Can Pawlenty Carry Minnesota?
One of the big reasons people cite Pawlenty as an obvious pick for McCain is the hope that he can help McCain carry the purple/blue state of Minnesota. There is evidence to suggest, however, that he won't be able to do that.
For starters, Minnesota hasn't voted for a Republican president since Richard Nixon in 1972. In addition, the political environment is trending bluer. Minnesota's version of the Democratic Party--the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) took control of both chambers of the State Legislature by wide margins in 2006.
That same year, Pawlenty barely won reelection with less than one percentage point, 46.69% to the DFL candidate Mike Hatch's 45.73%. An Independent candidate, Peter Hutchinson took 6.43% of the vote. For the mot part, the DFL cleaned up in the 2006 election. Many argue that Pawlenty would have been another electoral casualty if not for Hutchison's modest but crucial 6.43%. According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press (11/09/06):
Throughout the campaign, Hutchinson, the Independence Party candidate, insisted he would take votes equally from Democrats and Republicans. In the end, however, an exit poll suggested he took twice as many votes from Hatch as from Pawlenty. As a result, he may have inadvertently saved the governor as other Republican candidates went down across the country.
Hutchinson got 142,000 votes, or 6 percent of the total. Pawlenty won by 21,000 votes. An Associated Press exit poll showed that 6 percent of Democratic voters -- roughly 60,000 -- voted for Hutchinson, but only 3 percent of Republicans went for him. If those Hutchinson Democrats had voted for Hatch, he probably would be the governor-elect.
