As is their custom, Minnesota party leaders are spending their summer scolding candidates and primary voters who dare to disobey the endorsement of a relatively small group of party activists who attend their state conventions.
For instance, yesterday DFL Chairman Ken Martin, a good guy who seems to be doing a good job, had this to say about fellow DFLer Matt Entenza, who is challenging the DFL-endorsed State Auditor Rebecca Otto:
Although he was a one-time House DFL leader, Matt Entenza has a history of running in DFL primaries. His last-minute filing is an insult to the hard-working DFLers he has to win over.
Okay, I’m a DFLer. On rare occassions, I work hard. So I loosely fit Chairman Martin’s description of people who matter. But I am not one of the 1,300 people who endorsed Ms. Otto, and I didn’t delegate my democratic decision to them.
I’m one of the hundreds of thousands of hard-working DFLers who instead vote in primary elections, and I am far from “insulted” that Mr. Entenza wants to make his case to me and other primary voters. Primary voters should get to choose between whichever candidates want to make their case to them, and they should have party leaders who support their right to choose.
In the primary of 2010, the last non-presidential primary, about 435,000 Minnesota DFLers stepped forward to make themselves heard at the ballot box. There were well over 300 primary voters for every convention delegate. Though fewer will vote in the primary this year, we can assume that hundreds of thousands of DFLers will vote in this year’s primary. Those primary voters deserve to have their say every bit as much as the 1,300 DFL convention delegates deserved to have their say last weekend
I don’t begrudge the party activists their antiquated convention parlor game. As someone who grew up in a primary-only state, the caucus system has never made sense to me, but whatever. But I do resent the delegates’ and party leaders’ elitist, anti-democratic assumption that the opinion of the 1,300 should automatically outweigh the opinion of the 435,000.
I’ll probably end up supporting the DFL-endorsed Otto, because she seems to have done a good job, not because she was endorsed by 1,300 folks in donkey hats. But primary challenger Matt Entenza has every right to take his case to me and hundreds of thousands of other DFL primary voters.
– Loveland
Note: This post was featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs and MinnPost’s Blog Cabin.
Thanks for the column. Except for the gratuitous slap at donkey hats, I very much agree with you. As for caucuses, I don’t go any more. Wish we would put them to bed. There is nothing representative about the folks that engage in that process. Not saying they aren’t good folks, just seem to represent the extremes of both parties
Meanwhile, Politics in Minnesota reports that “GOP state chair Keith Downey wants party leaders to get behind the endorsed candidate or resign their posts.”