Color them purple: Minnesota and Wisconsin may not be ragin' red, but they're sure not liberal blue.

AFTER a campaign rally in Minnesota on September 16, President Bush spoke to a few of his supporters, including Republican governor Tim Pawlenty and congressman Jim Ramstad. Bush was amazed that he might win the state. If we carry Minnesota, he said, we'll sweep.

Bush, like many political observers, is clinging to a dated perception. Bush may very well win Minnesota and Wisconsin. But they are no longer two of the most liberal states in the union. Carrying them doesn't mean he will carry Rhode Island, or even Pennsylvania; it will, however, show how much these northern Plains states have changed.

Both states acquired reputations for progressivism early in the last century, as Scandinavian and German immigrants brought a social-democratic politics to the region. Wisconsin was the land of Robert LaFollette, who took 17 percent for the Progressives in the presidential election of 1924. Minnesota, meanwhile, produced such liberal giants as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, and Orville Freeman.

Wisconsin hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan's landslide in 1984. One of Wisconsin's Senate seats--the one now held by Herb Kohl--has been held by a Democrat continuously since Joe McCarthy died in 1957. Minnesota has gone even longer without voting for a Republican presidential candidate; longer, indeed, than any other state. It has not done it since 1972.

Now both states are moving rightward. Realignment isn't happening the way it did in the South, where states started voting for Republican presidential candidates and only later backed local Republican candidates. In Minnesota, especially, the Republican vote is increasing at every level simultaneously.

Realignment has been underway for some time. One milestone came in 1978, when Republicans won both Senate seats in Minnesota and the governorships of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minnesota's reputation for liberalism was already overstated by the mid-1980s. Sure, it rejected Ronald Reagan when the rest of the country embraced him in 1984. But it rejected him narrowly, and only because native son Walter Mondale was the Democratic nominee. The same year, Republicans won the state house of representatives. In 1986, Republican Tommy Thompson won the governor's race in Wisconsin. He would be reelected three times. Just as the Progressives had instituted innovative policies that other states copied, Thompson's Wisconsin pioneered welfare reform and school choice.

There were, to be sure, setbacks on the path to Republican dominance. In Minnesota, the very liberal Paul Wellstone unseated incumbent Republican senator Rudy Boschwitz in 1990. But that race was something of an aberration. Boschwitz had been a vocal supporter of the first President Bush's tax increase, and a sex scandal had hit the Republican candidate for governor right before the election.

Jesse Ventura's successful independent bid for governor in 1998 masked the growing Republican strength in Minnesota. That year was a rough one for Republicans nationally. But it was a still worse one for Minnesota Democrats. Hubert Humphrey III beat Ted Mondale in their gubernatorial primary--and then went on to take third place in the governor's race. The damage increased with time: Ventura, it seems, detached many Democratic voters from their old loyalties. Republicans would later pick many of them up. Gov. Pawlenty calls Ventura "a bridge figure."

In 2000, a strong Ralph Nader candidacy in Wisconsin and Minnesota brought Bush to the edge of victory in both states. (Nader is on both states' ballots this year, too.) Bush came within 60,000 votes of winning Minnesota, and was only 5,709 votes shy of winning Wisconsin. Bush carried the Milwaukee area, one of the few major metropolitan areas not to turn markedly more Democratic during the 1990s. In 2002, Minnesota Republicans won the governor's race, won the Senate race, and picked up 11 seats in the state house of representatives. All that seemed to be left of the mighty Democratic-Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota was Al Franken and Garrison Keillor (which is part of the reason they're so tetchy these days). The same year, Wisconsin Republicans lost the governorship after Thompson's long reign. But they also won control of the state senate and expanded their majority in the lower house.

Republicans have gained in Minnesota and Wisconsin largely because national trends have had a larger-than-average impact there. They are disproportionately white states, and the long erosion of the Democratic party among white voters has therefore hurt badly. Exurban areas have grown fast in Minnesota, and those exurbs, full of young families, lean Republican. Minnesota's Twin Cities are very liberal ("Minneapolis is San Francisco on the Mississippi," says former Republican congressman Vin Weber, an adviser to the Bush campaign for the region), but are a declining share of the state's population. Rural areas have been moving quickly toward the Republicans, as rural areas have across the country. Quickly, but not uniformly: Western Wisconsin has been slower to turn Republican than eastern. Minnesota's Iron Range--the heavily unionized mining country of the northeast--has slowed the state's political transformation, but its population is shrinking.

