What the election results tell us about Minnesota’s political identity

CATHY WURZER: Our top story-- election results and what they say about Minnesota voters. The state's 10 electoral college votes went to Vice President Kamala Harris, but Donald Trump performed better here than he did in 2020 in all but three counties, doing especially well in greater Minnesota, where polls put his support in rural areas and small towns at around 60% or more. Joining us to help explain what the results say about how Minnesota politics is changing, as well as what has not changed, is Craig Helmstetter of the APM Research Lab. Good to have you aboard. How are you?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Great to be here, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: As you know, President Trump made gains in counties all over the country, not just in Minnesota. That was a very interesting map that the New York Times had here this morning. What do you see as being a major shift in politics here in Minnesota? What popped out at you?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Well, what really popped out at me was that nationally, while we saw this huge sort of tidal wave of a change with Trump winning the electoral college, Trump winning the popular vote, Republicans gaining control of the Senate and possibly the US House-- so huge changes nationally-- and I think here in Minnesota, it's easy to think, well, that must mean there are huge changes here too. But I kind think of it as we saw a tidal wave nationally, but we saw kind of a ripple here in Minnesota.

CATHY WURZER: OK. But he made gains in greater Minnesota, as I mentioned. Those are pretty impressive gains outstate.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: And I think things like, there are more and more maps coming out as we continue to parse the data, including the map there in the New York Times that you mentioned. And I think what it's important for listeners to think about is that when you look at those maps and how much red there is on those maps, it really represents geography more than population. And so it looks like all of Minnesota shifted to the right, which it did. But those shifts are relatively small.

And those shifts, especially in urban areas, were pretty tiny. And then on top of this, it's also the case that many rural counties, as we know, we've covered demographics with you in the past-- many counties, rural counties in Minnesota, are either losing population or kind of staying the same. And so even though if they're shifting right, they're losing voters-- there's yet a lot to parse in these data.

But I think the overall point is that Donald Trump got 45% in both 2016 and 2020 here in Minnesota. And this year, he got 47%. So there's a 2% shift-- again, not a tidal wave.

CATHY WURZER: What was interesting, though, to see-- of course, I've covered politics for a very long time in the state-- and we've been watching the trend, especially on the Iron Range, which was traditionally blue, to red. That's been in motion for nearly 10 years or so, if that.

And I see Republicans flip several seats in the state House. The Range is now under full Republican control. Try to explain what's happening there.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah. I think you probably could explain it just as well, if not better. But we did put together a map of Minnesota House races coming up to the election, where we shaded races either red or blue, and then we shaded the ones that were pretty close as pink.

And so up on the Iron Range and in the Arrowhead region outside of Duluth, that's where there were still a lot of pink-- very close races in the last Minnesota House election a couple of years ago. And there was one very light blue race. And that was 7B, I believe.

And that one was flipped this year. So that was a very close race two years ago, won by less than 3 percentage points. This time, the Republican won by nearly 13 points. So, yeah, you're right. There has been a change.

And even though I said just a minute ago, we've had a ripple of a change here in Minnesota-- well, those ripples, over time, they can erode the shoreline, so to speak, and change things quite dramatically. And so that's what we've seen, I think, up on the Iron Range is that continued ripples and continued changes. And now, that's shifted solidly from blue to red.

CATHY WURZER: Of course, there's also ripples that have occurred. And I'm thinking the third congressional district pops out at me, specifically West Metro area there. Gosh, for years and years, it was represented by moderate Republicans-- Jim Ramstad comes to mind, Eric Paulson. And now, it's been represented by Dean Phillips and now Kelly Morrison. So that's an interesting congressional district to look at.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, it really was. And it sort of surprised me that, being an open seat, that more attention wasn't placed there. But the political consultants, I guess, are not dumb. They can read the tea leaves as well.

And our new representative from that area won with 58% of the vote-- and so extremely similar result to what we saw Phillips win by just two years ago. So I think we can safely say that that district now is, at least for the time being, a safe blue district.

And, really, all of the congressional races for Minnesota's eight districts looked extremely similar to what they did two years ago. Probably the biggest exception was in Angie Craig's race, where she won by a larger margin this year than she did two years ago. There was a lot of money, a lot of importance placed on that one. And she did safely defend that, and made some gains.

CATHY WURZER: Say, I'm not going to dump on pollsters here, but I do have to ask you this question. I wonder if people like Ann Selzer need to hang it up. Being off 16 points in that Iowa poll, that's kind of eye-opening. And what do you make of the accuracy of the polls?

Trump's first win in 2016, the polls were wrong then. And, really, how accurate were they this year, when you look at it all?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Well, yeah, here I am again in the position of being the defender of--

CATHY WURZER: Sorry.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Of polls. And, actually, I'm happy to do it. And especially here in Minnesota, I think the polls actually performed pretty well. Leading up until the race, we had Harris ahead in our polling average. We did this thing with Minnesota Public Radio News called Minnesota Poll Watch.

CATHY WURZER: Yes.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: And the average lead that she had was 6.5 percentage points over Trump-- really close to what the actual result was here. And I'll just say that Ann Selzer and the poll that they run in Iowa is one of the most respected in the nation, and it has been for a long time.

But what happens statistically when you do sampling and when you're doing polling is that these things are not precise and there is some randomness to it. And so occasionally, outliers will come out of that process. And it's just that that one happened at a particularly unfortunate time. So I sympathize with Ann. And I do trust that she does great work down there and will return to doing great work.

CATHY WURZER: So, as we leave here, what questions are going to be asking, what data do you really want to see as you look into the next few weeks here?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Well, right now, I'm going to be working with Regina Medina on the news team to continue to look at these county-level races and continue to parse things. One of the big surprises that we really need to wait to come out of this was how different racial and ethnic groups voted. With Trump winning so strongly among Latino males nationally, we'll have to take a look at how things have shifted here for different communities.

As we all know, communities of color are the growing communities throughout the state, both in rural and urban areas, and kind of parsing the vote there and the directions things will go. That'll be really interesting to look at over coming days and weeks.

CATHY WURZER: You are right. Yeah. Craig, thank you for your work.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Craig Helmstetter leads the APM Research Lab.