Not Your Parents' Minnesota: Immigration Politics in a Supposed Liberal Bastion

Minnesota was long known as a progressive stronghold, from its support for Ignatius Donnelly and the Populists of the 1890s and A.C. Townley and his Nonpartisan League in the First World War era to its election of Farmer-Labor governors, senators, and representatives in the 1930s to its later support for liberal Democratic heroes Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy and its status as the only state to reject Ronald Reagan in 1984. Minnesota was equally known as a bastion of whiteness, gently satirized in Garrison Keillor's ongoing radio broadcasts. Some pundits and scholars conjectured that the state's left-leaning politics had a foundation in its heavily Scandinavian and German ethnic make-up. Minnesota's political move to the right in recent years—Minnesotans have not elected a Democratic governor since 1986, and anti-tax politics has dominated state lawmaking for more than a decade—has coincided with its racial and ethnic diversification, as tens of thousands of immigrants have arrived from Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Mexico and Central America. Are these political and demographic developments related? Have the politics of immigration and diversity arrived in this piece of America's heartland to produce, from a progressive standpoint, a toxic outcome?