A Profile In Success: Amy Klobuchar (Part 1)
How a seemingly normal Democrat has created her own electoral machine
As of the writing of this piece, we are still over a year out before the 2024 election comes up, meaning that predictions are largely based on vibes and minimal amounts of polling.
On the one hand, the incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden’s approval rating is quite low, most Americans don’t want him to run, and his handling of the economy, which is said to be one of, if not the most important issues ahead of 2024, has been one of his weak spots throughout his entire presidency. On the other hand, his likely Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, not only has lower approval ratings than Biden does, but he seemingly always manages to find a way to get in absurd amounts of legal trouble, all leading up to the recent case in Florida, where it’s revealed that he knowingly held onto secret documents, likely for no other reason than bragging rights. Truly, the choice of a lifetime, and one that will almost certainly be highly competitive. While I personally believe the race is currently favored towards Biden, I also want to make it clear that it is by no means guaranteed, and faith in my prediction is subject to change depending on what happens between now and the election on November 5th, 2024.
But there is one chamber where predictions are not nearly as divided. A chamber, entirely due to how they are elected, is more likely than not a flip for the Republican Party next year. That chamber is the U.S. Senate, and the map is comically bad for the Democratic Party. In order to hold the U.S. Senate, assuming Biden is re-elected president, the Democrats can only afford to lose one seat, and with the map they have, even that task is easier said than done. On top of defending their seats in red states like West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana, they also have to defend their seats in toss-up seats like Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. This is all on top of the fact that they have practically no opportunity for offense, with their best bet being in the state of Texas, which Trump won by 5.5 points in 2020, and has been the state consistently disappointing the dreams of liberals everywhere who want the state to flip blue.
To be clear, these states I listed are by no means guaranteed Republican wins. Of all the states I mentioned, the only one that’s almost a sure gain for the Republicans is West Virginia, which is one of the most Republican states in the country. Outside of that, Democrats benefit from a wide range of factors in these states, whether it be strong incumbents, terrible Republican candidates on the horizon like in 2022, and a Trump nomination certain to drive Democrats to the polls. But with all of these states likely being either decent Trump wins or very narrow tossups, the Democrats will unquestionably have to put time and resources into making sure these seats stay blue.
However, when looking at most statewide predictions, there is one state that despite voting for Biden by less than double digits, is not even considered in the running for flipping next cycle. A state where as of now, the Republicans are hardly even making an effort. A state where Senate Democrats will almost certainly not have to spend time playing on defense. A state that is home to one of the strongest electoral overperformers in recent memory.
That state is Minnesota, and that overperformer in question is none other than the senior senator, Amy Klobuchar.
Ever since she first ran for statewide office in 2006, she has consistently been able to put up some massive victories compared to other Democratic candidates and the national environment as a whole. The amount of support she has been able to garner statewide in Minnesota consistently continues to shock, and it’s the main reason why Minnesota Republicans aren’t even looking to try to court a strong candidate against her in 2024, especially as they have other problems to tend to. Even if Trump or some other GOP candidate manages to somehow win Minnesota in 2024, it’s essentially a foregone conclusion that Klobuchar will still be re-elected alongside that.
To outsiders, this can be understandably confusing. At face value, Amy Klobuchar does not appear to be any different from any other Senate Democrat. Virtually all of her votes and beliefs go right alongside the views of the Biden White House, and she has consistently been one of the strongest backers of the President ever since she endorsed him just before Super Tuesday in 2020. In fact, like many other Senate Democrats that year, she even had her own presidential bid, which to many, put her in the same box as other Senators running that year as well, such as Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren, just to name a few. When looking at it, it can be difficult to connect the dots as to why this seemingly standard team player has managed to put up overperformances that dwarf pretty much every other Democratic statewide candidate.
But once you look a little bit deeper and analyze her entire political career, her rise into becoming an electoral juggernaut is easy to understand. Her rise to being one of the most successful figures in Minnesota politics did not come by accident. It came as the result of her mastering the art of politics in a way that not many politicians have been able to match. Her folksy personality, while not appealing to a nationwide audience, has been able to score her a considerable fanbase in Minnesota. Her aggressive work ethic has allowed her to be among the most productive members of the U.S. Senate. Her policy messaging, while alienating some on her party’s left, has allowed her to come off as a moderate who can get things done, giving her strong appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. All of this combines into a politician who is incredibly strong, one who Republicans have been crushed by again and again. And so long as she continues to stay involved in statewide politics, it’s almost certainly going to be staying that way.
But how did that all get started? How did this Hennepin County Attorney manage to propel herself into becoming an electoral messiah? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
1995: Amy and Abigail
Whenever analyzing a politician, one thing you’ll usually see is a story they like to talk about when advocating for a policy change. This is done for the purpose of establishing emotional appeal to complex issues, one that others may not have as much incentive to care about if they have not been personally affected by it.
