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: 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. In a controversial 1913 decision, Minnesota actually took parties off the ballot for the state legislature. Voting came down to candidates’ personal merits and causes over affiliation. In the mid-’40s, after President Franklin Roosevelt revived progressivism with his New Deal and turned Minnesota blue for the first time since statehood, local Democrats merged with the state’s Farmer-Labor Party to become the Democratic-Farmer-Laborers (DFL). The party pulled in Minnesota’s farmers and union workers. When partisan state legislature contests resumed in the ’70s, the DFL took over for the next two decades.