It's interesting how notorious the "Somalis of Minnesota" are, given that they are a minor population-element. Their absolute numbers remain <100,000; as a percent of the state population, they are now ca. 1.65%.
On the 2020 census, an additional 6.85% of the Minnesota population was counted as full- or part-Black but without any Somali origin. Adding in the Somalis, total Black (full or part) reached 8.5% (up from <1% before 1980), considerably higher in the Twin Cities metro area and considerably lower everywhere else.
Non-Somali Blacks outnumbers Somalis in Minnesota by about 4:1. Yet no one thinks of, or talks of, those other Blacks. Except for one, of course (died May 2020).
I hope that this campaign cycle is long enough that we get a story on Walz’s connections to the Feeding Our Future criminals. Seems like some good Steve Sailer content there.
> ...the Somalis would just call [would-be auditors] racist and then they’d back off.
Makes me admire Gov. Walz -- looking the other way shows proper deference to DIE gentry, while declining to demand a cut of the bounty is a testament to Walz' outstanding moral probity.
A more recent commentary on Feeding Our Future from a Somali who was working in the Medicaid fraud division until recently. Even with as softly as he is pedaling this, I have to wonder who he is getting more blow back from, fellow Somalis upset he hasn't sided with the clan, or white liberals for pointing out they are foolish dupes.
“Minnesota nice” leads to AWFL passive aggressive behaviors. The entire city council of St. Paul is now woke diverse millennial birthing persons. Massive fraud is another case study of how a small, low trust group can burn and loot a high trust society.
It's rough out there, southern Michigan is completely pozzed with Whitmer and black rule. Northern Michigan is still pretty nice though, it's mainly white, conservative, laid back, and people still do stuff like fishing and hunting.
That article is a great throw-back, Steve; thanks.
I grew up in NW Iowa, just across the border from Minnesota, and have quite a few friends and relatives who have moved to the Twin Cities to live the frozen urban lifestyle. Most of them are/have become hard-core lefties in the Walz mode; from what I've seen so far, they're beside themselves with joy that he (and their state) have been 'honored' in this way.
My impression (as an Iowan, whom woke Minnesotans typically look down on, both geographically and culturally) is that Minnesota lefties are a special breed. They're still drawing down the social capital that had accumulated so deeply in 1973 Minnesota, i.e. they still see it as a place that just 'works better'. This imbues them with a peculiar brand of polite-but-snotty upper midwestern smugness and condescension to other, lesser residents of the region.
But on the other hand, they know deep down they're still just flyover hicks to their cultural superiors on the coasts, so they burn with a zeal for wokeness fueled by a desire for recognition and validation from NYC and Washington and San Francisco.
It's this combination of cultural confidence and radical-envy that inspires them to do completely insane things like import Somalis by the tens of thousands, and just assume they can not only 'save' them from their pathologies, but also transform them into nice, orderly soft-socialist citizens.
I haven't lived in the region for a long time, though, so it would be interesting to hear from those who are there now if these impressions ring true.
One other note: it was amusing to see John Hinderaker eat his words on the Walz nomination. As recently as last week Hinderaker was swearing up and down that Walz's chances were 'zero'. I like the way Hinderaker thinks and writes, but he's often just that quarter-beat behind the zeitgeist and its fallout.
"But on the other hand, they know deep down they're still just flyover hicks to their cultural superiors on the coasts, so they burn with a zeal for wokeness fueled by a desire for recognition and validation from NYC and Washington and San Francisco."
This has been my observation of Wisconsin as well. They see the disorder and degeneracy as a mark of cosmopolitan sophistication. They import Chicago so that they have a hobby ghetto to bless with their beneficence. I think the zealotry derives from self loathing. They lacked confidence or ambition to make the leftie Haj to NYC, Washington, or San Francisco therefore they atone by debasing up the place they already live.
I don't think the advocates of caring for Non-Western people see them as a "ghetto," but as pets, like social-scale adopted children.
I am sure this is how this class of White Minnesota person saw the Ilhan Omar family from Somalia, when in 1997 they showed in in Minneapolis from Northern Virginia. The same types, transplanted, had also run a similar show in Northern Virginia for some time, which is why Ilhan Omar's family lived for two years Arlington, Va., after arriving from Somalia in 1995.
