Peter McLaughlin and Lisa McDonald will hopefully get to debate the issue in
front of the public during the upcoming Mayoral campaign. They are the two
who seem to be most talked about for the next election. Should be a fun
election when you throw in the present Mayor and Stenglein. We just have to
figure out which one will keep the majority of their campaign promises.
If both Lisa McDonald and Mark Stenglein run for mayor in 2005, both will again fail to survive past the primary. Both candidates compete for almost exactly the same vote.
McDonald is the more credible of the two. She can get over 50 percent in the general election by holding the conservative/independent base and then peeling off maybe a third (or more) of DFL voters. This was her winning strategy in the 10th Ward, which has a smaller conservative/independent base than the city as a whole. I don't think Stenglein can pull in nearly enough DFL votes to to win (Stenglein might have been able to do that against Sharon Sayles Belton in 2001, but he won't come close to doing that against either Rybak or McLaughlin).
Having said that, RT won with a lot of conservative/independent votes in 2001. If he manages to keep even a modest percentage of those voters in 2005, he will be nearly impossible to beat (assuming he stays strong with the progressive DFL voters who abandoned Sayles Belton in 2001, which seems likely).
The new reality is Minneapolis is that, if conservative/independent voters cast their ballots as a single bloc, they can choose which DFL'r wins. Which is why you'll see more of these really weird, conservative-progressive coalitions in the future (recent example? Don Samuels, of course).
And, in 2005 the conservative-progressive coalition will take a page right out the Republican playbook and continue to run against the "establishment" even though they are the establishment now.
Greg Abbott
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Sent from the computer of:
Greg Abbott Linden Hills 13th Ward
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TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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