After a two-week deep dive into Minnesota precinct data, here are my takeaways....
The Core Mostly Held For Harris--While Minnesota shifted three points to the right overall, that was less than the shift of the country at large. The primary reason is that the needle barely budged at all in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, be it the ur…
After a two-week deep dive into Minnesota precinct data, here are my takeaways....
The Core Mostly Held For Harris--While Minnesota shifted three points to the right overall, that was less than the shift of the country at large. The primary reason is that the needle barely budged at all in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, be it the urban centers, the first-ring suburbs, or the second-ring suburbs. The vast majority of municipalities in the Twin Cities were within a percentage point for Harris compared to Biden four years ago. Even the third-ring exurbs largely didn't move much, and in some cases, got a bit bluer. Meanwhile, Minnesota's third largest city of Rochester has continued its sharp Democratic trendline from a decade ago.
Mixed Bag in the Outstate College Towns--Most of the regional centers in outstate Minnesota that remain blue are homes to colleges and universities, some of which have been struggling with enrollment. I anticipated the student body, particularly the males, were probably more conservative this year than four years ago. There was little indication of slippage in Duluth, Moorhead, Bemidji, St. Peter, or Northfield. There was clearer erosion of support compared to Biden in Winona and the badly battered St. Cloud whose state university has seen the heaviest enrollment declines. Meanwhile, the bottom continues to fall out in Morris in western Minnesota, home of another college suffering from steep enrollment declines, going from a 16-point Hillary win in 2016 to a 1-point Trump win in 2024. Crookston remains the most conservative university town in Minnesota but didn't accelerate its rightward trend nearly as much as Morris.
The Mankato Embarrassment--The most inexplicable underperformance of Minnesota's college towns came in Walz's hometown of Mankato, where Harris lost more that four points from Biden's 2020 margin. I'm not sure what's going on here. Perhaps a more conservative student body reflective of the general conservative trend in southern Minnesota, but the underperformance was clear in precinct after precinct, not limited to neighborhoods with high student populations. There was no hint of any hometown victory chant for Walz among his neighbors, and that was decidedly not the case in any of his previous Congressional or gubernatorial runs where he always did well.
Klobuchar Still Ran Ahead of the Presidential Ticket--There was considerable polling that hinted at Amy Klobuchar's bipartisan appeal having faded and that, despite having her weakest challenger yet by far, her victory would be far less impressive this time than her three previous campaigns. In the end, her margin was at least within shouting distance of what we'd seen from her in the past, even if her county map wasn't nearly as comprehensively blue. Even though she didn't do as well as she had in the past outstate, her overperformance of Harris was more dramatic in the rural areas. There were numerous communities that went more than 2-1 for Trump that still voted for Klobuchar. It seems reasonable to predict that some Minnesota communities that held out for Klobuchar this year may never again vote Democratic in my lifetime.
Angie Craig Kills It--One of the most pleasant surprises of the evening was Angie Craig's dominating double-digit victory over Joe Teirab, who was actually a pretty good GOP candidate. After a trio of modest victories in previous cycles, Craig's winning margin in the district was much closer to Klobuchar's than Harris's. She was only 400 votes short of winning Scott County.
Warning Signs Among Immigrant Populations--The Minnesota Star Tribune ran a story that documented a double-digit shift toward Trump in the three Minneapolis precincts with the highest numbers of Somali-Americans. Harris still dominated in these precincts, but any time you see double-digit shifts among any demographic group, it's a development worthy of concern. Shakopee, another Twin Cities suburb with a substantial Somali population, also shifted two points toward Trump. It isn't fully clear if the Somali shift is related to Gaza or social conservatism. The Star Tribune article hinted at a combination of both. Similarly, the precincts with the heaviest Hmong populations on the east side of St. Paul also shifted decisively toward Trump and the GOP generally. Unlike Minneapolis, St. Paul actually shifted a couple of points to the right, and most of the losses came in those Hmong precincts. As a result, for the first time in my lifetime, St. Paul was NOT the most Democratic town in Ramsey County! Suburban Falcon Heights was. It's harder to pin down by precinct data how the Hispanic, Hmong, and Somali vote trended elsewhere in the state because outside of the core cities, there aren't many precincts with majority concentrations of first or second-generation immigrant populations.
