Minnesota's race for governor, with a DFL candidate from Mankato in Tim Walz and a Republican from the Twin Cities suburbs in Jeff Johnson, upends a geographic dynamic that has increasingly defined Minnesota politics in recent years.
In recent elections, Minnesota Republicans have built a durable political base outside the Twin Cities. While the party has struggled to win statewide, the GOP has nailed down majorities in the state House and Senate by decimating the ranks of rural DFL politicians in local races.
That came into play stronger than ever in 2016, when President Donald Trump carried all but nine of Minnesota's 87 counties while narrowly losing the state to Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump also heavily carried southern Minnesota's First Congressional District, which Walz has represented for a dozen years. Notably, Johnson has embraced Trump and his policies as he mounts his campaign this year.
Walz managed to hold the First District in 2016 despite Trump's 15 percentage point win over Clinton there, and Walz's outstate bearing — he's a former teacher and coach, and a military veteran who not so long ago was even backed by the National Rifle Association — offers the DFL a novel face for a party increasingly reliant on Twin Cities voters.
Johnson, a Hennepin County commissioner for nearly a decade, acknowledged in an interview that he knows he has work to do in battling a DFLer who's much more well-known across the lower swath of the state.
"I'm going to have to work a lot harder down there. But I think many of my issues are going to be a better fit in southern Minnesota and anywhere else in greater Minnesota," Johnson, who grew up in northwestern Minnesota's Detroit Lakes, told the Star Tribune. He cited issues such as guns, refugee vetting and immigration, and Walz's support for a gas tax increase to pay for infrastructure improvements.
'A welcoming Minnesota'
Walz said in an interview that he's been successful in southern Minnesota because voters there have come to know him and he's never hidden certain views out of fear of alienating rural voters — as when he spoke in favor of same-sex marriage and action on climate change during his first run for Congress in 2006.
At the same time, he said, he has shifted positions on some issues after talking to a broader set of Minnesotans since getting in the race more than a year ago. He said he wants to avoid the kind of polarized approach to issues that increasingly seems to define politics.