Politics of Minnesota
Minnesotans have voted for Democratic presidential candidates ever since 1976, more times consecutively than any other state outside of the South, and longer than any other ongoing streak.
Minnesota and the District of Columbia were the only electoral votes not won by incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
[citation needed] Historically, Republicans have come close to winning Minnesota—Ronald Reagan lost by a small margin in 1984, and Donald Trump was defeated by 44,593 votes in 2016.
Trump's near-win has motivated the GOP to invest heavily in the state, matching resources allocated to other key Midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
[citation needed] However, in the 2010 mid-terms, the 8th district, a Democratic stronghold for decades in the Iron Range, elected Republican Chip Cravaack over long-time incumbent Jim Oberstar, splitting the delegation again, 4 to 4.
Trump's near-win has motivated the GOP to invest heavily in the state, matching resources allocated to other key Midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In 1959, the legislature passed a map which made minor changes, notably preserving the districts in Southeastern, Central, and Northeastern Minnesota.
[10] In 2020, The Washington Post released an article that categorized the state into five regions based on political attitudes: Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the suburban regions of those two cities, the Iron Range, a section of southeastern Minnesota, and the remaining parts of the state (dubbed "Greater Minnesota").
[12] Greater Minnesota is a largely rural area that saw a significant swing toward Republicans in 2016, with Trump carrying every county.
The moderate Reform Party was able to elect the former mayor of Brooklyn Park, and former professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura to the governorship in 1998.
Since the early 1960s, the state's congressional districts have been drawn by a judicial panel due to the legislature's failure to enact a redistricting plan after every decennial census.
He was a delegate to the Fifth International Conference of American States at Santiago, Chile in 1923, and served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom from 1923 to 1925.
In 1928, he was awarded the Freedom of the City in Dublin, Ireland and in 1929 the government of France made him a member of the Legion of Honor.
Proposed by its other namesake, French foreign minister Aristide Briand, the treaty intended to provide for "the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy".
The party platform called for protection for farmers and labor union members, government ownership of some industries, and social security laws.
Harold E. Stassen (April 13, 1907 – March 4, 2001) was the 25th Governor of Minnesota from 1939 to 1943 and a later perennial candidate for other offices, most notably and frequently President of the United States.
At 31 he was the youngest governor to serve in Minnesota and was seen as an "up and comer" after delivering the keynote address at the 1940 Republican National Convention.
Stassen was a delegate at the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations, and president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1953.
During this period he held cabinet rank and led a quixotic effort to "dump Nixon" at the 1956 Republican National Convention.
Stassen gained a reputation as a liberal, particularly when, as president of the American Baptist Convention in 1963, he joined Martin Luther King Jr. in his march on Washington, D.C.
In 1968 Humphrey was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the United States presidential election but lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
In one of the most renowned speeches in American political history, Humphrey told the 1948 Democratic National Convention: "the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights," winning support for a pro-civil-rights plank in the Party's platform.
His anti-war stance and popularity prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention likely convinced Lyndon Johnson to drop out of the race.
In the 1968 presidential election, McCarthy unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for President of the United States to succeed incumbent Lyndon Johnson on an anti-Vietnam War platform.
He was also a two-term United States Senator from Minnesota and the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1984 against the incumbent, Republican Ronald Reagan.
Mondale also quickly stepped into the 2002 U.S. Senate race against Norm Coleman, when Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash two weeks before the election.
The first three, Hubert H. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter F. Mondale, were all prominent in the national Democratic Party and Wellstone became a leading spokesman for the progressive wing in his time.
His campaign consisted of a combination of aggressive grassroots events and original television spots, designed by quirky advertising man Bill Hillsman, using the phrase "Don't vote for politics as usual."
He spent considerably less than his opponents (about $600,000), and is widely regarded as one of the first candidates to effectively use the Internet as a medium of reaching out to voters in a political campaign.
