By Jerry Burnes for MinnPost.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Tom Rukavina cracked open beers with Republicans, stumped for Bernie Sanders, sued the sitting governors of both parties and made sure iron ore royalties helped Minnesota students pay for college.
In many ways he defined an Iron Range Democrat - a fierce independent, unshakable in his loyalty to the region and working class, and with an understanding of the value of the Farmer-Labor wing because he was once that laborer, born of generational laborers, and represented the region's core for 26 years in the Legislature.
Rukavina was from a different era, yet his brand of progressive populism has made him the standard-bearing politician of what is now Minnesota House District 7B. A local icon through his unrelenting belief that the "beautiful life" for working families could still be attained through the DFL policies championed by the likes of Paul Wellstone and others.
The Iron Range has both changed a lot and in some ways hasn't changed at all since Rukavina left the House in 2013 and died in 2019. But the political landscape is not what it was when the Range delegation wielded tremendous influence in St. Paul. Republicans slowly gained ground and started winning seats. Their success was rooted in convincing Rangers that Democrats from the Twin Cities metro, now amassing that same power, were an existential threat to their version of a beautiful life. Republicans now control five of the seven offices in the Range voting bloc.
In recent years, Republicans could finally envision taking the House 7B seat, a possibility that a decade ago seemed unthinkable. Rep. Dave Lislegard kept winning, securing three terms for the DFL, but Republicans narrowed the gap to less than 500 votes in 2022. Lislegard's surprise retirement announcement in May changed the race's dynamics, making it arguably wide open for Republican Cal Warwas or DFLer Lorrie Janatopoulos, with foreseeable control of the seat and control of the House possibly on the line.
This heart-of-the-Range district hasn't elected a Republican since John Richards in 1928, when elections were nonpartisan.
"We have to keep this seat," Janatopoulos told supporters before a recent door knocking effort. "This is Tommy Rukavina's seat that has been progressive for working families for so long, for decades. We can't lose that."
Warwas said being a conservative used to put one in the minority on the Range. If politics were talked about, it was an open forum only if the DFL opinion prevailed, but things changed and that change is now being reflected in voting.
"You couldn't talk about politics that worked, but the script has entirely flipped," he said. "Politics that work is open season if you want to talk about it."
Understanding the Range
There's a traditional fascination with Iron Range politics across Minnesota.
That's in part because of the colorful characters in the Legislature like Rukavina, David Tomassoni, Doug Johnson and Tom Bakk, who rarely passed up opportunities to spar with party leaders toward a certain end or privately fight among themselves because that's just what Rangers did. But it's also because of intrigue over the modern-day Range and its relationship with Democrats.
When Republicans favored unfriendly labor policies and restructured the DFL-controlled IRRRB, the Range delivered votes and seats to the DFL. Gov. Rudy Perpich (DFL) won on a "jobs, jobs, jobs" message after the economic collapse of the 1980s, and the slogan of the Range's only governor remains its central rallying cry even today. So when primarily Democrats pushed back on new mining projects, the Range started delivering votes and seats for Republicans.
The ideology of the Range that the Twin Cities should "watch their own bobber" never changed, but the party rocking the boat did, and politicians from both sides happened to be based in the metro. At the same time, news consumption habits shifted from local news sources to cable news, and now to social media - where disinformation and echo chambers flow freely, impacting engagement and political polarization.
Disaffected DFLers finding refuge with Republicans is one of the broad explanations of recent political realignment, and that frustration was a key factor on the Range in 2016. Changing demographics, industry globalization and rural population decline have combined to create a perfect storm of issues capable of diminishing a resource-based economy and quietly realigning its politics over time. The Iron Range would not be an exception to the rule.
"It makes no ideological sense because there are very clear ideological differences between the two parties," said Aaron Brown, an author, college instructor and columnist on the Iron Range. "It makes more sense in a cultural context and in an orientation context. They're oriented in opposition on regional, cultural and economic grounds, not just politics."
