Do you consider Minnesota a swing state?

[neostassenite31]

Minnesota is neither a swing state or a blue/red state. It is truly a political oddball in so many ways. On the surface, if you can look past the voting streak/history, we're a narrowly-divided state with a slight statewide Dem advantage.

The single most defining feature of MN politics over the past four decades is how competing demographics changes, decade after decade, keep cancelling each other out almost perfectly. National political trends transform Minnesota's politics every cycle, but the cancellations always result in Democrats holding a slight statewide advantage and thereby giving the state an extremely "inelastic" feel.

The voter coalition that propelled Michael Dukakis to victory in MN in 1988 is very much alien to the coalition that delivered the state to John Kerry in 2004, which is in turn almost indistinguishable to the coalition that delivered Hillary Clinton her narrow win in 2016. Dukakis was strong with rural Scandinavian populists and iron rangers but was a wash in the metro except in the central cities; Kerry did better in the central cities and held his ground with iron rangers, but he deteriorated significantly with rural voters overall and lost the suburbs badly; Clinton got wholesale destroyed in rural MN but performed very strongly in the Twin Cities and its suburbs. Despite these differences, the Democrat won all three elections, each from a separate decade, by low to mid single digits.

The narrow single digit margins in MN cycle after cycle have attracted national Republicans eyeing the state as a potential flip opportunity ever since 2000. Yet just as GOP presidential candidates/strategists believe victory is finally in sight (after 2000, 2004, and 2016), the state would forcefully snap towards the Democrats the next cycle but only to become more competitive again the cycle after that, much to the confusion and frustration of the GOP.

This sort of pattern has gotten to the point where it's almost as if Minnesota voters are actively playing a nasty joke on Republicans.