Collin Peterson: Last of His Kind

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN)

Thank to a continually busy work calendar, a real-life vacation, and a cold that I'm still getting over, I haven't had a lot of time in the past two weeks to weigh in on some real-life politics, as well as some other articles/reviews/thoughts that I've had in the past few weeks that I wanted to discuss.  We're going to be a little late, then, to a few parties this week but I feel like at the very least this conversation is one that has just started, rather than is finished, and so today we're going to be talking about the electoral prospects of Rep. Collin Peterson, the last of a dying breed of Democrats who could meet his match in 2020...or once again prove to be "Lucy with the football" for the Minnesota GOP.

Peterson, though he's served in Congress for nearly thirty years (he was first elected in 1990), is not a particularly noteworthy member of Congress (fun fact-he was the first person I ever got to vote for for the House as I grew up in his district...we also share a birthday).  He's not someone you'll see frequenting the cable news shows or being a fixture on social media (his Twitter account literally hasn't had a single tweet since last November).  Despite rumors in 2000 that he might make a play for the Senate against incumbent Rod Grams, he's never actually made a run for statewide office in his decades in Minnesota politics, and at 75, it's doubtful he ever will at this point.  His career is interesting (it took him four tries before he finally won a seat in Congress, a point where most sites would relegate you to "gadfly" or "frequent candidate" status, and one of those failed attempts he lost the race by only 121 votes), and he's certainly not without power (he's Chair of the House Agriculture Committee, an impressive perch for his largely rural district), but Peterson's most notable characteristic is that he's somehow a Democratic incumbent, as virtually every other Democrat who has run in a district that looks like Peterson's has lost in the past decade.

Peterson represents a district that is R+14 on the Cook PVI (a partisan scale that judges how much more-or-less a district is partisan compared to the national average)-that's basically impossible to win as a Democrat.  Only three other Democrats represent districts that are more conservative than that on a federal level-Rep. Ben McAdams, Sen. Doug Jones, and Sen. Joe Manchin (it's harder to do in reverse-Rep. John Katko & Sen. Susan Collins are the Republicans that represent the most Democratic-favored PVI, and that's a D+3 constituency).  And the district is getting redder, not bluer.  McAdams, for example, represents a district that Donald Trump only won by 7-points (Mitt Romney's over-performance here weights the PVI for this district quite a bit), while Peterson represents a district that Trump won by thirty points.  Even Doug Jones's Alabama went to Trump by less than Peterson's district did.  This is essentially the equivalent of a Republican holding federal office statewide in Hawaii-that's how wild it is that Peterson still holds power.  

And he's managed to hold onto this seat despite multiple Republican waves.  Keep in mind that he's been in the House since 1990 in a district that has gone Republican for POTUS by double-digits since at least 2000 (I can't find historical data before then-share in the comments if you have it).  That means he's survived 1994, 2002, 2010, 2014, and 2016.  Not all of these have been easy victories, and he's lucked out by having relatively poor candidates recruited against him in tougher years (had, say, Torrey Westrom waited two years to run alongside Trump he might have won in 2016), but Peterson is still standing.

Former Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach (R-MN)

He's done this by carving out a profile that looks more conservative than virtually any Democrat in Congress, perhaps even to the right of Joe Manchin on most issues.  Along with Manchin, Bob Casey (PA), Dan Lipinski (IL), & Henry Cuellar (TX), he's one of just five pro-life Democrats in Congress.  Considering the primary challenges to Lipinski & Cuellar this year, it could well be the last stand of pro-life Democrats in the lower chamber in 2021.  He's the only Democrat still in the House who voted against the ACA, as almost every other one still perished in the 2010 & 2014 midterms (or retired before they had the chance to fall).  He enjoys a very strong working & personal relationship with Nancy Pelosi (he's notably voted for her in every one of her ballots for Speaker), but he's decidedly a social conservative who goes liberal or moderate on economic issues, and seems to focus almost exclusively on local issues like agriculture.  It's frequently claimed he's the only Democrat who could possibly hold his seat.

This appears to be true.  In 2018, other than McAdams, no one even comes close to Peterson's district in terms of Cook PVI, and honestly Democrats weren't even trying to win seats that red.  Trump got 61% of the vote in 2016 in Peterson's sprawling 7th district-the next highest Democrat to hold a seat with a percentage that great is Anthony Brindisi, whose district went to Trump by 54.8%, and is widely assumed to be the most vulnerable House Democrat in next year's midterms.  Only 4 other incumbent Democrats currently hold seats that Trump won 50% and by double digits (Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Jared Golden of Maine, & Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico), and most of them either have demographic trends in their direction (Torres Small, Horn, & Cunningham all saw their districts become bluer from 2012 to 2016) or have more recent history on their side that a Democrat can do well there (Golden's district went for Obama twice)...and still all four are tossups in 2020.  Peterson stands apart as someone who simply shouldn't exist anymore, but does.

This year, the GOP seems to be trying to best him.  It's obvious after 2018 that the Republicans can't really afford a district like MN-7 to be in the Democratic column if they hope to win back the House, and so they recruited former Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach to run for the seat, by far the best opponent Peterson will have faced since Bernie Omann in the mid-90's.  Peterson was likely a goner after redistricting anyway in 2020 (Minnesota is on the cusp of losing a House seat, which would mean his seat would probably be chopped into Tom Emmer's, potentially setting up a member vs. member contest), but Fischbach could end his unparalleled-in-the-current-Congress streak earlier if she is able to stop even a small portion of Trump/Peterson voters in his district.  MN-7 has been some sort of ticket-splitting time loop for the past decade that simply doesn't exist in the rest of the nation-2020 we'll see whether or not Collin Peterson can keep modern, polarizing politics from entering northern Minnesota for a few years longer.