Minnesota - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

Minnesota 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.

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Outcome

Harris +4.2% (+137,947)

My Prediction

Harris +3.0%

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Preface

As Texas is to Democrats, Minnesota is to the GOP. In fact, I think the next dictionary to define fool’s gold should consider labeling Minnesota as such regarding its relationship with the Republican Party. It always looks winnable, and then one gigantic metro area, the Twin Cities, swallows up all hope. There are several Republican states that haven’t backed a Democrat presidential nominee since 1964, but Minnesota is the longest standing “blue state,” and hasn’t backed a GOP presidential nominee since it went for Richard Nixon in 1972. Even then, it only backed him by 5.5% in a 49-state national landslide against George McGovern, considered a radical leftist for the time.

Then came Ronald Reagan, who would have certainly carried the North Star State (and swept every state) had his opponent, Walter Mondale, not hailed from there. The margin between the two candidates was a paltry 3,761 votes. Trump was razor close (-1.5%) to flipping Minnesota in 2016, but 9.6% of the vote that year went to candidates other than Trump or Clinton, producing an artificially tight finish. The 2020 election in Minnesota was an utter catastrophe, which I’ll touch on later in the report, but most of the 2020 adjustments have now been codified into law and, in my opinion, make Minnesota unplayable for GOP nominees in presidential elections until further notice.

For these reasons, my advice to anyone who would listen was for Trump to forget about campaigning in Minnesota. J.D. Vance gave it a little attention, and I wound up putting it in the category of “leaners” (states likely for one candidate but by less than 8%), and tagged it in the 2-4% window for Harris in my final prediction (or 3%, taking the average). It is apparent in reviewing the results that Minnesota’s unserious, valor stealing Governor, Tim Walz, didn’t help the ticket in his own home state, let alone nationally, after being picked as Kamala Harris’s Vice-Presidential running mate.

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Analysis

· Impressively, 84 of 87 (96.6%) counties shifted Republican in the vote from 2020, meaning Trump won them by more (including four county flips) than he did four years ago, or lost them by less, in terms of percentage margin. Only Lincoln County in the far southwest of the state, and Lake and Cook Counties in the northeastern Arrowhead Region, shifted to the left (and all three by less than a point). Minnesota, like neighboring Wisconsin, does not register voters by party, but if it did, the state would clearly have a heavy GOP registration momentum surge ongoing. Harris won just 9 counties.

· Between the three states of the Upper Midwest (Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin), 250 of 258 counties (96.9%) shifted to the Republican right by percentage margin from four years ago.

· Minnesota resembles Wisconsin in that Democrats achieve overwhelming margins in two counties that allow the party to dominate statewide elections, including presidential ones. Those counties are Hennepin County, home to core Minneapolis, and Ramsey County, which contains the state capital of St. Paul. The two counties were responsible for 32.4% of all ballots counted in Minnesota this cycle, and have produced margins like this in each of President Trump’s races:

· Trump flipped four counties – Walz’s home county of Blue Earth, Carlton, Nicollet, Winona. Trump won all of them except for Carlton in 2016. Trump’s margins outside Hennepin and Ramsey County (+12.7% over 85 outlying counties) are dominant, but not enough to overtake the Twin Cities, which are a drag on the rest of the state due to the white liberal vote, the major Democrat minority groups, and the mastery of ballot stuffing made simple through the passage of unjust election laws:

· Harris missed out on 60,098 of Biden’s 2020 ballot count, which was so high it couldn’t be replicated, and failed to match his count in 73 of 87 counties statewide. Most of her gains were minimal, except for in Wright County, where she added 2,453 ballots to Biden’s bloated 2020 count. Her net losses from 2020 in Hennepin (-29,913, -5.6%) and Ramsey (-16,452, -7.8%) Counties greatly surpass her losses in suburban counties percentage-wise, corroborating my assessment that the 2020 presidential race was a heavily tainted cheat fest. Map of 2016 through 2024 shifts is shown below:

· Minnesota is loaded out with baked in cheating thanks to the new election laws passed by the Democrat legislature (and signed into law by none other than Walz), but it is clear based on Harris’s losses there, and her devasting collapse in Iowa, that Wisconsin’s 2024 election is perhaps the worst in the country. Most of Minnesota’s 2024 election outside of the Twin Cities resembles Iowa’s three-cycle contrast, which looked nothing like Wisconsin’s, despite a lengthy history of similarity. The Iowa and Wisconsin contrast map can be seen below:

· Minnesota and Wisconsin had added or lost net ballots for the Democrat nominee simultaneously from 1976 through 2020. That 12-election streak, with Wisconsin’s Harris net gain over Biden, came to an end this year.

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Opportunities for Election Manipulation