Highway 61 revisited: 100-mile road trip shows election fear, sour mood among Minnesota voters

HIGHWAY 61 – The sun peeked over the horizon, illuminating the Minnesota Capitol just days before the presidential election. The grounds were deserted except construction crews. Inside the silent Capitol, a facilities management employee stared at a stone column outside the Minnesota Supreme Court chambers, mesmerized by its beauty.

Every day, the man, a trim carpenter by trade, tries to find a new and surprising detail inside this ornate building. He approaches his workplace in Minnesota’s halls of power with a childlike wonder.

That wonder does not extend to Tuesday’s presidential election. The man — who declined to give his name while discussing politics, since he works alongside politicians of all stripes — doesn’t feel either candidate speaks for him. He’s worried about election integrity, worried his vote won’t count.

He’s very conservative, to the right of former president Donald Trump, he said, so he certainly won’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. But he won’t vote for Trump a third time either: “I think he’s been bought. I liked him before because he wasn’t a politician.”

His jaded view was echoed by many Minnesotans on a postcard-perfect recent fall day, as a Minnesota Star Tribune reporter and photographer embarked on a 100-mile journey down U.S. Hwy. 61 along the Mississippi River to talk with voters. The famed Great River Road route, lionized by Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” bisects the country from Minnesota to Louisiana.

From the Capitol at sunrise to the tiny river town of Minnesota City at sunset, the voters interviewed seemed in a mostly sour mood. Few seemed thrilled by the current administration, yet few seemed excited by the prospect of a return to the Trump years. The number of political signs for either candidate seemed muted compared to the last time around. The number of voters who expressed foreboding was striking, as was the number of voters who simply wanted this election to be over.

One theme seemed consistent with the previous election: 2024 again is all about Trump, both among those who love him and those who hate him.

“As long as Kamala wins, I’m all right. I got land in Canada if she doesn’t,” joked Sam Grant as he ate a breakfast sandwich at Swede Hollow Cafe near Metro State University.

Grant, a professor at Metro State, is upset with both parties, specifically over America’s role in the war in Israel and Palestine. But as a Black man, he celebrates the possibility of the female president, just as he celebrated Barack Obama’s election as a different sort of overdue American first.

“I still think this will be a moment of celebration — if America can do this,” he said.

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Down the highway, past Pigs Eye Lake, leaves turned golden along the river. Tanker trains trundled past a huge gravel mining site. A group of retirees waited in a strip mall parking lot outside the North Pole Restaurant, waiting for a gas leak to be fixed so they could have breakfast.

One man, a retired electrician from Cottage Grove named Ray, had an “I VOTED” sticker on his letterman jacket. Like many voters, he wouldn’t give his full name; he said he feared death threats in this overheated political climate. He wouldn’t say who he voted for, just that he didn’t vote for Trump. He cited former Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s comments that Trump harbors fascist leanings as one more reason he shouldn’t be president again. “Plus, Trump and Putin?” he said. “That’s a dangerous situation.”

In the rolling hills past the chain stores of Cottage Grove — Applebee’s and Target, Menard’s and Wal-Mart — Gary Siewert sat in his kitchen, drinking coffee, smoking a stogie and watching “The Price Is Right.” Outside his house facing the highway flew an American flag and a “TROOPS FOR TRUMP” flag. The 68-year-old, retired from an Eagan manufacturing plant, is not a military veteran. He’s a Trump supporter for myriad other reasons. Chief among them are grocery and gas prices. “I can’t afford to hardly eat,” said Siewert, who lives off Social Security.

Siewert doesn’t trust television news and gets his information off YouTube. There’s plenty more at stake in this election than the economy, he said. One of the issues he cited was the question of men being allowed to play women’s sports. “You’re a man or a woman — live with it,” he said.

Across the Mississippi River lies Hastings, on the eastern edge of Dakota County, which marks the edge of the Democratic dominance of the metro, a county where Biden beat Trump by 16 points in 2020.

“I’m scared as hell,” Jane Lee said outside an early voting site. The 69-year-old housecleaner planned to vote for Harris later that day. “If it goes the wrong way, then we won’t have democracy anymore. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.”

Lee gets emotional when talking about Trump voters, which isn’t something she likes about herself. But Lee just doesn’t understand why they can’t see what she and her friends see.

At a Dunn Brothers Coffee down the highway, four retirees, all Harris supporters, sipped coffee and lamented how they find it difficult, almost impossible, to have political conversations with the opposing side.

“I’ve lost family members over politics,” said Kath Pengelly, 76, who used to work with adults with cognitive disabilities. “My cousin, we will no longer speak to each other.”

They worried about a second Trump term, and how millions of immigrants could be deported. And they worried about the ways a legitimate Harris victory could be challenged or even undone.

