Minnesota's Other Disputed Election
The Land of 10,000 Lakes is no stranger to narrow elections
In the early 1960's, Minnesota was a politically divided national battleground; rural famers who supported labor and voted Democratic and urban and suburban professionals who were the backbone of the state's then-liberal Republican Party.
Evidence of the state's battleground status could be seen in statewide elections in the late 1950's and early 1960's. In 1956, Minnesota was Adlai Stevenson's closest loss outside of the South and in 1960, John F. Kennedy barely squeaked by Richard Nixon. The state was home to prominent national politicians of both parties; Liberal Republicans like Governor Harold Stassen and Senator Edward Thye and Labor-backed Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, who came to power after defeating Thye in the very competitive 1958 Senate Election.
Minnesota's battleground status was cemented, however, in it's tight elections for Governor, both in 1960 when Republican Elmer Andersen narrowly defeated Democratic incumbent Orville Freedman and in the the breathtakingly close 1962 gubernatorial election, where Andersen lost reelection to Democrat Karl Rolvaag in the tightest election in Minnesota history.
The final margin was 619,842 votes for Rolvaag to 619,751 votes for Anderson...a margin of only 91 votes or less than 0.01% of the vote.
Unlike the current Senate race, which is in it's sixth month of litigation, the 1962 Gubernatorial race was decided in just over four months.
Before the 1962 election, Andersen seemed to be headed for a narrow reelection victory, but the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party (or DFL, as the Democratic Party was called in Minnesota at the time) saw campaign gold when complaints arose about the construction of Interstate 35 in Eastern Minnesota. Local officials complained the construction was rushed, shoddy and not well supervised. Democrats blamed Andersen, saying that he was rushing construction so that it would be finished before the election and he could take credit for its completion before voters went to the polls. Though the story was proven false after the election, it did its damage. Andersen came out of election night 142 votes ahead of Rolvaag. Minnesota did not have an automatic recount law at the time and Rolvaag sued to get a recount going.
The recount changed the lead and by March, Rolvaag was 91 votes up. Rather than fight it out in the courts, Andersen conceded and Rolvaag became Governor.
Rolvaag was defeated four years later by Republican Harold LeVander after a nasty primary fight with the Minnesota DFL-endorsed candidate Lieutenant Governor Alexander (Sandy) Keith. Andersen became a major figure in the Minnesota Republican Party until the party was overtaken by national conservatives in the late 1990's. Before his death in 2004, Andersen harshly criticized President George W. Bush and his administration, even referring to Vice President Dick Cheney as "an evil man"
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