Northern Virginia is now a California-style one-party state of sufficient size and such to have tipped Virginia decidedly "Blue" already by ca. by 2010, and large areas are essentially post-Western (with also some deep-Blue White-supermajority areas that are quite nice).
The point is, none of the Enabler types that facilitated or cheered on this development in Northern Virginia, ca. 1970s-1990s saw their new pets as "ghetto" people, as that was confined to the north side of the Potomac River and had little influence in Virginia. They saw them more as "pets." The now old-and-gray people who cheered on the early waves can still be heard vaguely blaming "Reagan" for intervening in Central America, or the like, for why there are so many Salvadoreans, or the like; while at the same time saying it's good to have more diversity. The usual double-game.
The phenomenon has long since also colonizing areas far outside the original core into which Ilhan Omar's family arrived into in the mid-1990s; areas of Loudoun County, considerably outside what was ever considered the Washington DC metro area, are basically Asian-immigrant zones with full-Whites either outnumbered by Asians or clearly headed that way.
The 'pets' of a generation ago having up the majority, mobile Whites congregate where they are still a majority or look to leave the area; demographic momentum. The process has played out largely exactly the same in the Twin Cities, except maybe a generation later.
You are right about Minnesota and the writers at Powerline. I don't read it often but checked what they were saying about Walz yesterday. They don't understand what made Walz so bad as a Governor is part of why he was chosen for the ticket. He is just a dumb, loyal attack dog.
> "completely insane things like import Somalis by the tens of thousands"
My impression was, at least at the beginning, that this wasn't a choice of Minnesotans, but something that was imposed on them by the human-trafficking NGOs posing as "refugee charities", based in NY or DC. I recall a 1990s article in The Atlantic, or maybe Harpers, calling Minnesotans "racist" because they didn't want to be on the receiving end of an infinite conveyor belt of Hmong and Somalis.
But apparently at some point the Scandinavian weakness for Stockholm Syndrome kicked in, and submerged under the endless tide dysfunctional color, the Minnesotans have apparently convinced themselves that they really do want to be the dumping ground for the world's least assimilable migrants.
The Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, is no Scandinavian.
Interestingly -- and in accordance with your theory that Minnesota (read: Twin Cities metro area) is directly controlled as a political-cultural Regime outpost -- Jacob Frey (b.1981) is a product Northern Virginia in the 1980s--2000s. Band raised there; stewing in Big-Blue politics in Washington and elsewhere in the Bos-Wash corridor.
Jacob Frey had no ties whatsoever to Minnesota before 2009 (age 28). Somehow, he walked into the mayoralty in 2017, reelected by a pro-Wokeness coalition in 2021 despite a concerted campaign to dump him over the Lockdowns and the riots.
Show up in a place to which you have no ties and becomes mayor within a few years. How does that "even" happen? Use Jacob Frey as, in part, a symbol of what the Twin Cities politics are.
Jacob Frey has a similar life-trajectory to the Jewish mayor of Charlottesville, Michael Signer, the man largely responsible for the events of August 2017 perhaps more than any other single actor (apparently seeking to orchestrate the chaos for his own reasons). Signer had zero ties to Charlottesville or vicinity, or even to the state of Virginia. He was entirely a product of deep-Blue politics and elite tied to Washington. Then you had Minneapolis-2020, also with an ideologue Jewish mayor with no local ties who somehow swooped into and walked into the mayorship, and ideological riots occur and he washes his hands of it and tries to blame White-Christian villainy, just like happened back in the Tsarist period. What a strange coincidence!
"They're still drawing down the social capital that had accumulated so deeply in 1973 Minnesota"
This was around the time some posit as Peak USA, and you know there's "something to it" because the people saying this are so often born years or decades after 1973 (so it's not nostalgia).
I believe Steve Sailer has often asked a version of the question: "When was Peak-USA?" He himself is not a fair answerer because he would have youth-nostalgia for about that era.
In any case, the point at which Minnesota, specifically, began to "drawn down" its social capital may begin considerably later than 1973. There were no Somalis in Minnesota before 1992 or 1993, for example.
It's possible to overstate the degree of D-voting in Minnesota as a state, at least vis-a-vis Iowa. There is only a slight trend towards D-voting in Minnesota, and that is probably explainable entirely by the Twin Cities itself.
The broad baseline element of the population of both states is similar, or so I perceive things given my substantial family ties to north Iowa and long observation of what people are like.
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Here are the presidential-voting results of the past thirty years:
.
