Can Mark Dayton Reach 50% in 2014?

The state with the lowest level of voter support for Democratic gubernatorial candidates in the 20th and 21st Centuries is…Minnesota?

His job approval ratings are well above water.

His Republican competition is currently scant for next year’s election.

And there is no sign yet that a high profile third party candidate will emerge to undercut DFL (and Republican) support in the race.

However, if history is any guide, it still may be a challenge for Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton to win an outright majority of the vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election.

A Smart Politics review of gubernatorial election data finds that Minnesota is tied for the fifth longest streak in the nation in which the Democratic Party has failed to win a majority of the vote in the race for governor.

The last Minnesota Democratic governor to reach the 50 percent mark was Rudy Perpich in his victorious 1986 reelection bid (56.1 percent).

That leaves the party with a six-cycle drought – tied with Connecticut (1986), North Dakota (1986), and Mississippi (1987) for the fifth longest in the nation.

Only South Dakota (1974, 9 cycles), Utah (1980, 9 cycles), Maine (1982, 7 cycles), and Texas (1982, 7 cycles) have gone longer without a Democratic governor winning majority support from its voters.

By contrast, 29 states have gone no more than one cycle without a Democratic winning its governor’s mansion with 50+ percent of the vote.

A partial explanation for this phenomenon in the Gopher State is, of course, the prominent role third parties have played off and on over the last century.

Minnesota has had the third largest support for third party gubernatorial candidates in the nation since 1980 (10.7 percent), behind only Maine (29.8 percent) and Alaska (17.8 percent).

However, that hasn’t stopped Minnesota Republicans from winning a majority of the vote in gubernatorial races twice during this span (Arne Carlson in 1990, 1994).

In fact, while Minnesota is generally regarded as a light blue state today, a longer historical view reveals Minnesota as the state with the the lowest level of support for Democratic gubernatorial candidates throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries – at just 35.1 percent during its 44 contests since 1900.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates in only five other states fail to reach the 40 percent mark for their century-plus average: North Dakota (38.8 percent), Wisconsin (39.1 percent), Vermont (39.2 percent), California (39.3 percent), and South Dakota (39.6 percent).

Third parties have averaged 16.8 percent of the vote in Minnesota during this 110+ year span – tops in the nation, with Republican candidates averaging 48.1 percent (23rd in the nation).

To date, only five Democrats have ever reached the 50 percent mark in Minnesota gubernatorial elections: Henry Sibley (1857), John Johnson (1906, 1908), Orville Freeman (1954, 1956, 1958), Wendell Anderson (1970, 1974), and Rudy Perpich (1982, 1986).

Democratic Gubernatorial Candidates Failing to Win 50 Percent of the Vote by State

Data compiled by Smart Politics.

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