The factors in this trend are not isolated to the Iron Range and Greater Minnesota. They're also not a new development. It was a set of circumstances that built up over time, but the alarm bells sounded when Minnesota saw a 23-point swing of white, blue-collar voters toward Donald Trump in 2016, what DFL Chair Ken Martin called Trump's largest demographic shift nationally that year.
Trump was the first Republican since the 1930s to carry the Iron Range district. Down-ballot Democrats cruised, but the cracks started to show in congressional races. The narrative was the biggest change: Trump was a movement. National Democrats had taken the "Blue Wall" states for granted and didn't show up. For every election after 2016, reporters (including this one numerous times over) would pose some form of the question: When will the Iron Range go red?
This year will be no different. The shift nearly completed itself in 2022 after huge down-ballot Republican gains in 2020. Trump is on the ballot again. The DFL trifecta ran the legislative session, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is now the Democratic nominee for vice president.
House District 7B is the truest core of the Range. The district is home to three active taconite mines and has heavy union representation. The DFL and its politicians - from Fred Cina establishing the basis for the taconite tax model, to Rukavina's advocacy, to the funding Lislegard brought home - were critical in shaping the region. Assessing the District 7B race, with the absence of an incumbent in a presidential election year in a dynamic political climate, offers a unique opportunity to dig deep and try to illustrate how many factors combined to alter the Iron Range political landscape.
Local politicians, analysts and in-tune voters for years have told me this change in party allegiance would naturally happen over time. Their anecdotes tracing the changing dynamics date back decades, and research supports what's happened thus far on the ground. This story will explore those factors. It isn't an autopsy of a DFL stronghold on the Iron Range, but instead an examination of the pre-existing conditions left untreated by the party nationally and in Minnesota.
Since 2016, Iron Rangers have voted Republican more frequently than at any point in their history. Trump wasn't the reason for this. He instead tapped into people's underlying anxieties about how things were going.
"That's where it gets kind of tricky to figure out which came first, the demographic shift or the political shift, and I think you could say they're very closely related," Brown said. "What Trump did was give voice to a feeling that the world is changing too fast, that we can use trade policy to crush our enemies and make everything safe and secure. It's a message that's comforting, and Democrats used to kind of have that message, but now Republicans do."
The 2024 House 7B race
Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Twin Cities Democrat, was educated on the Iron Range like so many of her legislative colleagues. One winter, she headed north as a newcomer to state politics to meet with Rukavina. They cross-country skied, visited a mine, and he explained the all-time bragging right that Rangers helped win World War II through iron ore production for tanks and defense.
"I believed him, and I still believe him," Hortman, of Brooklyn Park, told a group of around 30 volunteers last month in Virginia. "I think this is a really important part of Minnesota. I also think it's a really important part of the DFL."
She was elected speaker in 2018 when the DFL regained control of the House and the foundational shift at the state level appeared to ebb from 2016. In 7B, Lislegard won the House seat by 24 points that year, and statewide Democrats, including Walz, enjoyed near double-digit margins in the district.
On that same September Saturday afternoon in Virginia, I joined Hortman on a door-knocking route for Janatopoulos, hoping to hear from some of the voters who will ultimately shape the District 7B outcome. I also wanted to see how one of the DFL leaders navigated the rare undecided voter in a changed district. We didn't find those voters. Instead it was solid support for one or the other candidate, with no in between. One woman had voted early that morning for Janatopoulos and still donned the "I voted" sticker. A Warwas voter told us she would "never, no way in hell" consider a Democrat.
The race for 7B was close in 2022 - Liselegard won by fewer than 500 votes. Two years later, if the contest is as close as expected, it's ultimately a credit to both parties. Republicans struggled to find candidates who did more than fill ballot vacancies in past elections. Warwas came into the race as a current member of the Clinton Township Board and had become active around the area on the issues. As a bonus, he's a third-generation Ranger and a card- carrying Steelworker for more than two decades.
"Labor on the Iron Range is trending conservative," Warwas said. "Rangers still believe in the value of labor unions, and they also recognize that there's aspects of the traditional DFL party that walked away from manufacturing jobs, and manufacturing jobs pay the bills."
