Title: Why do national polling analysts think Minnesota is a swing state? | MinnPost
Headings: Why do national polling analysts think Minnesota is a swing state?
News
Why do national polling analysts think Minnesota is a swing state?
Limited data
‘Might be a swing state’
Getting (relatively) less blue
Minnesota's Partisan Voter Index
Demographics
Greta Kaul

Content: When you have a big enough Democratic margin, (they) can peel it off.” ( Obama won North Carolina in 2008, but lost it in 2012.) Remember, too, that despite its track record on presidential elections, Minnesota isn’t all blue. The Minnesota governor’s office and the state House and Senate have switched party control in recent years. Minnesota’s congressional delegation is split, though weighted toward Democrats — there are five Democrats and three Republicans in the House and two Democrats in the Senate. If this were a different year, we might expect to see the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates running closer to neck-and-neck. If a strong Republican candidate ran for president, Byler thinks they’d have a shot of breaking Democrats’ winning streak in Minnesota. Article continues after advertisement
Demographics
That candidate is probably not Trump: while it makes sense that Minnesota, as a less racially diverse state, would be a target for a Republican candidate (Minnesota is 85 percent white, and white people have become more solidly Republican in recent years, according to Gallup ), Trump has struggled to make inroads with white, college-educated voters, of which there are many in Minnesota, Byler said. How votes are changing based on college degrees and race — both predictors of how people will vote — is something FiveThirtyEight has been looking into.