The Magazine

A HYBRID GROWS IN ST. PAUL

Jan 5, 1998, Vol. 3, No. 16 • By BARRY CASSELMAN
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THE REELECTION OF NORM COLEMAN as mayor of St. Paul passed almost unnoticed in the national coverage of November's races. First elected as a Democrat in 1993, Coleman switched parties a year ago. Yet he never caught the eye of Beltway pundits. The national media paid attention to just two East Coast governors' races and a lone U.S. House contest -- while out in Minnesota, people were beginning to say that Norm Coleman was the most charismatic politician since Hubert Humphrey and might be the state's next governor.


Coleman's success as a Republican -- he took 59 percent of the vote -- is a departure for St. Paul, long a stereotypical liberal Midwestern city. Its voters had elected few Republicans -- none as mayor -- for thirty years. The first time Coleman, then an assistant state attorney general, ran for the Democratic nomination for mayor, in 1989, he lost to a liberal city councilman whose base was the powerful neighborhood organizations. But St. Paul's fortunes were sagging -- its population declining, its downtown crumbling, its businesses fleeing the city's high taxes and labor strife. Traditional liberal solutions had clearly failed. Increasingly conservative, Coleman upset the liberal-endorsed candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1993. And this time, he won.


In his first term, Coleman took some effective steps to halt St. Paul's decline. Yet neither local nor state Democrats (their proper name in Minnesota is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, or DFL) were impressed. On many issues, Coleman was diverging from the party line.

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