Brown: When a blue district turns red, the dirt stays the same

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The Iron Range has been turning from blue to red for generations.

Of course, I’m referring to dirt.

Iron in its purest form is a deep, dark gray — almost midnight blue. In certain light it shines like a raven’s wing. When iron in the dirt is exposed to air and water, it oxidizes, turning the rusty red you see in reclaimed mine dumps of the Mesabi.

The blue and red colors result from chemistry. It’s the same dirt, changed.

You might say the same about local politics, which have also shifted from Democratic blue to Republican red in recent years.

For more than 70 years, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party dominated the political landscape of northeastern Minnesota. The DFL’s advantage on the Iron Range in particular grew so outlandish that it masked a shift toward Republicans in other rural northern and exurban counties that began decades earlier.

The region’s recent political transformation has captured the imagination of political writers. In 2010, venerable Eighth District Congressman Jim Oberstar lost in the Tea Party wave. Democrats clawed the seat back with Rick Nolan, but when Donald Trump swept the district in 2016, the whole region outside of metro Duluth began shifting to the right. By 2018, the breakout election of Pete Stauber signaled that the northeastern Minnesota district was to become a relatively safe Republican seat.

Last spring, state Rep. Dave Lislegard (DFL-Aurora) announced his retirement, leaving his competitive Iron Range district up for grabs. DFLers are now scrambling to keep this seat and to try to win back a few other competitive races in the area. Nevertheless, conservatives have a good chance of sweeping all state House seats on the Iron Range this November for the first time since World War I.

The obvious question is, “What changed?”

Of course, the standard answer you hear from newly ascendant GOP leadership is that the voters didn’t change, the DFL did by becoming more liberal and metro-centric.

But this explanation relies on correlation, not causation. The DFL is more liberal and urban because of demographic shifts within the state. Younger, college-educated people chased a new class of jobs in metro areas. Diversity expanded in cities but stagnated in other places. This made for change. Not all at once, but over many years.

Those same shifts made the GOP more rural and oriented toward cultural politics. Today’s nativist rhetoric and authoritarian policies would have alarmed many Republicans a couple decades ago. But those Republicans aren’t Republicans anymore.

The parties changed because we changed. Why? Because the world changed.

Deindustrialization gutted the economic systems that founded the Iron Range as a fount of Rust Belt steel and manufacturing. In most cases, something was replaced with nothing.

The fall of the Soviet Union removed a unifying antagonist from our national story. It was replaced by a confusing array of changing nations and political movements. The attacks of 9/11 punctured our national sense of security, creating mortal enemies out of impossibly abstract words like “terrorism” and “immigration.”

The proliferation of smartphones and social media changed how people talked to each other. First, young people disengaged. Then their parents and grandparents joined them. Local sources of news and cultural understanding suddenly found themselves competing with the internet, usually unsuccessfully. We still don’t fully understand the impact of this phenomenon.

Indeed, a better way to understand the change in Iron Range politics is to observe what has changed for the people who live here. For many, economic security is down. For all, costs are up. Forty years of stagnation now come to a head in an age of online vitriol and rampant misinformation. People are suitably, and rightfully, frustrated.

But a word of caution to politicians who benefit from this visceral discontent.

One of the biggest mistakes partisans make is assuming that voters who support their party do so because they hold all the same beliefs. In fact, a good deal of politics is about sticking with our peers, collectively sorting candidates and their policies in the break room or at the bar. We all want to be part of something. We all want to shape the world around us to our liking.

Rural Minnesotans of varying political beliefs want to define their lives and communities on their own terms. The Farmer-Labor movement of the 1920s and ‘30s, and today’s MAGA in turn share that value, even if the policy positions of these movements run diametrically opposed in some cases.

There is historical precedent for some of what we see today.

In 1924, B.H. Farley, a Farmer-Labor political organizer on the Iron Range, noticed something unusual during the campaign. Union members and organizers who had been enthused for the Farmer-Labor ticket and Progressive presidential candidate Robert LaFollette suddenly stopped showing up to events.

In a letter to Farmer-Labor Congressman William Carss, Farley implied that the only thing that changed was the proliferation of the Ku Klux Klan. Men who felt left out of the “Roaring ‘20s” grabbed onto persuasive rhetoric blaming the problems on immigrants, specifically the Catholic immigrants that came to work in the mines and loading docks of Duluth and the Iron Range.

When the Great Depression hit a few years later, Louisiana’s iconic governor and senator Huey P. Long shifted from economic populism to something more akin to today’s MAGA movement. He thought he would beat Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, but was assassinated before he could try.

Walter Winchell, another one-time progressive voice, became a radio star who drifted to the far right during Roosevelt’s administration.

What changed? The parties or the conditions?

Today’s amorphous politics of culture and division have little to do with policy. For five election cycles, political media have repeated the same story about the Iron Range trending toward the GOP. While that fact is true, another retelling does little to inform Iron Range voters or speak their truth.

Miners are not low-paid grunt workers. They are skilled technicians who make among the highest salaries on the Iron Range. Their problems stem from the shared woes of the middle class. Higher incomes drain into the debts of housing, vehicles and educational expenses that come with the American dream. The worst thing that could happen is losing an irreplaceable job, making the fear of layoffs and mine closures uniquely powerful.

Most Iron Rangers, just like most Minnesotans, are service workers. They care for patients, clean messes, serve customers and earn too little to buy a house. I teach at an Iron Range community college. Some of my students tell me they don’t believe they’ll ever own a house. The idea of buying a new car or even affording the house where their parents live seems out of reach.

And yet, opportunities for work abound. Local communities are desperate for skilled professionals: doctors, engineers and tradespeople. Employers tell me all the time how they need people with critical thinking and writing skills. The pay is good, too. We just have to make college, training, housing and child care more affordable.

Who is doing that? Anyone listening to the political speeches objectively knows that Democrats are at least talking about these issues. And yet, it doesn’t appear to be doing them any good — certainly not with the loudest voices here on the Iron Range and on social media. Perhaps because few watch any political speeches at all, instead administering the noise through the rectangular syringe we carry in our pockets.

The question facing my fellow Iron Rangers and me is the same one facing our whole state — indeed the whole world. As nationalism and multiculturalism converge to crash against the wall of capitalism, can we share power productively, or will we choose destruction?

We’ve been to this brink before. Previously, the rule of law and the economic incentive to cooperate pulled America from the cliff’s edge. But now we are closer to the unraveling of democratic traditions than ever.

Never mind the red and the blue, the iron and rust. We are dust, and to dust we shall return. It is the fundamental conditions behind our political chemistry that must be changed. Godspeed to those who actually try.