This is the second in an occasional MinnPost Voices series called Debunking the defamation of Minnesota on various attacks depicting Minnesota as a failed state. Read the first piece, on immigration, here.
Long before President Donald Trump and his allies unleashed Operation Metro Surge with a torrent of insults and falsehoods about Minnesota, other defamers were already hard at work fabricating the narrative of a failed state, ignoring ample evidence to the contrary.
For instance, about the same time last fall that the producers of “A Precarious State” were promoting their one-hour primetime TV documentary alleging the decline and fall of Minnesota and Minneapolis, U.S. News & World Report released its annual comprehensive ranking of “Best Overall States to Live In.”
Minnesota placed an enviable fourth overall for 2025 (thus, arguably, 46th least precarious of the 50 states) and up a few notches from ninth best in 2022. This was not some fluke, but typical of a half-century of superiority for the North Star State on most rankings by national researchers attempting to measure general prosperity and living conditions.
Related: Minnesota stands out as an exceptionally generous and prosperous state, thanks to the contributions of immigrants
(On most such metrics, states and nations with healthy democracies, civil liberties, higher taxes and larger public sectors that distribute resources more evenly to their people do better than illiberal and authoritarian states and nations.)
Meanwhile, despite years of furious Minneapolis-bashing by conservative propagandists leading up to Operation Metro Surge, at least one study (before the ICE invasion) indicated that Minneapolitans are more positive about their community than people in most other big cities.
Minneapolis ranked fourth-highest in resident satisfaction among 27 large cities, according to a poll by the digital news outlet Axios in 2024. About 75% said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the City of Lakes as a place to live, higher than in many red state cities that have become conservative exemplars of desirability, such as Austin, Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta.
After the surge, Minnesotans’ deep pride of place rebounded stronger than ever, with multiple new stirring musical anthems about our resilient community spirit, the “Rebel Loon” insignia popping up everywhere, and countless essays praising Minneapolis and Minnesota as the international model for resisting global authoritarianism.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a Minnesota native who in 2021 rashly dismissed Minneapolis as a “dangerous and dystopian ghost city” due to “super progressive” Democratic Socialist City Council members, flipped the narrative 180 degrees. In a recent column headlined “Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future,” Friedman lavished praise on the same city (with essentially the same super progressive character) for its “spontaneous uprising of civic activism” and a uniquely ”neighboring” culture.
On another front in the broader war on Minnesota’s reputation, despite an ever louder “bad for business” drumbeat (a canard that conservative and business lobbies have proclaimed to varying degrees for more than a century), the state is currently ranked 10th by CNBC among the “Top States for Business.” That puts us not far behind conservative role models like Texas and Florida. Forbes magazine, hardly a fount of liberal advocacy, currently ranks Minnesota 15th on its “Best for Business” list.
The leading defamers
A lead singer in the defamation choir has been the Center of the American Experiment (CAE), a well-funded, 35-year-old Minnesota-based conservative think tank. It once professed a more traditional center-right orientation but increasingly has aligned with Trump and the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party.
Another key dispenser of defamation is Alpha News, an online news aggregator platform that echoes and amplifies CAE dogma. Its star reporter is Liz Collin, who produced an even darker shockumentary in 2023, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” which attempted to vindicate Derek Chauvin and vilify racial justice advocates. Collin also happens to be the spouse of Bob Kroll, the incendiary former boss of the Minneapolis Police Department’s union who has described Black Lives Matter protesters as “terrorists.”
Pushing the boundaries of nonprofit restrictions on advocacy for political parties and candidates, recent front page covers of CAE’s “Thinking Minnesota” magazine are all aboard for MAGA Trumpism. One cover declares that “Minnesota needs a DOGE” (the mostly botched attack on federal agencies led by Elon Musk). Another cover blares “Make Minnesota Great Again,” and features our state bird (the common loon) wearing the red MAGA baseball cap, altered to read “MMNGA”.
Another less ideologically extreme and somewhat more credible source of criticism, sometimes constructive, is emerging from dissatisfied centrists and old guard DFLers, often voiced in an online outlet called Minneapolis Times. “A Precarious State” was influenced by this faction. The documentary’s producer and narrator is Rick Kupchella, a well-regarded former TV reporter for KARE-11. Sources of funding for the obviously expensive and very slick production, which ran ad-free on KSTP-TV, have still not been divulged.
Primary culprits for Minnesota’s alleged decline in these documentary and social media onslaughts are: immigrants (documented or otherwise), especially Somalis (Trump called them “garbage” and blamed them for turning Minnesota into a “hellhole”); a core of zealous Democratic Socialists on the Minneapolis City Council; any and all advocates for racial justice and police reform, and, of course, public employee unions.
