Jeff Rosenberg Posts

Voting rights advocates have released their first ad opposing the Voter Restriction Amendment, featuring longtime Secretary of State Joan Growe. In the ad, Growe uses the phrase "Voter Restriction Amendment" and says the legislature "didn't think it through."
Secretary Growe speaks from long experience. If anyone is an expert on Minnesota elections, it's her. So when she says the amendment is "too costly and too complicated," it's a charge Minnesotans should take seriously.
Watch the ad below:

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Minnesota has a problem with tax fairness. The very richest among us pay the lowest effective tax rate, according to the 2011 Tax Incidence Study. While the average Minnesotan pays between 11 and 12 percent of their income -- and the poor pay even more -- the rich pay only 10 percent. Our state's revenue problems can be traced back to ta...

From the ABC transcript of the debate, as well as some clips put together by the DNC, here are a few of Joe Biden's best moments from last night.
On Paul Ryan asking for stimulus money:
And I love my friend here. I -- I'm not allowed to show letters but go on our website, he sent me two letters saying, "By the way, can you send me some stimulus money for companies here in the state of Wisconsin?" We sent millions of dollars...
I lo...

Over the last week, Mitt Romney has made a concerted effort to appear reasonable, moderate, and bipartisan. It's something he's very good at -- in fact, he's made an entire political career out of being all things to all people -- and voters seem to like the act. The question is, who is the real Mitt Romney and what does he believe? Unfortunately, nobody knows.
During last week's debate, Romney broke with his own positions to portray himself as a moderate. But back on the campaign trail, he seem...

Wow. According to a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll, the CD8 race between Chip Cravaack and Rick Nolan is extremely close. Nolan holds a tiny lead, which is statistically insignificant given the poll's margin of error:

In an election for the U.S. House of Representatives today from Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, incumbent Republican Chip Cravaack and former Congressman Rick Nolan are eyeball-to-eyeball in a contest too-close-to-call, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for K...

Nick Coleman, former columnist at the now-right-leaning Star Tribune, asks an important question: Does Amy Klobuchar have an obligation to do more to defeat the Republicans' constitutional amendments?

Amy Klobuchar has been working hard to win the endorsement of Republican car dealers, like the ones featured in her campaign ad at the end of this post. But she hasn't done so well impressing Minnesota progressives who are wondering why the state's Senior U.S. Senator hasn't been an outspoken opponent of the two heavy-handed Rep...

There's one more excerpt I wanted to highlight from yesterday's debate between Rick Nolan and Chip Cravaack, particularly because it relates to another post on MPP yesterday. Dan wrote yesterday that Our candidates shouldn't shy from climate talk, emphasizing that independent voters agree with Democrats on climate change.
Republicans often attack environmentalists as anti-business. Chip Cravaack is no exception. Democrats, unfortunately, often don't know how to defend their position. ...

Dear Democrats:
Chill out.
Since last week's debate, liberals across the country have been despondent. It's all over! Obama threw away the election! Teh polls! Teh polls!!! Let's get a bit of perspective here, folks.
Obama lost one single debate against a guy who has proved himself an otherwise inept campaigner. But for the Democrats' own hand-wringing, it's unlikely the Romney campaign would even be able to capitalize on the win. Instead, with the Democrats' assistance, Romney has managed to convince the nation that the race has fundamentally changed.
He's done that larg...

Wow, what a difference two years makes. In 2010, Chip Cravaack was swept into office with the Tea Party wave, capitalizing on the movement's aggressive, confrontational tactics to take Jim Oberstar by surprise. This time, the landscape is much different, and Cravaack's ability to debate substantive issues is important. From what I saw a couple of hours ago, that's going to mean trouble for him.
Nolan had clearly done his homework. He spoke intelligently and forcefully on the issues, making a strong argument for his policy ideas and refusing to cede an inch to Cravaack. In comparison, it qui...

A new poll just released by Public Policy Polling is chock full of good news. The first bit of good news is on the Marriage Discrimination Amendment:

PPP's newest poll on Minnesota's amendment to ban gay marriage finds it running slightly behind, with 46% of voters planning to support it and 49% opposed. That represents a 4 point shift compared to a month ago when it led for passage 48-47.
The movement over the last month has been with independent voters. Where t...

