The lack of large cities also means a lack of wealthy suburbs and Fundie exurbs, which are major sources of Republican support in other parts of the country. Look at Michele Bachmann's district vs the rest of Minnesota for a well-known example.
Uh yeah. Orange County is a Democratic vote source? Also look at places like the Collar Counties in Illinois before Obama. Funny you mention MN-6 because it's NOT a wealthy suburban district. The actual wealthy suburbs in Minnesota mostly did vote for Obama but are hardly consistent Democratic cities, one could hardly say this about Eden Prairie, Plymouth, Maple Grove or Lakeville (the last one didn't even vote for Obama, didn't even come close) even not so uniformly affluent places like Woodbury and Eagan are marginally Democratic at best in a true close race.
BTW, is Edina in Michele Bachmann's district?
No, and it never has been. It's in MN-3 and will be evenly split between MN-3 and MN-5 in the new map.
That used to be the most Republican town in Minnesota, but I'm not sure how it is now.
No it wasn't. It was much more Republican than it is today though when it now voted for Obama by double digits. The stereotypes about Edina being so uniformly affluent though are about three decades outdated, in fact outside of one Census tract that has a median household income in the six digits it's significantly poorer than the parts of Minneapolis it borders. So basically outside of one specific area Edina is just a typical middle income middle class residential suburb.
BTW: The same is true of Orange County, although it still leans Republican.
Oh geez...
OK first of all if this is all because of social issues why the hell is Clinton the guy who started the shift? Just four years earlier you had a far more socially liberal Democratic candidate who got destroyed. Actually the main reason why Clinton was far more popular was because he was much less liberal than Dukakis in regards to crime and "law and order" issues. His gun control laws might've been popular in suburbia, but Dukakis was basically the same in regards to gun control. Really what generally happened is suburbanites became less scared throughout the 90s.
And in fact the main reason why Clinton was so popular is basically the time, the economy was booming and while certain areas were hard hit despite all this (like tons of places affected by NAFTA), suburbia was not one of them. Clinton was called a "New Democrat" after all, and he wasn't seen as the type of Democrat who wanted to sell out the middle class to unions or tax them to death. And actually this brings up another big factor in the swing here: the realization that pre-Reagan tax rates were not coming back nor were the Democrats proposing this anymore.
But beyond all this, to look at individual candidates is kind of minor in comparison to the main reason for the shifts in these discussed areas, especially OC, demographics plain and simple. There's a reason Goldwater did better than McCain in OC, and it's not social issues. If the entire country had the same demographics in 1988 that it does today in fact, Dukakis would've won. As it is the suburban counties in question no longer were havens of white flight from people fleeing the scary minorities of the cities and gained many minorities themselves. You now have DuPage County as more than 20% non-white and OC is barely over 60% white. With demographics like that there is simply no way you are going to get the numbers those places got before the 90s.
