Last week we made the case from a DFL operative that the annual tragicomedy of the legislative session has little bearing on the next election. The argument is that people are captivated by the national political narrative, but are paying less attention to local politics. Voters are also less likely to split their tickets than in the past. Which means their 2020 votes for legislative candidates are a function of their feelings about the presidential race — not what their local lawmaker does in St. Paul.
I promised a rebuttal, and it comes from former DFL operative and current public relations executive Todd Rapp, who wrote me an e-mail awhile back.
"Just because people aren't watching the day-in, day-out activities of the legislative session doesn't mean they are becoming more likely to vote straight party-line in the upcoming election. 2018 was an aberration — Trump was completely dominating the political landscape."
In Rapp's telling, President Donald Trump is a one-off, a kind of leviathan who has created his own oceanic storm, rather than merely a man of his time riding the current political currents of polarization.
At least in this sense Trump is like my beloved Fighting Irish of Notre Dame: People seem to either love him or hate him and will support or oppose his party's other candidates based on that sentiment.
"Trump is causing the entire country to think like straight-ticket voters, but Trump is a temporary force in an otherwise dynamic political era," Rapp writes.
And if people don't know who their lawmakers are, that's just because there's been so much turnover in the Legislature in recent years, Rapp argues.
In the upper chamber, 38 of 67 senators have served two terms or fewer. In the House, 74 of 134 lawmakers have served fewer than five years, and 48 members of the majority DFL have never served in the majority until this year.