Both candidates screened with the Steelworkers, but the union chose not to endorse. This also follows a trend. Prior to the 2020 election, I was reliably told to prepare for the United Steelworkers to endorse Republican Pete Stauber in the EIghth District congressional race, but the endorsement didn't happen. Local Steelworkers have not endorsed in that race since opting against DFLer Jennifer Schultz in 2022, who was out in front on "prove it first" legislation toward copper-nickel mining.
While many DFL candidates had already launched their 2024 campaigns, it came as a shock to locals that Lislegard chose to not run, a decision he announced shortly before the filing deadline. Democrats had to find a candidate who could compete and launch a campaign at a meteoric rate, despite being months behind. They found both in Janatopoulos, a 50-year Range resident with experience in state government and workforce development. By the time Hortman arrived in September, Janatopolous had organized and maxed out her allowed fundraising amount.
"We wanted to get Lorrie from zero to 60 as fast as we could," Hortman said. "Lorrie got herself from zero to 90 in no time at all."
Both candidates amplify pro-labor, pro-mining stances that shape the Iron Range identity, and the broad issues of the district haven't changed much from past elections. Discussions center on inflation, taxes, jobs, education, guns and how to best support families and communities.
Their approaches to the problems are guided by their respective conservative values and progressive policy visions, reflecting fundamental differences that have put this race in the toss-up category. Although the demographics of the region may indicate otherwise. It's not what or who you are voting for, it's who is voting.
The sharpest contrasts of two candidates are on reproductive rights and abortion, and around the idea of parental rights and the transgender community - issues that are both personal and relatively new to election cycles. Warwas was called "divisive and extreme" by Democrats for using disparaging language toward the transgender community on social media. Republicans are using the issue to paint Janatopoulos as a "radical" liberal.
"I'll have a lot to say when I see the vote totals, because they will be very, very useful in understanding how this district has really changed, how much it has changed and where the Range is at," Brown said. "You're just trying to read the vibes - it's not a blowout and it might be close."
Trading parties over trade
What's left of the Erie Mining Co. taconite concentrator in Hoyt Lakes will soon be the land it was built on. Its mills were removed, melted down and recycled earlier this year. The concrete was crushed for the same purpose.
When LTV Steel closed Erie in 2001, 1,400 jobs vanished (about 24% of mining jobs at the time) as did $14 million in annual state production taxes. It was one of 30 steel companies to declare bankruptcy between 1997 and 2001, punctuating the downfall of an industry that once boasted 650,000 jobs nationally in 1953 and would carry fewer than 100,000 by 2022. More than half of the 13,000 mining jobs on the Iron Range were gone after the 1980s steel crisis.
Lislegard was one of the United Steelworkers at LTV suddenly without a job, left to watch the slow fallout of the East Range communities as they bled residents and businesses. While some found jobs at other mines in the area, others migrated out of state. Lislegard stayed and organized support for mining projects behind the scenes, before running for local office and eventually the Legislature.
"It has ravaged our communities," he recalled. Aurora lost its only grocery store, dentist and pharmacy in the years after, foreshadowed by the Aurora-Hoyt Lakes school consolidation and, in 1991, when the district and Biwabik joined to form Mesabi East. Lislegard's old union hall became the Aurora food shelf. This year, citing population decline and finances, the Diocese of Duluth closed its churches in Biwabik and Hoyt Lakes. Earlier this month, Mudder's Market in Hoyt Lakes also closed.
"We're down here at the end of the path. What does Hoyt Lakes have now?" one resident asked during a parish meeting on consolidation last year. "We're losing everything. We lost our church. We lost our schools. We lost our businesses."
A look at the service territory of the Department of Iron Range Rehabilitation and Resources (IRRR) through Minnesota Compass, which examines U.S. Census data, found that mining made up 5.3% of the workforce in 2021. But the larger takeaway from the data is that the region lacks another significant industry supporting high-paying jobs that also would be more immune to the boom-bust cycles. Health care and social assistance (21.1%) and retail (11.7%) make up the two largest shares of IRRR service territory jobs, helping confirm the narrative that as the mining industry goes, so does the Iron Range.
