AP PHOTOS
Visualize the outline of Minnesota. Now, color it in. Let us guess—your Minnesota is purple.
Truly, there is no more apropos Minnesota color. Our NFL team is nicknamed the Purple People Eaters, and our PWHL team is purple, too. And then there’s Prince. Pantone literally created a shade of purple inspired by him, and his Minnesota-based film, “Purple Rain,” was so fully enveloped by violet that if someone who only knew the state from that movie ever came here, they’d be flabbergasted to see that our skies aren’t lavender.
And then, of course, there is Minnesota’s politics. Of our eight congresspeople, four are DFLers and four are GOPers. And what does four parts red and four parts blue get you? Ope! Sure, Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon (1972), and no Republican has won a statewide constitutional office in Minnesota since Tim Pawlenty’s 2006 reelection. But our state legislative chambers are so competitive that it’s vastly more common for the house to be controlled by one party and the senate by the other than to have a trifecta wherein the governorship and both houses are unified. How can a state that is simultaneously so red and so blue be described as anything other than purple?
“I would not describe Minnesota as purple,” says wet blanket Larry Jacobs, the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “It’s polka dotted. There are some really bright red spots. I mean, Michelle Fishbach and Tom Emmer have two of the most conservative congressional districts in the country—they look like they’re from Alabama. And then you’ve got Ilhan Omar, who could be from San Francisco. And when you look at statewide races, it is more like a Rothko, because you have these broad strokes of red in greater Minnesota, and then you’ve got this block of blue in the urban areas.”
Whether Minnesota is politically purple or, as Jacobs—one of the foremost experts on our state’s politics—asserts, a map of reds and blues, is no trivial question either, especially with such a pivotal election season upon us. Our incumbent governor, Tim Walz (D), is not seeking another term; our senior senator, Amy Klobuchar (D), is running to replace the governor; our junior senator, Tina Smith (D), is also declining to run; and, as political pundit and former Tim Pawlenty staffer Brian McClung notes, the state legislature is losing 40 incumbents to retirement or runs for other offices.
No matter who wins what, this all amounts to a moment of monumental political change and, as the next dominoes in deciding our political fate fall in the Aug. 11 primary, the question of Minnesota’s purpleness is central to all of it.
This Election
The future of Minnesota politics starts now and, purple or patterned, it’s hard to deny that Minnesota has been through the wringer recently and that’s almost certainly going to have an effect on November.
As Jacobs explains, while Dems historically don’t always turn out for midterms, that probably won’t be the case this time around. Jacobs cites the colossal turnout for the first No Kings (estimated to be well over 100,000 people) in June 2025 and the massive protests against ICE during Operation Metro Surge in January as evidence that the DFL base is highly motivated. Longtime Minnesota Star Tribune political columnist Lori Sturdevant agrees that people are outraged, and she adds that Minnesota tends to “bounce away” from the party of the sitting president, especially when said president’s policies have had a distinctly negative effect on the state.
“They want to get out and vote against what Trump has stood for here, and that might be a persistent attitude,” says Sturdevant of the Twin Cities voting bloc. “What we have just been through is the kind of trauma that people will remember. So, where does that take us politically this year? I think toward a high-turnout election.”
“Obviously, Minnesota has had two of the most significant national shocks: George Floyd being murdered and ICE,” underscores Jacobs. “I mean, that’s a hell of a whammy.” Sturdevant also cites both events as animating factors in the short-term trajectory of Minnesota politics, but draws a sharp distinction between our reaction to each, saying that we came away from the ICE episode with a wholly different attitude than George Floyd, which inspired anger focused on our own local government. She notes that in the wake of Operation Metro Surge, people seemed to be feeling good about the sense of collective action and how Twin Citians responded in a way that maybe even harkened back to bygone eras when Minnesotans would unite to solve problems.
A former Minnesota Senate majority leader Roger Moe agrees. The Crookston-born DFLer who was first elected in 1971 and was the leader from 1980 through his 2002 gubernatorial loss to Tim Pawlenty, felt inspired to a similar sense of hope as he watched Metro Surge play out.