Other purported destroyers of Minnesota expand broadly from there to DFLers from center to left, and, of course, Gov. Tim Walz, with a little extra venom directed at Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first Black Minnesotan and first Muslim to hold statewide office.
The defamers, despite frequent claims to the effect that they are uncovering things the established media want to hide, seldom break any real news. All the mostly urban maladies presented in “A Precarious State’’ and other attacks have been covered at length and more responsibly by mainstream news organizations and professional journalists.
These problems include a post-pandemic crime spike, increasing blight in selected neighborhoods such as Uptown, high vacancy rates in downtown commercial and office space, homeless encampments, lagging test scores and various problems in urban public school systems that serve our poorest children and families.
Lord knows, Minnesota faces serious problems. Always has, always will. Our public officials should be held accountable, and all of us have a civic duty to help make things better. But almost entirely missing from this orchestrated assault on Minnesota’s basic character is national and historical perspective, contrary evidence and data on Minnesota’s assets and strengths, and anything approaching fairness or balance.
The hugely pertinent context is that every single one of these ills are affecting every city and state in an increasingly precarious nation. Moreover, a strong case can be made that the root cause is conservative and corporate dominance in national policymaking since 1980. The direct result is growing economic and racial inequality since then, pay and benefits that fall short of affordability, corporate greed and looting of key industries by private equity firms, an unaffordable health care system run by profit-extracting players, highly disruptive and chaotic technology revolutions, and, most important, one of the weaker economic security safety nets among the world’s industrial democracies.
The rather amazing fact is that as life for many Americans in the middle and the bottom continues to become more precarious, quality-of-life rankings from multiple national sources for Minnesota and the Twin Cities generally remain high and stable, and some are improving. Minnesota, under attack as never before, is quietly outperforming the rest of the nation on most measures of well-being. (See the lengthy list of rankings in the accompanying chart.)
More responsible media, led by the Minnesota Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, and online sources such as MinnPost, the Minnesota Reformer and Axios News, have at times challenged the dystopian narrative and provided some balance. An especially acerbic debunker of the defamation machine has been Brian Lambert, a veteran journalist whose Facebook posts routinely dispute the doomsday narrative.
Although it’s difficult to measure with certainty, the attackers before Operation Metro Surge seemed to be winning the eyeball count, with millions of views on their documentaries and social media disinformation amplifiers.
One especially thoughtful and early critic of “A Precarious State” was Steve Cramer (who might be categorized as a Business Democrat), a former DFL state legislator and currently president of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. Allowing that he agreed with critiques of the Democratic Socialists and their efforts to underfund police budgets, Cramer in an October MinnPost Voices commentary described “A Precarious State” as an example of “overwrought communication” where “a kernel or two of truth is found, but the preponderance of truth lies elsewhere.”
This commentary, the second in “Debunking the Defamation of Minnesota” series, will focus on that preponderance, analyzing complex causes for problems and providing context and big-picture perspective. And it will champion the state’s proud tradition of progressive and communitarian public policies that advance equitable growth, social justice and environmental protection.
Let’s begin by examining some of the more specific claims and some glaring omissions in “A Precarious State.’’ We’ll look at a larger set of facts regarding economic status, population trends and business profitability in the Twin Cities and Minnesota. (In following articles, we’ll examine distorted allegations pertaining to public safety, education, health and housing, fraud from government programs and other standards that define relative quality of life in Minnesota and the United States.”)
“Precarious” opens with a rapid-fire set of scary declarations from about a dozen people featured throughout the one-hour takedown. The cast includes Minneapolis real estate owners, a couple of Republican legislators and activists, the Minneapolis police chief, and a set of voices best described as disgruntled Democrats and centrists who have in recent years become more vocal in opposition to urban political leadership.
Among the more extreme statements:
“We are losing jobs, we are losing value, we are becoming poorer.”
“We’ve never had this massive amount of migration so quickly leaving the state of Minnesota.”
“People [business owners] are done [in Minneapolis]. They are closing shop and things are being boarded up and they have lost hope.’’ And: “They’re killing the goose [businesses and corporations] that laid the golden egg.”
State is not getting poorer
Inflation-adjusted median household income in Minneapolis improved, from $74,823 in 2019, the year before the pandemic and George Floyd, to $80,269 in 2023, according to Census Bureau statistics. Income growth slowed after the pandemic, but perhaps the more important long-term trend is that between 2010 and 2023, Minneapolis median income grew 23%, outstripping the national average of about 8% in large urban areas over the same period.
