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: 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. Blue state politicians—Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Wendell Anderson—pushed for progressive policies in a country scandalized by Watergate. Even then, though, the DFL and GOP could often work together for “the broad middle,” says Mitchell Hamline Law School professor David A. Schultz in his book Presidential Swing States. HUMPHREY PORTRAIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHY DIVISION; FISCHBACH PORTRAIT: