I’m still working on a major post dissecting Tuesday night’s primary results and previewing the fall campaign. By now everyone knows Rick Nolan won and will face Chip Cravaack in the MN-8 election this November. Several legislative primaries occurred in northern Minnesota, all of which broke for the party endorsed candidates. So I’m focusing on some deeper analysis.
Tuesday night did give the opportunity, and I hope I didn’t abuse it, to talk more specifically about the challenges facing the Iron Range in coming years and how leaders of both parties could rise to address them. The tit-for-tat of these elections is actually a rather poor way to change anything, but political will is nevertheless an important ingredient in change.
I did an interview with Jennifer Austin at Northland’s News Center (Channels 3 and 6 in Duluth) about the changing political dynamic on the Iron Range. I’ve been talking about the demographic changes going on here for some time, wrote about it in my book “Overburden.” On Tuesday, I walked up to the deck of the Hawkins Mine overlook in Nashwauk, looked into a camera and this happened:
Later that night, as primary returns poured in, I did a chat for the Minnesota Public Radio “Capitol Views” blog with Michael Olson and my colleague Joel Sipress, a Duluth professor and writer for the Minnesota Progressive Project. I got to expand on the reality of the Range’s situation later in the discussion. If you ever want to see what I look like during “active blog” mode, you get a sneak peak into MinnesotaBrown World Headquarters.
What needs to happen is not assured with the victory of the DFL or the GOP in major elections. That is a factor, not a fix. What needs to happen is in the control of people in our communities.
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