The sense of loss in an Iron Range community during bust times, and the prolonged plight of the East Range, may as well have been the localized version of Trump's "American Carnage" inauguration speech. The jobs were gone. The mines were gone. The schools were gone. Something had broken.
Today, there are about 4,000 mining jobs at six mines across the Iron Range, and the eastern-most communities are a flashpoint of what the region faces economically. The employment heyday of the late 1970s isn't coming back. Foreign competitors took more market share with cheaper imports, free trade agreements helped hollow out blue-collar workforces, new technologies meant more efficiency and fewer workers, and the industry would ultimately come to rely on import regulations and tariffs.
"If we're being honest, in the 40 years since the 1985 collapse of the mining industry, DFL leadership has failed to change the story of the decline of the Range," Brown said. "There's reasons that are fair and unfair for saying that."
A 2016 MIT study showed globalization and trade impacts on the labor market were felt more acutely in regions impacted by trade with China. While China makes up a tiny portion of steel trade with the U.S. and is highly tariffed, steel dumping and illegal imports from China have at times ground the Range to halt.
Still, the study found that "labor-market adjustment to trade shocks is stunningly slow, with local labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and local unemployment rates remaining elevated for a full decade or more after a shock commences."
The number of mining jobs on the Range has been perpetually falling, dipping below 10,000 in 1981 and not close to that level since. Job levels stagnated around 6,000 for much of the 90s and started the slow decline to today's numbers in 1998.
The shifting attitudes of liberals and conservatives toward globalization and free trade, coupled with the impacts on the economy of the Iron Range, start to explain why blue-collar union workers started voting more with Republicans.
A University of Pennsylvania analysis showed changing attitudes over time among parties and ideologies. In 1998, liberals and conservatives favored globalization at a similar rate, but by 2016 liberals continued to approve and conservatives disapproved. From a party standpoint, Democrats and Republicans were fairly aligned during that same point, and almost completely in agreement by 2006, but Republican sentiment against globalization began to separate in 2010. The same trends prevailed on thoughts toward free trade, suggesting "those who already identified as Republican and/or conservative changed their minds about globalization."
In many ways the findings track on the Range.
The much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a Republican-led effort that passed in January 1994 with support from Republicans, pushback from the United Steelworkers, and was signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton. When Clinton was up for reelection in 1996, he won every Iron Range district by about 7,000 votes, while progressive populists like Wellstone and Rukavina won by wider margins. Even when Democrats nationally lost eight Senate and 54 House seats in the "Republican Revolution" of the 1994 midterms, DFL U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar didn't break a sweat on election night. In the 2000 post-Clinton election, Democrat Al Gore won the Range over Republican George W. Bush, but his margin averaged about 2,000 fewer votes than Clinton, a trend that would continue.
Union miners for decades would vote in line with their union or family politics, and that was dominantly for Democrats, Brown said. But the success of the party and progressives like Wellstone and Rukavina masked the region's conservative values. As Republicans started to shift on trade with more labor-friendly attitudes, loyalty to national Democrats faded and Trump's "America First" agenda resonated.
"I think I made the mistake when I was young, and a lot of people made this mistake, of believing that because the Range was turning in 70% vote totals in presidential years, that it was because they loved Democrats in general," Brown said. "I think we make a mistake when we assume vote totals equal love, and that's true now, as well as before."
The 'Diploma Divide'
Globalization and trade impacts also hit the Iron Range and rural America disproportionately along educational lines. Americans without college degrees lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages due to trade policies, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Broader research showed, as of 2008, that "international trade tends to make low-skilled workers in the United States worse off - not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."
Mines and steel makers took the direct hit of these policies, but the cascading impact on support industries and local businesses followed the so-called "Youngstown effect." A separate MIT study found that what happened in the Ohio steel city applied to regions most impacted by NAFTA, but it widely explains a trend often described on the Range during prolonged shutdowns and downturns.
