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: DAVID OAKES
From 1976 to the present, Democrats won Minnesota in presidential elections. But underneath, politics would adjust to national trends. Shortly after the 1994 Republican Revolution, when the GOP flooded Congress, the DFL lost the State House. In 1998, the gubernatorial win by the Reform Party’s Jesse Ventura exposed Minnesota’s “broad middle” at odds with red and blue. What had changed? 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.