Minnesota voted for the DFL candidate, former Vice PresidentWalter Mondale. He narrowly won his home state over incumbentPresidentRonald Reagan by just 3,761 votes, giving him his only state victory in the election (Mondale also carried the District of Columbia), resulting in the state weighing in at around 18 percentage points more Democratic than the nation at large. Minnesota was the only state not to back Reagan in either of his two presidential campaigns. Although Mondale won only twenty of the state's 87 counties – making Reagan the only presidential nominee to win a majority of counties in every state – his large majorities in the heavily unionized Iron Range of the northeast overbalanced Reagan's majorities in the more Republican west of the state. Had Reagan overcome Mondale's 3,761 vote margin, he would have been the first nominee since 1820 to carry all the states, with Nixon's 1972 49-state victory being less narrow both on account of Massachusetts's 14 electoral votes and the margin of 220,000 votes (nearly 9%).
Since the Republican Reagan won all 49 other states in 1984, this established Minnesota's status as the state with the longest streak of voting Democratic. As of the 2024 presidential election[update], it still has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon carried it when he was re-elected in 1972, though is the closest that a Republican presidential candidate has come to carrying the state since then. However, the District of Columbia has voted Democratic in all presidential elections since 1964, when it was first granted the right to vote in presidential elections. As of 2020, only five of the 20 counties Mondale won in 1984 were won by either Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020. Some examples of counties that have been lost to the Republican Party include those after 1996 (Anoka County), after 2008 (Aitkin County), or after 2012 (Itasca County). Minnesota regenerated as a left-leaning force in the 1990s, late 2000s and early 2010s, but has become a Democratic-leaning state in the 21st century, ironically with many former rural Mondale counties voting Republican in the 21st century. As Mondale won the state with a plurality, he became the only major party nominee to fail to get a majority of the vote in any state since William Howard Taft in 1912.
Despite Mondale carrying his home state, Republican Senator Rudy Boschwitz was re-elected the same night. When Reagan was asked in December 1984 what he wanted for Christmas, he joked, "Well, Minnesota would have been nice".[2] This marked the first time that a Republican won two terms without ever winning the state at least once and the second time since its statehood after 1916.
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