There is a lesson here that neither convention wants to hear: Minnesota is not a deeply progressive state, nor a closet conservative one. It is a center left state with a pragmatic streak, protective of rights and the environment, worried about its wallet, and impatient with extremes.
When Minnesota’s two major parties gathered at their endorsing conventions the last week of May, the activists in the room were not a cross section of the state. They were the most committed, the most ideological, and the most willing to give up a spring weekend to argue about platform planks. That is exactly why the positions they crafted drift away from where the average Minnesotan actually stands. I recently built an index of the median Minnesota voter, scoring twelve contested issues on a zero to one hundred scale from recent polling, where zero is the most conservative position and one hundred the most progressive. The median voter lands at about 60: modestly left of center, but nowhere near either party’s base.
That median Minnesotan is easy to describe. This is someone who believes abortion should stay legal, supports same sex marriage and nondiscrimination protections, backs legal cannabis, wants higher taxes on the wealthiest earners and a strong safety net, and supports the transition to clean energy. At the same time, this voter feels real strain from the cost of groceries, gas, and housing, treats illegal immigration as a genuine concern, wants both effective policing and police accountability without anything resembling defunding, prizes the Boundary Waters enough to resist copper nickel mining nearby, and is genuinely unsure about the most contested transgender policies. In short, progressive on rights and the environment, anxious but progressive on taxes and spending, and stubbornly centrist on the law and order and identity questions where the state is most evenly split. The full index is below.
The Median Voter Index
Scores run 0 (most conservative pole of each question) to 100 (most progressive). 50 marks the genuine center. The composite is the average of the twelve issue scores, each drawn from recent scientific polling.
Neither party speaks to that whole person. The Minnesota DFL, scored the same way, comes in around 80. On the issues where Minnesota leans liberal, the party is directionally right but simply louder, holding the position the majority already holds and pushing it further. Its 2023 to 2024 trifecta delivered a generation of policy in a single biennium: codified abortion rights, legal cannabis, a 2040 carbon free electricity standard, expanded background checks and a red flag law, free school meals, paid leave. Much of that tracked majority sentiment. But the party also ran ahead of the median on the harder questions, pressing the most expansive transgender policies, a sweeping new government health insurance option, and a reform posture on policing that the average voter never embraced. When you govern from 80 in a state whose center sits at 60, you win the big statewide races and then watch your legislative majorities evaporate. The 67 to 67 tie in the Minnesota House after 2024 is what a 20-point gap looks like in practice.
The Republican Party of Minnesota has the opposite and far larger problem. Scored against the same median, the MNGOP comes in at roughly 23. That is not 20 points from the center. It is about 37 points, nearly twice the DFL’s distance, and it sits on the wrong side of issue after issue where Minnesotans have made up their minds. The party’s platform calls for overturning the state and federal decisions protecting abortion, eliminating abortion funding, accommodating religious refusals of service to gay and lesbian customers, opposing recreational cannabis, and rolling back the clean energy mandate. Each of those positions puts the party against a clear Minnesota majority. A voter at 60 looking at a party at 23 does not see a reasonable alternative with different priorities. They see a party arguing about things the state settled years ago. The table and chart below place all three side by side.
The Parties Against the Median
This is the real explanation for a statistic that ought to alarm Republican strategists: no Republican has won a statewide election in Minnesota in roughly two decades. It is the longest such drought of any state in the country. The standard excuses, candidate quality, national headwinds, the metro’s growth, all contain some truth, but they miss the structural fact. You cannot win a state from 37 points out. The median voter is reachable for Republicans on exactly two dimensions, and they are not small ones. On taxes and spending, the average Minnesotan’s genuine sensitivity to cost of living and personal tax burden gives the party a real opening. On immigration, the median voter’s concern about illegal immigration aligns more with Republican framing than with the DFL’s expansive posture on benefits and licenses. A party disciplined enough to lead with affordability and border concerns while quietly setting aside its losing fights on abortion, marriage, and climate could compete. The convention delegates will not let it.
And that is the deeper point, the one that applies to both parties. The endorsing convention is a machine for amplifying the base and punishing the center. DFL activists pull their party toward 80; Republican activists pull theirs toward 23 or lower. Neither group is built to ask what the voter at 60 actually wants, because that voter is not in the room and rarely shows up to a caucus. The result is two parties whose official platforms are documents written for the faithful, not the electorate. The median Minnesotan, offered a choice between a party 20 points to the left and a party 37 points to the right, does what the data shows: leans reliably Democratic at the top of the ticket, because that is the shorter distance, while keeping the Legislature close and refusing to hand either side a durable mandate.
There is a lesson here that neither convention wants to hear. Minnesota is not a deeply progressive state, nor a closet conservative one. It is a center left state with a pragmatic streak, protective of rights and the environment, worried about its wallet, and impatient with extremes. The party that figures out how to govern from 60 instead of campaigning from its base will dominate Minnesota politics for a generation. So far, the DFL has come closer by accident of proximity, and the GOP has not come close at all. Until the activists who write the platforms make peace with the voters who decide the elections, the gap between the convention hall and the kitchen table will keep deciding who wins.
A Note on the Numbers
The median voter scores are coded from recent scientific polling: the MinnPost/Embold Research statewide polls, the Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 Minnesota Poll, the PRRI American Values Atlas, Data for Progress polling on the 2040 clean energy law, and related sources, with a large but nonscientific Minnesota House State Fair poll used only as directional context. The party scores are coded from the Minnesota DFL Action Agenda and the party’s 2023 to 2024 governing record, and from the Republican Party of Minnesota platform and recent legislative positions. The platform language reflects the most recently adopted MNGOP platform, supplemented by current legislative priorities. All scores place majority and plurality positions onto a common 0 to 100 scale and are intended as a transparent, revisable framework rather than a definitive measurement.
