Headed into this week, Minnesota’s state Senate was evenly divided between Democratic and Republican members. As The Minnesota Star Tribune reported, the results of the latest special election in the North Star State have tipped the scales.
DFLer Doron Clark was elected to the Minnesota Senate in a special election Tuesday for a heavily blue district covering northeast Minneapolis. The result officially breaks a 33-33 tie between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. Against GOP challenger Abigail Wolters, Clark won nearly 91% of the vote and will succeed Sen. Kari Dziedzic, who died from ovarian cancer at age 62 in December. Dziedzic held the Senate District 60 seat since 2012.
(Note, in Minnesota, the Democratic Party is known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The news report referring to Clark as a “DFLer” is another way of saying he’s a Democrat.)
The party’s victory coincided with a state Senate special election in Iowa in which Democrat Mike Zimmer narrowly defeated his Republican rival. The race generated some national coverage because of the broader circumstances: This special election was held in a district thought to be a GOP stronghold. Indeed, Donald Trump won this district a few months ago by 21 points.
And yet, this week, a Democratic candidate managed to flip the state Senate seat from red to blue anyway.
The Iowa and Minnesota contests come on the heels of a couple of closely watched state legislative special elections in Virginia, held three weeks ago, which Democrats also won. The contests were, as an NBC News report put it, “an early test of the political environment.”
A Politico report added that both parties were watching the Virginia races for “clues about Republicans’ durability in a Democratic stronghold that tilted toward Trump in November.”
The news comes with some rather large caveats. Legislative special elections in January tend to be low-turnout affairs, and drawing sweeping conclusions about the meaning of their outcomes is unwise.
That said, in the aftermath of Election Day 2024, the conventional wisdom suggested not only that Republicans had entered an era of electoral dominance, but also that Democratic voters were demoralized, disheartened and prepared to withdraw from civic life for a while.
It’s against this backdrop that the party has put together some notable victories, undermining some of the assumptions from November. Or as a new Politico report put it, “For a moribund party, Democrats in the span of 24 hours are showing some signs of life.”
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