Race Analysis

10/7/14 -- Dayton is maintaining a comfortable lead. He's below 50 percent, but not by much.

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Today there is probably no state more firmly associated with the Democratic Party than Minnesota. Yet for most of this state's history, there was no Democratic Party to speak of there. It was dominated by Republicans, although they were Republicans decidedly from the party's progressive wing.

After the New Deal, these progressives increasingly aligned themselves with the Democratic Party. When Hubert Humphrey fused the party with the Farmer-Labor alliance, it created the modern DFL, which has given us some of the most memorable standard-bearers for liberalism in modern times: Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone. At one point, the state’s Republicans actually renamed themselves the "Independent Republicans" to avoid association with the national party.

But like much of the Upper Midwest, the state moved toward the Republicans in the 1990s; it is only a few points more Democratic than the rest of the country today. At the same time, the state retained a quirky character: It is, after all, the place that gave us Gov. Jesse Ventura and Sen. Al Franken.

The Democrats won the governorship in 2010 for the first time since 1986, when former senator Mark Dayton won a three-way race against an embattled Republican nominee and an Independent. Dayton starts out this cycle with an edge, although a big enough wave could bring him down.