Not So Fast! Still Two Weeks to Go in Election 2014

For at least the ninth time in the last two years, the 2014 election in Minnesota has been declared over, with Democrats said to be winning a historic victory.

For this outcome to be true, Minnesota has to be the only state in America to buck the current anti-Obama trend.

Earlier this month, Gallup compared national voter sentiment in 2014 to voter sentiment in the Republican-wave year of 2010.  Gallup found that the anti-Obama vote is actually running four points higher this year than in the “Tea Party” year of 2010.  In that mid-term year, Republicans picked up 6 seats in the U.S. Senate and 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This result makes sense when you look at Obama’s job approval ratings.  Gallup has Obama at 40 percent approval as of yesterday, exactly 4 points below his approval rating in October 2010.  It has gotten so bad, that in deeply Democratic Maryland yesterday, the crowd started walking out of an Obama campaign rally after only 10 minutes.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has Obama’s approval in Minnesota at—you guessed it—40 percent.  But we are to believe that while Minnesota voters may no longer support President Obama, they still support the local variety of Obamaism.

Like those “Ready for Hillary” bumper stickers that are said to exist, the narrative goes something like this:  Obama himself may have turned out to be a bust, but Minnesotans love his mix of big government spending and higher taxes.

As Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant explains, Minnesota voters finally reached the correct political answer by electing all-Democrat rule in 2012.  Even if the Democrat brand has lost some appeal to national voters, Minnesotans will never abandon the utopia we’ve created in just the last two years. 

I’m not so sure.  Minnesota doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  We follow the national news and are impacted by Federal policies.

With two weeks to go, expect to see a convergence of state trends with the national direction.