"The blue-collar diner worker in the [industry] town is hurt by the agreement, as is the blue-collar [industry]-factory worker in a town dominated with insurance companies. Worst hit of all is the blue-collar [industry] worker in an [industry] town, particularly if that worker never finished high school," researchers wrote. "College-educated workers skate away mainly unharmed."
Since 1970, District 7B has had a lower share of college-educated residents aged 25 and up compared to the rest of Minnesota, and that share has grown more slowly than the rest of the state, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).
At the same time, DEED reported a share of District 7B residents with up to an associate degree was higher than the statewide rate. More than three out of every four residents in District 7B fit into this category, despite being in line with the statewide average in 1970, while the rate for Minnesota as a whole basically held steady around 60%.
Zoomed out to St. Louis County, excluding Duluth, the share of workers aged 25 and up with a bachelor's degree has closed in on the statewide rate since 1995, but a wide gap has persisted. Meanwhile, the state as a whole has seen a larger share of workers with less than a bachelor's degree.
As educational divisions have widened between college-educated whites and the white working class, so have political polarization and shifts in voting. The realignment trend - often referred to as the "Diploma Divide" - was central to research by University of Pennsylvania political scientist William Marble in his latest working paper.
Marble found that college-educated white voters started favoring more liberal economic policies around 2000, mainly redistribution over the free market, pushing them to vote with the Democratic Party. Around the same time, the conservative white, working-class voters gave more thought to cultural issues that pushed them toward voting with the Republican Party. He noted the emerging coalitions "fit uneasily" - labor interests are now more represented by well-educated voters and business interests by laborers - but "are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future."
Research contained in his study also noted that Republicans started appealing more by using "wedge issues" like guns, allowing the culture war era of politics to interplay with economic issues. This led to more appeals to identity, coupled with a Republican economic agenda, while conservative stances on transgender and immigration issues also connected as they became partisan campaign issues.
Brown said the new messaging made it more comfortable for Range Republican voters because they now had issues that fit in with people of Greater Minnesota, rather than talking points of the stock market and corporate tax cuts, for example.
"What Trump gave is a moving target of a Republican Party that can be whatever you want it to be," Brown said. "Kind of a broad tent."
Republicans like Pete Stauber, he added, also co-opted Range DFL messaging to make mining a cultural issue through the "Our Way of Life" slogan. Democrats used it as a way to differentiate regional party politics, but Stauber added it to the culture war canon.
"There were seeds planted during the decline of the DFL machine," Brown said. "I think of it as a Frankenstein monster that got out of control and killed its creator."
From power play to shorthanded
Doug Johnson served as an Iron Range legislator for more than three decades. As chair of the Senate Taxes Committee, his ability to secure funding for the region elicited quips that he believed the state motto was "Send the money north." Johnson, after all, has the trust fund for Range infrastructure projects named after him.
Bakk succeeded him in the Senate and later as the chair on taxes, before a seven-year run as the Senate DFL Caucus leader in the minority and majority. Rukavina chaired education for the House. Tomassoni would hold a high profile in the Senate. The Range not only had a seat at the table in St. Paul, its representatives sat at the head of the table.
If there's one story that highlights the divide of the Iron Range and the Twin Cities metro, it's from 2020, when former Sen. Susan Kent organized an effort to successfully oust Bakk as the Senate DFL leader. Business was behind the move, but the optics were an urban senator taking power from a rural mainstay.
The chain of events unfolded during an election year when Iron Range dissatisfaction with the DFL would, for the first time, significantly dent down-ballot local Democrats. The long-expected attrition due to shifted economies and changed opinions arrived, now coupled with a heightened division over copper-nickel mining and the natural losses of rural populations that withered Iron Range influence at the Capitol.
"They were trying to win seats and support a political coalition that now included far more metro and suburban districts," Brown said. "And Tom Bakk was not helping that, so that whole revolution was kind of baked into the demographic shifts of the whole state."