MINNESOTA
.Year: D-R voting (for president)
1992: 44-32 (+12)
1996: 51-35 (+16)
2000: 48-46 (+2)
2004: 51-48 (+3)
2008: 54-44 (+10)
2012: 53-45 (+8)
2016: 47-46 (+1)
2020: 53-45 (+8)
.
IOWA
.Year: D-R voting (for president)
1992: 43-37 (+6)
1996: 50-40 (+10)
2000: 49-48 (+1)
2004: 49-50 (-1)
2008: 54-45 (+9)
2012: 52-47 (+5)
2016: 42-52 (-10)
2020: 45-53 (-8)
.
In the six elections from 1992 to 2012, Iowa and Minnesota voted about the same (point-gaps in 2000-2012: 1, 4, 1, 3, respectively; "coin-flip"-type differences). As to the gaps in 1992 and 1996, in both cases the 'D' vote is almost identical and the relatively-large point-gap is because many more Republican-leaners on net voted for Perot than for R candidates HW Bush or Dole.
So it's really the 2016 and 2020 elections you saw Iowa sharply diverge and be slotted in national-level thinking as a safe-Red state" for the first time in modern memory, really (gap with Minnesota in 2016: 11-points; in 2020: 16-points).
The Iowa vs. Minnesota political-gap, judging by these voting patterns, is really a Trump-MAGA phenomenon and it is that era which demands special explanation.
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The USA has a mature political-party system with people having stable political-party-support 'identities,' unlike Bangladesh or the Philippines where parties are meaningless and people mass-migrate from one to another all the time.
What is amazing to see in Middle-America places, and strongly seen in Iowa, is entire areas of Iowa that had been in the vicinity of 50-50 or 60-40 R-D turning 75-25 or higher. Even as high locally as 85-15 R-D, an seldom-precedented collapse in a stable major party's vote. In such places, something up to one-third of normal D-voters in Iowa defected to Trump, with those who leaned to being R-leaning Nonvoters also motivated to turn out, and the result: Huge local supermajorities for Trump.
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Judging by the big precinct-level map of the 2020 results, much the same phenomenon is seen all across Minnesota. Except for a huge hole in the middle of the state: The Twin Cities metro area.
Huge, huge margins for the D-team in the Twin Cities metro area in the Trump era, and they flipped even deeper Blue in 2020 (hence the rise from the 11-point gap to the 16-point gap, 2016 to 2020). Iowa has nothing close.
Iowa has several trifling Blue puddles: one around Des Moines, a smaller one in Waterloo. Then the usual college-towns -- Iowa City, Ames (nothing unusual there or that has controlling-power over the state). But otherwise it was all Trump-majorities or huge-supermajorities. Even Dubuque swung decisively to Trump, after years of 20-point margins for the D candidate.
You're not wrong, or potentially not wrong. But there really is a big gap between the Twin Cities metro area and the norm for the rest of the state.
Driven by self-sorting, in part, similar to the national-level phenomenon. Reinforced by the strange of Migrant Pet phenomenon of which Ilhan Omar is such a perfect exemplar (see also this comment: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/whats-the-matter-with-minnesota/comment/64703083). And here and there do ne'er-do-well elements like Mr. Floyd (d. May 2020), elements that wouldn't be welcomed it in the rest of the state, or at least simply aren't to be found there.
"What is amazing to see in Middle-America places, and strongly seen in Iowa, is entire areas of Iowa that had been in the vicinity of 50-50 or 60-40 R-D turning 75-25 or higher. Even as high locally as 85-15 R-D, an seldom-precedented collapse in a stable major party's vote. In such places, something up to one-third of normal D-voters in Iowa defected to Trump, with those who leaned to being R-leaning Nonvoters also motivated to turn out, and the result: Huge local supermajorities for Trump."
Yes, good analysis here. From what I could see -- and which you've noted with your example of Dubuque -- is that Iowa used to have a stronger East/West split, with eastern Iowa, especially in the mini-rust-belt cities of Dubuque and Waterloo, holding to a more Wisconsin-like devotion to the Democrats. That has been shifting.
And the supermajorities in western Iowa are interesting, too. The 85-15 gap you mention is likely Sioux County, where I was raised. It's always been R territory, but in recent years it's just a wipeout. Sioux County, as was discussed at length years back on Steve's other site, is an outlier in that it's a prosperous and growing rural area. Democrats really don't have much to offer to Sioux County voters, who seem to have finally grasped that they are people the Woke Establishment despises the most: rural, very heavily of northern-European (Dutch) extraction, Christian, self-reliant, prosperous -- they are the poster-demons of Wokeness.
