Minnesota results by State House district

[mileslunn]

I believe in the Southern part of the state, the Southwest has a large German and Dutch population who the Republicans tend to do well amongst, well the Southeastern part is more Scandinavian and most of them seem to be Lutheran or otherwise non-Evangelical Protestant.  The West probably only went for Obama due to the spillover from North Dakota.  With polls showing him being competitive there (even though it wasn't as close as the polls suggested), I believe he did a lot of media advertising and considering the largest centers are in the Eastern part of North Dakota, I suspect much of that spilled over into Minnesota.  Minneapolis, you can see the urban core going heavily Democrat, the built up suburbs narrowly voting for Obama, while McCain winning the exurbs and low density suburbs.  I suspect if you plotted Obama's percentage against the population density of each district in the Minneapolis area, there would be a pretty strong correlation.  Off course this is the case throughout much of the US, although Northeastern Minnesota is pretty low in population density, yet strongly Democrat.  Although I suspect this has due with the area being heavily Scandinavian and also I believe much like neighbouring Northern Ontario, much of the area is in forestry and mining as opposed to agriculture.

[mileslunn]

I understand the Northeast of Minnesota is quite leftist compared to elsewhere in the state, but any particular reason.  Is this region heavy in forestry or mining as those areas tend be heavily unionized plus somewhat left leaning.  Also what about the large Scandinavian community in this area.  I believe the Democrats tend to do better amongst them than other groups such as the Germans, Dutch, Scots-Irish, and English who are more likely to favour the Republicans, while the predominately Catholic groups (German Catholics, Irish, Polish, French-Canadians, Italians) seemed to be historically Democrat, but more evenly split in recent elections.