Behold, another American Federation TL election.
The Republic of Minnesota has always been known, despite its rural character, as one of the Federation's more radical states. In its early days, the Liberal Party government it elected in the first organized election to its General Assembly (the lower house of its legislature), led by Alexander Ramsey, immediately abolished slavery and made any enforcement of it a criminal offence. He also instituted civil rights protections for freedmen like suffrage and an early form of discrimination laws. Despite this, Ramsey also represents the strange contradiction of Minnesotan politics in that he was also vehemently opposed to Native Americans remaining in the country and only went so far in instituting any kind of social welfare.
For the next few decades, the Liberals and their main rival party, the Conservatives, would interchange in power, but with the First World War, the country's nature started to change significantly. While leftist groups had had an undercurrent in the early years of the 20th century, the First World War galvanized their support, particularly among ethnic Germans and Scandinavians in Minnesota disillusioned by the Liberals' and Conservatives' alacrity to intervene in Europe. Initially it seemed the Communists might emerge as a major force, but the intervention of the young, charismatic Floyd B. Olson in the small Farmer-Labor Party or FLP (named to appeal to both rural and urban marginalized workers) led to that party's meteoric rise over the decade.
After grand coalitions between the Liberals and Conservatives had kept the FLP out, in late 1929, just as the Great Depression was starting to hit home, the Liberals broke with the Conservatives and brought down the government, causing an election in which the FLP won a plurality easily. Under its governance over the next twenty years, the modern Minnesotan welfare state, universal healthcare system and collective bargaining industrial relations system came into being, and have remained so- despite the occasional tampering of governments- ever since. While Floyd would not live to see all of it- he died in 1936 while still in office- his party would become dominant in Minnesota for years to come, and in every election since 1929 it has won pluralities of both the popular vote and of the General Assembly's seats.
It is not exactly accurate to describe Minnesota as having a dominant party system, of course. For one thing, since the 1930s it has used PR, with 10 constituencies of (currently) 15 members each being elected to the General Assembly each election cycle, and only during three landslide victories- under Olson in 1933, Hubert Humphrey in 1965 and Paul Wellstone in 2000- have the FLP won an absolute majority of seats.
Many would argue that the party system as we know it did not really start until the 1969 election, though. That was the year in which the FLP under Humphrey lost power for the first time in 20 years in rather striking circumstances, as the colorful Eugene McCarthy, the new Liberal leader, managed to sow discontent among the FLP's left and energize the right to vote a coalition headed by his party in. It succeeded, but McCarthy's gradual shift from an anti-establishment populist to an anti-establishment right-winger badly damaged the Liberals' image in the long run. After a brief FLP administration headed by the rather humdrum Walter Mondale, the recently-rebranded Conservatives, now known as the Moderates akin to the Swedish party of the same name and led by Rudy Boschwitz, took power and spent the 80s 'streamlining' Minnesota's economy.
Unlike most right-wing governments of the 80s, though, Boschwitz did not do much to roll back the welfare state or weaken unions in Minnesota, knowing they were much too popular with the country's citizens to even try, and simply focused on reducing the country's deficit. Furthermore, he was pressured by the Minnesotan left not to do so, and private initiatives by right-wing Moderates failed. When the right-wing Jon Grunseth succeeded Boschwitz as leader and PM and tried to make cuts to welfare, he immediately made himself Minnesota's public enemy number one, and the FLP's Rudy Perpich looked certain to take power.
The 1993 election, however, upturned the status quo of Minnesotan politics for good, as former wrestler Jesse Ventura entered the political arena by creating the Independence Party. Ventura, who has led the party on and off for the 23 years since (usually coming back whenever an election or serious policy issue emerges), established the Independence Party as 'a party based around not ideological commitments, but practicality and the common good of Minnesota'. It worked a charm to snatch voters from both the left and the right, and he successfully forced the humiliated Moderates and Liberals to support a coalition under his leadership.
