Not Even a Red Wave Could Save Them
The take aways from Minnesota's election results last Tuesday
On November 2nd, 2004, the American people gave the Republican Party a resounding mandate. In every corner of the country, it looked like George W. Bush had broken through in a way no other Republican had done since the Republican Revolution of 1994. He expanded his electoral college map and won a majority of the popular vote. He won 31 out of 50 states. His party gained four seats in the U.S. Senate and held onto their U.S. House majority. He made historic gains in the New York City metro, the South, and in Hispanic-majority counties.
Sound familiar?
The number of parallels between the 2004 election and the result we saw last Tuesday is a little startling, but I would be lying if I said anything I just listed was the reason I started drawing these conclusions. What truly got me questioning this link was the results we saw in the North Star State because they were almost identical to what we saw in 2004.
On paper, it was a decent night for the Minnesota GOP. Trump would come within 4.2% of victory, a swing rightward of 2.9% from 2020. The State House would come down to a 67-67 split, effectively deadlocking the DFL agenda for the next two years. All of their U.S. House incumbents won re-election comfortably, all of them improving on their numbers from 2022. They achieved some of the best numbers the party has seen in generations with rural voters. If you are a Republican, these results are hardly the worst you could have asked for.
However, when you factor in how the rest of the country voted this year, these results come out looking much more bleak for the Minnesota GOP. They present the picture of a party that is incapable of making up ground where they need to, and in the process, are locking themselves out of victory entirely. While there were places elsewhere in the country where the Republicans made very important gains, Minnesota was not among them. Just like in 2004, these results are not a cause for celebration for the Minnesota GOP. Their showing should be deeply concerning, and if they don’t get their act together very soon, they are on track for a large defeat in 2026.
But why? Well, let’s get into it.
Where the GOP Did Well
Before we get to the areas where the party failed, let’s first examine the places where the party made notable improvements.
As I said previously, Trump did manage to build on his margin compared to 2020, taking the state 2.9% closer to him this time around. Almost all of that was due to gains in Greater Minnesota, the part of the state not included in the Twin Cities metro. This is where the positive story for the Minnesota GOP lies, and it’s not an entirely unfounded one. To gain a better idea of the importance of these gains, I want to compare this recent result to the 2022 Minnesota Attorney General race, which saw incumbent DFLer Keith Ellison win re-election by just 0.8%. One-half of that underperformance story was due to massive losses in rural areas, and frighteningly for the DFL, Kamala Harris replicated much of that last Tuesday. Here are some examples:
Stevens County (Western Minnesota): Schultz+26.9 → Trump+26.9 (R+0.0)
Nicollet County (Southern Minnesota): Ellison+0.1 → Trump+0.5 (R+0.6)
Itasca County (Northern Minnesota): Schultz+19 → Trump+20.1 (R+1.1)
Pine County (Northern Minnesota): Schultz+33.3 → Trump+35 (R+1.7)
Mower County (Southeast Minnesota): Schultz+7.2 → Trump+10.5 (R+3.3)
Cass County (Central Minnesota): Schultz+35.7 → Trump+33.4 (D+2.3)
Polk County (Northwest Minnesota): Schultz+37.8 → Trump+33.7 (D+4.1)
While the result wasn’t uniform across every county in Greater Minnesota, the general trend was the continuation of the DFL’s slow death in rural communities, with Kamala Harris either failing to make any gains from the worst 2022 DFL showings or just outright underperforming them. This netted Trump and the Minnesota GOP a sizable chunk of votes, effectively guaranteeing the election of all four of their U.S. House incumbents.
Make no mistake, these gains are good for them. As I said in an article last year, if the GOP wishes to carve a path to statewide success in Minnesota, they have to take steps to emulate Jim Schultz’s near-victory against Ellison in 2022. One of the ways to do that is to max out gains in rural areas as much as possible, and I would argue that the GOP mostly passed that test this year with rural voters. If you’re a Minnesota GOP operative and you’re looking for optimism about your prospects, these gains would be the first place to look.
