To situate the 2022 midterm election in the context of the last hundred years of American politics, consider two communities in Minnesota. To the north, the city of Hibbing sits non-coincidentally at the edge of what was, for much of the twentieth century, the largest iron mine on the planet. Indispensable to Allied victory in the Second World War, the exploitation of Minnesota’s Iron Range also gave rise to a series of local political-economic arrangements at once distinctive and paradigmatic.footnote¹ Thanks to some combination of pure mineral largesse and fear of labour militancy—strikes in 1907 and 1916 almost brought the iron industry to its knees—a progressive city government successfully taxed mining profits to fund a spectacular array of public works.footnote² At the time of its construction in 1922, Hibbing High School, a Tudor Revival masterpiece known as ‘the Castle in the Woods’, was perhaps the most expensive public school in the United States. It was here in the 1,800-seat auditorium—underneath ornate moulded ceilings and Belgian crystal chandeliers—that school officials famously cut the young Robert Zimmerman’s microphone midway through a 1959 performance of ‘Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay’.

The outrageous wealth of the Iron Range was never expropriated from the expropriators, but over the course of a century, after further concessions won by mineworker unions, a fair portion was extracted from the extractors. Yet Hibbing today is a world removed from its iron age zenith. The mines are as productive as ever, but now employ fewer than 6 per cent of the city’s workforce. As health care, retail and other service sectors outstrip the industries of the ‘historical working class’, Hibbing’s economy has come to resemble that of many other struggling blue-collar towns across the Midwest.footnote³ Its median household income is under $50,000 a year, well below the state norm; its average home price is just $111,300; and less than a quarter of its adult population holds a bachelor’s degree.

Two hundred miles south, the St. Paul’s ex-urb of North Oaks, mn, passed its quiet twentieth century at the opposite end of American capitalism’s value pipeline—not where the money comes from, but where it takes refuge. The area was first developed as a manor home and recreational cattle farm by the railroad tycoon James J. Hill, the ‘Empire Builder’, and the man Jay Gatsby’s father hoped his son would become.footnote⁴ In the 1950s Hill’s heirs converted the family estate into a kind of libertarian residential experiment. To this day, the city of North Oaks maintains no public property: all land, including the streets and sidewalks, belongs either to individual residents or a private homeowner’s association.

Though its literal gates came down in the 1980s, the town continues to enforce its no-trespassing rules. (In 2008 North Oaks successfully petitioned to remove images of its streets from Google Maps; it remains invisible on Street View.) Billed as ‘an exclusive, private community’, naturally complete with its own golf club, lakeside beaches and conservation area, North Oaks strives to appear less an outgrowth of Minneapolis–St. Paul than a secluded realm apart from it. Nevertheless, the suburb has prospered handsomely within the booming ‘Headquarters Economy’ of the region, home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other metro area of its size. Since the 1970s this preeminence has helped the Twin Cities attract and retain a disproportionate share of high-earning managerial professionals and their families.footnote⁵ Some five thousand of them now live in North Oaks: the town’s median household income is over $220,000 a year; its average home price, over $696,000; and nearly three-quarters of its adult residents have earned a bachelor’s degree.

Galaxies apart in history, economy and social geography, Hibbing and North Oaks have recently crossed paths in politics. For decades the heavily unionized Iron Range was among the most dependable Democratic regions in the country, offering loyal if lonely support to landslide victims like George McGovern and Walter Mondale. The city of Hibbing delivered two-to-one majorities for generations of Democrats as distinct as Lyndon Johnson, Paul Wellstone and Amy Klobuchar. In national politics, the deluge came in 2016, when Hibbing narrowly voted for Trump over Clinton; Biden failed to win it back in 2020. Yet until last year the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (dfl) still held ten of the Range’s eleven state House seats.footnote⁶ It was only in 2022 that Hibbing, which elected two new Republican legislators, left behind its transitional status as an ambivalent ‘Obama-Trump’ district and was absorbed into the vast and darkening red plain that now runs unbroken from Lake Superior to the Cascades.

North Oaks, too, has been ‘on a journey’. When founded at midcentury, the former Hill family estate became a citadel of country-club Republicanism. The otherwise hapless Barry Goldwater carried North Oaks by a three-to-one margin in 1964; for the next half-century, national and Minnesota Republicans could count on winning around 60 per cent of the vote there. Again 2016 marked a partial watershed: North Oaks voters recoiled from Trump, while remaining solidly Republican at the state level. Only in 2022 did North Oaks become truly Democratic, voting to oust its Republican legislators and helping propel a blue wave across the greater Twin Cities. Though the dfl lost five state House seats in the Iron Range, it held the Minnesota House and retook the Minnesota Senate, largely on the back of these sweeping suburban victories.

These examples are admittedly extreme. But the opposing journeys of Hibbing and North Oaks illustrate the dominant trend in twenty-first-century American politics: the movement of poorer and lower-educated voters toward the Republican Party, and the parallel migration of wealthier and higher-educated voters toward the Democrats. Political scientists call this phenomenon ‘class dealignment’; left-wing writers, with a reliable ear for the ungainly phrase, have adopted the term as a shorthand for the two-way traffic of downscale voters traveling right and upscale voters moving left. Dealignment’s roots sink far back beyond this century, and its emergence, varying in speed and intensity, has been tracked across much of the advanced capitalist world.footnote⁷ Yet it is in the United States—in places like Hibbing and North Oaks—that the process has been most vivid, particularly in the last decade. Why is this happening? How has it reshaped the two dominant coalitions in American politics, in both ideological and institutional terms? And what are its implications for the future of left political struggle in the United States?