After winning re-election in 1997, Ventura's star declined and the affable new FLP leader Paul Wellstone successfully ousted him, holding power for 8 years until being replaced by Moderate Norm Coleman as the Great Recession hit Minnesota. Coleman soon ran into the same problems as Grunseth, though, and in the 2011 election he was ousted as PM by former comedian Al Franken, with the FLP ruling Minnesota ever since.
Despite this, the 2010s have been a difficult decade for the FLP. After falling to just 29.6% of the vote in 2008, their lowest in nearly a century, the party's polling numbers have hovered around that level ever since and the parliamentary arithmetic has proved difficult for them to avoid capitulating to smaller left-wing and centrist parties. Under Franken, this was minimized as his personal popularity was sizeable and allowed him to win the 2015 election with a sizeable plurality, and a speech he gave in late 2016 denouncing the rise of the far right across the world briefly made him a leftist hero of sorts.
This reputation was torpedoed the following year when allegations of sexual harassment by Franken came out, and he resigned in disgrace. For a while, this, as well as the tokenistic-looking election of the more moderate Tina Smith (who had grown up in New Mexico) to replace him and become Minnesota's first female PM, made it look like the FLP were sure to lose the next election. Unfortunately for the Moderates, they made a terrible decision in response, picking Michelle Bachmann to run against Smith for the next election. Bachmann was a Moderate in the Grunseth and Coleman mould, something which was a poor fit for the public mood, many of whom sympathized with Franken's sentiments (though not Franken himself) and were concerned a Bachmann-led government might embrace far-right populism.
Consequently, Smith called a snap election in May of 2018 which the FLP won a third term in, though with just 46 seats (29 short of a majority), the arithmetic was to be tight. However, in keeping with his nebulous politics, Ventura decided to coalesce with Smith, and with the smaller parties like the Greens, feminist Women of Minnesota (WoM) and LGBTQ activist Rainbow Party generally inclined towards a leftist government, Smith was back in office.
Her first full term, as with those of most world leaders in recent times, has been eventful and difficult, particularly in the past year. Initially Minnesota seemed to be weathering the COVID-19 pandemic fairly well thanks to its well-funded healthcare system and generous use of furloughs, but in May, an entirely different crisis struck the country when an unarmed black man, George Floyd, was murdered in an act of police brutality.
The shockwaves this sent through Minnesotans, who generally considered themselves one of the most progressive countries in the Federation, are hard to overstate, and despite Smith immediately condemning the officers involved and calling for reform, many on the left have felt this would not go far enough. Public sympathy for them and the protestors against police brutality intensified when protests against the Minneapolis PD ended with riots instigated by more acts of brutality by police officers.
In response to this, the FLP, under pressure from the Greens, instigated a new policy of defunding police departments across the country, as well as enacting a zero tolerance policy on any officers who use violent means against protestors. This seems to have had a beneficial impact for now, but the Communists have been growing in strength in the polls during the parliament, and their stance that the police force should be abolished altogether has gained some traction amongst the Minnesotan left.
While the FLP has been pushed to the left, the Moderates are badly divided, with some supporting measures to crack down on racism while the party's right has resolutely defended the police and argued the protests are 'stopping them doing their jobs'. Despite facing criticism from within his party, the Moderate leader, Mike McFadden, has managed to more tactfully critique the government and the left's strategies, accusing Smith of hypocrisy for weakening police unions in the wake of the crisis (as mentioned, collective bargaining and the right to a union are important values in Minnesota).
With an election due by May 2022, it remains unclear which way the wind will blow. Smith and her supporters in the government are hoping the measures taken so far will quell the police's discontent; McFadden will be hoping for his party to hold together and secure the crucial support of the Liberals and Independence they need to form a government; and Smith's opponents on the left will hope to gain the support required to pressure her into police abolition, which some have even compared to Minnesota's 19th century abolition of slavery for its significance for civil rights. In any case, even though the FLP will most probably emerge as the biggest party as it has for every election in nearly a century, the future of Minnesotan politics has almost never looked so uncertain.