It’s the most corrupt nation on the planet. Great choice bringing naturals into the Midwest where natives literally give the shirt off their back to ya. Man the Somalis are quick studies.
A writer in Chronicles magazine wrote in the 00s that Minnesota didn't seem to have the problems other states had because "their diversity is your strength ." That appears to have broken down.
I moved to Minnesota from California at the end of 2019, right before Covid and the riots. What I found when I moved here were generally wonderful but painfully naive people. In general, things in Minnesota still "work" unless race is involved. Like the rest of the country, most of the social problems out here are caused by racial gaps, but no one is willing to admit it. At least in Southern California liberals had the good sense to be hypocrites and avoid diversity. It's almost comedic how far people out here will go to bend the truth to get around discussing race, and the dangers they place themselves in by denying reality. Crime waves, falling test scores, rise in gun violence - all these things are treated as if they had nothing at all to do with demographics. It feels like living in a very polite authoritarian dictatorship, where speaking obvious truths is not permitted.
When Walter Mondale died Steve made a post about how well run Minnesota was during his prime and I commented that it really wasn't, but the social trust level was so high it gave that appearance to outsiders. The social trust level is obviously breaking down, but the elite political class still doesn't have the will to stop things like Somalis stealing $250 million in obvious Covid relief fraud. They were more angry about people saying "Somalis shouldn't be cops" after the Mohammed Noor shooting than the shooting itself and refused to consider if they had a point. For the older generations nothing will break the fever, the younger ones able to figure it out appear to be fleeing the state in droves.
After 80+ years of government policy, relentless Hollywood propaganda, corrupted religious church teachings, required educational indoctrination of anti-racism, and attached social stigma---being called "racist" is such a fear and racism against non-whites so taboo that Crimestop has been fully entrenched in the modern American mind of the masses.
A key quote from interesting the article you shared is: "(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America" Those were the sorts of early reforms that happened across states in different forms and at different times along with very impactful ones at the Federal level, but there were many over a thirty or forty year time period, and I suspect much of the later ones were done in bad faith and were actually intended to advance the ultimate effect of all of them, which was the transformation of our two parties from being decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into being very centralized and very publicly inaccessible centrally managed parties, it took time but all these reforms (and BTW, much of the early ones were both done in good faith and well conceived and actually improved the parties had they not done the later ones) led to the near total elimination of the USA's democratic governance structures and some cases and enabled and in other cases outright originated many if not almost all of the USA's current problems
A key quote from interesting the article you shared is: "(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America" Those were the sorts of early reforms that happened across states in different forms and at different times along with very impactful ones at the Federal level, but there were many over a thirty or forty year time period, and I suspect much of the later ones were done in bad faith and were actually intended to advance the ultimate effect of all of them, which was the transformation of our two parties from being decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into being very centralized and very publicly inaccessible centrally managed parties, it took time but all these reforms (and BTW, much of the early ones were both done in good faith and well conceived and actually improved the parties had they not done the later ones) led to the near total elimination of the USA's democratic governance structures and some cases and enabled and in other cases outright originated many if not almost all of the USA's current problems
It's interesting how notorious the "Somalis of Minnesota" are, given that they are a minor population-element. Their absolute numbers remain <100,000; as a percent of the state population, they are now ca. 1.65%.
On the 2020 census, an additional 6.85% of the Minnesota population was counted as full- or part-Black but without any Somali origin. Adding in the Somalis, total Black (full or part) reached 8.5% (up from <1% before 1980), considerably higher in the Twin Cities metro area and considerably lower everywhere else.
Non-Somali Blacks outnumbers Somalis in Minnesota by about 4:1. Yet no one thinks of, or talks of, those other Blacks. Except for one, of course (died May 2020).
https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/09/30/when-did-gov-tim-walz-know-about-the-feeding-our-future-fraud/
I hope that this campaign cycle is long enough that we get a story on Walz’s connections to the Feeding Our Future criminals. Seems like some good Steve Sailer content there.
It looks like whenever they tried auditing the organization the Somalis would just call them racist and then they’d back off.
> ...the Somalis would just call [would-be auditors] racist and then they’d back off.