One size fits none.
A top down approach.
David – Thanks for an analysis that at least attempts to quantify something I think any fair-minded observer “feels” unmistakably – that each of our parties’ convention-going populations represent a collection of extreme positions which are not shared by the population at large. There are a number of other “feels”, though, that seem to be contradicted, and it’s worth thinking about them. So please take this as a constructive criticism, not a “slam”.
First, your analysis pegs the DFL at 80, and the MNGOP at 23. I think many would “feel” that each is more extreme than that, and that the MNGOP today is still slightly the *more* extreme – not slightly less.
Second – and this one is pretty critical – you peg the entire population at 60. I have door-knocked for DFLers way more hours in my lifetime than I care to count (or admit!). both in Minneapolis and Metro suburbs, and served as a strategist or manager for a number of metro suburban campaigns, where I straddled the transition years from “safe GOP” to “safe DFL” for a number of those terrains. I have never door-knocked, let alone served a campaign, in Greater MN, but have spoken with, and “swapped stories” many times over the years with like-minded folks who have. MN, statewide, has not ever, and does not today, “feel” like “60”. 60 is 3 out of 5. 60 is “50% more people think one way than think the other way”. 60, in either direction, in a district (as opposed to the entire state), is a district one does not even spend a lot of resources in, because to the extent it even could be “flipped”, so many others would be easier to flip. MN “feels” more like 52-55. And as you know, given your profession, “55” is already a really difficult “flip”. If MN *is* 60, then it does not matter for the DFL whether they present themselves as 80, or 65, or 99. They are *in* and there is nothing the MNGOP could do about it – not even shifting themselves to, say, 45. So there would be no reason for *either* party to change a thing. Each continuing to excite their base, as a strategy, would do just fine, thank-you-very-much! The DFL can’t lose if it tries; the game for the MNGOP is to realize they can’t win, and do as not-bad-ly as possible until the sense of the people changes and their time comes. That doesn’t “feel” right.
I spent a few moments looking at the individual issue-area numbers, and I think that’s where the disconnect lies. The devil is in the details on these, and, to pick just one, there is no way that “transgender rights”, defined as an issue in a way that most folks would agree on, is a 55. While it is likely in flux, I think most today would agree it is something between 20 and 30. The “false 55” almost certainly arises from lumping into the issue’s definition “general equality”. Almost no one seriously argues that transgender individuals should be *denied* universally agreed-upon rights that we *all* have, and doing so should not even count as a political issue. The entire “issue” is contained in the other half of your description – “contested specifics”. And we are not just “split” on those, they are, at least at present, a “70/30 to 80/20 against” proposition. So in this way, the actual numbers get skewed, and if one tries to do a “higher level” of analysis using this tool, one goes astray.
The good news is that you’ve still presented a really good attempt at distilling a lot down to a single number, and the trends go in the right directions, and that’s pretty much the “gold standard” for the first stab at a mathematical model for something as subjective as this! Thanks again!
Nice analysis.
Great article, thank you. In the mere 2 years that I have been participating in the DFL caucuses and conventions, I have seen how skewed the delegates are compared to the average DFL voter. I wish Angie Craig had made this more clear when she opted out of the endorsement. IMHO Angie Craig really does represent the views of the vast majority of Minnesotans. If you looked at the delegates from my precinct in Minneapolis you would think we all had rainbow hair, worked gig jobs and were some of socialist. Since I know this is not the case, I will continue to participate to represent the rest of us ‘normies’ at the conventions.
I think Shcultz is basically correct–his conclusion squares with what I see and hear just living in Minnesota, and knowing people in both the Cities and elsewhere. But I’m struck by one thing: that the positions held by the majority of Dems would not have been out of line for my Eisenhower Republican parents (well, except maybe gay marriage, but that’s a cultural sea change that had not yet occurred in the 1950s). I’ve been a Democrat since high school, and I once told my Dad that it’s because I actually listened to him, and took him seriously: All people are created equal, e pluribus unum, I am my brother’s keeper.
My view is that the Republican party began its shift rightward with the election of Ronald Reagan (after the brief spasm of Barry Goldwater). Dems have barely budged—think of LBJs Great Society, which was more “progressive” than anything Barak Obama even imagined. I think of this in terms of geology: The parties are like tectonic plates. The Dems are a solid continent. The Republicans are a plate that moved along its fault line, creating a new landscape. Then Trump arrived like a well of hot magma, uplifting and shifting the plate with a violent force–like India crashing into Eurasia to create the Himalayas. But over the long course of time, the Republican plate will be worn down–all things must pass–and political gravity will pull us back to the meandering streams of common sense.
Alas, political time is a subset of geologic time–I fear it it will take generations before the Trump era erodes into a level plain, leaving evidence of it’s trauma etched into our history. I’ll be long gone. Unless some unexpected cataclysm intervenes. Ya never know….
A lot of thought and research has gone into the editor’s attempt to seek out the “average Minnesota voter”. I would say that the energy spent on this endeavor does not shed the light we might hope to see. In the real world, no such person exists. In the real world, ideology, family and religious background, personal journey and more, are all factors in shaping our views of society. Differences are fine. Our system of government is designed to both allow and accommodate differences, in spite of the chorus of complaint that says otherwise.
The other thing that may not be as easy to quantify, but has to be statistically relevant now in MN, is HOW many would have considered supporting a Republican candidate ( so many Independents and even some Democrats..depending) but would not NOW, given Trump’s outrageously damaging activities.
This glaring failure of almost all Republican office holders and candidates, in their unwillingness or inability to take and hold a position in direct opposition to the Trump Administration, makes many of them unelectable in MN.
So…THAT is the backdrop here, and may be in many other states too.