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Article snippet: ST. PAUL, Minn. — For decades, the shotgun marriage between the Minnesota Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party engineered by Hubert Humphrey created a prairie populist machine that ran this state. Republicans have not won Minnesota’s electoral votes since 1972. No Republican candidate running for a U.S. Senate seat or the governorship has won more than 50 percent of the vote since Arne Carlson in 1994. But now, as Minnesota’s largest cities surge and rural communities lose both population and economic staying power, that coalition is fraying, fractured by tensions between urban and small-town residents worried about their futures. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, some worry, is losing the farmer and the laborer. “Democrats have lost focus on kitchen-table issues in general, and blue-collar jobs in particular,” said Jason George, the business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49, a union that represents mine workers in Minnesota’s Iron Range. “The far left is trying to stop those jobs. You can’t tell people you’re for them when your party is trying to take away jobs.” MORE lost Minnesota by just 45,000 votes in 2016, the closest any Republican has come to winning the state since Ronald Reagan’s reelection bid in 1984. Trump became the first Republican to win parts of Minnesota’s Iron Range, like Itasca County in the northeast corner of the state, since Herbert Hoover in 1928. “You have a lot of economic anxiety, small towns t... Link to the full article to read more