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: Many would not get in. Before an estimated crowd of 8,000, he credited his administration’s tariffs for lifting the area’s ailing iron industry. He urged the crowd to vote Republican in November. And he said, of 2016, “We came this close to winning the state of Minnesota, and in two and a half years, it is going to be really easy.” Minnesota, he implied, would follow two other long-Democratic states in the Great Lakes Steel Belt—Wisconsin and Michigan—in flipping from blue-leaning (Democrat) to red (Republican). Immediate reactions from news media were split: Could the Democratic Party’s claim on Minnesota, through 11 straight presidential cycles, be coming to an end? From Nonpartisan to Polarized
To understand how Minnesota earned its blue reputation in the first place, we should examine an earlier time, when “blue” and “red” had different meanings than they do today. By the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. had entered a period of progressivism. Along with trust-busting legislation and muckraking journalism, Minnesota’s Scandinavian-rooted Christian culture had sown distrust in big corporations and political parties.