The unspoken question lurking beneath the raging conflict over ICE in Minnesota is this: Why here and not somewhere else? The answer lies, in part, in the Gopher State’s unique history as the most diehard Blue state in the nation, the lone holdout in the Reagan landslide of 1984, and a state that has gone for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1976. Minnesota’s Democratic Party is still known officially as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), a tribute to its roots in the vibrant economic populism of the 1930s and 1940s that spawned the election of Civil Rights champion and Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey to the US. Senate in 1948 and later catapulted him to the White House serving as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president in 1965. Other Minnesotans — including Humphrey protégé Walter Mondale, who served as Jimmy Carter’s VP — followed in his wake, giving the state its unusual national prominence.
Despite this historic alignment, Minnesotans overall display a fierce and decidedly rowdy independent streak: They elected progressive rebel Paul Wellstone to the U.S. Senate in 1991 (and again, in 1996) and another political outsider, professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura, an outspoken critic of both parties, governor in 1998. Predictably, Minneapolis was the site of the historic riots protesting the death of George Floyd in police custody in 2020, an incident that sparked the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-police protests nationwide. When Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (who was slow to crack down on the BLM rioters) as her running mate in 2024, it confirmed the state’s status as a hotbed of progressive militancy.
But for all its liberal veneer, Minnesota is, in fact, highly polarized; outside the Twin Cities, in rural areas a world apart, MAGA conservatives hold sway and continually threaten to tip the scales. The Iron Range in the upper northeast, home to mining towns, and once a DFL stronghold, is now staunchly conservative. So is most of the west. In 2016, Trump made a big play for Minnesota, and came within a whisker of winning. He lost to Hillary Clinton by just 1.5%, a real shocker. Joe Biden, in 2020, wisely sought to shore up his party’s position and won the state by a comfortable 7 points. Harris and Walz preserved that Democratic advantage, but by a lesser margin (4 points). Overall, the state still tilts Blue, but it is closer to becoming a battleground state like neighboring Michigan and nearby Ohio, which also feature vast, solidly Red rural towns encircling a Blue citadel.
Minnesota features another major wild card: The massive influx of war refugees, primarily from Africa. It’s not well known, but Minnesota is the nation’s fifth-largest state for refugee relocation; most others are highly populated, multicultural regions, including New York, California, and Texas, which are home to most U.S. immigrants also. In these jurisdictions, the foreign-born presence has been “normalized” over many decades. Not so with the Gopher state. The stark demographic contrast of the refugees with Minnesota’s dominant White population of just 6 million people, and their concentration in the Twin Cities, makes them a highly visible outlier. And the outspoken defense of the refugees by Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), a fierce critic of Trump and the Democratic party establishment, makes for a combustible mix. She has become a favorite MAGA punching bag, even more controversial than New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar’s conflict with Trump and MAGA — and her alleged ties to an unprecedented state welfare fraud scandal implicating terrorist groups inside Somalia — is one more element threatening to transform this otherwise bucolic American heartland into a global ideological theater.
The upshot? If any state is poised to become ground zero in a 21st-century American civil war, it is unquestionably Minnesota.