But The Math Doesn’t Add Up
Unfortunately for them, this is where the positive signs for the Minnesota GOP end, because when you look at everything else that happened on Tuesday, they do not point to the optimistic future that the Dustin Grage’s of the world are looking for. These results have done little more but confirm my analysis from last year that—assuming the party does not get its act together soon—they are on track to continue their status as clear underdogs in the state’s politics. But why?
First of all, it’s important to stress a caveat about those rural gains I mentioned earlier. While I maintain that those gains are important, they also pale in comparison to other trends we are seeing across the country right now. For this part, I’m going to assume that Trump’s final victory in the popular vote is around 1.5%. This would represent a national shift of around 6% to the right from 2020, and if applied to Minnesota, would have resulted in a Harris victory of just 1.1%. If this was the result that we saw last Tuesday, I would have put the DFL’s dominance in the state into serious question.
But that didn’t happen, and a comparison of the swing compared to the nation reveals the problem for the Minnesota GOP. While the gains with rural Minnesota were impactful, they weren’t necessarily devastating either. Out of the 87 counties in the state, only 3 would shift more than 6% to the right, suggesting that there is virtually no opportunity left for the GOP to make the massive gains with rural communities that they saw in 2016. This is made even worse by the fact that most of these counties are becoming less electorally relevant with each passing day, with young people moving to the cities and conservatives leaving the state entirely. Making gains with rural voters is important, but it’s not clear that it will net the GOP many more votes than they already have going forward.
However, this is only a fraction of the problem that the party faces. Where things begin to truly look calamitous for them is when you enter the Twin Cities metro. This has been the Achilles heel for the Minnesota GOP since Trump came on the scene, and this election has confirmed that it will continue to be a very, very heavy anchor on their ship. To prove this, let’s go back to comparing this election to the 2022 Attorney General race, this time looking at how each candidate did in the seven Twin Cities metropolitan counties:
Hennepin County (Minneapolis, West Suburbs): Ellison+36.3 → Harris+42.4 (D+6.1)
Ramsey County (St. Paul, North Suburbs): Ellison+40.4 → Harris+43.1 (D+2.7)
Washington County (Eastern Suburbs): Ellison+1.5 → Harris+8.9 (D+7.4)
Dakota County (Southern Suburbs): Ellison+5.7 → Harris+12.8 (D+7.1)
Anoka County (Northern Suburbs): Schultz+9.9 → Trump+4.4 (D+5.5)
Carver County (Southwest Suburbs): Schultz+15.2 → Trump+5.4 (D+9.8)
Scott County (Southern Suburbs): Schultz+15.5 → Trump+8.4 (D+7.1)
The takeaway from these results is clear. Unlike Keith Ellison—whose failure to make up significant ground in the suburbs nearly cost him the race—Kamala Harris was able to hold onto Joe Biden’s margins in the suburbs from 2020, thus delivering her the state by a relatively comfortable margin. Since none of these counties saw a rightward swing even close to 6 points, all of them trended significantly to the country's left.
To put it simply, the GOP winning with these kinds of margins and trends in the Twin Cities metro is little more than a fantasy. These counties all overpopulate Greater Minnesota substantially, and with the rural population in continuous decline, this disparity will only become more prevalent as time goes on. With Trump and his wing emboldened by a clear victory last Tuesday, his effect on the party is as obvious as ever. While this may present the party with gains elsewhere, it only serves to remind suburban voters of why they hate the GOP now, isolating the party even further. Unless this second Trump administration ends up going so poorly that even the biggest hardliners in the party break away from him, there should be no expectation that the party can break through the suburbs, and by extension, no expectation that they should win the state barring the largest red waves.
