Interesting read. Hillary won Minnesota by only 44,000 votes and it was Minneapolis-St. Paul that carried the state for her. Minnesota could likely end up in the red column by the next presidential election.
One of the most underreported stories of this year’s election cycle was how darn close the race finished in Minnesota for Donald Trump.
Yes, Minnesota.
The president-elect did not win the North Star State on Election Day, but he was 44,000 votes shy in a state he was supposed to lose by a predicted 8 percentage points.
That near-miss shows how red Minnesota has become and illustrates how much the entire Great Lake Rust Belt has changed. Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania all flipped their support from President Obama to Trump.
Underreported, too, is how muscular the Republicans have become in the state legislature. The GOP expanded its Minnesota state House majority and won control of the state Senate for the first time in six years.
Minnesota is definitely on the same path that Wisconsin was in 2009 when Reince Priebus took over as state party chairman, explained Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and founding partner of OnMessage.
“A lot of that trajectory has been accelerated by the unpopularity of what is called MNcare (MinnesotaCare) which is basically Obamacare on steroids,” said Todd.
In short, MNcare is a result of Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton taking Medicaid expansion to the furthest extreme possible, a move that has wrecked the insurance market for good private coverage and has served as an example of liberalism gone wild.
The Democratic Party in Minnesota has always been more populist than liberal. In fact, its name is technically the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
You can trace the farmer labor roots of the DFL to a recurrent pattern of populism in the state’s politics that began with the national Grange of the 1860s, followed in a direct line to the Anti-monopoly, Greenback and People’s Party, all the way through to the populist candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s and into the present century.