Greater Minnesota legislators held more seats than the Twin Cities metro region for the better part of a quarter century, as far back as 1958, according to the Center for Rural Policy and Development (CRPD), but the gap has widened toward the metro in every decade since 1982. Rural counties saw modest population gains in 2022 compared to the seven-county metro, but broke even when compared to their 2010 population, while the metro region averaged double-digit gains between 2010 and 2022. The CRPD Rural Atlas showed entirely urban areas of the state, which includes a handful of counties outside the metro, were home to more than 60% of residents in 2022.
If ousting Bakk was a numbers-based business decision, it was one that the senator didn't take lightly. Shortly after Senate Republicans maintained a narrow 34-33 majority in 2020, Bakk and Tomassoni left the DFL and reclassified as Independents aligned with Republicans. The moves came with chairmanships on capital investment and higher education committees from Republican leaders, and Tomassoni was briefly voted in as the new Senate president.
Just how far the balance of power shifted away from the Range since 2020 went unrealized until after the 2022 election shook out and the DFL emerged with a trifecta - majority control of the House, Senate and executive branch - once again sweeping all statewide seats in a year Republican dominance was expected. Republicans have pitched the region that under their control the Range will have its influence back in St. Paul, but projections and demographic trends suggest it would be with fewer Range lawmakers.
St. Louis County, home to District 7B, has an average age over 42, and more than 20% of its population is 65 and older. The CRPD Rural Atlas projections show St. Louis County, and the surrounding counties that touch the Range, steadily losing their population through 2050 and only a 1.3% uptick predicted for Carlton County. Migration rates show St. Louis County lost about 26% of its population who would be aged 25-29 between 2000 and 2010, and 27% aged 30-34, which are generally the ages when families are built. The CRPD is expected to update these numbers in January, when the State of Rural 2025 is released.
The power shift and trifecta gave Republicans on the Range another rallying point to attack local DFL candidates and incumbents. Warwas said the trifecta influenced him to run for the Legislature, citing the need to balance government and policies that didn't represent the region. Bakk, a self-described "lunch bucket Democrat" would tell the St. Louis County Republican Convention prior to the 2022 election that if he ran again, he would seek the Republican endorsement and there was "no way I'd ever run as a Democrat."
A recent MinnPost poll showed differing support in Greater Minnesota for the single-party government structure, which moved legislation on carbon-free energy, gun control, gender-affirming care and codified abortion laws. It also passed modest permit reform, $80 million in Local Government Aid that largely benefitted the Iron Range, and prescription drug reform, to name a few.
Brown said it would be hard to predict what a Republican-led Minnesota would look like for the Range. There would still be infighting, and even though they could alter state policies many of the economic and demographic trends in play here are larger problems with complex solutions beyond the state government.
"It's an example of how people were sick of the situation, but I don't know that going this road changes the Range's fate to one of prosperous plenty," Brown said. "We're in this strange situation that Rust Belt places find themselves in, trying to change a big economic trend when it's so very hard to do that at a local level."
The Range's DFL divorce
Whatever the intel told Democrats about the 2016 presidential election, the writing appeared to be plastered to the walls of Iron Range mining operations years earlier.
Justin Perpich, who that May would be tapped to lead the Eighth District DFL, recalled seeing posters at the mine he was working at as a Steelworker in the late 2000s denouncing President Clinton for NAFTA and ruining American manufacturing. The trade policy had outsized impacts on the rural Midwest, and unions clashed with Clinton over signing a Republican-crafted trade deal, saying it weakened their bargaining power toward what was best for the company out of fear of layoffs.
Now Hillary Clinton was on the ballot against a populist promising to protect their industry, but it's likely national Democrats didn't read the tea leaves from their stronghold on the Iron Range.
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders - a progressive populist who was running against Clinton for the Democratic nomination on a message that even evoked the what-ifs about Wellstone - packed a Hibbing High School rally that saw none other than Rukavina introduce him as a fighter cut from the same cloth. Sanders met privately with Steelworkers and delivered a message on trade that mirrored and predated Trump, and the famed auditorium of the high school was filled with mostly union supporters for the fiery Vermonter.