The two states are very similar. "The line is, Wisconsin is Catholic deer hunters and Minnesota is Lutheran deer hunters," says Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from southeastern Wisconsin. They're midsized states, with ten electoral votes each. After suffering rather less from the recession than most states, both Wisconsin and Minnesota are booming. The unemployment rate in each state is 4.8 percent, compared with a national average of 5.4.

Both states are competitive in this year's presidential race. But the contest is being fought harder in Wisconsin. By the end of September, Bush and Cheney had been there eleven times this year, as had Kerry and Edwards. Bush is doing better in Wisconsin than in Minnesota, as one might expect given his 2000 performance. Depending on the poll, he is up by anywhere from three to ten points in the Badger State. The polls in Minnesota are mixed. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had Kerry up nine points in mid-September. But its poll skews Democratic. Other, later polls have shown Bush either tied or with a modest lead.

Ryan has a theory for why Wisconsin seems to be backing Bush. The state likes mavericks: liberal senator Russ Feingold, for example. Kerry is too equivocal. "George Bush is really winning the personality/likeability contest in Wisconsin," says Ryan. "That counts for something. It would be better for [Kerry] to stick to the consistent liberal he was in the Senate than what he's trying to be." Republicans are working hard to make a recent Kerry gaffe--he said "Lambert Field" when he meant "Lambeau," home of the Green Bay Packers--reinforce the impression of his phoniness. George Twigg, the communications director for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in the state, is confident his team will win. "We are weathering the attacks," he says. The state economy, he continues, isn't all it's cracked up to be: "The unemployment numbers don't tell the whole story."

Compared with Minnesota, Wisconsin has more Republican-leaning voters. But Minnesota has the better organized Republican party, and it shows. Minnesota has a popular conservative Republican governor in Pawlenty, while Wisconsin has a popular Democratic one in Jim Doyle; Minnesota has a Republican senator while Wisconsin has none. Wisconsin Democrats are suddenly nervous about Feingold's reelection--challenger Tim Michels just won the Republican primary--but Feingold is still favored and the race is not a top priority for Republicans nationally. Ron Eibensteiner, the chairman of the Minnesota Republican party, says that his goals by the end of 2006 are to reelect Pawlenty, replace Democratic senator Mark Dayton and congressman Collin Peterson, hold the state house of representatives, and win the state senate. Those are realistic goals, even if Republicans do not achieve all of them in the end.

Minnesota and Wisconsin are socially conservative states. Minnesota has four Democratic congressmen. One of them has a 90 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. Another has 100 percent. The contests in these states are part of a larger trend: The terrain of presidential elections is getting more socially conservative. For years, the media wisdom has been that swing voters' social views are moderate to liberal. Yet the most sought-after voters today are the blue-collar social conservatives of the Ohio River Valley--and the social conservatives of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 2000, Al Gore muted his support for gun control to win in places like these. This year, Kerry has soft-pedaled his positions on abortion and same-sex marriage.

A few years ago, you might have assumed that the Republicans had wrung all the advantage that could be had out of social issues; that all the socially conservative Democrats who were tempted to switch parties over those issues had already done so. But you would have been wrong.

Pawlenty says Minnesota is "purple" rather than "red," describing it as a "politically competitive state instead of being fairly solid for one side or the other." He thinks that the presidential election could play an important role in the state's realignment.

"There are still a lot of skeptics about whether Minnesota has changed. Having President Bush win this state would be a huge psychological breakthrough for Republicans and conservatives in Minnesota because it would be the most visible confirmation of this change that we could have," he says. "The chattering class in Minnesota, much of which is getting a little long in the tooth, came of age during this liberal era. They continue to hold sway as thought leaders, and they want to discredit the Republicans and the conservatives as aberrational. And a Bush victory would put that to rest in a way they couldn't deny."