Why whites in the rural upper Midwest often vote Democrat prior to Trump?

[GregTheGreat657]

Whites in the upper Midwest aren’t super culturally conservative nor are they significantly more secular than the rurals in the rest of the country. Is it a larger union presence? Are these voters mostly left of center on economics?

[JGibson]

Whites in the upper Midwest aren’t super culturally conservative nor are they significantly more secular than the rurals in the rest of the country. Is it a larger union presence? Are these voters mostly left of center on economics?

My guess is that union priorities came ahead of racial resentment issues in their voting intentions (Obama reluctantly/downballot Dems much more intensely).

[CookieDamage]

I think the 1980s farm crisis made the region blue as well. It was never an ancestrally Democratic area, and Trump might have helped it "revert" to its Republican voting pattern.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Since they tend to hold more hostile views on immigration and trade, which the Reps never emphasized until Trump. Politicians of both parties held relatively similar views on both issues leading up to Trump, and the region was more socially & economically liberal, so the pre-Trump GOP was generally a poor fit for the area.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

Whites in the upper Midwest aren’t super culturally conservative nor are they significantly more secular than the rurals in the rest of the country. Is it a larger union presence? Are these voters mostly left of center on economics?

My guess is that union priorities came ahead of racial resentment issues in their voting intentions (Obama reluctantly/downballot Dems much more intensely).

The Upper Midwest is racially homogenous, so the WWC didn't have the racial resentment that WWC in the South did.

[Non Swing Voter]

It's definitely the union presence.  Weren't all those Scott Walker recalls all about union issues?  It's a region where there was a large manufacturing and union presence for a generation and it was engrained in the culture.  This was bound to diminish over time as the Democratic Party took on more coastal priorities but Trump exploited that and accelerated the trend.

[SInNYC]

Its not just unions, its also a populist left undercurrent. Upper midwest (and upper plains) politics combined populist left farmers who wanted to get out of the influence of big city bankers and corporations as well as populist left unionized workers, for a gentler version of the sickle and hammer. In MN this was the Farmer-Labor Party; in ND it was the non-Partisan League; in WI, it was the Progressive Party. The Dakotas had a state owned bank, insurance, mills, ...

Although these issues/parties were mostly folded into the Democratic party after the New Deal, I think they still formed a powerful undercurrent in the state Democratic parties until fairly recently, unlike Democratic parties in the rest of the nation. When national Ds in the 90s decided they would downplay (or in some cases, be against) these issues and chase corporate money, that left an opening for this populist left undercurrent to become populist right based on the social issues that were the new core of the party.

[lfromnj]

It's definitely the union presence.  Weren't all those Scott Walker recalls all about union issues?  It's a region where there was a large manufacturing and union presence for a generation and it was engrained in the culture.  This was bound to diminish over time as the Democratic Party took on more coastal priorities but Trump exploited that and accelerated the trend.

Nope unionization rates were never particularly high in the driftless .

[Tartarus Sauce]

The farm crisis and Republican turn towards hard-edged evangelical social conservatism alienated the voters in this region, flipping them towards the Democrats during the late 80s and early 90s.