The Iron Range is Gone--The big realignment of Minnesota's previously dark blue mining towns that make up the Iron Range happened in 2016. Since then, it's been continued incremental slippage, and in 2024, only Chisholm, Eveleth, and the tiny town of McKinley stayed in the Harris column on the Range proper. Virginia, Mountain Iron, Biwabik, and Nashwauk all flipped to Trump this year, joining their neighbors who already flipped in 2016 or 2020. And the last state House seat held by a Democrat in the central Iron Range flipped handily to the GOP this year after the retirement of Dave Lislegard who only won by 2 points in 2022. The local realignment happened more quickly than I anticipated even after the 2016 bloodbath at the top of the ticket. Most interesting about the Iron Range collapse is that the Itasca County side of the Iron Range fell the hardest and the most quickly. Twenty years ago, as one of numerous examples, nearly all of the towns on the Itasca County side of the Range went stronger for John Kerry than nearly all of the towns on the St. Louis County side. Fast forward to 2024 and the vast majority of the Range towns in St. Louis County held out comfortably for Amy Klobuchar, but except for Nashwauk and Keewatin, all of the Range towns in Itasca County didn't even vote for her!
Canoers Go The Other Direction--The inverse to the Iron Range story is that the only two Minnesota counties that went stronger for Harris than Biden were Lake and Cook counties in the state's Arrowhead region. It's a safe bet that their position on copper-nickel mining conflicts with that of the neighboring Iron Range. In fact, the town best known for being the gateway to the Boundary Waters, and which has one foot in the mining culture of the Iron Range, is Ely in northeastern St. Louis County. Ely went for Biden four years ago and voted for Harris this year, as did a couple of its neighboring townships. From a numerical standpoint, you'd rather have the Iron Range in your column than the Boundary Waters corridor but there's at least some degree of divergence going on here where votes lost in one area are being made up for elsewhere. If state Senator Grant Hauschild has any hope of being re-elected in Tom Bakk's old district in 2026, he'd better hope these trends continue.
The Center of Minnesota Is It's Darkest Shade of Red--From the Dakota borders to the Wisconsin border, central Minnesota has become the biggest disaster zone for Democrats. But it's the patch of territory in the dead center of the state where Republicans have recently begun to run up margins more reminiscent of central Nebraska than anything previously seen in Minnesota. Most of these counties are populated by German Catholics and are ancestrally Democratic, albeit VERY conservative Democrats. Outside of Collin Peterson, Democrats in federal races haven't fared well here for most of my lifetime, but as recently as the 2000s, these counties voted Democratic in statewide downballot races and sent Democrats like Dallas Sams, Mary Ellen Otremba, Larry Hosch, and Al Doty to the Legislature. More recently, the area was the home district of Republican Senate Leader Paul Gazelka. What's driving their surge to the right above and beyond the rest of outstate Minnesota? It's probably equal parts social conservatism, tied to their particularly strident Catholic diocese, and backlash to the considerable immigration settlements, be it the Somali influx to St. Cloud or the migrants at the dairy farms and food processing plants in the area.
Excellent and informative round-up. I wonder if the university town shifts are a reddening student population or declining enrollment . . I'd suspect the latter is a far larger variable. Long-term that's actually a major worry for the Dem Party . . the constant growth in degree obtainment has hit a brick wall over the past decade nationally, and there aren't many signs it's getting any better (although I do think colleges/universities will have to have a come to Jesus shift in the next decade re: costs as a result)
I think it's a combination of both. And it definitely is a major worry for Democrats as college attendance is at this point directly adjacent to Democratic voting. The fact that Harris's campaign was announcing that they were gonna lift degree requirements for more federal jobs was a good indicator that they see the future is a place where fewer and fewer people have college degrees. It's also another good indication of how disastrous it's been for the Democrats to coast on their 15-year-old "coalition of the ascendant" strategy that's now been completely blown apart at all levels.
"It's also another good indication of how disastrous it's been for the Democrats to coast on their 15-year-old "coalition of the ascendant" strategy"
Where I disagree is I don't see this as some deliberate strategy on the part of the Democratic Party and more part of a global realignment occurring along educational and rural/urban lines that is happening across the entire developed world. Has the party made some at times significant errors? Sure, but I don't see any alternative reality in which the Dem Party is able to hold onto its 2008 coalition via policy/messaging changes.