One of the most notable examples of this is former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and current U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, both serving the state of Arizona. Both of them are staunch advocates of gun control, and when they campaign on behalf of that issue, they’ll sometimes mention the story of when Giffords was shot in the head and nearly killed in 2011. It’s a strong message to those who do not have a personal connection to the tragedy that is gun violence, and it creates a demand to do something.
Something particularly notable about those two, however, is that the story mentioned changed not just the lives of the two forever, but also their political careers. In the case of Giffords, it would be the end of her political career, as she would need to take years to recover from the brain damage she suffered. In the case of Kelly, it would be one of the reasons he started his political career, eventually deciding to run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat in 2020. I mention this horribly tragic story because, for many politicians, it’s not just a story they can use when talking about an issue, but the story that causes the start of a life-changing career in government.
In the case of Amy Klobuchar, her story falls under this tragic distinction. For the first part of her life, it didn’t look like Klobuchar was interested in taking the dive into politics in her own right. This isn’t to say that she had no connection to it, she was an intern to the then-Vice President and Minnesota icon Walter Mondale, she had frequently volunteered for DFL candidates in Minnesota throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and she had even taken a run at becoming the county attorney for Hennepin County in 1994. But after becoming a corporate lawyer and prosecutor, it appeared that she was more interested in the practice of law than being in a position to change policy.
However, all of this would completely change in 1995 with the birth of her first and only child, Abigail. What initially looked to be an exciting new chapter of her life soon turned into a nightmare, as it was revealed that Abigail had suffered from a condition making her unable to swallow, which meant that she would have to be fed from a feeding tube for three years afterward. This on its own would be scary enough news, one that most parents would be horrified by. But it would soon become even worse for the Klobuchar parents.
After the time had passed, and amid the shock they had, they were forced to leave the hospital. 24 hours had passed, the minimum amount of hospital stay guaranteed in Minnesota at the time. Not only that, but since Abigail had to be fed through a feeding tube, the parents were forced to go from the hospital to her hotel room every three hours to be breastfed properly, basically guaranteeing that neither of them ever got any sleep.
This event, which was caused by wholly inadequate guarantees under Minnesota law, was the spark that Klobuchar needed. The story that started her political career. The story changed her focus away from just law practice and towards changing policy in her own right. Her first fight, which would be for increasing hospital stay time, would be the first in her political life. And it was in this fight that she showed her first signs of political marvel.
Thanks to the connections she had as a corporate lawyer, she was able to earn herself a hearing with members of the Minnesota Senate, where she would use her personal story to get the chamber to understand the need to have a policy change. She would use this, as well as her connections, to successfully lobby the Minnesota Senate to pass a bill to increase hospital stay time to 48 hours, completely beating out the hospital lobby at virtually every turn. It was a big enough deal that it even eventually made it to the national scene, with then-President Bill Clinton signing a similar bill into law in 1996.
This on its own is a big enough success story. Being able to lobby for a bill in a way so effective that it jumps right over lobbyists and makes it into the halls of the U.S. Congress is something to behold. Just on that basis, this would already be enough of a sign that Klobuchar had a strong political career ahead of her. But that isn’t even the full story. During the process, there was a fight over one part of the bill that showed off her political skills even past what I’ve presented to you.
The fight in question was for when the bill was to be implemented. Of course, the lobbyists sought to delay the bill, effectively giving up on the grounds and just looking to minimize as much damage to themselves as possible. At first, it seemed like they might win on this one small front. It could have been a small boon that politicians in the State Assembly could have thrown their way in the face of a policy change that would go against their interests, while also not hurting their political standing too much in the process. Politically speaking, it made a lot of sense to go this route.
Of course, this was completely unacceptable, absurd, and totally pointless. It served as nothing more than the last cry of hospital lobbyists who had completely failed to use their influence to stop a much-needed reform from getting through. It symbolized them completely giving up on winning the fight, and out of spite, trying to make the fight something more akin to a wash. In this fight, Klobuchar could have chosen to let loose and allow them to have a crumb. She and her allies had already basically won the war, so it wasn’t like giving them this would really change the broader picture.
To her credit, however, she didn’t sit back and let it happen. Recognizing how pathetic the move was, she went all in on this difficult fight, and she wouldn’t hold back any punches. Not only did she make her opposition very clear in the Minnesota Senate to this change, but she would also bring an audience. In a story she loves to tell now, she would bring an audience of six pregnant women into the Minnesota Senate chamber in an attempt to outnumber hospital lobbyists and look good to the public.
