Get Uff Da Vote, Ya?

FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich warns that like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana, Minnesota is trending red and Biden and the Dems need to do everything he can to hold on to Land of 10,000 Lakes. (and yes, I lived in Minnesota, I know I'm misusing "Uff Da", deal with it.)

In the fabled “blue wall” — the collection of historically Democratic states that pundits (wrongly) assumed gave Hillary Clinton an Electoral College advantage in 2016 — Minnesota is the cornerstone. The Democratic candidate has won Minnesota in 11 straight presidential elections, the longest active streak in the country. What’s more, no Republican has won any statewide election in Minnesota since 2006 — not for Senate, not for governor, not even for state auditor.

It’s tempting to conclude from this that Minnesota is a safe Democratic state. But Minnesota is much more evenly divided than that record suggests: For example, it came within a couple percentage points of voting for now-President Trump in 2016. And as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012 — showed in 2016, streaks are meant to be broken.1

Most ominously for Democrats, there is evidence that Minnesota is becoming redder over time, with 2016 being a particular inflection point. In 1984, the state was 18.2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. But in 2016, for the first time since 1952, Minnesota voted more Republican than the rest of the U.S.

And Minnesota may be even further right in 2020. According to the current2 FiveThirtyEight forecast, Joe Biden is on track to defeat Trump by 4.2 points in Minnesota — 1.9 points better for Trump than our forecast for the national popular vote.

What explains Minnesota’s rightward shift? Fifty-three percent of the population age 25 and older are non-Hispanic white and lack a bachelor’s degree, a demographic with which Republicans — and especially Trump — have been gaining ground. Historically, though, Minnesota’s predominantly white, working-class population has actually been quite progressive: The state’s many German and Scandinavian immigrants (the biggest ethnic groups in Minnesota are German Americans, at 33 percent of the population, and Norwegian Americans, at 15 percent) brought with them their progressive values and faith in government, and its active labor movement (in 1983, more than 23 percent of Minnesota employees were members of a union) rallied blue-collar workers around the Democratic Party. In fact, Minnesota’s Democratic Party isn’t called the Democratic Party at all — it is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, reflecting its historical growth out of those two constituencies.

But in recent elections, Democrats’ pro-environment and anti-gun positions have alienated these voters in places like the Iron Range, an ancestrally Democratic mining region, and in 2016 Trump was able to tap into their racial and economic grievances as well. Democrats went from carrying Minnesota by 7.7 points in 2012 to carrying it by just 1.5 in 2016. Tellingly, the counties that shifted the most toward Trump were also the counties with the highest concentrations of white people without a college degree.

Demographics, demographics, demographics.  While Texas, Florida, Georgia, and NC are red heading for purple, the Upper Midwest is trending older, whiter, and towards the GOP. Trump came within 1.5% of taking Minnesota, and the state's been trending red for the last several years.

I hate to say it, but Biden has to win the state. A 4.2% win would definitely be a good thing, but if I'm Trump, I'm playing my cards here.

Look at it this way: if the only changes from 2016 are that Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but he loses Minnesota in a nail-biter, Trump still wins 270-268.

Yeah, I'm worried. All of us should be. Minnesota to the Democrats is what Arizona is to the GOP, the break in the wall that signals a loss.