Title: Is Minnesota a Red or Blue State in 2018? | Minnesota Monthly
Headings: Is Minnesota a Red or Blue State in 2018?
Is Minnesota a Red or Blue State in 2018?
From Nonpartisan to Polarized
Hillary’s Purple-State Blues
What Is Changing?
What Has Remained?
Digital Extra: How Are You Voting?
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Content: Clinton’s campaign never stopped in Minnesota (while Trump’s did twice). Also, 9 percent of state voters cast ballots for neither Trump nor Clinton—the most since Independent Ross Perot ran in the mid-’90s. Finally, Trump’s resonance with small-town America, including Minnesota’s strapped mining and farming communities, evidently boosted rural turnout (often Republican), while urban turnout (often Democratic) dipped, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Clinton still won Minnesota, but times have clearly changed: Obama took half the state’s 87 counties in 2008, about a third in 2012, and Clinton carried only nine in 2016. Of course, six of those nine included the densely populated Twin Cities and Duluth. But the rest of Minnesota’s 78 less populated, mostly ex-urban counties went red, often with as much as 60-70 percent of the vote. Another dint to its blue reputation: Minnesota as a whole leans only 1 percent more Democratic than the U.S. based on the last two presidential cycles, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index. True blue juggernauts—California, New York, and Massachusetts—clock in at 12 percent.