The next time your right-wing family member or former high school classmate posts a status update or tweet about how taxing the rich or increasing workers’ wages kills jobs and makes businesses leave the state, I want you to send them this article. When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty…who called himself Minnesota’s first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history. Pawlenty prided himself on never raising state taxes…. Between 2003 and late 2010…he managed to add only 6,200 more jobs. Between 2011 and 2015, Gov. Dayton added 172,000 new jobs to Minnesota’s economy…. Even though Minnesota’s top income tax rate is the 4th-highest in the country, it has the 5th-lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent. According to 2012-2013 U.S. census figures, Minnesotans had a median income that was $10,000 larger than the U.S. average, and their median income is still $8,000 more than the U.S. average today.
If one was trying to understand why Republicans should never be allowed to manage anything more complicated than a Dairy Queen, all that would be necessary would be a comparison between my home state of Minnesota and neighboring Wisconsin. The differences could hardly be more stark or the impact more distressing. While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has done the bidding of the Koch brothers- dismantling union rights, erecting obstacles to reproductive health care, and erecting obstacles to voting- Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has taken the opposite tack. Gov. Dayton may be by some estimates a world-class nerd, but he’s presided over a state government success story that stands in stark contrast to the growing disaster that is Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.
For a man who has won a competitive US Senate race and secured his second term as governor in November, Mark Dayton is a terrible retail politician. “He’s very shy and he’s an introvert,” Ken Martin, the chair of the state party and a friend of Dayton’s, told me unprompted earlier this month. “He’s not a typical, backslapping politician,” Martin continued. “He’s not very articulate; he’s kind of jerky,” Tom Bakk, the Democratic Senate majority leader, says of his ally’s style. When Dayton first ran for his current job, in 2010, The New Republic dubbed him “Eeyore for Governor.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Gov. Dayton’s personality, but in a results-oriented business, he stands out heroically when compared to Gov. Walker’s Right-wing cluster—— next door.
Think of Dayton as Scott Walker’s mirror image. With the help of GOP-controlled legislatures, Walker …passed wish lists of conservative policies and touted their states as laboratories that demonstrate the benefits of conservative governance. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has parlayed that hype into a potential 2016 presidential run. And across the border in Minnesota, Dayton seized a brief moment of unified Democratic control to create the liberal alternative to Walker’s Wisconsin—a blue-state laboratory for demonstrating the potential of liberal policies. Dayton didn’t “set out” with the objective of one-upping Walker in mind, he told me after the Eagan event. But “the contrast,” he notes, is obvious.
If you’re going to tout the “benefits of conservative governance,” it would stand to reason that you’d have some actual “benefits” to claim. Of course, if you believe suppressing unions, curtailing access to the ballot box, restricting access to reproductive health care, and sluggish economic growth to be “benefits of conservative governance,” I suppose you have much to celebrate. From where I sit, it’s difficult to see how those things could be considered “benefits” in any sense of the word…but then I (thankfully) don’t live in Wisconsin.
What makes Gov. Walker’s dismantling of the Badger State even more depressing is that not only has he been re-elected- he’s survived a recall election. If you believe that voters get exactly the quality of leadership they deserve- and I do- it’s difficult to fathom how the standards of Wisconsinites could be so abysmally low- especially when they can look next door to see what Mark Dayton has been doing to lift Minnesota up.
As November approaches and you find yourself trying to decide between Republicans and Democrats, might I suggest you compare Minnesota and Wisconsin side by side? If that doesn’t make up your mind for you, I’m not certain what would.