“I think this latest demonstration, particularly out of the urban center, is probably one of the most positive things I’ve seen in a long time,” says Moe. “It was a remarkable fountainhead of goodwill and neighborliness and caring for one another.”
Jacobs predicts these current events will have near-term consequences for Minnesota Republicans and thinks the DFL might do well this election cycle, possibly even getting the oh-so-rare unified government. McClung, the former GOP operative, seems to agree, albeit reluctantly. Like Sturdevant, McClung cites the fact that midterms are almost always bad for the party of the sitting POTUS but says that this might be especially true for a POTUS whose approval rating is in the 30s, and under whose watch gas prices have ballooned to $4.50 per gallon while polling on the economy has gone from bad to worse.
Sturdevant feels similarly and also points to the overall freshness of a race with no incumbent senator or governor and such massive change in the state legislature. She mentions an old truism that former St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman told her: that the “most durable political slogan in Minnesota is ‘time for change.’”
Sturdevant adds, “Well, we’re about to have a change.”
“I think that elections are national elections all the way down the ticket now,” says Moe, pulling back out to the broader geopolitical world. “An uncalled-for war, this kind of behavior that is not fitting a particular office, some of the culture stuff, the economy. I come from farm areas. I mean, they were lied to by this administration. So, I think all of that together is going to have an impact on what’s going to happen here come this fall.”
Casting Ahead
Should our pundits be right and November does signal time for change, the next question will be how long said change lasts. Sturdevant seems to believe that the recent surge in civic activism will elicit a sustained amount of grassroots pressure on elected officials to implement big changes. Jacobs, meanwhile, thinks that what comes in the further-off future really boils down to what happens to the GOP as President Trump fades away, which, McClung suspects might not be for a while.
McClung points to the fact that Trump’s massive influence on the national GOP is unlike anything before it. He notes that the current batch of national GOP activists are so “all in with the style and direction” of the Trump Republican Party that his residual presence could be felt for another two decades after he has left office.
Jacobs thinks that without the looming specter of Trump, whenever that might be, the Minnesota Republican party might find its way back to being the sort of well-oiled political machine it was in the early aughts when Steve Sviggum and Tim Pawlenty were among its figureheads. Jacobs notes that it was an era when the MN GOP kept good voter files and recruited top-tier candidates who were psychographic fits for their districts and party—a party that Jacobs says “is no longer around,” citing the rise of a slate of mystifying statewide candidates like Royce White as the party has marched ever further right, first to the Tea Party then to MAGA and, now, to ultra-conservative Action for Liberty.
“I know there are some really smart, talented people in the Republican party who are working hard to get control of it back from the activists,” says Jacobs. “On the Democratic side, the story is really that progressive Democrats are raising more money. They also have leaders who’ve been putting a lot of resources into building the foundation of a competitive party.”
The competitive DFL foundation Jacobs speaks of owes, among other things, to the party’s far-reaching cache of voter data that allows them to give canvassers an iPad that can tell with granular certainty who they will encounter at each house on a given block, and what sort of messaging they should receive. Jacobs says the DFL has also made soft in-roads, particularly on quality of life and social issues, with a business community that has historically been cozier with state Republicans. He thinks the business community’s broadening perspective might owe to needing to compete for, and appeal to, top workforce talent nationally.
“I’m hopeful,” says Moe of his cautious optimism at the business community’s nuanced shifts toward the center. “But it’s going to take different factors: reasonable politicians and business leaders that have a focus on making a profit but also on being good corporate citizens who are concerned about the state.”
One thing everyone is concerned about is a stagnant GDP. For Jacobs’ part, he doesn’t believe the DFL has dealt with that fact as responsibly as they could have, while also admitting that the seemingly nonstop series of tragedies—George Floyd, Annunciation, Operation Metro Surge—created a challenging environment from which to enact proactive policy. Jacobs notes that the DFL’s seeming nonchalance about the GDP is a marked departure from the days of Walter Mondale and the Minnesota Miracle, when the party was overtly oriented to growth politics and prioritized state economic and manpower expansion.
“Taxes are relatively high compared to other states,” says Jacobs. “The workforce is really not meeting the demand. The bottom line here is, you cannot continue to have a liberal, generous state set of provisions if your economy is not growing—it doesn’t matter who is in power. There are plenty of states with a lot of spending like New York and California that are growing and putting their money into things like human capital and physical capital and that contributes to economic growth.”
