New Minnesotans and politics

Here's a question I've heard a lot of people speculate about: Why has politics in Minnesota changed over the past few decades? Specifically, why have policy debates become more partisan and more polarized? What happened to the consensus politics which characterized Minnesota in an earlier era?

One answer that has been proposed is that it has to do with "outsiders". Over time, this argument suggests, people from other parts of the country have moved to Minnesota and brought a different spirit of politics with them. (In other words, it's not really our fault.)

Carefully examining whether the data supports this idea is a long project, and I'm just going to make a dent in it here. Let's look at how migration patterns have changed in Minnesota over the last 20 years. I'm going to use county-level data here because of the way census data was collected in the 1980 census. Thanks to the wonderful folks at NHGIS, the data files do exist to map 1980 census data by census tract, but (1) the entire state was not tracted until the 1990 census, and (2) even if I want to confine myself to the metro area alone, I'm still puzzling out how to link up the raw 1980 data file with the NHGIS geographic tract files. (Nice rainy day project -- for a lot of rainy days.)

The first thing to notice is that although the proportion of "outsiders" in Minnesota has been increasing over time, it has been pretty gradual. Here are some statewide numbers:

		1980	1990	2000
	Percent of population born outside Minnesota Percent of population not living in MN 5 years earlier	25.1 8.3	26.4 8.8	29.8 9.6

 

Now, I've mapped some of these same trends so you can see how this breaks down county-by-county. Even though these images are small, there's something rather remarkable to see here. See if you can find what I'm referring to:

 

The first thing that strikes me is how similar these maps are. The areas that were attracting new Minnesota residents in 1980 were pretty much the same areas that were attracting them in 2000 -- the Twin Cities and the southern metro, Rochester, and the Fargo/Moorhead area. This doesn't seem especially supportive of the "not our fault" hypothesis. If Minnesota is changing now in roughly the same way it was changing in 1980 (if a little more so), then it seems odd that demographic change would be the main driving force behind a different political atmosphere.

Here's a closer look at the metro area using census block data from 1990 and 2000. Again, there's just not a lot of difference:

 

Now, about that remarkable thing from the county-level maps (you can see part of it in the metro area maps, too): there's an amazing difference between the fast-growing areas of the northern/northwestern metro and the fast-growing areas of the southern and western metro. Look especially at the two fastest-growing counties in Minnesota, Scott and Sherburne:

Percentage born outside of Minnesota
		1980	1990	2000	20 yr chg
	Southern/western metro:   Scott   Carver   Dakota Northern metro:   Sherburne   Anoka   Washington	18.3 18.9 28.6   19.4 22.4 26.5	20.6 21.6 30.5    19.7 22.2 27.7	27.2 27.4 33.2    18.4 23.7 28.4	+8.9 +8.5 +4.6    -1.0 +1.3 +1.9

 

Percentage not living in Minnesota five years earlier
		1980	1990	2000	20 yr chg
	Southern/western metro:   Scott   Carver   Dakota Northern metro:   Sherburne   Anoka   Washington	5.2 8.1 11.2   8.5 5.7 8.2	5.7 8.6 12.3    7.3 6.1 9.9	9.4 10.3 10.2    4.4 6.1 9.2	+4.2 +2.2 -1.0    -4.1 +0.4 +1.0

 

Sherburne, a county which more than doubled in size between 1980 and 2000, actually had a higher percentage of native Minnesotans at the end of that time period than it did at the beginning! And all of the stats for the north metro are very interesting, particularly given the historical voting patterns of the sixth congressional district.

Further, only Dakota and Carver exceed the statewide Minnesota numbers in either table, and not by lots and lots. The statewide numbers do not come from a disproportionate number of folks moving into the suburbs from out of state -- in fact, it's folks moving into Minneapolis and St. Paul and to other parts of the state like the Rochester and Fargo areas.

Putting it all together:

1. Geographic and demographic patterns of people moving into the state have not changed radically in the last 20 years. Although the increase is substantial in real numbers, in proportion to the state's population as a whole it's not that dramatic.

2. Suburban growth is due primarily to Minnesotans moving around within the state, not to folks coming here from elsewhere. Folks new to Minnesota are a small (though significant) fraction of the total growth.

3. The contribution of "outsiders" to metropolitan growth is greater in the southern metro than it is in the northern metro.

So what does this mean for new Minnesotans and politics? If we're trying to defend the idea that folks new to Minnesota are changing the state's politics, we would expect to see substantially more evidence of a change in political atmosphere in the southern suburbs than the northern suburbs -- and we would expect to see the greatest changes in the Twin Cities themselves. Now, I have not put together a bunch of data to test that conclusion (putting this together took me long enough), but that doesn't strike me as consistent with my observations or with the conventional wisdom about the state. If you think differently, let me know in the comments.

One other note. It could be argued that the changes in Minnesota's political atmosphere are due more to the type of folks who have come here recently, not their numbers. But if that's true, then these new residents are exerting political influence out of proportion to their statewide numbers.

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Note: For the record, The Analyst states that he is not a native Minnesotan himself. (Go Hawkeyes!) But he does have relatives who are native to the state and he spent many childhood summers in northern Minnesota.

posted by DK @ 2:01 PM permalink