I've often said that the Tea Party Republicans don't just want to return to a more limited interpretation of the Constitution, they actually want to drag us back to 1787. To further that goal, they treat any policy that represents a post 18th-century society as unconstitutional. As it turns out, this is almost exactly how at least one prominent Republican thinks. That Republican is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who recently offered some shocking insights into his method for interpreting the Con...

Driving down I-94 over the weekend, I saw an odd new billboard. The billboard says VOTE YES and features a small image of a woman holding a flag and hugging a man in military fatigues. There's absolutely no indication of what the man and woman have to do with voter restriction. To me, they just seemed like random patriotic imagery.
A quick search revealed that MPR actual...

In last night's debate, Mitt Romney responded to Barack Obama's criticism of his tax plan in a way that sounded pretty appealing:
I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don't have a tax cut of the scale you're talking about. I think we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I won't reduce the share of tax paid by high-income people.... I'm not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce revenues going to the government. My number one principal is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that no tax cut that will add to the...

Mitt Romney needs a major game-changer tonight. For weeks now, his campaign has been plagued by one self-inflicted injury after another, to the point where Republican operatives are already casting blame on each other for the failed campaign. If that's still the narrative after tonight's debate, it may be too late.
That makes scoring the debate a bit different than normal. Often, a tie is said to go to the challenger, because he's proven he can go head-to-head with the incumbent and hold his own. This time, a tie won't do for Romney. In fact, even a win won't do for Romney. He needs a game...

In one of Amy Klobuchar's first ads of the 2012 campaign, she highlights her vote to save the American auto industry, and for good reason: The initiative saved around a million jobs. In Klobuchar's ad, auto dealer -- and Republican  -- Paul Walser speaks on her behalf, saying "I really believe in her as a public servant."
Kurt Bills told MPR he would have opposed saving the auto industry, which would have been ab...

Kurt Bills appears to have suddenly realized that it's only about a month before the election, and figures it's about time he got to doing something about it:
Bills plans to visit 87 counties over the next 36 days. [Campaign manager Mike] Osskopp said the media, business leaders and unions have abandoned Bills campaign, so they are taking their message "directly to the people."
To me, this illustrates just how unseriously Bills has taken this campaign. He's just now thinking that he should try...

Kurt Bills appears to have suddenly realized that it's only about a month before the election, and figures it's about time he got to doing something about it:
Bills plans to visit 87 counties over the next 36 days. [Campaign manager Mike] Osskopp said the media, business leaders and unions have abandoned Bills campaign, so they are taking their message "directly to the people."
To me, this illustrates just how unseriously Bills has taken this campaign. He's just now thinking that he should try...

With the Marriage Discrimination Amendment on the ballot this year, a lot of Minnesotans are at risk of losing their civil rights. Oh, I'm not talking about the same-sex couples who lack any legal recognition of their unions. No, the real victims here are the voters. If you don't vote yes on the amendment, they could lose their ability to vote on other people's civil rights!
That's the odd message behind Minnesotans for Mandatory Marriage Discrimination's first ad. Rather than trying to convince voters that there's a pro...

Barring a major game-changer, Mitt Romney looks like he's toast. Obama has a comfortable lead in nearly every poll, Romney is still desperately casting about for a campaign theme, and early voting has already begun in many states. What's perhaps even more telling is that Republicans both inside and outside the Romney campaign have started either playing the blame game or trying to come to grips with what a Romney loss means for the party.
Conservatives, who now enjoy nearly abso...

Poll denialism is a growing trend on the right this election season. And of course, baselessly accusing corporate-owned media of somehow being leftists is an age-old conservative trope. Even in the context of both of these behaviors, though, Kurt Bills's campaign challenging the Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll is just sad:

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills campaign says a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll that shows incumbent Democrat Amy Klobuchar with a substantial lead in the race is biased, a charge that Star Tribune leaders dispute....

The poll, conducted last week, found that 57 percent of likely voters favored Klobuchar, compared to 28 percent for Bills, a lead of 29 percentage points. More than 60 percent of those polled said they did not recognize Bills' name.

Bills' internal polling shows Klobuchar with a 15 percentage-point lead. (Emphasis added)

The Star Tribune is in the tank for Klobuchar! We think we're only losing by 15 points!

Even if Bills is right -- and I doubt he is -- so what? Losing by 15 points still counts as getting shellacked in my book. With less than 40 days until the election, this is not a good way to convince anyone that Bills has a shot at winning.