Sturdevant agrees that solving the riddle of rising property taxes while also growing the economy and workforce is imperative in whatever politics comes next, but also sees other problems on the medium-term horizon, including evolving our environmental protections and keeping our vast cache of clean water both vast and clean. And then there’s the Gordian Knot of solving how to ease the state’s largest demographic, baby boomers—of which Sturdevant is one—into adequate long term care scenarios in a future closer than it appears.
Who’s Next?
A big part of what happens in future Minnesota politics is going to come down to who happens next in Minnesota, both in terms of future politicians and the populace more broadly.
What we know for certain is that, come November, Minnesota will have a new junior senator and a new governor and lieutenant governor. And if the governor’s race goes the way Sturdevant and some prognosticators seem to think it might—with Minnesota’s current senior senator Amy Klobuchar winning the governorship—there will be another new senator via special election shortly thereafter. That alone is seismic change in a state where incumbents tend to stick around for a spell.
Even if Klobuchar, who has been winning statewide elections for 20 years, moves into the governor’s mansion come January, Jacobs, Sturdevant, Moe, and McClung all still believe Minnesota is on the precipice of a new generation. Jacobs thinks the next few elections will see seismic demographic and generational shifts akin to the ones that swept up U.S. politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For his part, Moe agrees.
“I think we’re going to see a new generation of leaders step forward,” he says. “And you have to hope that, regardless of their political stripes, they look back and say, ‘Listen, we can’t keep doing things the old way. We’ve got to understand that we have to work together.’”
McClung notes that Minnesota history would suggest that even once that new generation of leaders does step forward, they won’t be outsiders. He says that, unlike in many other states, in Minnesota wealthy, well-funded outsider candidates might find their way onto the ballot from time to time, but they rarely win. “Our tradition really has been people that kind of come up through elected office and have served in the legislature, served on the county board, and kind of been around the scene,” he says before adding that he thinks many of the next gen statewide leaders could come from our current crop of congresspeople.
Despite the challenges the sitting president has created for the local GOP, for his part Jacobs sees intriguing movement in their state level operators, chiefly in current speaker of the Minnesota house and Republican gubernatorial candidate Lisa Demuth, who represents house district 63A, which includes Cold Springs, St. Joseph, and swaths of Stearns County. Jacobs opines that Demuth, who graduated from Bloomington Kennedy High School, is a “different kind of Republican candidate” who “has a kind of sophistication that a lot of voters don’t associate with the Republican party” and could “open the door for a different future for the Republican party.” He’s uncertain whether, with Trump lingering, she can make it through the “picket fence of right wingers” in the primary field but thinks that if she did, her message could resonate with some moderate suburban voters.
Looking at the DFLers vying for the seat that Sen. Tina Smith is leaving after one term, Jacobs notes that, despite being in her third term representing the 2nd congressional district, candidate Angie Craig is still relatively new to politics on the whole. He says Craig’s strength is discipline and moderate appeal, which could lead to a cash advantage. But he sees her chief primary challenger, Peggy Flanagan, the current lieutenant governor, as a talented foe who eschews Klobuchar-style pragmatism for unabashed progressivism. Jacobs calls their race “a test” of which style of DFL politics Minnesota favors.
Coming out of the party nominating conventions in late May, neither Demuth or Craig had secured their party’s nomination. For her part, Craig skipped the DFL convention to focus on campaigning thereby handing the senatorial nomination to Peggy Flanagan, while Demuth was present at the Republican convention but lost the gubernatorial nod to MAGA-aligned businessman Kendall Qualls. McClung puts little stock in the results of either endorsing convention, noting that both tend to be loaded with “dedicated activist bases” of delegates (the reason Craig cited for not attending hers) that aren’t representative of the broader electorates for either party. McClung says the result is frequently that the most conservative and most progressive candidates tend to walk away with the endorsement but usually go on to lose in the primary to more moderate opponents.
That said, which style politician either party favors is itself likely poised to change or at least evolve as the state and country’s demographics continue to shift, which Jacobs and Sturdevant both believe is a critical part of the story.
