Democrats are winning in suburbs. In rural America, it’s another story.
At the Third Base Sports Bar on the edge of town in Carlton, Minnesota, Linda Luomala, a retired paper mill worker, orders fried cheese curds without looking up from her stack of pull-tabs, the state lottery tickets that look like paper slot machines.
If Democrats want to get back to winning in rural areas, says Ms. Luomala, dropping the unlucky pull-tabs to a growing mound at the base of her bar stool, then they need to get back to basics. Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) has forgotten about farmers and laborers, she says, focusing instead on issues that feel secondary.
Her friend, Anna Lind, a railroad conductor, nods in agreement. Like Ms. Luomala, Ms. Lind says she always votes Democratic. But in 2018 she voted for a Republican congressman, after he was endorsed by her union.
With the nation’s longest Democratic voting streak in presidential elections, Minnesota has long been a cornerstone of the Democrats’ midwestern “blue wall.” But the state has been shifting more Republican in recent years. In 2016,
The rural-suburban tradeoff‘Democrats can’t be against everything’‘We chose to be here’