Makes me admire Gov. Walz -- looking the other way shows proper deference to DIE gentry, while declining to demand a cut of the bounty is a testament to Walz' outstanding moral probity.
A more recent commentary on Feeding Our Future from a Somali who was working in the Medicaid fraud division until recently. Even with as softly as he is pedaling this, I have to wonder who he is getting more blow back from, fellow Somalis upset he hasn't sided with the clan, or white liberals for pointing out they are foolish dupes.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/07/17/a-somali-american-investigator-heres-why-youre-hearing-so-much-about-fraud-in-my-community/
Their population mostly consists of people from open, welcoming and Christian countries. What’s wrong with Sweden, England, France, etc?
What do you mean, why did they leave?
I mean the same transformation has taken place in each of those countries.
“Minnesota nice” leads to AWFL passive aggressive behaviors. The entire city council of St. Paul is now woke diverse millennial birthing persons. Massive fraud is another case study of how a small, low trust group can burn and loot a high trust society.
There was a massive Covid fraud case I was reading about today, under Walz’s government.
It's rough out there, southern Michigan is completely pozzed with Whitmer and black rule. Northern Michigan is still pretty nice though, it's mainly white, conservative, laid back, and people still do stuff like fishing and hunting.
At least Minnesota is no longer behind the times
That article is a great throw-back, Steve; thanks.
I grew up in NW Iowa, just across the border from Minnesota, and have quite a few friends and relatives who have moved to the Twin Cities to live the frozen urban lifestyle. Most of them are/have become hard-core lefties in the Walz mode; from what I've seen so far, they're beside themselves with joy that he (and their state) have been 'honored' in this way.
My impression (as an Iowan, whom woke Minnesotans typically look down on, both geographically and culturally) is that Minnesota lefties are a special breed. They're still drawing down the social capital that had accumulated so deeply in 1973 Minnesota, i.e. they still see it as a place that just 'works better'. This imbues them with a peculiar brand of polite-but-snotty upper midwestern smugness and condescension to other, lesser residents of the region.
But on the other hand, they know deep down they're still just flyover hicks to their cultural superiors on the coasts, so they burn with a zeal for wokeness fueled by a desire for recognition and validation from NYC and Washington and San Francisco.
It's this combination of cultural confidence and radical-envy that inspires them to do completely insane things like import Somalis by the tens of thousands, and just assume they can not only 'save' them from their pathologies, but also transform them into nice, orderly soft-socialist citizens.
I haven't lived in the region for a long time, though, so it would be interesting to hear from those who are there now if these impressions ring true.
One other note: it was amusing to see John Hinderaker eat his words on the Walz nomination. As recently as last week Hinderaker was swearing up and down that Walz's chances were 'zero'. I like the way Hinderaker thinks and writes, but he's often just that quarter-beat behind the zeitgeist and its fallout.
I still remember with love the word 'Minnesooooota'. Wonderful people.
It was a different age, apparently. Thanks Steve!
Minnesotans are Scandinavian: how is Sweden doing?
"But on the other hand, they know deep down they're still just flyover hicks to their cultural superiors on the coasts, so they burn with a zeal for wokeness fueled by a desire for recognition and validation from NYC and Washington and San Francisco."
This has been my observation of Wisconsin as well. They see the disorder and degeneracy as a mark of cosmopolitan sophistication. They import Chicago so that they have a hobby ghetto to bless with their beneficence. I think the zealotry derives from self loathing. They lacked confidence or ambition to make the leftie Haj to NYC, Washington, or San Francisco therefore they atone by debasing up the place they already live.
Great comment. 'Hobby ghetto' is especially pithy and insightful.
I don't think the advocates of caring for Non-Western people see them as a "ghetto," but as pets, like social-scale adopted children.
I am sure this is how this class of White Minnesota person saw the Ilhan Omar family from Somalia, when in 1997 they showed in in Minneapolis from Northern Virginia. The same types, transplanted, had also run a similar show in Northern Virginia for some time, which is why Ilhan Omar's family lived for two years Arlington, Va., after arriving from Somalia in 1995.
Northern Virginia is now a California-style one-party state of sufficient size and such to have tipped Virginia decidedly "Blue" already by ca. by 2010, and large areas are essentially post-Western (with also some deep-Blue White-supermajority areas that are quite nice).