It wasn't so much a strategy as an interpretation based on 2008 and 2012 results, a half-baked interpretation that they internalized and then coasted on for far too long. A lot of tactical choices were made that accelerated the problem, be it limiting campaign stops to population centers or the shift to an immigration platform that they believed would appeal to Hispanics but ended up driving them away. I definitely think the alternative reality where Democrats didn't slow-walk their way to a de facto open borders position would have slowed the stampede of working-class whites and Hispanics toward the Republicans. It also wouldn't have given Trump so much to work with this year.
In your opinion, if Biden and Dems had taken action in immigration a year earlier, do you think it would have made a significant difference in this election? When the numbers of migrants started hitting NYC in summer of 23, I thought they really needed to do something quick.
Two years earlier might have stanched the bleeding. The cake might have already been baked only one year earlier but the sooner they showed a hint of seriousness about it, the better politically.
This is the proper context for our current struggles. This is a really worrisome global phenomenon going back to the early 2010s and it’s only accelerating.
Pierre Poilievre looks likely to win a Mulroney-sized majority in Canada. Parties like the FPO in Austria and SD in Sweden are easily coming ahead of traditional conservatives and forcing them right. Slicker, more polished nationalists like Bardella and Zemmour loom in France. AfD might be the second largest party in Germany in March. South Korean politics is just a contest to see who can be the biggest incel. It’s hard not to sense that the lights are going out, as Earl Grey said in 1914, not just here but everywhere
If nothing else I think the negative trends for smaller regional/“directional”
state schools, HBCUs and small liberal arts colleges aren’t going to get better even if larger land grant/flagship research state schools continue steady growth, albeit at a slower pace than in previous years.
At some point the sector is going to need serious cost reform. Job prospects are still much better for college graduates but the absurd prices at a lot of institutions aren’t sustainable
Yeah, half of them shuttering by 2035 is probably the optimistic case. I just don’t know what the upside to attend such an institution at current costs is when the education at most public state unis is as good if not better
I'm not sure the problem is with the liberal arts colleges. The issue is really whether you justify the tuition costs at public universities vs. private universities.
Taking a look at how much an undergraduate education costs at Stanford vs. UC Berkeley, we have the following figures:
Granted it's cheaper at UCB or any other UC compared to Stanford or even any of the ivy leagues, $168,000+ is still expensive no matter how you spin it. Therefore, the question of the value of education is always being brought to the test.
We have Ronald Reagan to thank for this back when he was Governor of California during most of the period of the Vietnam War.
Stanford has a reputation as being an elitist kind of school and can get you anywhere in Silicon Valley. After all, it's where Peter Thiel graduated from with both his degrees (including his JD).
However, UC Berkeley is far better of a university because students have a tendency to challenge the status quo, which many UCs preach.
Therefore, the better school in this case costs less.
That's a good point. I wouldn't think Mankato State University would be a school that would be likely to have a substantial percentage of the student body motivated by Gaza, but I may be out of touch about that.
Excellent summary. Re the Somali shift to the right, might the general swing due to inflation have something to do with it if the Somali community is generally lower-income than the state average? There seems to be a consistent pattern that poorer counties swung more toward Trump than more affluent counties did, all else equal.
A Somali imam from Minneaplis had an excellent piece in the Star Tribune yesterday giving some context for the numbers in the Somali precincts and framing the matter as a decline in turnout compared to four years ago more than it was a MAGA shift. He said the precincts with the double-digit percentage shift only saw 200 more votes for Trump but 1,531 fewer votes for Harris compared to Biden. It's not awesome if turnout cratered that badly but that loss of raw votes was clearly a bigger driver for the double-digit percentage shift than was gains for Trump.
Pretty amazing that we saw a sizable minority and immigrant population turnout decline on our side in a cycle where we ran a daughter of immigrants (and first ever Asian candidate to boot) vs an opponent going full-on Bill the Butcher nativist.
After a two-week deep dive into Minnesota precinct data, here are my takeaways....
The Core Mostly Held For Harris--While Minnesota shifted three points to the right overall, that was less than the shift of the country at large. The primary reason is that the needle barely budged at all in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, be it the urban centers, the first-ring suburbs, or the second-ring suburbs. The vast majority of municipalities in the Twin Cities were within a percentage point for Harris compared to Biden four years ago. Even the third-ring exurbs largely didn't move much, and in some cases, got a bit bluer. Meanwhile, Minnesota's third largest city of Rochester has continued its sharp Democratic trendline from a decade ago.