Among the nation’s top 40 metropolitan areas, the Twin Cities ranks 11th in per capita income, roughly the same place it’s been for the past 35 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (Could you pls give me a link for this?). Way back in 1970, the really good old days according to many older white curmudgeons, the Twin Cities ranked 17th.
For Minnesota as a whole, the latest rankings on median income put us at 13th and down from 8th in 2013, but still higher than every Midwestern state and higher than all but two red states (Utah and Alaska), also higher than in the 1970s.
Minnesota does more than most states to alleviate poverty, and it shows. We have the third-lowest poverty rate. That’s a remarkable achievement for a state that also has been one of the most hospitable in the nation, opening its arms to immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa, many of them quite poor when they arrived. In supposedly impoverished Minneapolis, the poverty rate has appreciably declined since the Great Recession of 2008, bumping up a bit in the past couple of years.
Numerous other national rankings reveal a state that is consistently above average in net worth, home ownership, credit scores, health care coverage, financial literacy and suitability for both young families and retired people. (See rankings chart).
Everybody is not leaving
Minnesota for decades had a higher population growth rate than most states in the Midwest, and the Twin Cities area has been one of the faster-growing metro regions outside the Sun Belt. The population within the urban core boundaries of Minneapolis and St. Paul ballooned by 100,000 residents since 1990, from about 640,000 to 740,000 an amazing reversal after decades of outmigration to suburbs following World War II.
Before the pandemic, this urban renaissance, especially in downtown business districts, was one of the most important trends of the new century, often overlooked by our own media. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal recently reported that downtown populations are continuing to grow and added 2,000 more residents in 2024.
That growth was bound to level off, and it has indeed in recent years. Respected experts including State Demographer Susan Brower and prolific centrist commentary writer Tom Horner have expressed legitimate concerns about falling birth rates and less in-migration of young people. But Horner also echoes business leader concerns about Trump’s mass deportation and shutting off the flow of immigrants into Minnesota, which has been our primary source of population and workforce growth.
Minnesota has benefited in many ways from one of the higher rates of international immigration, and many studies show that newcomers from abroad add more than they subtract from the economy. (See Part 1 of this series, focusing on our maligned immigrant population.)
And while it might be true in recent years that slightly more U.S. citizens are leaving Minnesota than are moving in, those numbers are relatively small. Net domestic migration loss of about 8,000 a year (Baby Boom retirees moving to warmer states continues to be a factor) on a population of 5.8 million is not a monumental problem. Moreover, the very latest numbers indicate a turnaround, with in-migration in 2025 outpacing out-migration to other states by 8,000, the first net inflow since 2018.
Here again, national and global context is important.
Most of the world’s wealthier democracies, especially those that prioritize equal rights for women, are leveling off toward zero population growth. Reputable scientists agree that the Earth can’t sustain unlimited population growth, now topping 8 billion, and the inevitable exhaustion of natural resources and continued deterioration of air and water quality.
Boom states like Texas, Florida and Arizona are headed for water crises and other environmental disasters. High growth red states with big cities and sprawling suburban metro areas (bluish islands with more liberal local leadership) are indeed growing faster. But other red states like Ohio, Deep South states without big cities, Appalachia, and many other red states closer to Minnesota in size and population are not growing as fast or are even losing population. Blue states in New England, the mid-Atlantic and West Coast states are also growing slowly and doing well on other socioeconomic measures.
The goose is alive — and part of the problem
Conservative propagandists cherry-pick the few outlying metrics where Minnesota does not rank near the top, or where it has slipped somewhat in rankings, to make their case for a failing state. A favorite statistic is a slower growth rate than the national average for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and new job creation in the urban core over the past five years. These are offered as proof that liberal tax and budget policies, a fact of life in Minnesota since the 1930s, are “killing the goose that laid the golden egg.’’ That’s a timeworn application of an Aesop fable, thrown at anything democracies do to distribute resources more fairly or curb the power of wealthy interests.
The important context here is that GDP also has been roundly criticized by many economists as an inadequate or even distorted measure of real prosperity, mostly because it fails to measure how wealth and income are distributed, ignoring quality of life, inequality and environmental sustainability. Numerous other rankings show that Minnesotans in low- and middle-income households are earning more than their peers in other states, enjoying higher rates of health insurance coverage, and participating at a higher rate in the workforce.
And although Minnesota and its urban centers might be growing a little slower than the national average in new job creation since the pandemic, our larger problem for years has been a worker shortage. Unemployment rates for Minnesota have consistently been lower than the national average, although Operation Metro Surge created a temporary spike and the latest report put us slightly above the national average, 4.4% to 4.3%.
