Minnesota has long occupied an odd corner of American political life, and this week it got a fresh label from an unexpected direction. Fox News political analyst Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman and onetime White House chief of staff, offered a succinct assessment of the state’s political character: “Minnesota has always been a little bit quirky when it comes to politics.”
That remark, reported by American Thinker, became the jumping-off point for a sharply worded column by Eric Utter, who argues that “quirky” is far too gentle a word for what Minnesota has produced over the decades.
The Case Against ‘Quirky’
Utter’s central complaint is one of understatement. He stacks Priebus’s word against a series of increasingly pointed comparisons, suggesting that calling Minnesota politics merely quirky is like describing a public figure as merely quirky in their speech, or characterizing historical atrocities as minor personality tics. The rhetorical escalation is deliberate — Utter isn’t interested in a measured taxonomy of Midwestern electoral behavior. He wants readers to feel the gap between the polite framing and what he sees as the reality.
To make his case, Utter trots out a roster of names and moments that he treats as evidence of a state that reliably colors outside the lines.
There’s Jesse Ventura, the professional wrestler who won the governor’s mansion. There’s Rudy Perpich, remembered by the nickname “Governor Goofy.” There’s Tim Walz, whom Utter refers to by a derisive nickname tied to a viral moment rather than his official title. The column also flags Attorney General Keith Ellison, whom Utter labels “thoroughly corrupt” — an assertion offered without supporting detail in the piece.
The 1984 Footnote
Utter reserves particular attention for 1984, when Minnesota was the only state in the country that did not vote for Ronald Reagan. Instead, it went for Walter Mondale, the hometown candidate and former vice president, whom Utter dismisses as a “liberal milquetoast” and mocks with the spelling “Mondull.”
That single electoral fact has become something of a fixed star in conservative commentary about Minnesota — a data point that seems to confirm the state’s status as an outlier even in a landslide year. Whether it reflects genuine quirkiness or simply the pull of a native son on the ballot is a question Utter doesn’t entertain. For his purposes, the anomaly speaks for itself.
Hijabs, Salads, and Loons
The column then moves to more recent material. Utter notes that Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, whom he describes as far-left, recently wore a hijab as a gesture of solidarity with Minnesota’s Somali Muslim community. He also reaches back to an old anecdote about Senator Amy Klobuchar, who once acknowledged using her comb to eat a salad — a detail Utter clearly relishes as further proof of the state’s eccentric streak.
The through-line, such as it is, is accumulation rather than argument. Utter isn’t building a thesis so much as a collage: wrestlers, nicknames, a lone holdout state, a comb, a hijab. The effect is meant to be cumulative, and readers already inclined to agree will likely find it persuasive. Those looking for a causal explanation of why Minnesota behaves this way will not find one here.
He closes the litany with a play on the state’s famous nickname. Minnesota has well over ten thousand lakes, he writes, but far more loons than that. It’s a pun that doubles as a verdict.
An Imagined Second Coming
The column’s most caustic passage arrives near the end, when Utter imagines what would happen if Jesus returned to Earth and landed in Minnesota. According to his telling, locals would first ask about pronouns and then about where the Almighty stood on unchecked illegal immigration. If the Savior offered a kind word about ICE, Utter writes, Minnesotans would send Him packing — and the sentence trails off into a crude suggestion about what else might be thrown.
It’s a passage that says more about the author’s frustrations than about the state’s electorate, but it captures the tone of the piece: exasperated, combative, and uninterested in hedging.
What ‘Quirky’ Is Doing Here
The interesting question lurking beneath Utter’s column isn’t whether Minnesota has produced colorful politicians — nearly every state can claim a few. It’s what work the word “quirky” is doing in Priebus’s original remark, and why it provoked such a response.
On one reading, “quirky” is a diplomatic word. It acknowledges difference without assigning blame. For a national political analyst appearing on Fox News, that kind of soft framing is often the safer path — it signals familiarity with a state’s reputation without endorsing any particular theory about why it votes the way it does. Priebus, a Wisconsin native who spent years in national Republican politics, would know Minnesota’s recent electoral record well: the state has not backed a Republican for president since 1972, the longest such streak in the country.
Utter, by contrast, treats “quirky” as an evasion. In his reading, the word launders a set of political outcomes he finds not merely unusual but objectionable. Hence the comparisons that escalate from the merely eccentric to the genuinely monstrous — a rhetorical move designed to shame the gentler label out of circulation.
The Limits of the Frame
What gets lost in the exchange is any serious accounting of why Minnesota politics looks the way it does. The state has a long tradition of high civic participation, a strong labor movement, and a durable progressive strain that predates the modern partisan alignments. It also has a substantial rural and suburban conservative population that has kept statewide races competitive even as the presidential map has drifted away from Republicans.
None of that fits neatly into a column built around punchlines. Utter isn’t writing analysis; he’s writing a bill of particulars, and the pleasures of the form come from the rhythm of the accusations rather than their evidentiary weight.
The column ends with a brief appeal to the importance of speaking freely, followed by a standard donation request — a reminder that American Thinker, like most opinion outlets, is in the business of persuasion. Whether Priebus’s “quirky” survives the assault is doubtful. Whether it deserved to is another matter entirely.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/analyst-says-minnesota-has-always-been-a-little-bit-quirky-when-it-comes-to-politics/