As Goodhue County shifts further right, compromise is harder to find
When she first ran for office in 2016, former State Rep. Barb Haley, a Republican from Red Wing, wrote down a list of guiding principles for her campaign.
“It was literally a recipe card. I kept it in my desk, in my office all six years,” she said. “And that one line of ‘Be true to yourself,’ that’s what I held out in front of me.”
Haley’s commitment to her values was tested in 2022 when she ran for an open state Senate seat. She couldn’t secure a party endorsement, partly because she refused to repeat unfounded claims that former President Donald Trump had won the 2020 election. She told delegates that the party needed to move on.
“I got booed. The people at the endorsement convention just did not want to hear that,” she said.
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After a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Haley’s legislative record was used against her when she investigated whether Minnesota gun laws could prevent a similar shooting from happening locally.
“That became ‘Representative Barb Haley is anti-Second Amendment rights’,” she said.
Haley also supported a House resolution that declared racism a public health crisis — a vote she said some members of her party didn’t like.
She dropped out of the race before the primary, and a far more conservative legislator won by a wide margin.
Haley’s experience within her party reflects where Goodhue County is heading politically. An electorate that barely backed Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 is now firmly in the pro-Trump camp.
Angst over the state’s pandemic masking and lockdown requirements played a role. So did the response to the unrest following George Floyd’s murder and subsequent calls to defund the police.
Goodhue County’s evolution from a moderately conservative area to a deeper red region is also a window into broader political trends that track along stark geographic lines, said Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.
Rural areas have become more Republican, while Democrats are “sorting into suburban and urban areas,” said Jacobs. The result is more political polarization.
“Minnesota is catching up with the rest of the country,” he said.
‘One crisis to another’
In 2016, when Haley first ran for office, Goodhue County’s shift further right had already begun — voters favored Trump by nearly 18 percentage points in the presidential election.
She also won by a wide margin over her DFL opponent in a region that’s largely rural, but includes more liberal Red Wing.
Haley went on to win elections in 2018 and 2020, but she could see that the politics of her community was changing quickly.
“You have Trump getting elected and everything that came with that in the Republican Party,” she said. “Then we have George Floyd and racial tensions, and then we have a pandemic. We just went from one crisis to another like we had never seen before.”
She noticed that national issues started permeating local politics and priorities.
The trend heightened polarization on the local level for many communities, said Jacobs.
“When I first started teaching at the University three decades ago, I would talk about elections as being run based on local issues and personalities. Today, I don’t talk that way,” he said. “Our elections are being nationalized. Most voters readily accept the leadership of their party and how they frame the election, then impose that on local issues and in local elections.”
Freedoms clash with government rules
In Goodhue County, national issues prompted first-term Republican Representative Pam Altendorf of Red Wing to run for office when Haley’s seat opened.
In 2021, she helped start a conservative group where members shared concerns about the 2020 election results.
The government’s response to the pandemic was a big topic, too, said Altendorf. Statewide lockdowns and mask mandates were at odds with the values that define her rural community, like the freedom to make individual decisions.
“I was very concerned about ‘What are we doing to the kids with masking?’ So I went to some school board meetings, and I was just asking simple questions,” Altendorf said.
She found the answers unsatisfactory, driven — in her view — more by government overreach than scientific certainty.
Other conservatives in the district who felt the same way began scrutinizing the voting records of their elected GOP officials, she said.
“They found that even though this is a Republican, sitting in the seat, some of these issues, they’re not aligning with my values,” said Altendorf.
‘It’s a full contact sport’
Localizing national issues is effective because it motivates voters, said Goodhue County GOP activist Jack Schlichting.
Among Republicans in his region, he said the prevailing feeling has been that their views aren’t valued in local government — even as they have the political upper hand in the county.
“I would drive by and I’d see a Trump flag in 2016, and I’m like ‘OK, great,’” he said. “But the thought that if I vote for the top of the ticket every four years, then I can go fishing and hunting and I don’t have to worry about anything else, it’s like, ‘Well, no, it’s a full contact sport.’”
Schlichting and other conservative activists point to the firing of Red Wing’s police chief in 2021 as an example of how the national political tenor on an issue can motivate voters locally.
The Red Wing City Council said it had grounds to fire the chief, though employee privacy rules prevented them from detailing their reasons.
Conservatives saw the chief’s ouster as a knee-jerk reaction to the national discussion around policing practices after George Floyd’s murder.
Local conservatives launched an unsuccessful attempt to recall council members involved in the decision. In 2022, some of those recall organizers won council seats.
Then-City Council president Becky Norton, who supported firing the chief, said the episode made for an unusually polarizing reelection campaign in 2022 — a year when Goodhue County also saw above average turnout for an off-year election.
“It was just a really polarized environment,” she said. “There was a lot of misinformation in the community. Some letters that were sent out were filled with misinformation about some of the candidates. It wasn’t trying to run on who you are, it was trying to win, for some candidates, by knocking down the opponent.”
Norton won her reelection campaign.
Goodhue County’s more conservative representation at the Legislature has also had a big effect on local issues, said Evan Brown, a Red Wing city council member.
Once smooth discussions around bonding projects are now filled with rancor, he said.
“It’s not a working relationship. It’s not about, ‘Are there projects that you think are worthwhile?’ It’s an ideological litmus test,” said Brown.
Reflecting on her time in the Legislature, Barb Haley says she doesn’t regret standing behind her values, even if they made her a pariah within her own party.
“Can you disagree and still be civil and polite? That changed really rapidly,” she said.
She said the moderate middle, which she considers herself a part of, is exhausted by political division, leaving a vacuum for extremes on the left and right.
Haley said she hopes voters will eventually demand a move back to a middle ground.