The Minnesota Miracle Meets Arizona Stockholm Syndrome

Topic: Elections

Imagine with me, for a moment, if you will.  Imagine the most loyal state to Democrat presidential nominees in modern history.  If you’ve been reading my work, you’ll know I’m talking about Minnesota.  No Republican presidential nominee since Richard M. Nixon in 1972 has carried the North Star State, now worth 10 electoral votes.  There have been some close calls, like for Ronald Reagan in 1984, when he won the other 49 states and lost Minnesota by an eyelash because his opponent, Walter Mondale, was from there and earned the home field vote.  George W. Bush was within 3.5% twice, and of course, in a MAGA sweep across the Industrial Midwest that reached all the way out to what I call the Upper Midwest, Minnesota held on for Hillary Clinton by 1.5% and showed such a major trend and indication that it would go for Donald Trump in 2020 that he spent valuable campaign time and energy trying to win this state he didn’t need to win (which also should tell you he knew he had Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – states with a more rightward lean – in the bag).

I believe in an election free of electile dysfunction that Minnesota’s Democrat streak would have come to an end, albeit narrowly, in 2020; however, as the certified ballot totals stand, Joe Biden had 1,717,077 votes – a gain of 349,252 over Hillary Clinton in 2016, an all-time record shattering John Kerry’s pickup of 276,748 net new votes over Al Gore in 2004.  In that election, Kerry not only held Minnesota’s electoral votes, but widened the Democrat margin by 1.1% in a Republican reelection year.

Now imagine with me that Donald Trump, despite Biden’s purported gains, won Minnesota in the same year the all-time Democrat record net new vote gain was set.  Remember, Trump didn’t win it in 2016 despite a second consecutive Democrat vote decline, because he only had a gain of 3,007 votes over Mitt Romney himself and left a lot of potential support over in the third-party column, which was large that year thanks to disaffected voters from both parties.  Also remember, Bush 43 missed out on a few tight races, and even Saint Ronald Reagan himself, in a 49-state route, couldn’t do the trick.

If you thought the George Floyd mostly peaceful protests in Minneapolis were bad, you ain’t got nothin’ on the Donald Trump wins Minnesota the same year the Democrats set a record in the most loyal Democrat state of all time protests. They would make the Floyd riots seems like a time of national unity and togetherness.  But of course, that’s not what happened, at least in official results.  In the official results, Biden beat Trump nearly as badly as Barack Obama trounced Mitt Romney in 2012, despite a massive working class shift in Minnesota in favor of Trump in a reelection year - despite the fact that Attorney General Keith Ellison sent out a S.O.S. of a Tweet at 3:57 PM on Election Day, apparently not knowing Minnesota officials would be certifying a slam-dunk of an election result:

If you’ve voted, great! Can you please call a friend? Spend a little time getting friends, fams, and folks out to the polls.  We don’t have all of the votes we need quite yet.  So, help a friend (even a brand new friend) vote.  Right now would be awesome.

It didn’t really sound like Attorney General Ellison expected a comfortable Biden victory, one that has avoided scrutiny from most onlookers because it wasn’t even close.  After all, Biden’s gain was a Democrat record in a state that hadn’t voted for a GOP presidential nominee in 48 years (since Donald Trump was 26 years old), and…

States aren’t lost by the dominant party’s nominee when his gain is an all-time record.

Minnesota has a political cousin of an opposite temperament.  What Minnesota represents in terms of loyalty to Democrat presidential nominees, Arizona represents to Republican nominees.  I spelled this out in a recent post in this journal: