Gov. Mark Dayton enters the home stretch of his first re-election bid and his last statewide campaign with a lengthy liberal record and a 100 percent name recognition factor.
The 67-year-old Democrat's first statewide race was in the 1982 - more than 30 years ago - when he unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate. He later served one term as Minnesota state auditor and one term as U.S. Senator.
A recent Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found that his opponent, Republican Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson, is unknown to at least a third of likely voters, while another 40 percent had no opinion of him.
In an interview at the Brainerd Dispatch Thursday, Dayton said he wouldn't run for state office again and he didn't spend time worrying about how his opponent might bolster his name recognition. He said he didn't presume anything about the election, which he described as the only poll that matters in politics.
During an interview at the Brainerd Dispatch office, which followed a Brainerd kindergarten class visit, Dayton touched on topics such as MNsure, Minnesota's economy, unions and tax policy.
ADVERTISEMENT
He described Preferred One's decision to pull out of the state's MNsure online health insurance exchange as a free marketplace decision made after the firm under-priced its competitors and cornered a good share of the market. It appeared, Dayton said, they weren't making money at the prices they offered.
"These are market adjustments," he said. "Companies will get more refined" and establish their profit margins, he added.
He noted a Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development report issued Thursday showed the state's employers added 6,100 new jobs during August. At the same time, Minnesota's unemployment rate has dropped to 4.3 percent - its lowest rate since 2006.
He said Brainerd's unemployment rate was still too high at 7.9 percent, but noted that it had dropped from 17 percent when he first took office.
He said the stagnant figures on household incomes is a national phenomena. He said Minnesota ranks ninth best in the country in median household income, although nationwide median household incomes are not as high as they were 15 years ago.
"Middle income families are squeezed," he said by factors such as the costs of health care and education.
Real standard income for middle Americans is falling and wealth disparity is increasing, he said. Also, he said, the wealth disparity is racially skewed, affecting African-Americans and Hispanics disproportionately.
"The financial squeeze in middle income families is very real," she said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Jobs in the service sector have replaced manufacturing jobs resulting in a "major economic pressure," Dayton said.
"The solution is advanced education and advanced education training," the governor said.
Job skills that are needed are often engineering skills or skills learned at a two-year college. Job training must be aligned with the jobs of the future, he said.
"It's not just about four years of academics," Dayton said.
In 2010 he ran on a platform where he pledged to increase state revenue by raising taxes for high-income earners. When DFLers took control of the state House and Senate in 2012 legislation to hike the tax rate for the wealthiest Minnesotans was passed and signed by Dayton.
The governor said local and state taxes were regressive by nature and he proposed the higher income tax hike from a tax equity standpoint.
"I thought it was necessary and the right thing to do," Dayton said.
The result was the Legislature didn't have to cut its way out of a deficit, Dayton said, and it found funding available for all-day, every-day kindergarten and a Minnesota State Colleges and Universities tuition freeze.
ADVERTISEMENT
Responding to criticism that his policies are driven by a sense of obligation to unions, Dayton said he was a supporter of unions. He said with their negotiated higher wages, benefits and retirement packages, they have been essential in improving the standard of living for many families. He said criticism that his support for unions was a payback or was inappropriate was not true.
"The decline of unions is directly correlated to the loss of family income," Dayton said.
Most of the criticism he's received relating to unions were his support of a measure that would allow child care workers whose customers receive state aid to decide for themselves and vote on whether they want a union to represent them. The measure, he said, was undermined and met with resistance by his opponents, even though he said his position was a reasonable one.
If the customers of a child care facility pay without government sources of money his measure would not call for the possibility of a union vote. It's not forcing unionization, Dayton said, but if government money is being used for child care the government has a right to set ground rules.
The absence of much political rhetoric about the recently passed gay marriage bill, has "pleasantly surprised" Dayton. He said he's waiting to see whether direct mail literature will address the issue in the final days of the campaign.
Dayton said he believes gay marriage is receiving "broad acceptance" as people discover that neighbors whom they discover are gay and who were good people before they were married to each other are still good people.
The proposed Sandpiper pipeline route through northern Minnesota will be decided by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), with input from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the DNR, he said. Dayton said he has not expressed an opinion on which route is best. He said he's expecting the PUC to devise the best route. He has appointed three of five commission members but they are somewhat insulated from politics because they have six-year terms.
"We need pipelines in addition to rail," he said, noting that railroad lines are badly overloaded. "There's no way we can supply the energy needs of the state without transporting energy supplies."
ADVERTISEMENT
MIKE O'ROURKE may be reached at 855-5860 or mike.orourke@brainerddispatch.com . Follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MikeORourkenews .
