Voting in Red Wing, and everywhere in the U.S. today.  I was number 362 to check in, and number 352 to check out (some were taking a while to vote), and was told it was a high turn out.  While waiting for results to come in, I was thinking about how this election might compare to the last Presidential election.

From the Minnesota Secretary of State site, HERE are the 2012 voting results.

So here are some numbers for Red Wing, taken from the above spreadsheet.  First the numbers of voters in each Red Wing precinct (click for larger view), by the time the polls closed, 8,748 voters, and in Minnesota we don’t register by party:

For the 2012 Presidential race, it’s 4:3 for Democrat/Obama v. Romney, with very few voting 3rd party, and for those few, mostly Green Party.   This distribution is significant when we get down ballot, where there’s quite a bit of crossing over and people voting for an R here and a DFLer there, back and forth.

For the US Senate race, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (incumbent) v.  State Rep. Kurt Bills (? know nothing about him?), it’s more than 2:1 DFL over Republican!  A very heavy win for Klobuchar.  And then for our Representative, Rep. John Kline (incumbent) v.  Rep. Mike Obermueller (or former Rep.), it’s favoring Kline the Republican, but nearly tied!

Looking at the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election:

In 2012, for the state, it was very much like the U.S. races, for Minnesota Senate, first term Sen. John Howe (R) v. unknown Matt Schmit, which went by a wide margin to the DFL, though not as much as the US Senate contest.  Conversely, as with the Congressional race, the House race between Rep. Tim Kelly (R) v. unknown John Bacon (DFL) went Republican in an almost mirror image of the lopsided MN Senate race!  ???

It’s been a split ticket forever down here.  For way too long, we were “represented” in the Minnesota Senate by Steve Murphy (DINO and corporate toadie), the Senator from Xcel, literally an Xcel/Northern States Power employee until he resigned/retired(?) in his last term.  And in the state House, forever it was Rep. Jerry Dempsey (R), and I mean FOREVER, well, maybe it just seemed it, from 1993 to 2006, replaced by Rep. Sandy Wollschlager (DFL) for one term, then Rep. Tim Kelly (R) for three terms.  Now it’s an open seat, with Haley (R) v. Bayley (DFL), hotly contested and lots of outside money on this race — my guess is it’ll flip back to DFL this time.

And then there’s Goodhue County, the Senate District 21, it’s a swing district…

Wednesday there are two public hearings scheduled for the MERC Rochester Natural Gas Pipeline, PUC Docket number G-011/GP-15-858.  You can look up the filings on this PUC docket — GO HERE — and search for 15-858 (15 is the year, 858 is the docket number).

Show up!  Very few people commented on the environmental review, and this is the routing case, where comments are needed — the environmental review scoping and CEA comments will not necessarily be taken into account.  Everyone needs to bring them to the judge’s attention!

This project is a high pressure natural gas connector line around the south, southwest and western edge of Rochester, with the purpose of providing natural gas to a new natural gas generating plant at the Westside Energy Station.  This would involve routing a pipeline near existing homes and planned developments.  This is an existing problem in Kasson and Byron, where that huge line paralleling Hwy. 14 runs right through people’s yards — communities platted over it, homes were built, and for new homes, there’s no disclosure requirement!  That is obscene, and should be crminal.  Rochester and Olmsted Counties should not put themselves in a similar situation.

Those supporting Trump, do consider the words and advice of Republican Ohio Gov. Kasich and the Pope, links below.

The Republicans could have had a viable candidate in Ohio Gov. Kasich, but noooooooo.  The good news is that Drumpf doesn’t have the votes to win tomorrow. Yesterday, he showed his hateful rejection of refugees, his plan to stop immigration, and it elicited cheers from the crowd — what would those supporters’ grandparents think of his vitrolic statements. I listened to the entire speech, if you could call it that — he used such disjointed, repetitive hook-laden inflammatory words, started with a bashing of the organizers of the event, outright lies saying Clinton wants to cut Social Security and Medicare — where does he get these ideas? It was also painful to listen to because he cannot speak, it was stream of (un)consciousness where he’d jump on one topic and just throw words out, and suddenly jump to another. I wish there were transcripts of his “speeches” to analyze, because I’d think, I’d hope, that supporters would try to make sense of what he says, because it can’t be done. There’s no substance. Only incendiary jumbled rhetoric of code words repeated over and over.

The Pope had a few things to say about this candidate recently:

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel,” the Pope told journalists who asked his opinion on Trump’s proposals to halt illegal immigration.

“I say only that this man is not a Christian if he thinks like that.”

Trump’s responded, of course, he is unable to restrain himself, and he responded lashing out, not an ounce of reflection.

From Time on yesterday’s Trump visit:

Kasich has for a while been alerting voters about Trump’s failings, his shortcomings, and how unqualified and dangerous Trump is — that he is not fit or qualified to be President. A former POW says it well in this new Kasich ad about Drumpf: