Minnesota's political divide: Urban, rural

Divided government. It's been the big Minnesota topic since the wee hours Wednesday when the GOP tilt of the 2015-16 state House became clear.

The "divided" talk wasn't just about the newly Republican House and the DFL governor and Senate, absorbing as that is. The hot word last week was that Minnesota's rural/urban divide, an age-old feature of state politics, found new legs and leaped onto center stage in Tuesday's election. Republicans wrested 11 House seats from DFLers, 10 of them in Greater Minnesota, only one in the outer 'burbs.

Some buzzing questions: Have Minnesotans evolved, or devolved, into distinct rural and metro tribes? And if so, what did DFLers do in 2013-14 to offend one of them? If the people who represent Greater Minnesota are in the majority, does that make the metro area Lesser Minnesota in the House? And whatever happened to that noble concept of One Minnesota?

Before we ponder them, take a gander at the new House district map of 72 GOP and 62 DFL seats. They are arrayed in what may be the sharpest rural-urban separation seen in the 40 years since legislators took party labels.

Except for a few northwest-metro square miles, all of the districts touching the Interstate 494-694 beltway and within it will be represented by DFLers in the 2015 House. Suburbs that had been deemed political battlegrounds a decade or two ago have become reliably DFL blue.

But with exceptions in northeastern Minnesota and the cities of Duluth, Moorhead, Rochester, Mankato, Winona, Northfield and Austin, all of the rest of the state will be represented in the House by members of the Republican majority. Among good-sized Minnesota cities, only St. Cloud will send Republicans to St. Paul next year.

(In the Senate — which wasn't on the ballot, but whose new office building was not forgotten — the 39-28 DFL majority has a geographically dispersed base. But eight DFL senators will soon see Republicans in both of the two House districts that their Senate districts comprise. That fact is likely to weigh heavily on those DFLers' thoughts and actions through the remainder of their terms, which end in 2016.)

Greater Minnesotans tend to be older than their metro counterparts (median age 41, compared with 36). Their communities include more seniors (29 percent of households, compared with 20 percent). They're less well-off (median annual household income $47,827, compared with $63,444). They're more likely to be native-born (97 percent, compared with 91 percent) and to be white (9 percent people of color, compared with 19 percent in urban Minnesota). They're less well-educated (21 percent of the population with a bachelor's or higher academic degree, compared with 41 percent in urban counties).

Those aren't trivial differences, politically speaking, especially when one considers the trend line Brower described.

"We've been seeing a widening of the gap between rural and urban median income in the last few years," she said. "That gap had been narrowing during the recession. Since then, we've seen gains in incomes in the seven Twin Cities counties that we haven't seen in Greater Minnesota."

What's more, a wide educational attainment gap between metro and outstate workforces has not budged in recent years, Brower said. That's despite Minnesota's heavy investment in higher-education institutions in Greater Minnesota and much state economic development talk about helping outstate employers find skilled workers.

Those trends may explain why those in Greater Minnesota may be feeling left behind as they note the quickening economic pace of the Twin Cities. It may have made rural folk susceptible to believing that their DFL representative had thrown in with those Minneapolis and St. Paul DFLers who were all about light rail and stadiums and a Senate office building and, for a few months anyway, taxing farm equipment repairs.

The 2013 vote to legalize same-sex marriage did not flip the House to the GOP. But it probably didn't help nine outstate DFLers who voted for marriage equality keep their seats, either. (Two who voted no also lost.)

Neither did it help that every DFL candidate for statewide office this year was from the metro area. And that the House DFL leadership team was Speaker Paul Thissen from Minneapolis and Majority Leader Erin Murphy from St. Paul. And that the DFL chair of the House agriculture and environment committee for the past two years has been the able, principled Rep. Jean Wagenius of Minneapolis.

"The feeling was that the metro area is running the state right now," said Brad Finstad, executive director of the Center for Rural Policy and Development in St. Peter and a former GOP legislator.

It's telling that at his first postelection news conference, GOP Speaker-elect Kurt Daudt said he intended to split agriculture and environmental policy into separate committees. It went without saying that the new chairs of those committees would not be from Minneapolis or the next five largest cities, St. Paul, Rochester, Bloomington, Duluth and Brooklyn Park. No one from those places will wield a gavel next year.

Are those places now Lesser Minnesota in the House? The new outstate Republicans better not be thinking that way, for their own districts' sakes. A well-running economic engine in the metro area has been a great blessing for Minnesota, producing the tax revenues that fund services the whole state needs. Just ask outstate city and county officials, or community college presidents, or school leaders, about the importance of the state funds flowing out of the Twin Cities.

But it also may be that some adjustment in statehouse thinking in favor of Greater Minnesota was in order to sustain the larger vision that has served this state well for 156 years — the One Minnesota vision. Economic evolution has changed the terms of Minnesota's rural-urban codependency. But the future of each portion of this state will be diminished if one or the other falters.

Gov. Mark Dayton spoke well Tuesday night when he said: "We are all Minnesotans. Our futures and our fortunes are intertwined. Our children and our grandchildren will all inherit the same state. It will be the state that we, together, make for them. … We owe ourselves, and we owe all of them, a better Minnesota."