Mixed Bag in the Outstate College Towns--Most of the regional centers in outstate Minnesota that remain blue are homes to colleges and universities, some of which have been struggling with enrollment. I anticipated the student body, particularly the males, were probably more conservative this year than four years ago. There was little indication of slippage in Duluth, Moorhead, Bemidji, St. Peter, or Northfield. There was clearer erosion of support compared to Biden in Winona and the badly battered St. Cloud whose state university has seen the heaviest enrollment declines. Meanwhile, the bottom continues to fall out in Morris in western Minnesota, home of another college suffering from steep enrollment declines, going from a 16-point Hillary win in 2016 to a 1-point Trump win in 2024. Crookston remains the most conservative university town in Minnesota but didn't accelerate its rightward trend nearly as much as Morris.
The Mankato Embarrassment--The most inexplicable underperformance of Minnesota's college towns came in Walz's hometown of Mankato, where Harris lost more that four points from Biden's 2020 margin. I'm not sure what's going on here. Perhaps a more conservative student body reflective of the general conservative trend in southern Minnesota, but the underperformance was clear in precinct after precinct, not limited to neighborhoods with high student populations. There was no hint of any hometown victory chant for Walz among his neighbors, and that was decidedly not the case in any of his previous Congressional or gubernatorial runs where he always did well.
Klobuchar Still Ran Ahead of the Presidential Ticket--There was considerable polling that hinted at Amy Klobuchar's bipartisan appeal having faded and that, despite having her weakest challenger yet by far, her victory would be far less impressive this time than her three previous campaigns. In the end, her margin was at least within shouting distance of what we'd seen from her in the past, even if her county map wasn't nearly as comprehensively blue. Even though she didn't do as well as she had in the past outstate, her overperformance of Harris was more dramatic in the rural areas. There were numerous communities that went more than 2-1 for Trump that still voted for Klobuchar. It seems reasonable to predict that some Minnesota communities that held out for Klobuchar this year may never again vote Democratic in my lifetime.
Angie Craig Kills It--One of the most pleasant surprises of the evening was Angie Craig's dominating double-digit victory over Joe Teirab, who was actually a pretty good GOP candidate. After a trio of modest victories in previous cycles, Craig's winning margin in the district was much closer to Klobuchar's than Harris's. She was only 400 votes short of winning Scott County.
Warning Signs Among Immigrant Populations--The Minnesota Star Tribune ran a story that documented a double-digit shift toward Trump in the three Minneapolis precincts with the highest numbers of Somali-Americans. Harris still dominated in these precincts, but any time you see double-digit shifts among any demographic group, it's a development worthy of concern. Shakopee, another Twin Cities suburb with a substantial Somali population, also shifted two points toward Trump. It isn't fully clear if the Somali shift is related to Gaza or social conservatism. The Star Tribune article hinted at a combination of both. Similarly, the precincts with the heaviest Hmong populations on the east side of St. Paul also shifted decisively toward Trump and the GOP generally. Unlike Minneapolis, St. Paul actually shifted a couple of points to the right, and most of the losses came in those Hmong precincts. As a result, for the first time in my lifetime, St. Paul was NOT the most Democratic town in Ramsey County! Suburban Falcon Heights was. It's harder to pin down by precinct data how the Hispanic, Hmong, and Somali vote trended elsewhere in the state because outside of the core cities, there aren't many precincts with majority concentrations of first or second-generation immigrant populations.
The Iron Range is Gone--The big realignment of Minnesota's previously dark blue mining towns that make up the Iron Range happened in 2016. Since then, it's been continued incremental slippage, and in 2024, only Chisholm, Eveleth, and the tiny town of McKinley stayed in the Harris column on the Range proper. Virginia, Mountain Iron, Biwabik, and Nashwauk all flipped to Trump this year, joining their neighbors who already flipped in 2016 or 2020. And the last state House seat held by a Democrat in the central Iron Range flipped handily to the GOP this year after the retirement of Dave Lislegard who only won by 2 points in 2022. The local realignment happened more quickly than I anticipated even after the 2016 bloodbath at the top of the ticket. Most interesting about the Iron Range collapse is that the Itasca County side of the Iron Range fell the hardest and the most quickly. Twenty years ago, as one of numerous examples, nearly all of the towns on the Itasca County side of the Range went stronger for John Kerry than nearly all of the towns on the St. Louis County side. Fast forward to 2024 and the vast majority of the Range towns in St. Louis County held out comfortably for Amy Klobuchar, but except for Nashwauk and Keewatin, all of the Range towns in Itasca County didn't even vote for her!