“Demographers have been tracking the changing ethnic and racial composition of the state and of the country,” says Jacobs. “And currently in the United States, a majority of the newborns are people of color. By the early 2040s—which is not that far away in historic terms—a majority of voters will be people of color.”
Jacobs couches this fact by noting that Minnesota is roughly 80% (non-Hispanic)white, so that sort of profound demographic change will not be as acute here, but he says that doesn’t mean it can’t be felt already in our politics. And that, while it “looks like the Democrats have got a bit of an advantage there,” prior to ICE it was “an open question as to how that would play out in terms of party support” as Republicans were making inroads with minority groups.
“Donald Trump does not win in 2024 if he’s not able to win over Hispanic voters and a certain portion of black voters and Muslim voters in places like Dearborn, Michigan,” says Jacobs. “And you saw some smart political organizing by the Republican party here, appealing to Somalis and the growing Hispanic population who are far more culturally conservative than the DFL.”
McClung has seen the Republican party’s outreach to immigrant and minority communities over the past few decades firsthand, but agrees with Jacobs that, at least for now, any inroads that had been made have been “entirely pushed aside by Operation Metro Surge.”
Sturdevant points out that this sort of demographic change is part and parcel to Minnesota’s political and civic history, citing that at the outset of the 20th century, no state in the country had more non-native born people. And that, while immigration did drop significantly after World War II, in Minnesota it picked back up soon after. Jacobs points to company towns like Willmar (Jennie-O) and Marshall (Schwan’s Co.)—both of which have growing Muslim and east African populations—as evidence of the role immigrants have and do play in bolstering workforces while simultaneously shifting demographics.
“Minnesota, from the early 20th century forward, was a much more immigrant friendly state than many other places,” says Sturdevant. “We built an economy on human capital and understood the importance of immigrants to our success story. On the Iron Range, immigrants sustained that workforce and made it the behemoth economic powerhouse that it was in the middle of the 20th century. The immigrant workforce is an enormous part of our economy to this day.”
And, as Jacobs notes, immigrants in Minnesota aren’t just human capital—they’re part of the new generation setting their sights on the capitol.
“If you look around at the legislature and city elections, the success of new Americans is just remarkable” says Jacobs. “There are really a number of very gifted new American political talents coming up. And that is, to me, going to be part of the future. They’re not running based on their religious or national identity—they’re running as Minnesotans who are going to do a good job.”
The Town and the City
Of course, the part of the Minnesota political story that’s most to the point of whether we call this state purple or patterned is the state’s increasingly significant geographic political split.
Sturdevant, who has been pondering this so long that she wrote a six-part series called “Better Together” about the topic for The Minnesota Star Tribune back in 2014, notes that the DFL’s concentration in the metro and a few other urban centers around the state and the Republican’s concentration in greater Minnesota isn’t new, but it is more severe now than ever before. She says that one of the keys to Minnesota’s success has been quality state government, and that one of the keys to that is a strong rural/urban partnership. She hopes, whatever the future of Minnesota’s politics holds, that that is a theme she begins hearing more from candidates.
McClung agrees that increasing geographic polarization isn’t good for anyone but is maybe worse for Republicans. He notes that having ever-increasing voter numbers in greater Minnesota is great, but that “75% of the vote in a county that doesn’t have that many people in it anymore is not a long-term strategy.”
“I think the rural/urban divide is really bad for the state,” adds Moe, who, as a DFLer, probably couldn’t get elected to the district he represented for more than 30 years—Minnesota’s 2nd—if he ran today. “We don’t see ourselves in it together. It would be good if we had Democrats in the country and Republicans in the center cities like we used to when everybody was in it together.”
Moe has an innate understanding of how the state’s shifting political map has hamstrung leaders in the state legislature, noting that one advantage he had during his long tenure as senate majority leader was that the DFL represented districts all over the state—from northern Minnesota to western Minnesota, to southern Minnesota to the suburbs to the urban core—which meant the DFL caucus itself represented an ideological spectrum within which they had to find common ground. It’s a trait of Moe’s that McClung appreciated when he worked for Pawlenty saying that “as the Senate DFL leader Moe was legendary at knitting that quilt together between rural Democrats and suburban Democrats” who were bringing different perspectives and points of view, which helped deliver “a product that worked for more of Minnesota.”