The point is, none of the Enabler types that facilitated or cheered on this development in Northern Virginia, ca. 1970s-1990s saw their new pets as "ghetto" people, as that was confined to the north side of the Potomac River and had little influence in Virginia. They saw them more as "pets." The now old-and-gray people who cheered on the early waves can still be heard vaguely blaming "Reagan" for intervening in Central America, or the like, for why there are so many Salvadoreans, or the like; while at the same time saying it's good to have more diversity. The usual double-game.
The phenomenon has long since also colonizing areas far outside the original core into which Ilhan Omar's family arrived into in the mid-1990s; areas of Loudoun County, considerably outside what was ever considered the Washington DC metro area, are basically Asian-immigrant zones with full-Whites either outnumbered by Asians or clearly headed that way.
The 'pets' of a generation ago having up the majority, mobile Whites congregate where they are still a majority or look to leave the area; demographic momentum. The process has played out largely exactly the same in the Twin Cities, except maybe a generation later.
Besides "hobby ghetto", "the leftie Hajj to NYC" is steal-worthy.
You are right about Minnesota and the writers at Powerline. I don't read it often but checked what they were saying about Walz yesterday. They don't understand what made Walz so bad as a Governor is part of why he was chosen for the ticket. He is just a dumb, loyal attack dog.
> "completely insane things like import Somalis by the tens of thousands"
My impression was, at least at the beginning, that this wasn't a choice of Minnesotans, but something that was imposed on them by the human-trafficking NGOs posing as "refugee charities", based in NY or DC. I recall a 1990s article in The Atlantic, or maybe Harpers, calling Minnesotans "racist" because they didn't want to be on the receiving end of an infinite conveyor belt of Hmong and Somalis.
But apparently at some point the Scandinavian weakness for Stockholm Syndrome kicked in, and submerged under the endless tide dysfunctional color, the Minnesotans have apparently convinced themselves that they really do want to be the dumping ground for the world's least assimilable migrants.
The Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, is no Scandinavian.
Interestingly -- and in accordance with your theory that Minnesota (read: Twin Cities metro area) is directly controlled as a political-cultural Regime outpost -- Jacob Frey (b.1981) is a product Northern Virginia in the 1980s--2000s. Band raised there; stewing in Big-Blue politics in Washington and elsewhere in the Bos-Wash corridor.
Jacob Frey had no ties whatsoever to Minnesota before 2009 (age 28). Somehow, he walked into the mayoralty in 2017, reelected by a pro-Wokeness coalition in 2021 despite a concerted campaign to dump him over the Lockdowns and the riots.
Show up in a place to which you have no ties and becomes mayor within a few years. How does that "even" happen? Use Jacob Frey as, in part, a symbol of what the Twin Cities politics are.
Jacob Frey has a similar life-trajectory to the Jewish mayor of Charlottesville, Michael Signer, the man largely responsible for the events of August 2017 perhaps more than any other single actor (apparently seeking to orchestrate the chaos for his own reasons). Signer had zero ties to Charlottesville or vicinity, or even to the state of Virginia. He was entirely a product of deep-Blue politics and elite tied to Washington. Then you had Minneapolis-2020, also with an ideologue Jewish mayor with no local ties who somehow swooped into and walked into the mayorship, and ideological riots occur and he washes his hands of it and tries to blame White-Christian villainy, just like happened back in the Tsarist period. What a strange coincidence!
“Lil Frey” as Garage Logic has penned him.
"They're still drawing down the social capital that had accumulated so deeply in 1973 Minnesota"
This was around the time some posit as Peak USA, and you know there's "something to it" because the people saying this are so often born years or decades after 1973 (so it's not nostalgia).
I believe Steve Sailer has often asked a version of the question: "When was Peak-USA?" He himself is not a fair answerer because he would have youth-nostalgia for about that era.
In any case, the point at which Minnesota, specifically, began to "drawn down" its social capital may begin considerably later than 1973. There were no Somalis in Minnesota before 1992 or 1993, for example.
It's possible to overstate the degree of D-voting in Minnesota as a state, at least vis-a-vis Iowa. There is only a slight trend towards D-voting in Minnesota, and that is probably explainable entirely by the Twin Cities itself.
The broad baseline element of the population of both states is similar, or so I perceive things given my substantial family ties to north Iowa and long observation of what people are like.
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Here are the presidential-voting results of the past thirty years:
.
