How Mark Dayton Bested Scott Walker—and Became the Most Successful Governor in the Country

[Karmadillo]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/mark-dayton-minnesota-governor-profile-scott-walker

The Unnatural: How Mark Dayton Bested Scott Walker—and Became the Most Successful Governor in the Country
Minnesota's chief executive is a terrible campaigner. Here's how he got past that.
—By Patrick Caldwell | Wed Feb. 18, 2015

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Think of Dayton as Scott Walker's mirror image. With the help of GOP-controlled legislatures, Walker and other Republican governors, such as Kansas' Sam Brownback, have passed wish lists of conservative policies and touted their states as laboratories that demonstrate the benefits of conservative governance. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has parlayed that hype into a potential 2016 presidential run. And across the border in Minnesota, Dayton seized a brief moment of unified Democratic control to create the liberal alternative to Walker's Wisconsin—a blue-state laboratory for demonstrating the potential of liberal policies. Dayton didn't "set out" with the objective of one-upping Walker in mind, he told me after the Eagan event. But "the contrast," he notes, is obvious.

Over the past several years, Minnesota has become a testing ground for a litany of policies Democrats hope to enact nationally: legalizing same-sex marriage, making it easier to vote, boosting primary education spending, instituting all-day kindergarten, expanding unionization, freezing college tuition, increasing the minimum wage, and passing new laws requiring equal pay for women. To pay for it all, Dayton pushed a sharp increase on taxes for the top 2 percent—one of the largest hikes in state history. Republicans went berserk, warning that businesses would flee the state and take jobs with them.

Minnesota added 172,000 jobs during Dayton's first four years in office. Its 3.6 percent unemployment rate is among the lowest in the country.
The disaster Dayton's GOP rivals predicted never happened. Two years after the tax hike, Minnesota's economy is booming. The state added 172,000 jobs during Dayton's first four years in office. Its 3.6 percent unemployment rate is among the lowest in the country (Wisconsin's is 5.2 percent), and the Twin Cities have the lowest unemployment rate of any major metropolitan area. Under Dayton, Minnesota has consistently been in the top tier of states for GDP growth. Median incomes are $8,000 higher than the national average. In 2014, Minnesota led the nation in economic confidence, according to Gallup.

Minnesota has even pulled ahead of Walker's Wisconsin, leapfrogging its neighbor to the east on measure after measure. "In a whole number of ways, we're very, very similar," Bakk, the DFL Senate leader, says of the two states. "But politically, we have taken just totally different paths in the road."

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[snacker]

1. And to think...

In 2010, Minnesota was 9,000 votes away from becoming another Wisconsin.
Way to go, Minnesota!

[hifiguy]

2. Mark Dayton will go down as one of the best governors

my state has ever elected and we have had some good ones, going all the way back to the almost socialist Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B. Olson, who was Minnesota's own FDR.

Dayton's a little on the wonky/geeky side and not a great speaker, but he's smart, hard-working and a damned good administrator who knew exactly where he wanted to take our state. His success in turning Minnesota around after the disaster of Pawlenty speaks very loudly for itself.

[Octafish]

3. Any chance for ''President Dayton''?

I'd like to hope there may still be a chance for America, you know, for a change.