The president's visit to Minneapolis last night was the occasion of 10,000 news spots on the question: Can Trump turn Minnesota red in 2020? I think the chance of that is less than the Twins' chance of winning the World Series was at the start of the playoffs—in words, "nonnegligible" but less than merely "small." The universally poor analysis that's rushed into service to hype the prospect is perhaps the best sign that there is more hype than prospect. In one spot I saw, the question was framed as, on the one hand, the Democrats' 11-game winning streak in Minnesota (Nixon, in his 1972 landslide, was the last Republican to win here), and, on the other, the fact that in the 2018 midterms, when congressional seats were turning from red to blue across the country, Republicans turned two of Minnesota's eight seats from blue to red. I guess this passes for "balanced" reporting, but both points are super lame.
The winning streak argument is like the sports guys who say that college football team A is a big underdog in Saturday's rivalry game because team B has won for the last ten years in a row. The result of last year's game might have some predictive value, but once you're back more than a couple of years, who cares? Different coaches, different players, different programs, all circumstances altered. Those who think of Minnesota as some kind of liberal outpost aren't keeping up with the times. In 2016, Trump lost the national popular vote by a little more than 2%, and he lost Minnesota by a little less than 2%, so Minnesota was a little more Republican than the country as a whole. It doesn't matter at all that 35 years ago Minnesota was the only state carried by Walter Mondale, a Minnesotan, in Reagan's landslide reelection—a somewhat fluky circumstance without which Minnesota would not own "the longest current Democratic winning streak in presidential elections." (Though it wouldn't matter what happened 35 years ago even if what happened 35 years ago wasn't sort of fluky.)
The argument about a couple of congressional districts flipping from blue to red has the merit at least of relating to recent history, but it studiously avoids the forest in order to contemplate two trees. Yes, Republicans picked up two largely rural districts, one in northeastern Minnesota and one that runs along the entire length of the Iowa border, but, since the Dems gained two suburban seats in the Twin Cities metro, the net result was a wash. I think it's pretty obvious that these outcomes say nothing about who is likely to win a statewide election and a lot about how the partisan divide, in Minnesota as everywhere else, is increasingly geographic, with the Republicans gaining strength in their rural strongholds while losing suburban voters to the Democrats. The above map, which shows the result of the 2016 presidential election in Minnesota by county, is stark visual evidence of this fact. Although Clinton carried the state by around 45,000 votes, Trump outpolled her in 78 of the 87 counties. Clinton's nine counties, however, included six of the eight largest, and she lapped Trump in the two behemoths, Hennepin (centered on Minneapolis) and Ramsey (centered on St Paul). Close to a quarter of the statewide ballots were cast in Hennepin County, where Clinton defeated Trump by 63-28 percent, amassing a raw vote margin of 237,000. She padded this by another 107,000 in Ramsey County, which she carried by 65-26 percent. If I had to guess whether a Minnesotan voted for Trump or Clinton from their answer to a single yes-no demographic question, I think I'd dispense with race, gender, income, education, and religious affiliation (if any), in order to ask, simply: Does the county in which you live have a population of at least 175,000? (The figure is strategically selected in order to exclude Stearns County, population of about 160,000, in the very conservative central part of the state, while including St Louis County, population of just under 200,000 and home to the city of Duluth.)
The rather obvious way to gauge how these shifts shake out in a statewide race is to look at the results of recent statewide races. In the 2018 midterms, there were six, and the Democrats won all of them. Amy Klobuchar won reelection to her Senate seat in a landslide. None of the other five were particularly close, and there wasn't much variation, either. The Republican candidate's share of the vote, for example, ranged from a low of 42% to a high of 45%, which, considering that we're looking at five different races (and excluding one in which the Republican was wiped out by a popular Democratic incumbent), suggests quite a low ceiling. Trump received 44.9% of the vote in 2016, so the view that he's some kind of electoral dynamo poised to outperform other Republicans seems doubtful. In the latest poll by Morning Consult, which tracks month-by-month the presidential approval rate within all 50 states, 43% of Minnesotans approved of Trump's job performance, and 54% disapproved.
Maybe Trump came to Minneapolis because he's privy to super top-secret information indicating impeachment is giving him a boost and he will win Minnesota if he talks enough about Joe Biden kissing Barack Obama's ass. It's also possible that he's a dipshit and this is just wishful thinking. His rallies have to be somewhere, and there are 20,000 dead-enders in every state.
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