MINNESOTA
.Year: D-R voting (for president)
1992: 44-32 (+12)
1996: 51-35 (+16)
2000: 48-46 (+2)
2004: 51-48 (+3)
2008: 54-44 (+10)
2012: 53-45 (+8)
2016: 47-46 (+1)
2020: 53-45 (+8)
.
IOWA
.Year: D-R voting (for president)
1992: 43-37 (+6)
1996: 50-40 (+10)
2000: 49-48 (+1)
2004: 49-50 (-1)
2008: 54-45 (+9)
2012: 52-47 (+5)
2016: 42-52 (-10)
2020: 45-53 (-8)
.
In the six elections from 1992 to 2012, Iowa and Minnesota voted about the same (point-gaps in 2000-2012: 1, 4, 1, 3, respectively; "coin-flip"-type differences). As to the gaps in 1992 and 1996, in both cases the 'D' vote is almost identical and the relatively-large point-gap is because many more Republican-leaners on net voted for Perot than for R candidates HW Bush or Dole.
So it's really the 2016 and 2020 elections you saw Iowa sharply diverge and be slotted in national-level thinking as a safe-Red state" for the first time in modern memory, really (gap with Minnesota in 2016: 11-points; in 2020: 16-points).
The Iowa vs. Minnesota political-gap, judging by these voting patterns, is really a Trump-MAGA phenomenon and it is that era which demands special explanation.
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The USA has a mature political-party system with people having stable political-party-support 'identities,' unlike Bangladesh or the Philippines where parties are meaningless and people mass-migrate from one to another all the time.
What is amazing to see in Middle-America places, and strongly seen in Iowa, is entire areas of Iowa that had been in the vicinity of 50-50 or 60-40 R-D turning 75-25 or higher. Even as high locally as 85-15 R-D, an seldom-precedented collapse in a stable major party's vote. In such places, something up to one-third of normal D-voters in Iowa defected to Trump, with those who leaned to being R-leaning Nonvoters also motivated to turn out, and the result: Huge local supermajorities for Trump.
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Judging by the big precinct-level map of the 2020 results, much the same phenomenon is seen all across Minnesota. Except for a huge hole in the middle of the state: The Twin Cities metro area.
Huge, huge margins for the D-team in the Twin Cities metro area in the Trump era, and they flipped even deeper Blue in 2020 (hence the rise from the 11-point gap to the 16-point gap, 2016 to 2020). Iowa has nothing close.
Iowa has several trifling Blue puddles: one around Des Moines, a smaller one in Waterloo. Then the usual college-towns -- Iowa City, Ames (nothing unusual there or that has controlling-power over the state). But otherwise it was all Trump-majorities or huge-supermajorities. Even Dubuque swung decisively to Trump, after years of 20-point margins for the D candidate.
See the big map at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
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Is the Iowa-vs-Minnesota political-gap really as a simple as:
"The same, except Minnesota has the multi-million-person metro area anchoring its 'Blue'-team"?
> "and that is probably explainable entirely by the Twin Cities itself"
and by the Democrat-machine getting to count the votes in the Twin Cities. Or should I say count the "votes"?
You're not wrong, or potentially not wrong. But there really is a big gap between the Twin Cities metro area and the norm for the rest of the state.
Driven by self-sorting, in part, similar to the national-level phenomenon. Reinforced by the strange of Migrant Pet phenomenon of which Ilhan Omar is such a perfect exemplar (see also this comment: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/whats-the-matter-with-minnesota/comment/64703083). And here and there do ne'er-do-well elements like Mr. Floyd (d. May 2020), elements that wouldn't be welcomed it in the rest of the state, or at least simply aren't to be found there.
"What is amazing to see in Middle-America places, and strongly seen in Iowa, is entire areas of Iowa that had been in the vicinity of 50-50 or 60-40 R-D turning 75-25 or higher. Even as high locally as 85-15 R-D, an seldom-precedented collapse in a stable major party's vote. In such places, something up to one-third of normal D-voters in Iowa defected to Trump, with those who leaned to being R-leaning Nonvoters also motivated to turn out, and the result: Huge local supermajorities for Trump."
Yes, good analysis here. From what I could see -- and which you've noted with your example of Dubuque -- is that Iowa used to have a stronger East/West split, with eastern Iowa, especially in the mini-rust-belt cities of Dubuque and Waterloo, holding to a more Wisconsin-like devotion to the Democrats. That has been shifting.
