Minnesota's white conservatives like Trump's message, less sure about messenger

John Hedtke distinctly remembers giving up on the Democratic Party for good.

"It was 20 years ago," said Hedtke, a 50-year-old warehouse worker who lives near the small Carver County town of New Germany. "I'm not always happy with the Republican Party. But the Democratic Party gives me no options."

This year, Hedtke is backing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The celebrity businessman has been targeting white, working-class voters with a protectionist message on trade, tough talk on immigration and terrorism, constant ridicule of "political correctness" and repeated tributes to the Second Amendment and religious freedom.

Trump is trying to capitalize on a long-term shift in voting patterns exemplified by people like Hedtke, who has populist instincts on economic issues but feels the Democratic Party doesn't tolerate his social conservatism on topics such as abortion and gay marriage.

Riding high in recent national and swing-state polls, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton consistently registers her lowest support among white, working-class voters — particularly men. There are plenty of them in Minnesota, but the state also has the highest rate of college graduates of any in the Midwest, and it has stayed firmly in the Democratic column in presidential races.

Both candidates see the Midwest as decisive.

Michigan, like many of its Midwestern neighbors, still has plenty of the kind of white, working-class voters who have shifted right in recent presidential cycles and are a primary target of Trump's strategy. States like Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania have been an early focus of his campaign's efforts to model a path to 270 electoral votes, though Clinton's persistent leads in swing-state polls are making that tricky.

The Trump campaign has signaled interest in Minnesota too, and is assembling a state campaign team, with the first members working out of Republican Party headquarters in Minneapolis. So far, though, Clinton's organization here far exceeds Trump's.

"I think it's extremely important that Trump win," Hedtke said in an interview last week at the Carver County Fair in Waconia. Having spent years in a manual labor job at a Twin Cities company with a traditional corporate structure, Hedtke said it's not hard for him to picture a businessman running the country.

That's despite his own sense that executive pay is too high, and that corporate leaders gain the most when times are good but suffer the least when they're bad.

Even with his skepticism of the GOP, he has nothing good to say about Clinton, saying a vote for her is "a vote for a fascist, socialist, communist government."

But Trump needs to win more than the outstate to win statewide. He would need to rack up big numbers in a place like Carver County, which has the highest rate of white residents in the seven-county Twin Cities area and the third-highest per-capita income of any county in the state. Carver has long been the most reliably Republican county in the Twin Cities metro.

Interviews with working people at the Carver County Fair found mostly self-identified Republicans and conservatives. Some were at ease with Trump while others still had huge reservations.

"I'm ready to vote for Trump," said Todd Miller, a 52-year-old Eden Prairie resident who works in security for a national retail chain. A military veteran, he likes Trump's message on immigration and national security.

His wife, Cindi, a 57-year-old accountant, is less sure.

"I just don't think he has enough political experience to be running our country," she said. She raised what for some has become perhaps the fundamental fear of Trump as president — control of the nuclear arsenal: "He could push the button and then we're done," she said.

The Millers have lived in Minnesota for 18 months. They came from California, Todd Miller said, and the move has panned out: "We feel more economically secure here," he said.

In California they saw a society increasingly divided between the wealthy and the poor, Cindi Miller said. But she doesn't like Democratic economic policies: "Too many programs. Stop it. Go to work," she said.

Fairgoers expressed satisfaction with their own economic prospects, but unease about the country's direction and the tone of the election.

"I think if we had a third party in there we might actually be able to get something done," said Kyle Hoen, a 28-year-old New Prague resident who was helping his dairy farmer parents tend cattle in the livestock barn.

Hoen, who works with gas turbine engines, said he might vote for the Libertarian candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. A McClatchy-Marist poll from earlier this month found that Hoen's view is relatively common among younger voters, with Johnson and the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, getting more support than Trump among those under 30.

"I'm very excited about the potential of having a woman president, I really am," said Teresa Starry-Bussler, a 45-year-old city employee from Glencoe. Starry-Bussler is worried for her daughter, who's starting college this fall, and is receptive to Clinton's proposals to lower college costs and student debt.

Easier to find, though, was disgust at politicians seen as valuing partisan loyalties over progress, and a strong desire for different presidential choices.

Dan Oelfke, a 40-year-old self-employed construction worker from Green Isle, said times have been good lately. He barely made it through the Great Recession of 2008-09, but was happy last week to be able to take a half-day off to bring his wife and three kids to the fair. ("I'll probably work a half-day on Saturday," he quickly added.)

Oelfke leans Republican and said he's more likely to vote for Trump than Clinton, but confessed he hasn't yet paid much attention to the race. He said he's been looking forward to the presidential debates, but then recalled something he heard on sports talk radio: Two of the debates are scheduled for the same time as NFL games.

Which will he watch?

Patrick Condon • 651-925-5049