History of Iron Range’s blue-to-red shift long, unexpected

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was elected president with 61.1% of the popular vote, the highest share for any candidate since 1824. With this mandate, he enacted his Great Society program, the high point of American liberalism. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president with 489 Electoral College votes to Jimmy Carter’s 49, and the conservative counterrevolution was underway.

The path from 1964 to 1980 is often attributed to the fracturing of what prominent liberal Joe Rauh called “the liberal-labor-Negro coalition that had elected every liberal president and made possible every liberal advance since the 1930s.” Civil Rights and Vietnam were the great stressors of this coalition in the 1960s and 1970s, driving wedges between its labor faction and the liberals and minorities. But this isn’t the whole story.

Historian Camden Burd argued: “The environmental movement (also) provided a point of fracture for the Democratic coalition.”

Of the contemporaneous secessionist movement in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Burd wrote: “Arguing that environmental legislation hindered economic possibilities and threatened notions of political autonomy, politicians and residents throughout the region disputed much of the new environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, driving a wedge through traditional Democratic strongholds throughout the Great Lakes region.”

Minnesota saw this, too. In 1975, 8th District Congressman Jim Oberstar introduced a bill to address the conflicts arising from the “mixed use” of the Boundary Waters when the area was included in the 1964 Wilderness Protection Act. It proposed two zones: one with full wilderness protection and one where logging and motorized travel could continue.

Congressman Don Fraser of the 5th District countered with his own proposal, saying, “My bill principally restores the BWCA to … true wilderness status. In addition, we add about 35,000 acres at particular points around the periphery of the BWCA.” Fraser’s bill banned logging, mineral prospecting, and mining; all but banned snowmobile use; limited motorboat use; and officially changed the name of the region to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It provided stipends for resort owners and outfitters who stood to lose customers.

The resulting battle pitted Twin Cities liberals who embraced the newly popular cause of environmentalism against the unionized miners and loggers of northern Minnesota who saw the bill as unwarranted interference in their lives.

At a hearing at the State Office Building in St. Paul on July 7, 1977, state DFL Rep. Phyllis Kahn of Minneapolis said, “It is an undeniable conflict, and, above all, it is a one-way conflict. It is the cross-country skier who expects tranquility and solitude both destroyed by the snowmobiler; as in the manner the canoeist’s calm is broken by the presence of motorboats.”

The following day, at a meeting at Ely High School, Cook County state DFL Sen. Doug Johnson said, “My people have compromised. The preservationists are the most selfish people I have ever encountered.” Oberstar accused Fraser and company of seeking to turn the Iron Range into a “junior Appalachia.”

This captured a widespread, if not universal, feeling. In June 1976, the Duluth News-Tribune lambasted “the typical idealistic impracticality of a liberal Democrat.” Steelworkers from the Range picketed Fraser’s Minneapolis office in October 1977. A letter from Cloquet accused Fraser of prioritizing “so-called conservationists, (whose) only goal is to secure a playground for the rich and able-bodied, and to hell with the rest of us! Why don’t you people clean up Minneapolis and St. Paul. … Why are you making northern Minnesota the target for destruction — to appease the privileged people?” “Dump Fraser” bumper stickers appeared across the Range. “People are simply not going to elect into office someone that is going to cut their throat,” an Ely resident exclaimed.

Fraser was running for Hubert Humphrey’s Senate seat in 1978. He won the DFL endorsement in June but was challenged and beaten by 3,471 votes out of 511,107 cast in the September primary by “maverick” businessman Bob Short, who campaigned hard against the BWCA bill. Short scored 69% in St. Louis County, 80% in Lake County, and 88% in Cook County, the three BWCA counties. The Ely Echo ran a front-page editorial cartoon showing the “Little Guys of N.E. Minnesota” shooting down the Fraser jet with a slingshot. When Fraser gave the final speech of his congressional career that November, he reflected: “There is no question that the BWCA was a ‘deciding factor’ in my defeat.”

The liberals got their revenge that November, voting for Short’s Republican challenger Dave Durenberger. “I never supported Short,” DFL state Sen. Allan Spear said, “and, for the only time in my adult life, I voted for a Republican. … Many liberals in the party did the same.” As Range Democrats had rejected Fraser, urban Democrats now rejected Short.

If Charles Stenvig’s elections as Minneapolis mayor from 1969 onward showed the willingness of urban, blue-collar voters to split with the liberals, Short’s victory over Fraser showed the willingness of rural, blue-collar voters to do likewise. Personal loyalty tied them to Oberstar, and, as late as 2008, he scored 68% of the vote.

But in the seismic midterms of 2010, the 8th District elected a Republican for the first time since 1944. Four decades after Rangers voted for someone Fraser described as “a Republican in Democratic clothing,” they voted for a Republican in Republican clothing, and the GOP has held the seat ever since, with their vote rising in every cycle from 51% in 2018 to 58% in 2024.

Environmental issues “divide Democrats, but they also represent social-class issues,” argued a July 1979 editorial in the National Review. “They divide haves and have-nots. The affluent want clean air, tourist-free forests, uncrowded and oil-free beaches, happy caribou and snail-darters. The non-affluent want jobs, raises, economic expansion, and enough gas to get the family to a public beach.”

They still do.

This article originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on June 6, 2025