Explosive growth has not been our way over the last half-century. Instead, Minnesota has long been blessed by stability and a diversified economy, a few eggs in many economic sector baskets. We have been distinguished by slow and steady growth rather than the boom-and-bust pattern typical of both Sunbelt and Rust Belt states that have too many eggs in too few baskets. We have proven to be more resilient when bubbles burst in technology, fossil fuel production, housing, or manufacturing.
Related: How’s the economy in Minnesota? The answer depends on your income bracket
Another canard that needs to be challenged is the assertion that Minnesota no longer leads the nation in any economic sector. “A Precarious State ” asserts that the glory days of mainframe computers and medical technology are over and a college professor opines that “we’re not the center of the universe for anything now.”
A thorough search of reliable sources reveals voluminous evidence of Minnesota’s leadership in multiple sectors including health care and medical technology; life science and biotech; renewable energy and climate action innovation; specialized small manufacturing; financial services; water quality technology, and the legacy standbys of agribusiness, mining and forest products. A very good case can be made that Minnesota has emerged as the leading state when it comes to all things pertaining to health.
Websites for the state’s leading business and trade associations are chock-full of new initiatives and optimistic outlooks, when they are not complaining about taxes and regulations. The business press frequently reports on relocations to Minnesota from other states and major expansions of homegrown companies, such as Solventum’s recent announcement of a $200 million research and development center in Eagan.
And despite constant nattering about losing business here and there to neighboring states, the Twin Cities and Minnesota indisputably still reign as the thriving economic capital of the five-state Upper Midwest region, ranking third nationally in Fortune 500 companies per capita, far out front of every other Midwestern state on most basic indicators.
Minnesota might not be as lucrative a tax haven for affluent households as the mostly red states without a progressive state income tax. In those states, the state-local tax obligation falls more on the middle and lower echelons and public goods and services are generally inferior. But being rich works out pretty well anywhere one lives, and a drive around Lake Minnetonka towns and our toniest neighborhoods bears this out.
The more important fact is that Minnesota’s historic preference for economic fairness and equalizing opportunity inevitably means that it ranks as a better state for workers and for the majority of us near the middle and the bottom. The progressive case rests on the theory that in the long run, a truly democratic system with a fairer economy is better for those on top too.
Workers who are secure and healthy make better employees, and they can afford to buy the products and services they produce. And they are less prone to violent revolutions. This theory proves out in the fact that liberal nations and states with open democracies and clean elections are more prosperous than various conservative oligarchies where wealthy men, one-party rulers, or religious theocracies call all the shots and crush dissent. Until they are deposed and their statues are toppled.
Nary a word is heard from the defamers about the persuasive evidence that it’s actually the goose — wealthy and powerful corporate elites increasingly aligned with Trump and the MAGA movement — that is worsening an economic inequality crisis. Nothing is ever acknowledged about decades of ongoing racial injustice and exclusion in the United States, a weaker safety net than most other industrialized democracies, unaffordable profit-driven housing and health care, and out-of-control gun marketing and violence.
One thing that has gotten worse is the behavior of the goose. Minnesota in days of yore was blessed with a more philanthropic and communitarian set of capitalists, including brand names like the Pillsburys and Daytons as patrons of the arts and promoters of progressive economic policies. Their largesse and leadership loomed large in building our reputation as a model of practical liberalism. Liberal and moderate Republicans in Minnesota, from Gov. Harold Stassen in the 1930s to Gov. Arne Carlson in the 1990s, helped shape progressive policies and made DFL programs work better, rather than oppose any and all equalizing reforms.
Many observers over the past 50 years have worried that this benevolent spirit has eroded, as hardcore laissez-faire capitalism came back into vogue and recaptured the Republican Party. And now the many billionaires aligned with Trump openly promote the idea of a high-tech economic aristocracy ruling the nation and world, strongly aligned with the advance of conservative white Christian nationalism.
Putting a red MMNGA hat on our beloved state bird is a primary objective in Trump’s ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States. Attacking blue states and urban areas with gross disinformation, devoid of context, is part of that game plan.
Minnesotans who care about our state’s legacy of communitarian equality need to face the fact that this is nothing less than an existential threat to our identity. And all of us who know better need to counter-attack the “hellhole” narrative with factual clarity and passion.
Next in the “Debunking the defamation of Minnesota” series: National perspective deflates “staggering” and “sprawling” fraud narrative and attacks on human service programs.
Dane Smith is a retired St. Paul resident, a former government and politics reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a former president of a progressive policy research and advocacy organization. He is a frequent writer of public policy commentary and the author of MinnPost’s “Reappraising Minnesota” series, published in 2023-24.
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