A Republican has won the White House again, but there were no signs of apocalypse here on the prairie.
Except one.
Hell didn't freeze over, the sun didn't rise in the West and the Vikings remain unlikely to win a Super Bowl in our lifetimes. Still, the reelection of George W. Bush was accompanied by something equally as astonishing:
Edina turned blue.
Edina voted for a Democrat, giving John Kerry the nod over Bush. If the city that was incorporated in 1888 and started by Irish and Scottish farmers still had pigs, they would have been spotted in the skies over Southdale.
A city of cake-eaters, hockey golden boys, fashionistas, brokers and the first enclosed mall in the nation did something it hasn't done since it had more sheep than salesmen: Gave thumbs down to a Republican candidate for president -- 16,090 for Kerry to 15,277 for Bush.
Records that go back to the Eisenhower era show no Democrats winning in the leafy precincts. None.
Not Kennedy (who lost by a 4-1 margin to Nixon); not favorite son Hubert Humphrey (who lost by 9,000 votes to Nixon), not Fritz Mondale (Edina gave Ronald Reagan a giant margin of 11,000 votes in 1984).
And Barry Goldwater, who I think said, "Extremism in the defense of shopping is no vice," held off the Democratic landslide in 1964, beating Lyndon Johnson by 7,000 votes in Edina.
Edina going for a Democratic presidential candidate is like hearing that your Lutheran pastor left his wife and ran off with a Catholic catechism teacher. You knew it could happen in theory, but it didn't seem likely. Edina was never seduced by Bill Clinton, and went for Bush over Gore by 2,400 votes just four years ago.
Still, Bush should have seen this coming. What can you expect from a town whose main drag is an avenue called France?
It was just last April that Edina impresario David Frauenshuh played host to George Bush and 110 invited guests with big wallets to a soirée at his home in Edina's Indian Hills neighborhood (no, there are not many Indians in Indian Hills). That little deal collected a million dollars for the Bush campaign. The swag might have helped the president nationally, but it didn't put him over the top in Edina, where half of the city's 20 precincts went to Kerry.
The big difference came in four precincts (4, 13, 14 and 17) on the east side of the city -- along the France Avenue corridor adjacent to the cities of Minneapolis and Richfield. They went heavily for Kerry, rolling up a 1,500-vote Democratic surplus that was enough to hold off the Republicans elsewhere in the city of almost 48,000.
The outcome was no surprise in Morningside, a cozy Edina neighborhood of oaks and comfortable homes (small by Indian Hills standards). Near the Precinct 4 polling place on Grimes Avenue -- a warming house next to the ice rink in Weber Park -- many yards still had Kerry-Edwards signs.
The Democrats finally have "achieved" Edina.
"I'm not terribly shocked," said Clement Volpe, a retired trumpet player for the Minnesota Orchestra who was bagging leaves in front of his home on Grimes, where he and his wife, Ephie, have lived since 1957. Volpe, 75, and his wife, a retired special-education teacher, voted for Kerry, along with almost 63 percent of their Precinct 4 neighbors.
"We have a lot of younger people here and they're pretty well-educated and they probably felt it was time for a change," Volpe said. "We have esprit de corps in Morningside."
There they go again, talking French.
Joni Kelly Bennett, the DFL precinct chair, was walking Morgan, her golden retriever, past Volpe's house. "Yes!" she exulted when I delivered the Edina vote count to her. "At least we won something!" But Bennett said the Edina shift to blue was no fluke.
"It's not just Edina that has changed," said the stay-at-home mom with a law degree from Columbia who is involved in many volunteer efforts. "The Republican Party has changed, too -- it has shifted to the right. The Republican Party has been paramount in Edina, but it's not as monolithic as it used to be. There are a number of Republicans in Edina who couldn't stomach what Bush was doing."
Down the street, Lisa Borgia was just getting out of her car. The executive director of the National Wildlife Rehabilitator Association, Borgia almost opened her door when she woke up Wednesday to go out and yell, "What's the matter with you people?"
But she didn't mean her neighbors: She and her husband, a construction company executive, voted for Kerry.
"People in this neighborhood, including the Republicans, are intelligent enough to know when they've been lied to and manipulated, if I can be so blunt," Borgia said. "I'm really proud of Minnesota for voting for Kerry, and I think Paul Wellstone would be smiling today."
Who woulda thunk it?
Minnesota stayed blue in the election of 2004, and Edina voted for the Democratic candidate for president. If I were planning the Republican strategy for 2008, I would try very hard to understand what is going on in Edina.
Edina is always ahead of the curve.
Nick Coleman
