No doubt about it: Minnesota is being swept by a blizzard in the northwest and blustery winds everywhere else. Stay off the roads if you live in those areas where MNDOT is advising no travel and bundle up and drive appropriately everywhere else.
The Winona Daily News reports today on a different sort of turning blue in today's article, County turning blue: Voters picking more Democrats in state, national elections. Unlike Twin Cities papers which are attributing Congressman Walz's win to his personality, the WDN looks at the deliberate grassroots organizing by local progressives.
Mark Sommerhauser, who has emerged as a top-flight political reporter among the First's daily papers, writes:
Winona County Democrats devised a blueprint for victory in 2004 in the aftermath of a dispiriting defeat.
But instead of shuttering their party office between elections, as in previous years, local DFL members redoubled their efforts in early 2005. They enlisted volunteers to staff at their West Fifth Street office year-round and initiated more-aggressive voter-outreach efforts, which Morse said paid off beginning with the 2006 election of U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, DFL-Minn.
The good news for local DFLers continued in 2008, when Walz, Barack Obama and Al Franken carried Winona County. Those results continued a trend of Winona County turning a darker shade of blue in the past 10 years, according to an analysis by the Daily News and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
Read the whole article at the WDN. The article looks at the Winona-area manifestation of the sort of grassroots work which earned the progressive movement of Rochester an award from Take Action Minnesota. We wrote about the groundwork in Rochecter earlier this month in the post Progressive Movement in Rochester recognized by Take Action Minnesota.
A side note: one of the interesting things about the press in the First is the presence of lively daily papers--and increasingly more robest and frequent reporting online at venues like the Owatonna People's Press. Sadly, the newspaper industry in southern Minnestoa is also being buffeted by the sector-wide downturn afflicting papers everywhere.
We'd liked to note our appreciation for the work of another reporter, who unfortunately has been let go as a full-time staffer by the parent company of the Rochester Post Bulletin. Washington-based Ed Felker, a meticulous researcher with a gold-plated horse apple detector, will be missed for his probing articles and his hard-pressing questions in Congressman Walz's news conference calls.
Photo: Behind every elected face, there's flourishing grassroots in progressive southern Minnesota.
Great article, major kudos to you and everyone who's done such great organizing in the last few years.
Ollie: I'm not one of those who has been organizing in Rochester and Winona, just a person writing about it.
Posted by: Karl | December 14, 2008 at 07:42 PM