Senate races illustrate lack of national issues

MINNEAPOLIS — To understand why finding a national trend in this year's Senate races is like discerning a narrative in a Jackson Pollock painting, start here. Once a hotbed of cool, earnest Scandinavian welfare state liberalism, Minnesota, which has not voted Republican in a presidential race since 1972 (when it gave Richard Nixon his narrowest percentage margin over George McGovern), has a former professional wrestler (Jesse Ventura) as governor, a senator (Democrat Paul Wellstone) who may be the Senate's most liberal member, and another senator (Republican Rod Grams, now seeking a second term) who is among its most conservative.

Minnesota illustrates a paradoxical national phenomenon — the volatility of the contented. Only a state without a coherent notion of how the nation could be improved would paint such an incoherent political self-portrait.

Unlike Republicans almost everywhere else, who are stressing traditional Democratic issues such as education, Social Security and more Medicare entitlements, Grams echoes George W. Bush's call for a large tax cut. Grams insists this is salient because Minnesota is the "second or third" highest taxed state. (According to the Tax Foundation, Minnesota ranks 10th in state and local taxes as a percentage of income and 13th in total taxes as a percentage of income.) Grams may have helped drain the appeal of tax cuts: He strongly supported the $500-per-child tax credit, and partly because of that, a family with a median income ($50,200) now pays a smaller percentage of its earnings in federal income taxes than at any time since 1955.

Grams' 22-year-old son, who last year was arrested on drug charges, was arrested last week in a New Mexico motel with a 15-year-old runaway girl and charged with multiple felonies. Grams' wealthy Democratic opponent, Mark Dayton, lost races for senator (1982) and governor (1998), and now finances bus trips for the elderly to shop for medicines in Canada. Polls show Grams trailing Dayton by five or more points.

The Republicans have a four-seat edge in the Senate. If Sen. Joe Lieberman remains on Connecticut's ballot, and Al Gore wins, Connecticut's Republican governor will pick Lieberman's successor, so Democrats would need to gain five seats to enable Vice President Lieberman to break a tie for Senate control.

Republicans currently have only one very promising chance of capturing a Democratic seat (Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb's). In Nevada, in what was supposed to be a second easy pickup, former Rep. John Ensign, who came within 428 votes of winning a Senate seat two years ago, is ahead for the seat of retiring Democrat Richard Bryan, but Ensign is under 50 percent. Republican incumbents Slade Gorton of Washington, John Ashcroft of Missouri and Conrad Burns of Montana also are in close contests.