We in Minnesota have a Democratic Governor. Our Mark Dayton is a rich Democrat -- the heir of the family who started the Dayton's Department Stores and B. Dalton Bookstores and Target -- and he was educated at Yale, so he's actually pretty smart for a guy who inherited money. Citizens of Wisconsin have a Republican Governor (Scott Walker, who brags about dropping out of college). In Minnesota we have a balanced budget, partly because we raised taxes on the top earners. In Wisconsin, they cut taxes on rich people and are now scrambling to cut spending (including major cuts for the once proud University of Wisconsin (which breaks my heart)). More orange details below the squiggle. Or whatever. Lurid details below the orange squiggle.
This article, recently published in Mother Jones, explains why Minnesota, which is demographically very similar to Wisconsin, its neighbor to the east, is doing so much better.
The Unnatural: How Mark Dayton Bested Scott Walker—and Became the Most Successful Governor in the Country.
Here are a few things I got from the article:
Dayton was elected Governor by a slim margin in 2010 (the Tea Party year). He entered office facing a hostile Republican legislature.
By the time Dayton was sworn in, on January 3, 2011, the recession and Pawlenty's budget tomfoolery had left Minnesota with a $6.2 billion deficit for the next two years, and the state GOP, which had won control of both houses of the Legislature for the first time since the state ended nonpartisan elections in 1974, was in no mood to help. Immediately following the 2010 election, the state GOP excommunicated Republicans who had endorsed Horner, the independent, for governor—including Arne Carlson, who had been the Republican governor of the state for eight years in the 1990s. Tony Sutton, the state party chair, warned Republicans in the House and Senate that they too would be cast out if they dared to compromise with Dayton, let alone raise taxes. "It created this really nasty sort of dynamic within the Legislature where many of these Republicans felt like they were more allegiant to their party leader than to the people who voted them in," says Ken Martin. Dayton was back where he had been in the US Senate—a lonely liberal who had made a lot of promises he couldn't keep.
So the Democratic governor vetoed the Tea Party budget bills and the state government shut down for a month or two. No highway projects (which employ lots of people -- and by the way, in Minnesota, you can't fix highways in the winter ). No fishing licenses (a big deal in the land of 10,000 lakes). Not even lottery tickets. Here's something I wrote on DKos back in 2012:
MN Repubs Wanted To Get Out The Vote – With Homophobia.
From 2010 to 2012 the Republicans in MN shot themselves in the foot, over and over again. A few examples: 1) The Republican woman (a married woman) who was Speaker of the House fired her chief of staff (a man) because they were having an affair and it went sour. He filed a lawsuit and then she resigned. 2) The Republican party of MN had spent a ton of money on the lawsuit about the election of Senator Al Franken. So they were in debt. And they almost got evicted from their main office because they couldn't pay the rent (in other words, they couldn't even balance their own frigging Republican party frigging budget). And 3) The Tea Party Republicans thought maybe if they put a one-man-one-woman constitutional amendment on the ballot, they could get voters to come out in 2012.
The voters did come out in 2012. Voters defeated the anti-gay amendment and they elected Democrats to both houses. So the newly elected Democratic legislature legalized marriage equality and they raised taxes, which balanced the budget. And they stopped borrowing money from local school boards (which the Republicans were doing by delaying payments).
After the 2012 election...
Priority No. 1 was raising taxes on the rich. The final tax plan—which bumped up income taxes 2 percent for couples earning $250,000 per year—made Minnesota the fifth-highest tax state in the nation. But the hike paid for an arsenal of new programs. The same day Dayton signed the tax bill, he also approved a $429 million jobs bill. "He was unswayed by the consultants in the Democratic Party who were counseling Democrats to go to the middle to avoid the tax and spend label that is put on Democrats," says Jacobs, the University of Minnesota political scientist.
"Back when I first raised [the idea of] taxes on the richest Minnesotans in 2009," Dayton says, "it was considered the kiss of death among even the Democratic political establishment of the country." That might not have been the accepted wisdom, but Dayton now brags that he "won because of that issue," and that "politically it was the right thing to do."
And that's why I'm happy I live in Minnesota instead of a Republican state like Wisconsin or Kansas or Alabama. Things are good. We have a balanced budget and we're not taking benefits away from the poor and disabled and old people. And, as Garrison Keillor would say, all the children are above average.