Canoers Go The Other Direction--The inverse to the Iron Range story is that the only two Minnesota counties that went stronger for Harris than Biden were Lake and Cook counties in the state's Arrowhead region. It's a safe bet that their position on copper-nickel mining conflicts with that of the neighboring Iron Range. In fact, the town best known for being the gateway to the Boundary Waters, and which has one foot in the mining culture of the Iron Range, is Ely in northeastern St. Louis County. Ely went for Biden four years ago and voted for Harris this year, as did a couple of its neighboring townships. From a numerical standpoint, you'd rather have the Iron Range in your column than the Boundary Waters corridor but there's at least some degree of divergence going on here where votes lost in one area are being made up for elsewhere. If state Senator Grant Hauschild has any hope of being re-elected in Tom Bakk's old district in 2026, he'd better hope these trends continue.
The Center of Minnesota Is It's Darkest Shade of Red--From the Dakota borders to the Wisconsin border, central Minnesota has become the biggest disaster zone for Democrats. But it's the patch of territory in the dead center of the state where Republicans have recently begun to run up margins more reminiscent of central Nebraska than anything previously seen in Minnesota. Most of these counties are populated by German Catholics and are ancestrally Democratic, albeit VERY conservative Democrats. Outside of Collin Peterson, Democrats in federal races haven't fared well here for most of my lifetime, but as recently as the 2000s, these counties voted Democratic in statewide downballot races and sent Democrats like Dallas Sams, Mary Ellen Otremba, Larry Hosch, and Al Doty to the Legislature. More recently, the area was the home district of Republican Senate Leader Paul Gazelka. What's driving their surge to the right above and beyond the rest of outstate Minnesota? It's probably equal parts social conservatism, tied to their particularly strident Catholic diocese, and backlash to the considerable immigration settlements, be it the Somali influx to St. Cloud or the migrants at the dairy farms and food processing plants in the area.
Excellent and informative round-up. I wonder if the university town shifts are a reddening student population or declining enrollment . . I'd suspect the latter is a far larger variable. Long-term that's actually a major worry for the Dem Party . . the constant growth in degree obtainment has hit a brick wall over the past decade nationally, and there aren't many signs it's getting any better (although I do think colleges/universities will have to have a come to Jesus shift in the next decade re: costs as a result)
I think it's a combination of both. And it definitely is a major worry for Democrats as college attendance is at this point directly adjacent to Democratic voting. The fact that Harris's campaign was announcing that they were gonna lift degree requirements for more federal jobs was a good indicator that they see the future is a place where fewer and fewer people have college degrees. It's also another good indication of how disastrous it's been for the Democrats to coast on their 15-year-old "coalition of the ascendant" strategy that's now been completely blown apart at all levels.
"It's also another good indication of how disastrous it's been for the Democrats to coast on their 15-year-old "coalition of the ascendant" strategy"
Where I disagree is I don't see this as some deliberate strategy on the part of the Democratic Party and more part of a global realignment occurring along educational and rural/urban lines that is happening across the entire developed world. Has the party made some at times significant errors? Sure, but I don't see any alternative reality in which the Dem Party is able to hold onto its 2008 coalition via policy/messaging changes.
It wasn't so much a strategy as an interpretation based on 2008 and 2012 results, a half-baked interpretation that they internalized and then coasted on for far too long. A lot of tactical choices were made that accelerated the problem, be it limiting campaign stops to population centers or the shift to an immigration platform that they believed would appeal to Hispanics but ended up driving them away. I definitely think the alternative reality where Democrats didn't slow-walk their way to a de facto open borders position would have slowed the stampede of working-class whites and Hispanics toward the Republicans. It also wouldn't have given Trump so much to work with this year.
In your opinion, if Biden and Dems had taken action in immigration a year earlier, do you think it would have made a significant difference in this election? When the numbers of migrants started hitting NYC in summer of 23, I thought they really needed to do something quick.
