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: As private-sector unions and agriculture declined, so did those factions of the DFL. Social conservativism grew in the ’80s, and Minnesota’s rural Christian roots recoiled from liberal stances on such issues as abortion and gay rights. By 2016, the northeast Iron Range—once reliably blue due to a then-strong, unionized mining industry—had drifted toward the business-minded GOP. The state, in short, developed pockets: the Twin Cities, rural Minnesota, the Iron Range, and the suburbs. Today, University of Minnesota political studies professor Larry Jacobs in fact describes Minnesota as “polka-dotted.” The Twin Cities vote as blue as liberal California while some rural districts vote as red as parts of Alabama. And even now, that ground is shifting: Minnesota’s eight congressional districts, torn between the GOP and DFL by 4-4 or 5-3 since the late-’90s, could realign come November. Trump, when he visited the reddening northeast, surely realized this.