In June, I visited my mother’s new apartment for the first time: two bedrooms, balcony, an open kitchen in a brand-new building in Hudson, Wis., a town on the Minnesota border. She had moved there after my father died, despite living just across the St. Croix River in Minnesota for nearly 50 years. As I drove up to the building, the first thing I noticed was the swath of Minnesota license plates in the parking lot. Just like my mother, all her new neighbors seemed to hail from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
These ex-Minnesotans aren’t alone. According to IRS tax-return data, Minnesota has lost taxpaying residents each year since 2019. The state suffered a net population loss of 45,000 people between 2019 and 2022, the latest year for which IRS data are available. In one respect, this is hardly unusual. Residents of northern states like Minnesota have been flocking to the Sun Belt for years. At the same time, Minnesota has long been a net recipient of residents from other northern states like Illinois, Iowa, and New York. Even Californians move to Minnesota in net terms, and the state’s overall migration balance was positive in 2017 and 2018.
Some combination of weather and economic opportunity can make sense of why Minnesota imports people from Illinois but exports them to Florida. Neither factor, however, can make sense of my mother’s neighbors. Between 2015 and 2018, the net population flow between Minnesota and Wisconsin was basically even. While 2019 was again a mostly break-even year, over the next three years, Minnesota turned into a net exporter of people to Wisconsin. Between 2019 and 2022, Minnesota lost around 8,500 residents and some $650 million in taxable income to Wisconsin, making the Badger State the fourth highest net recipient of former Minnesotans and their money in the entire country. Only Florida, Texas, and Arizona are more attractive relocation sites.
While people might move from Minnesota to Florida to escape minus-40 wind chills and 10 hours of sunlight in January, no one moves from Minnesota to Wisconsin for that reason. But one might do so to keep a job in the Twin Cities area while taking advantage of a 5.3 percent state income-tax rate on middle-class families (Minnesota’s is 6.8 percent for married couples making between $46,000 and $184,000, 7.85 percent for married couples with incomes between $184,000 and $321,000). One may also be drawn to Wisconsin’s 5 percent sales-tax rate (Minnesota’s is 6.875 percent), or 20 percent lower median home prices (compared to those in the eastern Twin Cities suburbs). One might even do so to leave a state whose politics have taken a sharp left turn.
Minnesota politics became a matter of national interest after Vice President Kamala Harris tapped the state’s governor, Tim Walz, to be her running mate. Since January 2023, Minnesota Democrats have held the trifecta with control of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature—not to mention every statewide constitutional office, as well. Under that trifecta, the Walz administration has recorded a string of legislative victories that collectively stand as the most significant recent left-wing triumph in America. Since 2023, Minnesota has no state laws of any kind limiting abortion access; in light of restrictive post-Dobbs abortion laws in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa, Minnesota now even markets itself as an abortion “sanctuary state.”
The same is true for so-called gender-affirming care for minors. Walz first laid out the state’s transgender sanctuary welcome mat by an executive order that was later ratified by legislation. This year, Minnesota Democrats advanced a bill that would ban state law-enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities and thus make Minnesota a sanctuary state for unlawful immigrants as well. Although it continues to ban recreational fireworks, last year Minnesota legalized recreational marijuana. For good measure, the state’s Democrats eliminated Columbus Day from the calendar and replaced it with Indigenous People’s Day.
“Migration to Wisconsin shifted up a gear only after Tim Walz was elected.”
It may be sheer coincidence that Minnesotans’ migration to Wisconsin shifted up a gear only after Walz was elected governor, or that St. Croix County, Wis., of which Hudson is the seat, has been the state’s third-fastest growing county, adding its third-largest number of residents since the 2020 US Census. But no one traveling through western Wisconsin can miss the crop of lawn signs proclaiming “Don’t [blue icon of Minnesota] my [red icon of Wisconsin].” The national media view Wisconsin as a classic purple swing state. But standing in the glow of true-blue Minnesota, western Wisconsin sees itself as firmly red.
This hasn’t always been the case. St. Croix County voters backed Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and the Democratic candidate for governor as recently as 2006. Through the mid-1990s, St. Croix County voted more Democratic than Wisconsin as a whole. Since 2008, however, county voters have backed Republican candidates 14 points to 19 points more than Wisconsin overall in every gubernatorial and presidential election. In the 2020 presidential race, St. Croix County favored Trump by 16 points, while Wisconsin as a whole supported Joe Biden by about one point. Across the river in neighboring Washington County, Minn., they supported Biden by nine points.
St. Croix County’s red turn combined with its recent population growth has made it an increasingly important place for Wisconsin Republicans to find votes. The county more than doubled its share of the state’s total GOP vote between the early 1990s and 2020. Last week, the Wisconsin Republican Party began a “Team Trump Bus Tour” of the state. Its launch site was Hudson. The latest aggregation of opinion polls shows Kamala Harris leading Trump in Wisconsin by a single percentage point. St. Croix County’s 35,000 Republican voters won’t win Wisconsin for Trump on their own. But negative motivation often proves the strongest kind. With their nemesis on the ballot, Walz’s refugees will happily play the role of Jeremiah. We won’t know until November whether they are fated to play the role of Cassandra, as well.