Last election day was not a happy one for rural Minnesota democrats... While we won all the statewide offices and our incumbent congress members were re-elected, we lost near a dozen state house seats and with that the majority. 10 of the 11 seats lost were in rural Minnesota, and most of those lost were in the 7th congressional district. Yup, MN CD7, where moderate dem Colin Peterson was re-elected... Again.
After that crushing defeat I expected that the CD7 Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party, our Minnesota hybrid of a merger between the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties in the 1940s, would curl up and die. Or at least become a social group with a few extroverts running underfunded losing campaigns for office. I debated resigning my position as Outreach and Inclusion Officer of CD7, and I sure as hell wasn't running for the legislature again! I fully expected the DFL to cede CD7 and rural Minnesota to the republicans without a battle, and our CD7 DFLers eventually surrender to the inevitable. But a funny thing happened on the way to the political graveyard...
After some general airing of campaign grievances here and in other forums, we decided to have a meeting to post mortem and decide where we go from here. Now our CD7 meetings are generally all too intimate affairs, and if it's a nice summer day we'll have a whole twenty some folks in attendance. Well, last saturday, with freezing rain and snow threatening, 90 DFLers came together for that meeting, many traveling a couple hundred miles from the ends of our vast district to attend!
With almost every CD7 state house candidate present (I must hang my head in shame for sneaking off to Florida for the winter), they talked about what went wrong with the campaigns and how to right it. They spoke of the "Citizens United" inspired blizzard of attack ads, with republican candidate's millionaire and billionaire supporters spending six figures sums to buy elections in little state house districts where hand made campaign signs and lit composed and printed on the kitchen table are not unusual. And they vowed to keep fighting... In fact, with the ballots barely canvassed, DFL candidates are already announcing their candidacy for 2016!
And almost all of those 90 DFLers who refuse to give up on progressive candidates and campaigns in rural Minnesota were from CD7 in rural Minnesota. Used to be we looked to the Minnesota DFL in the metro to see if we'll have a serious well funded campaign or not... With 80 odd rural DFLers ready to, in the words of Paul Wellstone- "Stand up, Keep fighting!"... It don't matter if the metro DFL abandons us, we can stand up on our own!
After seeing 80 odd of my fellow rural CD7 DFLers stand up and keep fighting in the middle of an off year winter, "I'm in", ready to get back on the campaign trail and win back our rural Minnesota house seats and majority!
Are you in?