Do you consider Minnesota a swing state?

[Battista Minola 1616]

I did some quick maths (not quick at all actually) on Minnesota and Wisconsin since it has been brought up.

I started from the 2016 presidential election.

I used the easiest and clearest definition of "rural" I could think of i.e. any county that is not part of a Metropolitan Statistical Area (although I considered Cook, MN and Ashland, WI and Bayfield, WI as though they were part of the Duluth MSA, because... I mean, look at any electoral map).

Results:

Minneapolis-Saint Paul MSA voted for Hillary Clinton 52.5 - 38.8 (D+14), and it accounted for 62.5% or 5/8 of the Minnesota vote.
The rest of Minnesota went to Donald Trump 55.1 - 36.3 (R+19).
After excluding the other MSA's, 'rural Minnesota' appears to have voted for Donald Trump 59.6 - 32.2 (R+27).

Milwaukee MSA and Madison MSA summed together voted for Hillary Clinton 55.6 - 38.1 (D+17), which is a larger margin than the Twin Cities metro, but they only accounted for slightly less than 40% or 4/10 of the Wisconsin vote. For detail, it was D+7 for Milwaukee but D+40 for Madison.
The rest of Wisconsin went to Donald Trump 53.2 - 40.5 (R+13).
After excluding the other MSA's, 'rural Wisconsin' appears to have voted for Donald Trump 56.8 - 37.3 (R+19).

So:
Rural Minnesota was actually to the right of rural Wisconsin.
Considering that rural Wisconsin is only slightly larger than rural Minnesota, and that the two states had almost identical total raw votes, it seems that what made the difference is Minnesota having a much bigger liberal core metropolitan area, and in turn not having such a plethora of reliably conservative small metros as Wisconsin has (Green Bay, Appleton, Wausau, Sheboygan, Fond du Lac vs. only St. Cloud).

Giving a quick glance to the 2020 map, it seems that the gap between the two states grew larger this year mostly because MSP swung harder than either MKE or MDS - and the swing accounts for more since the metro is already bigger - and in addition I'd say that the gap between rural MN and rural WI appears to have narrowed.