peterson's view of the rural political landscape isn't as foggy. That may be because he still lives on the farm near Madison on which he was raised, and politics rivals agriculture as the family enterprise. His father, Harry Peterson, spent 10 years in the state House; Doug followed 15 years later and served for 12 years, and his son Aaron Peterson was elected in 2002 and put in six years.

"Rural people feel that their economic opportunity has been taken away," Peterson said. That sense has grown after three successive years of low commodity prices and rising costs in the individual health insurance market. "There's a sense that economic justice isn't reaching us."

In response, he said, his party's message should have been: "We're the party of the pocketbook." Instead, he said, Democrats in Washington pushed trade deals and regulations that farm interests consider burdensome, and DFLers in St. Paul failed to deliver property tax relief. Social issues carried too much weight.

"At some point, people form opinions that the Democrats aren't for us anymore. That's sad," he said — then quickly brightened. "At the same time, you end up with an opportunity to find new leadership."

I had the sense that Peterson would like to supply some of that leadership. At age 68, he's younger than both the nation's president-elect and the state's sitting governor. He made a brief foray into gubernatorial politics in 2010.

But Peterson didn't suggest that his name should go on the lists we pundits keep of possible 2018 gubernatorial candidates. Instead, he offered to share the ideas he presented in his farewell address at the state Farmers Union convention on Nov. 19. His theme: State and national policies should be built on the notion of "a right to be rural" — that is, a right to public services of a quality comparable to those in the metro area, at a comparable cost.

That notion is at the heart of the implicit promise DFLers made 45 years ago with the Minnesota Miracle — the use of the state's tax muscle to pool resources and distribute them to schools, cities and counties on the basis of needs-driven formulas, not political whims. It's also embedded, though not as firmly, in state transportation funding formulas.

These remain among Minnesota's best policy ideas. But their durability is threatened by the resentments and political rivalry that have developed between Greater Minnesota and the metro area.

Peterson's "right to be rural" ideas start with the basics — education and transportation at an affordable tax price. They extend to available, affordable health care and broadband service. They include government support for small-business expansion in Greater Minnesota that's on par with what government might do for a large employer in the Twin Cities.

They touch on what looms as the touchiest rural-urban topic in coming decades, environmental protection. Peterson calls for an "equal voice" for rural landowners and "common-sense management" of land and water resources, which he balances by asking farmers to help "preserve our resources for future generations."

That kind of balancing of rural and urban interests used to happen within each of Minnesota's two big political parties, each of which had a stake in both the 80 outstate and seven metro counties. No matter which party came out on top in an election, residents on both sides of the then-narrower metro-rural divide had some confidence that their interests would be guarded by the winning party.

Regrettably, that assurance has been lost in recent years. My guess is that an advantage awaits the party that figures out how to provide it again.

Lori Sturdevant, an editorial writer and columnist, is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.