City liberals, miners, environmentalists, and union workers make up the Minnesota Democratic coalition. But, like in a lot of the Midwest, it's getting tougher and tougher to hold together.

Molly Hensley-Clancy A statue in the Iron Range town of Chisholm, Minnesota, honors metal miners.

In the backyard of a bar in Coleraine, Minnesota, Pat Medure, a former county sheriff, was making his case for the Democratic Party’s future in rural America: universal health care, rural broadband internet, bringing back businesses to an increasingly deserted Main Street.

“There’s some things going on in the Democratic Party that divide us,” Medure, who is running for a state legislature seat against a Republican incumbent, acknowledged to a crowd assembled over pulled pork, baked beans, and lemon squares sponsored by the Itasca County Democratic Party. “There’s a lot of friction in the party. We can worry about that when we get there — but we believe in the same things.” To most people in the crowd, it was immediately clear what Medure was talking about: mining. Here, in and around the state’s long-struggling iron mining region, known as the Iron Range, the tension in the Democratic Party between mining advocates and environmentalists is almost palpable. The issue, mostly, pits people in northern Minnesota’s small towns against city environmentalists. And it’s a sign of a broader problem: In Minnesota, tension between urban and rural Democrats has been growing increasingly sharp. Democrats on the Iron Range worry it could cost the party in 2018. While Republicans shower rural Minnesota with energy and money, much of Democrats’ focus is on the suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul — “the Cities,” as they’re known up here. In the Cities, Democrats have the chance to flip two seats held by Republicans in districts that Hillary Clinton either won by 9 points or lost only narrowly. It’s the same thing the party is chasing across the country: the chance to win in wealthy white suburbs in places like New Jersey and Orange County, where Democrats are energized and some historically Republican voters, especially white women, are turned off by Trump. Meanwhile, Itasca County is teetering on the edge of losing its long Democratic heritage. It went to Trump in the 2016 election by 15 points — the first time since 1928 that the county had voted for a Republican president. Unlike in many other parts of the Midwest, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, as Democrats are known in Minnesota, is still unusually strong in rural parts of the state. It has a long history of knitting together a coalition, however fragile, of city liberals, miners, environmentalists, and union workers. In Congress, the state’s three most rural districts are still represented by Democrats, including the 8th District, home to the Iron Range. But many Democrats here, fighting to cling to those seats and bring disillusioned voters back to the party they grew up with, worry that could be lost. If Democrats can win here in Coleraine and other small towns, they could chart a path for a rural Democratic Party that has faded in many other rural Midwestern counties. One major problem, according to Cyndy Martin, the chair of the Itasca County Democrats: “Nobody cares about us.”

Molly Hensley-Clancy Empty storefronts in downtown Virginia, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range.

It’s no mystery to Martin what happened in 2016 in Itasca County, and across the range: pure economic desperation. “We don’t have any economic growth here,” Martin said. “I had a son who lost his job. He bought a house, he got married, and then the mines closed. He got a job at the paper mill, and the pay was so poor that he couldn’t make his house payments. And guess what? They’re living in a camper in Pennsylvania now. Because they’re pipelining — that’s where the money is.” As mines closed across the Iron Range, with thousands of jobs lost in 2016 alone, Trump wove that desperation, Martin said, into something uglier. She balks when she hears people in northern Minnesota talking now about the importance of the border wall and the fear of “immigrants taking our jobs” — here, about as far from the Mexican border as you can get, where the population in the district is overwhelmingly white. Republicans, for their part, see an opening in rural Minnesota in 2018 unlike anywhere else in the country. They sent Trump here last week, to the shores of Lake Superior, where he touted his popular steel tariffs, praised miners, and promised to allow mining in the Superior National Forest. He also promised a capacity crowd in Duluth that he would deliver the 8th District — and, in 2020, the state — to Republicans. Trump lost Minnesota by less than two points in 2016. “In two and a half years, it’s going to be really easy,” he said, to roars of approval. Meanwhile, the tension between urban and rural Democrats in Minnesota was ratcheted up earlier this month, when the state Democratic Party voted to endorse a liberal woman from St. Paul, Erin Murphy, over Tim Walz, a Congressman from rural southern Minnesota who won in 2016 in a district Trump carried. Murphy promptly picked another urban, liberal woman as her lieutenant governor.

“She didn’t think about us when she picked her running mate,” Martin said of Murphy. Loren Solberg, an Iron Range Democrat who served in the Minnesota House from the 1980s until 2010, said that in his early years there was a “strong coalition between rural and urban legislators. We were focused on labor and jobs.”



But things have changed, Solberg said: “The parties have become more and more narrow in their attraction of people.” Iron Range Democrats are still cautiously optimistic about their chances. The state party realizes how important the 8th District race is, they say. They’ve talked to neighbors and coworkers here, lifelong Democrats, who voted for Trump in hopes that he would bring something — anything — new, but are now increasingly disillusioned and frustrated. They’re pinning their hopes on people like Dr. Cam Jayson, a retired dentist who has lived his whole life in the Minnesota mining town of Virginia. Jayson long voted mostly for Democrats, he said, but opted for Trump in 2016, hoping he would “bring back integrity” to politics. Jayson wouldn’t vote for him again, he said. “I don’t see that happening,” he said. “I think he’s a malignant narcissist, is why.” “People are absolutely energized,” said Johnnie Forrest, the president of a local progressive group and a former union painter who came to the barbecue fundraiser in Coleraine. “Since two years ago, our meetings have gone from 20 people to 32. The enthusiasm is there.”

Susan Walsh / AP Trump supporters cheer as the president speaks at a rally in Duluth, Minnesota.