Perpich described 2016 as a "weird year" in Minnesota. Trump's message resonated, but Sanders was a movement unto himself. He prevailed in Iron Range caucuses that year and won the state's DFL caucus with more than 60% of the vote. Trump finished third, 15 percentage points behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
"I think those Steelworkers would have supported Bernie over Trump in 2016," he said in a recent interview. "There was enthusiasm for Trump. There was no enthusiasm for Clinton, but Bernie had the energy and enthusiasm."
National-level Democrats exacerbated the dissent from rural voters and allowed Trump to break down the once-fortified "Blue Wall" states. That included the Range even as Clinton barely won Minnesota. The Clinton campaign took its eye off the Midwest, and under President Barack Obama illegal steel imports flooded the market and idled nearly all the Iron Range mines in 2015.
"Nobody was paying attention," said DFL Eighth District Rep. Rick Nolan at the time. He organized for Obama's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to visit the Range, and tariffs soon arrived for the industry. But the slow reaction offered little comfort. Nolan prevailed in his 2016 race by just over a half-percentage point.
"I think that was a huge part of the change, especially on the presidential front," Perpich said. "Nolan was able to sneak out partly because he ran on protecting the steel industry, especially the illegal steel dumping."
Democrats like Bakk, who supported Clinton, noticed the top of ticket struggling in Greater Minnesota and accurately predicted local incumbents would be fine, but the damage was done. Trump ignited a fire in people feeling left out of the DFL and gave them an outlet.
"The Democratic party has left me and people like me," Bakk said at that same 2022 Republican convention.
The deal breaker for the Range and those like the influential senator came in the form of mining and environmental policies. Where trade, tariffs and cultural differences were up-front issues, Rangers and the local DFL were united on mining and natural resource management. The Minnesota DFL shaded toward the environmental wing to lead its policies. For the Range, a federal mining moratorium, lawsuits over copper-nickel projects and the ill-fated Resolution 54 crossed a line in the sand.
The resolution's defeat in the DFL Central Committee was mere weeks after the 2016 election, and could be seen as a reaction to the results, instead of a watershed moment that found common ground. Gov. Mark Dayton's administration provided mixed results and the Walz administration has been largely viewed as supportive or at least not a hindrance to mining. But the rhetoric and divide over copper-nickel mining has led to no meaningful dialogue between the sides for more than a decade.
Mining might only be a small percentage of the overall Minnesota economy, but it's a major driver on the Iron Range. Beyond tourism, it is in many ways a large balance of what the Iron Range can contribute. The industry is critical to the region's economy, with around 4,000 miners and thousands of spin-off jobs. The state benefits from mining royalty taxes going back to the state general fund, into local cities and schools, as well as the permanent school fund. The Iron Range is value-added to Minnesota, said Paul Peltier, executive director of the Range Association of Municipalities and Schools. Current attitudes in the Twin Cities have the Range red in the face and voting red at the polls.
"The metro core is losing us, the region, rather than us losing them," he said. "Their stance on environmental issues is pushing us away."
Will House 7B go red?
Indicators from the 2022 election showed more Republican gains overall. But a miniscule loss by Walz, and a victory comparable to Lislegard's by Secretary of State Steve Simon, suggested election integrity played a role then, but will it now? Trump wasn't on the ballot in 2022, and the Range for many years showed a clear separation of local politics from national politics. That trend, too, has faded.
Brown doesn't expect a November blowout for Janatopoulos or Warwas. The race will likely come down to just how fractured the coalition that used to deliver reliable DFL votes is now, and despite deep polarization, how many crossover voters will split their ticket in either direction..
"This open seat, in a presidential year where that district is likely going to go to Trump, it's going to be a hard ask for any DFL candidate on the Range," Brown said. "If the DFL wants to keep the House, they're probably going to need to make up a seat somewhere else on this one."
This story was originally produced by Jerry Burnes of MinnPost as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.
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