One counterargument that a Republican could make to this claim is that while Donald Trump himself failed to make gains in the suburbs, that didn’t extend to many other Republicans down-ballot. To their credit, this argument isn’t entirely without basis when you take a look at the State House results. When looking across the Twin Cities metro, DFL candidates for State House consistently underperformed Harris, with five districts that voted for the Vice President also splitting their tickets for a GOP State House representative. This notable gap down-ballot ultimately resulted in the State House splitting exactly down the middle, and the final popular vote was a DFL victory of just over half a point. If the Minnesota GOP could replicate these down-ballot suburban numbers elsewhere, they could theoretically pose a major threat to the DFL’s long-held dominance.
However, this by itself doesn’t fix the problems they’re facing going forward. On a base level, even if the GOP can find a way to get closer to the suburban numbers scored by their down-ballot officeholders, that still probably wouldn’t result in a win. After all, even when factoring in the suburban decline, the State House DFL still won more votes in total, just like Keith Ellison did in 2022. It would certainly be much easier for the Minnesota GOP to score a win, but since the state would still be to the left of the country by 2 points, it’s still nowhere near its 2016 peak.
More importantly, nothing about the trajectory of the national or state GOP suggests that they’ll hold onto these gains, and there isn’t anywhere they can go to counterbalance losing them. Out of the six districts that split between Harris and the Minnesota GOP, five of them were located in the Twin Cities metro. All five of these districts contain a similar demographic profile: A high percentage of college-educated voters, higher income than average, and suburban. All of these groups are where the GOP has lost the most ground since Trump came on the scene, and with him securing a mandate from the rest of the country, it’s highly unlikely that his hold on the party will be going away any time soon.
All of this makes the DFL’s path to retaking the State House in 2026 an extremely simple one: They just have to tie their opponents to the Trump administration. The president-elect is already deeply unpopular with suburban voters, and it’s unlikely that he’ll be any more popular by the time 2026 rolls around. Not only are presidents usually underwater in approval by the time midterms come around, but with his promised plans for across-the-board tariffs and mass deportations on track to cause economic and moral chaos respectively, Trump will likely serve as an anchor around the neck of every Republican in the country. It’s not too difficult to imagine that some suburban Republicans hold onto some of their crossover appeal, but depending on how Democratic the national environment is in 2026, it might not even matter.
Further analysis into this promise only makes the conclusion more obvious: The math just doesn’t add up for the Minnesota GOP. For them to be able to gain a majority in the State House, not only do they have to hold onto every single seat they currently have, but they also have to flip a DFL-held seat. Assuming that 2026 is a favorable year for Democrats because of Trump’s unpopularity, this would mean that the suburban incumbents have to put up overperformances to the scale that we haven’t seen yet and go against every single current demographic trend. While I don’t want to discount the possibility that it could happen due to the unpredictability of elections, there’s also no evidence suggesting that it will either. Until the Minnesota GOP can make real headwinds in the suburbs with Trump-esque candidates, their path to a statewide majority remains extremely narrow.
Suburbs, Suburbs, Suburbs
Once again, I reached the same conclusion that I made last year regarding the Minnesota GOP’s future: The Twin Cities suburbs are killing them and they have no plan to fix it.
While their rural support does give them a sizable support base, it was never going to be enough to turn the state red. They’re just too small. A Republican victory in Minnesota is going to require gaining meaningful support in the Twin Cities metro, but the Minnesota GOP continues to ignore them. Rather than looking at the strengths of Trump’s showing in rural areas and figuring out ways it could be balanced with strong support in the suburbs, the party has decided to forego any real introspective analysis and just embrace Trump wholeheartedly. The result is exactly what you would expect: a party stuck in perpetual decline, still desperately trying to chase the dragon that was their 2016 performance.
Donald Trump’s win last Tuesday was undoubtedly a triumph for the Republican Party. Many predictors, including yours truly, were thrown off guard by how quickly the election wrapped up for him. Their victory was decisive, and it left several state party branches far better off for it. The Minnesota GOP may gaslight themselves into believing that they are one of them for the next four years, just as they’ve done since Trump nearly won the state back in 2016.
But eventually, they will have to confront reality and face the facts: So long as Donald Trump and his movement run the party, Minnesota is going to be far out of reach.