And the supermajorities in western Iowa are interesting, too. The 85-15 gap you mention is likely Sioux County, where I was raised. It's always been R territory, but in recent years it's just a wipeout. Sioux County, as was discussed at length years back on Steve's other site, is an outlier in that it's a prosperous and growing rural area. Democrats really don't have much to offer to Sioux County voters, who seem to have finally grasped that they are people the Woke Establishment despises the most: rural, very heavily of northern-European (Dutch) extraction, Christian, self-reliant, prosperous -- they are the poster-demons of Wokeness.
I like the old Minnesota better than the ‘vibrant and diverse’ version.
Somalis are the worst diversity imaginable.
It’s the most corrupt nation on the planet. Great choice bringing naturals into the Midwest where natives literally give the shirt off their back to ya. Man the Somalis are quick studies.
The past is quite literally a different country
A writer in Chronicles magazine wrote in the 00s that Minnesota didn't seem to have the problems other states had because "their diversity is your strength ." That appears to have broken down.
It’s not a mystery. Whites declined from 98% to 81%; blacks (including the Somalis) increased to 6.5%. Recipe for chaos.
Turns out, when you import Somalians en masse, the problems that made their home country unlivable don’t magically disappear. Who knew?
Magic dirt ain’t so magic after all
I moved to Minnesota from California at the end of 2019, right before Covid and the riots. What I found when I moved here were generally wonderful but painfully naive people. In general, things in Minnesota still "work" unless race is involved. Like the rest of the country, most of the social problems out here are caused by racial gaps, but no one is willing to admit it. At least in Southern California liberals had the good sense to be hypocrites and avoid diversity. It's almost comedic how far people out here will go to bend the truth to get around discussing race, and the dangers they place themselves in by denying reality. Crime waves, falling test scores, rise in gun violence - all these things are treated as if they had nothing at all to do with demographics. It feels like living in a very polite authoritarian dictatorship, where speaking obvious truths is not permitted.
Thanks; I know this attitude all too well. It is almost comedic, but wholly infuriating.
When Walter Mondale died Steve made a post about how well run Minnesota was during his prime and I commented that it really wasn't, but the social trust level was so high it gave that appearance to outsiders. The social trust level is obviously breaking down, but the elite political class still doesn't have the will to stop things like Somalis stealing $250 million in obvious Covid relief fraud. They were more angry about people saying "Somalis shouldn't be cops" after the Mohammed Noor shooting than the shooting itself and refused to consider if they had a point. For the older generations nothing will break the fever, the younger ones able to figure it out appear to be fleeing the state in droves.
Crimestop.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop
After 80+ years of government policy, relentless Hollywood propaganda, corrupted religious church teachings, required educational indoctrination of anti-racism, and attached social stigma---being called "racist" is such a fear and racism against non-whites so taboo that Crimestop has been fully entrenched in the modern American mind of the masses.
As always, Orwell was right.
As you know Steve, “demography is destiny”.
Lake Wobegon, where everyone is now below average.
The law of averages finally caught up to them. Sad!
A key quote from interesting the article you shared is: "(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America" Those were the sorts of early reforms that happened across states in different forms and at different times along with very impactful ones at the Federal level, but there were many over a thirty or forty year time period, and I suspect much of the later ones were done in bad faith and were actually intended to advance the ultimate effect of all of them, which was the transformation of our two parties from being decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into being very centralized and very publicly inaccessible centrally managed parties, it took time but all these reforms (and BTW, much of the early ones were both done in good faith and well conceived and actually improved the parties had they not done the later ones) led to the near total elimination of the USA's democratic governance structures and some cases and enabled and in other cases outright originated many if not almost all of the USA's current problems
A key quote from interesting the article you shared is: "(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America" Those were the sorts of early reforms that happened across states in different forms and at different times along with very impactful ones at the Federal level, but there were many over a thirty or forty year time period, and I suspect much of the later ones were done in bad faith and were actually intended to advance the ultimate effect of all of them, which was the transformation of our two parties from being decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into being very centralized and very publicly inaccessible centrally managed parties, it took time but all these reforms (and BTW, much of the early ones were both done in good faith and well conceived and actually improved the parties had they not done the later ones) led to the near total elimination of the USA's democratic governance structures and some cases and enabled and in other cases outright originated many if not almost all of the USA's current problems