For St. Cloud, an election with friction

12/26/2005

Two Christmas-week special elections in St. Cloud have produced a spate of accusations and complaints. The elections could nudge the delicate party balance at the Capitol in either direction.

Conrad Defiebre,
Star Tribune
Last update: December 25, 2005 at 9:08 PM

Special elections for the Minnesota Legislature rarely draw much interest beyond their own district boundaries.

But the disqualification of Republican House candidate Sue Ek on residency grounds last week—leaving only DFLer Larry Haws on the ballot—is just one of the fascinating oddities produced by a midwinter outbreak of electioneering in St. Cloud.

Consider:

• Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s scheduling of the election two days after Christmas has sparked DFL allegations of a partisan scheme to disenfranchise vacationing St. Cloud State University students.

• DFL Senate candidate Tarryl Clark’s background as a lobbyist for nonprofit groups has Republicans casting her as a “Twin Cities ultra-liberal” who ignores state rules for filing lobbying expense reports.

• Republican Senate nominee Dan (Ox) Ochsner’s campaign brochure photo that was doctored to transform a 2004 rally for President Bush into one for Ochsner has been denounced as election fraud by DFLers.

Perhaps all the background noise could be expected, given that this double-barreled election presents each party with a chance to grab a rival seat and reshuffle the Legislature’s tight partisan balance.

St. Cloud-area voters will be making a Christmas-week trip to the polls because both Republican Sen. David Kleis and DFL Rep. Joe Opatz stepped down from the Legislature—Kleis after his election as St. Cloud mayor in November, Opatz after being appointed interim president of Central Lakes College in Brainerd, Minn.

Besides Ochsner and Clark, Dan Becker of the Independence Party is seeking the Senate seat.

In the House race, Republican Kay Ek is mounting an uphill write-in bid against Haws in place of her daughter.

Until recently, legislative special elections in Minnesota were thought of as a playing field tilted toward Republicans, who usually had better luck than DFLers motivating voters for these low-profile, low-turnout contests.

But that began to change in 2003, when DFLer Rebecca Otto won a surprising victory in a House special election in a solidly Republican Stillwater-area district. She lost a general-election rematch in 2004 to Republican Matt Dean.

In special elections in November, DFLer Terri Bonoff picked off a GOP Senate seat in the western suburbs while Amy Koch held onto another one for Republicans in the exurbs around Buffalo, Minn.

Now Haws, a three-term Stearns County commissioner, is an odds-on favorite to beat Kay Ek, a newcomer to electoral politics who entered the House race only last week as an 11th-hour write-in candidate. The Senate race is thought to be closer, but even as loyal a Republican as Pawlenty suggested last week that DFLer Clark, who lost to Kleis in both 2000 and 2002, will probably win this time.

“Tarryl has run twice before,” said Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar. “She’s a known commodity in the St. Cloud area. We’re cautiously optimistic.”

Although central Minnesota is known as a hotbed of religious conservatism, Johnson suggested that “social issues are not carrying the day” as they did in the past. “Core issues” such as education, transportation, health care and the environment are gaining more attention from voters, he said.

Ochsner, Ek and the IP’s Becker are touting their opposition to abortion, support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage and fiscal conservatism. Besides the “core issues,” Clark and Haws stress positive efforts to reduce abortion instead of new restrictions—“The Ten Commandments didn’t end sin,” Haws says—and note that a 1997 state statute outlawing gay marriage has not been challenged.

That message might play better in an election held when St. Cloud State’s 15,400 students were not on Christmas break. Some DFLers have accused Pawlenty of trying to minimize turnout by setting the voting on Dec. 27.

Pawlenty’s office replied that previous governors also set elections during the holiday season, and that delaying this one could have increased costs because of federal voting-equipment mandates that take effect Jan. 1.

But DFLers have tried to turn the situation to their favor with a direct-mail campaign urging students to cast absentee ballots.

Their brochure features a picture of Pawlenty and the headline: “We understand why he doesn’t want you to vote. He raised your tuition 36 percent.”

Another brochure—with a photo of a Bush rally last year that Ochsner emceed, but with the Bush-Cheney signs changed to ones for “Ox”—also drew attention in the Senate race.

Critics say it disproves Ochsner’s claim to be “Central Minnesota’s voice of integrity.”

Ochsner defended the digital imaging switch as a necessary shortcut in a brief campaign. “We had to get things going quick,” he said.

“Nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. There’s no legal problems with it.”