“I’m concerned about the election,” said Karen Moore, 73, a retired instructional designer. “And I’m concerned about what’s going to happen after the election, no matter who is elected.”

They also wondered if they were too fearful. Trump’s first term didn’t end democracy; why would his second? Life, they said, has a way of going on.

At Vermillion Falls Park, Thomas Norring and his wife visited a memorial bench for his son, Devin, who died of fentanyl poisoning at 19 in 2020. The Norrings work with both sides of the political aisle on things like legislation protecting minors from the harms of social media. The Norrings actively support Democratic Rep. Angie Craig, citing her work combatting fentanyl, though they lament how infrequently fentanyl has been a topic in the presidential election. They support Trump for two fentanyl-adjacent reasons: Secure borders and support of law enforcement.

“Now they’re starting to come back around,” he said of Democrats. “They realize defunding police wasn’t such a good idea.”

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Past Hastings, farm fields of corn stubble are punctuated with the occasional deer stand or the occasional antiabortion sign. In Welch, one family had planted a rare sign for Goodhue County, where Trump beat Biden by nearly 15 points in 2020: A Harris-Walz sign at the end of their long driveway.

“Foreboding and hope — I felt both in 2020,” said Kris Portinga, a retired labor and delivery nurse. Her husband, a retired Lutheran deacon, nodded in agreement. “This time the foreboding is greater. It’s all the Republicans speaking out against Trump, all the people who have seen this government in action and are expressing their deep, deep concerns. And that there won’t be the safeguards there were in the first term.”

Further down the highway, a giant sign on the Red Wing Shoes manufacturing plant read, “America: Made in Red Wing.” Just beyond was a privately owned Trump Store, which rents part of its space to the county GOP as a campaign headquarters. The store had sold out of two batches of T-shirts reading, “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President.”

Andrew Lane, a 41-year-old father of six who cobbles together work between the Trump Store and DoorDash, spoke about his Libertarian leanings, and how Trump was a perfect retort to the “uniparty” — the idea that Democrats and Republicans have become virtually indistinguishable.

Lane believes wholeheartedly that Trump puts America first: In rejecting illegal immigrants, in avoiding foreign conflicts. He doesn’t understand concerns from the left, like when one woman told him she feared Trump would open concentration camps.

“I don’t understand how anybody’s fearful of what could happen other than more money in your pocket,” he said.

But just down the street, Mike Johnson, a 68-year-old old retired middle school teacher, lamented the Republican Party’s radicalization.

“It began changing with Rush Limbaugh, then the ascendancy of Fox News, and all of the sudden we have two realities,” Johnson said.

His 88-year-old mother, though, gave him hope. After Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, Johnson’s mother went to a Harris rally in Eau Claire. It took two hours to park her car, then a 2-mile walk to the venue — then she raved about how exciting it was.

“Trump’s said so many horrible things,” he said. “We’ll see. If he wins, I guess I’ll put my head down, go to work and sign off Facebook.”

In Red Wing’s bustling downtown, Bill Hanisch called up the most recent results from his bakery’s cookie poll. Every election cycle since 1984, Hanisch Bakery has conducted a cookie poll. A couple months in, Hanisch had sold 5,966 Trump cookies and 3,124 Harris cookies.

“Every year except 2020, it’s matched the popular vote!” Hanisch bragged. But the bakery does not sell Electoral College cookies, he noted.

“It feels like we got a lot of Republican coverage of this in 2020, so it skewed a lot of Democratic people against us,” said Hanisch, who plans to vote for Trump but generally avoids politics. “People came in yesterday and said they knew this is a Republican bakery. No — this is a Minnesota Vikings bakery.”

Hanisch noted that there just haven’t been that many political signs around town this cycle. If you want signs, he said, cross the river into Wisconsin.

Past Old Frontenac, past the Whistle Stop Cafe, past Lake City’s Sunset Motel on Lakeshore Drive, the sun was falling in the west. Farm fields bled into the bluffs. “HARRIS WALZ YOU BETCHA” read a homemade sign near a Winona County farm.

In Minnesota City, population 202, a dozen or so people bellied up to the bar at Trails End, with its miniature radio-controlled car track out back. At the other end of the two-block main strip, Joan Albrecht sat in her living room, watching that evening’s Trump rally on her iPad.

Much of her home is a shrine to Trump. A flag out front read, “THANK YOU TRUMP/SAVE AMERICA AGAIN.” Inside, a framed portrait of Trump had its own throne-like chair.

She’s not quite sure what first grabbed her about Trump, but she remembers him coming down the Trump Tower elevator in 2015, and she was taken.

On her front door was an upside-down American flag, a sign of extreme national emergency that’s been adopted by Trump fans during the Biden administration. But Albrecht exudes confidence.

“Our country is in distress,” she said. “But it’s not going to be for long. We’re going to get our country back, and everything’s going to be just fine.”