Decades of swing: How one Minnesota county’s streak of picking the presidential winner ended Tuesday

MOORHEAD – Rob Kupec steered his Kia Sorrento through the streets of his neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, just hours after Donald Trump had been declared the next president.

Kupec, a longtime television meteorologist and first-term DFL state senator, was performing a thankless task, first in yards near Minnesota State University Moorhead and next in the far-flung rural areas of Clay County. He was helping Democratic candidates remove yard signs after the election.

In every presidential election since 1992, as Clay County went, so went the nation. For eight elections in a row, Clay County voters picked accurately. It was the longest streak in Minnesota, one of the longest in the country.

Until Tuesday, when 16,121 Clay County voters chose Kamala Harris and 15,965 chose Donald Trump. Harris’ Clay County margin of victory was less than half a percentage point. For the first time since Clay County voters chose Michael Dukakis in 1988, their sentiment did not reflect the Electoral College result.

As he plucked a Harris-Walz sign from under a tree and tossed it into his trunk, Kupec looked for a silver lining: His party had retained the Minnesota Senate, while the Minnesota House was still up in the air. And Harris had won Clay County, barely.

But the big story was the big story. Trump had won a resounding victory across the country. Arizona was called for Trump Saturday night, giving him 312 electoral votes, more than Biden’s 306 in 2020. And after losing the national popular vote in 2020 by 7 million votes, Trump appeared on track to win the popular vote this time by 5 million votes. In Minnesota, Trump increased by four the number of counties he won, to 78, and in Clay County, Trump did about 2 percentage points better than four years ago.

“I grew up a Red Sox fan, and being a Red Sox fan when I was little prepares you for always being let down,” Kupec said, braking as a flock of wild turkeys crossed the road. “Always a feeling of unease. No lead ever feels safe.”

This county’s role as a longtime political bellwether is a result of being a mostly rural area in a heavily rural, Republican part of the state — but also having the urban Democratic sway of the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area and a handful of colleges as well. Modern American politics is defined by the urban-rural divide, but few counties experience that in the just-down-the-road way that Clay County does.

The county serves as a microcosm of the United States, Moorhead Mayor Shelly Carlson said: urban and rural diversity, ethnic and economic diversity, and the rare commodity of bipartisanship as a border community between two states with very different politics and laws. Two-thirds of the county’s 66,000 people live in Moorhead, but go outside city limits and Clay County quickly turns rural. The next-largest town outside of Moorhead is Dilworth, with fewer than 5,000 people. After that is Barnesville, population 3,000 and known for its annual Potato Days Festival.

While allegiances have somewhat flipped from a generation ago — Moorhead businesspeople used to be the Republicans, farmers used to be the Democrats — the balance remains.

“If Democrats have enough votes to overcome the Republican base in our county, they usually have enough votes for the rest of the country,” said Markus Krueger, a local historian and the programming director at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. “If Republicans have enough votes to overcome the college students in Moorhead, they usually have enough votes to overcome the Democratic votes in the rest of the county.”

Without reading too much into a 156-vote Harris victory here not reflecting the national result, Nicholas Howard, an assistant professor of political science at Concordia College, said increasing urbanization of Clay County could change its swing-county status.

“We’re seeing fewer and fewer swing counties,” Howard said. “The economic needs of Moorhead and the non-Moorhead areas in this county have gotten more divergent in the past 20 years. That’s led to some economic and political self-separation. Clay County is no longer the Minnesota bellwether.”

But the near-even split this election meant a stark divide this week in how residents digested what the results meant. And voters didn’t always fall neatly into a box.

Jay Ramaley, a 75-year-old retired Spanish and German teacher in Moorhead with two Trump signs in his yard, had been on pins and needles until early Wednesday, when Fox News called Pennsylvania for Trump. He might have considered a centrist Democrat — Mark Cuban, Josh Shapiro — but he felt the Democratic Party has become too permissive about illegal immigration. He looked at the influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and wondered how a place like Moorhead could have handled that.

“They wanted to paint Republicans in the wrong light,” Ramaley said. “I’m not against immigration at all. We’re all immigrants. The only non-immigrants would be Native Americans, and we treated them terribly. We just have to do it smart, vet these people, make sure they don’t have a criminal background.”

A 30-minute drive down Interstate 94, Josh Schroeder was having a Reuben and a beer at the Purple Goose Eatery & Drinkery in Barnesville. Schroeder, an increasingly rare rural Democrat, had just won a seat on the school board. But he lamented Harris’ loss — and how Democrats lost their connection to rural America.

“Nobody really harasses you for it, but they do look at you funny: ‘What’s wrong with you? You seem to be a family man!’” said the structural engineer and father of two girls. “I’m hoping we’ll still have good checks to keep Trump from doing the worst of what everybody’s afraid he’s going to do. But I really don’t know. It’s hard to see somebody worse than him coming along later, but he’s just opened so many doors for bad actors. It’s going to be a rough couple years no matter what.”

Down the street, Susan Pautzke, 61, watched NBC News alongside her protective Shiba Inu, Nala. She voted for Trump because she felt he spoke to working-class families like her own. She loved populist Democrats like Paul Wellstone but thinks they no longer exist. Ultimately, she feels Democrats speak down to rural people, and she felt the Harris campaign focused too much on identity politics.

“They cause more division,” she said of Democrats. “They talk about the gender, the color of your skin. If we just left everybody alone and didn’t talk about all those things so much and didn’t give special rights to people of color and people with gender issues, we wouldn’t have the division and hate we have now.”

Back in Moorhead after sundown, it seemed the weight of the world was on Tammi Kromenaker’s shoulders. A few months ago, the director and owner of the Red River Women’s Clinic had been at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and was confident Harris would win. On Wednesday, her clinic, which had to move from North Dakota to Minnesota after Roe v. Wade was overturned, performed a couple dozen abortions. Just about every patient feared what the election results could portend.

“I’m worried about what is laid out in Project 2025,” Kromenaker said. “I’m worried about a national abortion ban. I’m worried about a national 15-week abortion ban. I’m worried about the Comstock Act being used to interfere with medication abortion distribution. It’s in Project 2025. They wrote it down.”

“I don’t have any hope today,” she continued. “Today is for mourning. We need to have a lot of feelings. Whether it’s numb today, anger tomorrow, dread the next day — we need a little bit of mourning time first.”

Graphics reporter Yuqing Liu contributed data analysis to this story.