Two years earlier might have stanched the bleeding. The cake might have already been baked only one year earlier but the sooner they showed a hint of seriousness about it, the better politically.
This is the proper context for our current struggles. This is a really worrisome global phenomenon going back to the early 2010s and it’s only accelerating.
Pierre Poilievre looks likely to win a Mulroney-sized majority in Canada. Parties like the FPO in Austria and SD in Sweden are easily coming ahead of traditional conservatives and forcing them right. Slicker, more polished nationalists like Bardella and Zemmour loom in France. AfD might be the second largest party in Germany in March. South Korean politics is just a contest to see who can be the biggest incel. It’s hard not to sense that the lights are going out, as Earl Grey said in 1914, not just here but everywhere
If nothing else I think the negative trends for smaller regional/“directional”
state schools, HBCUs and small liberal arts colleges aren’t going to get better even if larger land grant/flagship research state schools continue steady growth, albeit at a slower pace than in previous years.
At some point the sector is going to need serious cost reform. Job prospects are still much better for college graduates but the absurd prices at a lot of institutions aren’t sustainable
I struggle to see how more than quarter of existing private liberal arts colleges will still be around by 2035.
Yeah, half of them shuttering by 2035 is probably the optimistic case. I just don’t know what the upside to attend such an institution at current costs is when the education at most public state unis is as good if not better
I'm not sure the problem is with the liberal arts colleges. The issue is really whether you justify the tuition costs at public universities vs. private universities.
Taking a look at how much an undergraduate education costs at Stanford vs. UC Berkeley, we have the following figures:
Stanford - $328,648 for undergraduate students
https://www.sofi.com/stanford-university-tuition-fees/
UCB - $168,576 for undergraduate students
https://financialaid.berkeley.edu/how-aid-works/student-budgets-cost-of-attendance/
Granted it's cheaper at UCB or any other UC compared to Stanford or even any of the ivy leagues, $168,000+ is still expensive no matter how you spin it. Therefore, the question of the value of education is always being brought to the test.
We have Ronald Reagan to thank for this back when he was Governor of California during most of the period of the Vietnam War.
Interesting since Berkeley is probably a better school than Stanford at half the cost.
Stanford has a reputation as being an elitist kind of school and can get you anywhere in Silicon Valley. After all, it's where Peter Thiel graduated from with both his degrees (including his JD).
However, UC Berkeley is far better of a university because students have a tendency to challenge the status quo, which many UCs preach.
Therefore, the better school in this case costs less.
Gaza may also play a role for the colleges you mentioned but there is no one answer that covers everyone who shifted or didn't show up.
That's a good point. I wouldn't think Mankato State University would be a school that would be likely to have a substantial percentage of the student body motivated by Gaza, but I may be out of touch about that.
Excellent summary. Re the Somali shift to the right, might the general swing due to inflation have something to do with it if the Somali community is generally lower-income than the state average? There seems to be a consistent pattern that poorer counties swung more toward Trump than more affluent counties did, all else equal.
A Somali imam from Minneaplis had an excellent piece in the Star Tribune yesterday giving some context for the numbers in the Somali precincts and framing the matter as a decline in turnout compared to four years ago more than it was a MAGA shift. He said the precincts with the double-digit percentage shift only saw 200 more votes for Trump but 1,531 fewer votes for Harris compared to Biden. It's not awesome if turnout cratered that badly but that loss of raw votes was clearly a bigger driver for the double-digit percentage shift than was gains for Trump.
Pretty amazing that we saw a sizable minority and immigrant population turnout decline on our side in a cycle where we ran a daughter of immigrants (and first ever Asian candidate to boot) vs an opponent going full-on Bill the Butcher nativist.
You think the George Floyd murder might have pushed some people who normally stay home to vote for Biden in 2020?
Hard to say. I don't think there's any reason that Floyd's murder would diminish turnout disproportionately high in the Somali community though.
I was speculating whether the murder pushed Somali turnout up in 2020, and then it fell back to a normal level this year.
Next open Senate seat in Minnesota, Angie Craig should go for it!! 💙🇺🇲
Might be a wait but I'm fine with her(or Walz)
My hunch is this will be Amy Klobuchar's last term. She'll be 70 in 2030.
70 is young for a Senator. I could see two more terms at least.
Tina Smith is 2 years older.