It worked like a charm and exposed what the hospital lobby was trying to do to the bill. Not only did the effort ensure the bill would be passed in its full form, not only did it propel the policy change into the national scene, but it also made Amy Klobuchar a star in the DFL overnight. She clearly had a knack for political action, and even her political opponents on the conservative right could see she was obviously good at it. It paved the way for a dominating political career in the state, something that Amy Klobuchar was clearly aware of when she actually began to run for statewide office in 2006.
And in her second run for public office in 1998, this dominating political career would be put on full display for the first time.
1998: Going to the Lion’s Den
Her political image could not have been stronger by this point. On the one hand, she was a Democrat in a state that had been defined for decades as a bastion of liberal and progressive thought, giving her the by-default edge that generic Democrats had in this blue state. On the other hand, and the one that would later make her an electoral juggernaut, she had established a reputation as a bipartisan moderate driven by legislative success on popular issues. The hospital stay reform she successfully pushed through, despite not even being a politician, had given the people in Minnesota proof that she was good at doing this.
For most politicians, this strong reputation would not stick around for the long haul. This can be for a wide variety of reasons, whether it be controversial votes or positions they had to take on wedge issues, increasing polarization, or simply just getting tired of the politician in charge. Not many politicians are able to successfully keep up the popular image they first establish, and it was not certain if Amy Klobuchar would be able to do so. It’s an easy image to maintain when you fight lobbyists who are trying to keep their terrible, anti-parent policy in place, but it is more difficult when you are in a position to act on several other issues.
Amy Klobuchar, now a star in the state, would use that newfound image to once again run for Hennepin County Attorney in 1998. It was, for all intents and purposes, her first real run for office, as her 1994 run would be abruptly stopped when the incumbent, who had been running for governor, suddenly ended that bid after losing the DFL endorsement, and ran for re-election to his County Attorney position, effectively forcing Klobuchar to drop out of the race. This time, however, he announced that he was running for governor again, this time with the DFL endorsement he had lost in 1994.
With that in mind, the now-DFL star Klobuchar was able to step up to the plate, effectively winning over DFL support by default. The plate she was stepping up to, however, was not going to be one she could take for granted. This was shaping up to be a very tough race for any DFL candidate who wanted to step in. While the DFL was more dominant in Minnesota overall, this race was considered non-partisan, meaning that any by-default advantage they may have had in the state would not be able to help her.
On top of this, the Republicans had settled on an extremely strong candidate, Sheryl Ramstad Hvass. She was well-known in the area, being the president of the Minnesota State Bar Association, the sister of sitting congressman Jim Ramstad who represented the Hennepin County suburbs and exurbs, and experience being a federal prosecutor, public defender, and judge. Adding on the fact that she was ten years older than the 38-year-old newcomer Klobuchar, and she was by all accounts, a very strong recruit by the GOP, and one that would be extremely difficult to beat.
This is an example of a race where a person with weak political instincts would falter. Even someone with more neutral or decent political instincts may very well have also seen themselves lose to such a strong recruit. Even for a party star like Klobuchar, this was a race where at the start, she was the favorite to lose. It became clear early on that she would not have the advantage in cash compared to her Republican opponent, partly due to her refusal to take money from criminal defense funds. On top of this, it looked less and less likely that her party would win Hennepin County in the upcoming gubernatorial race, which was seeing the surge of a third-party outsider who was from the county, as well as strong Republican support in the suburbs and exurbs of the county. So, with all of these disadvantages going against her, what did Klobuchar decide to do?
Knowing the cash disadvantage she had, Klobuchar would immediately set out to make the advertising battle something of a wash between herself and the much wealthier Hvass. The first thing she did was take advantage of the quickly-growing internet, setting up a campaign website for herself and promoting her campaign through online advertising. This was a pretty big gap in Hvass’ frontlines that Klobuchar successfully took advantage of. Hvass, likely dismissive of the internet’s influence at the time, did not bother to set up a campaign network on it, giving Klobuchar free rein on that front. This alongside her TV advertising strategy of going low budget and hitting on her message of legal success with simple black and white photos of her winning cases, she had been able to remain competitive in the advertising market with Hvass.
But this on its own would not be enough. The politics of Hennepin County in 1998 is not at all like the Hennepin County politics of today. Today, you would expect a DFL candidate to be carried statewide by the county, which typically votes for the party by over 40 points. This is thanks to incredibly strong margins in the city of Minneapolis, and more importantly, thanks to increasing Democratic support in the suburbs seen in the last two decades, with many of them flipping outright after 2016. In the modern DFL, the county is the heart of their statewide success, and without it, the state would become far harder to win.
