What’s the Matter With Minnesota?
19th January 2026
Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?
To understand what’s going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.
In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.
This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and fellow neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It’s still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.
As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.