The1956 United States presidential election in Minnesota took place on November 6, 1956, as part of the1956 United States presidential election. Voters chose 11 electors, or representatives to theElectoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Minnesota was won by theRepublican Party candidate,incumbentPresidentDwight D. Eisenhower won the state over formerIllinois governorAdlai Stevenson by a margin of 101,777 votes, or 7.6%, which made Minnesota 8% more Democratic than the nation-at-large. Eisenhower went on to win the election nationally, with 457 electoral votes and a landslide 15.4% lead over Stevenson in the popular vote. The 1956 presidential election was a rematch of the1952 election, in which Eisenhower also defeated Stevenson, both nationally and in Minnesota. As of the2024 presidential election[update], this is the last time Minnesota was carried in two consecutive elections by the Republican nominee.
The Democratic nomination campaign leading into 1956 presidential election may have had a major role in the end of the political career ofCoya Knutson, the first woman to be elected to theUnited States House of Representatives fromMinnesota. TheMinnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, in a ploy to win a possible vice presidential nomination for its rising star,U.S. SenatorHubert Humphrey, desperately attempted to ensure that Stevenson would win in the DFLPresidential Primary in Minnesota that year. However, Congresswoman Knutson, believing that the agricultural policy positions of U.S. SenatorEstes Kefauver ofTennessee would have been more beneficial to her constituents, instead endorsed and campaigned on behalf of Kefauver. In part due to Knutson's efforts, Kefauver won the March 20th Minnesota Presidential Primary; as a result, when Stevenson was ultimately nominated, Kefauver was chosen as his running mate.
Two years later, shortly before the 1958 DFL state convention, a letter signed but not written by Knutson's husband was circulated to reporters. The contents of the letter played on anxieties over deviations from the rigidgender roles of the time, and its publication by newspapers essentially ensured Knutson's defeat in her bid for re-election that year. It has been alleged by several individuals, including Concordia College political science professor Harding Noblitt, Knutson biographer Gretchen Beito, and numerous people who were close to Knutson, that either DFL state leadership or local operatives wrote the letter and bribed Knutson's husband to sign it, as a means to exact retribution against the Congresswoman for denying Humphrey a shot at the vice presidential nomination in 1956.[3]
Since 1956, Minnesota has only voted Republican in one more presidential race, whenRichard Nixon won the state in his re-election bid in1972, after which it has always voted Democratic. After 1956, no Republican presidential nominee would get over 70% of the vote in any Minnesota county again untilDonald Trump in 2016.
^Although he was born in Texas and grew up in Kansas before his military career, at the time of his election Eisenhower was president ofColumbia University and was, officially, a resident of New York. During his first term as president, he moved his private residence toGettysburg, Pennsylvania, and officially changed his residency to Pennsylvania.[2]