This was not the case in 1998. The Hennepin suburbs, which would later become the defining symbol of the DFL’s continued strength in the face of rural collapse, had not yet started voting blue. In fact, they were solidly Republican, often being up there as the strongest hubs of Republican support in the state. While the city of Minneapolis was very blue, it didn’t put up margins nearly as large as what you see today. These two factors combined meant that Hennepin County, while certainly not Republican-leaning, was not an impossible hill for them to climb, especially with the right candidate as shown by their strong results in the 1990 and 1994 elections, which saw them win Hennepin County both times by strong margins. Hvass, who had family ties with the popular Republican congressman in the Hennepin County suburbs, seemed to be one of those candidates who could pull off a victory in such a county.
Amy Klobuchar knew this very well. She was able to stay even in the advertising contest, but if she did not make an effort in winning voters beyond that, she was still likely to go down in defeat in this race anyway. While she was going to do very well in Minneapolis regardless if she tried or not, she had to make an effort to stop the bleeding she was essentially guaranteed to face in the suburbs and exurbs. If she lost there too badly, it would doom her bid altogether. So, what did she do?
As her campaign manager and future DFL chair Ken Martin put it, Klobuchar had decided to make a specific point of going to “the lion’s den”. But she wouldn’t just do that. She would make a point of appealing to the concerns of those in the lion’s den. The first and most obvious way she did this was just by going to these places. This is easy enough to do, and for a competitive Hennepin County race, doing anything less is just political malpractice. But the second one was much more of a gamble. She would message herself as a tough-on-crime politician, one who argued that the problem with rising crime in Hennepin County was that we were not replicating what other cities were doing and that Hennepin County had to start “enforcing the law down the line”.
This campaign message was a controversial decision and one that gave her many critics on the progressive left, even as recently as 2020. While it made her more palatable to many in the traditional Republican suburbs, it also risked alienating turnout in deep blue Minneapolis, something that she was going to need to have if she wanted to be County Attorney. It was a risky bet, one that many were not sure was going to pay off.
Ultimately, however, it would end up working out. While progressives and the left of the DFL didn’t like her more moderate messaging, they also had a history of liking her advocacy and work within the party, and were not willing to sacrifice her and give the County Attorney seat to the Republicans. Most importantly, it succeeded in stopping the bleeding in the Republican suburbs, playing right into her image as a moderate unifier who was willing to lead by consensus. While Klobuchar was still not favored to win them, the difference she had made campaigning and focusing on this area would pay dividends, and her numbers in the suburbs would go past many of the DFL statewide candidates running. Even her critics wouldn’t deny what had happened here. Her bet had paid off.
Combining all of this with a strong debate moment where she beat back an insult her opponent tried to make by bringing up her Iron Range roots, Klobuchar had turned a race that was heavily against her into an extremely competitive horserace, one that once again demonstrated how well she knew the art of politics. When she was just an advocate for hospital stay reform, it was still arguably easy to dismiss her. Successful advocacy on an issue does not always translate to strong electoral results, these are two separate fields that are by no means 1:1.
However, in the case of Klobuchar, this argument would be shattered on election day. Even as many other DFL candidates had lost Hennepin County, including the DFL candidate for governor who would end up in 3rd place in the county, Klobuchar would manage to defeat her highly funded, well-known Republican opponent by a margin of 0.8%, largely due to better than expected support from the county’s suburbs vs other DFL contenders.
While it was by far the closest election of her entire career, it’s important to not undersell how impressive this was. Virtually all of the odds were stacked against her in this race, whether it be lackluster fundraising, a strong opposition candidate, the removal of by-default generic DFL support thanks to it being non-partisan, and lackluster suburban numbers for the DFL. For a weak or even just normal candidate, this race would have ended in a loss, potentially a crushing loss.
But Amy Klobuchar had demonstrated that she was not like any normal candidate. She didn’t just know how to win. She knew how to win in even the most difficult of circumstances, and while doing so, still manage to overperform other DFL candidates on the ticket. Throughout the entire campaign, she had succeeded at maintaining the positive image she had among liberal DFL voters that she gained in 1995, while at the same time, bringing in a bunch of suburban Republicans who had hardly ever voted DFL before. She could maintain liberal-leaning positions using moderate rhetoric, something that most Democratic politicians, even one in the highest positions in government, can only dream of. Even many of her biggest supporters probably didn’t assume she would be able to pull it off in this race.
But she did, and her victory in this contest would be life-changing. Not only did it propel her into a position of power she had never previously held before, but the mastery of politics she put on full display in this election would be the model for all of her elections going forward.
Only this time, she’d have experience under her belt. And she was not afraid to run with it.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
oh you really had to leave us on a cliffhanger didnt you huh