Moe laments that, in the state’s current political epoch, the map is very bluntly just two caucuses, urban/DFL and rural/GOP. And he believes that such massive geographic polarization is crippling to good governance.
“One truth about Minnesota politics is that we need to work across the aisle here, not just because it’s a good thing to do and the right way to govern, but because there’s never going to be a time in Minnesota where one party has consistent super majorities forever and ever,” says Moe. “It’s more common here to have the house be divided or the governor to be a different party than the two chambers or whatever. And when you’re governing in a situation like that, if you’re not governing across the aisle, you’re not governing.”
Clay Masters/MPR
A Formula for Purple
In that way—the one where Minnesota seems to now exist as two distinct geographical caucuses—Jacobs isn’t wrong that our state, at least on an election map, isn’t purple, but is a Rothko. But Rothko-looking maps don’t tell the whole story; just the one of which color won.
Think of it this way. By conventional election standards, a candidate who garners 70% of the vote has blown their opponent out and, accordingly, the map of that election will usually be presented as deep red or deep blue. But that’s where the map, and even the blowout, lies. If 70% of your neighbors voted for the red candidate and 30% voted for the blue one, that’s three out of 10 people—3,000 residents in a town of 10,000—who don’t show up on that Rothko map. You know what you get when you mix three parts blue and seven parts red? Magenta. Or when you mix seven parts blue with three parts red? Indigo. Take a guess what color family magenta and indigo are in.
Which is just to say that, yes, that geographical polarization is there, but it’s not infinite. Or, heck, even permanent. And that’s what gives Moe, who is one of those blue people hidden behind a red map, optimism.
“You have to hope that eventually you elect people who understand the word compromise, who understand that’s an important part of legislating,” says Moe. “No political party has a monopoly on all the good ideas nor a monopoly on all the bad ideas.”
Moe admits that he hasn’t faced an electorate for nearly a quarter century, and that in time, things have changed monumentally, but he still can’t believe what he’s seeing: the dishonesty, the blame shifting, the gleeful polarization, and the total lack of empathy. He says that, despite it all, he still believes that a just political process demands people behave, be honest, and be empathetic, and he doesn’t think you can blame one particular person or thing for that paradigm breaking.
He also believes that it’s always darkest before the dawn. “You keep thinking we have to have gotten to the bottom of the barrel of polarization,” says Moe. “And with every next thing, you’re like, ‘Maybe this is the thing that will finally break through and we’ll all kind of get back together on things.’”
“I tend to think that we’re better served by a divided government,” adds McClung. “People like to believe that politicians are going to compromise, but I’m not as worried about politicians compromising as I am about politicians balancing one another out.”
For her part, Sturdevant insists that even though our purple facade is harder to parse these days, we still have enough small-state political DNA that we’re closer to, as Moe says, getting back together on things than it seems. Moe and Sturdevant both cite their belief that in Minnesota, the best thing for the DFL is a strong GOP and the best thing for the GOP is a strong DFL. It’s a matter of, as Moe says, keeping an equilibrium in policy that crowds the state’s political agenda to the bigger part of the bell curve.
“I keep an eye on the legislature, and there’s some very solid Republicans who are very thoughtful, good legislators just as there are Democrats,” says Moe. “But often they don’t get the attention. They’ve got their heads down working harder.”
McClung says that that sort of good, serious governance is a north star of Minnesota politics, noting that we’re always among the top states in voter turnout, per capita charitable giving, and volunteerism rates.
Sturdevant agrees and cites political scientist Daniel Elazar who, in his 1966 book “American Federalism: A View from the States,” theorized that America could be divided into three distinct political cultures: moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic. Elazar grouped Minnesota with the political moralists—states who view government as a force for good that should promote the welfare of its citizenry and features politicians who are committed to improving the lives of their constituents.
Elazar even developed a map that broke the political cultures out by color. Traditionalist states including many southern states were yellow, individualist states including states like Nevada and Alaska were turquoise.
And the moralist states like Minnesota? Well, they were purple.
