“I was raised as a Democrat. If you were a working-class person, you would have voted Democratic no matter what,” said Pat Lezeman, a Minntac electrician who plans to vote for Trump. (37) said. “That’s changing now. Democrats aren’t thinking about blue-collar workers.”
Shelby Karakas has a photo of a group of friends who graduated from Roosevelt High School in neighboring Virginia City in 1966. The group met at BG’s Bar & Grill in Mountain Iron, Minn. (Glenn Stubb/Minnesota Star Tribune)
Mountain Iron’s downtown was once vibrant. But decades ago, mines were buying up homes downtown and demolishing them to mine the iron ore beneath. There are now a few dozen homes downtown, but mostly closed stores, post offices and vacant schools. The action centers on highways along the Virginia border or emerging developments on the west side of town: flashy new schools, new subdivisions of large suburban homes, shopping areas where Walmart is based.
The town’s biggest business success in recent years is a sign of change. Atop a pile of old tailings sits a 90,000-square-foot manufacturing facility for Helien, the third-largest solar cell manufacturer in the United States. A town shaped by generations of Old World mining has added 400 jobs in the New World green energy industry.
Gary Scalco, Mountain Iron’s former mayor for 18 years, knows how jobs have determined the politics of the Iron Range for generations: How it became the home of the DFL. The mining boom era that led to the 1980s, the recession that severed that connection, and concerns about environmental issues that led many miners to rebel against the party, including support for the Democratic Party.
At 75 years old, he’s still an old-school range DFL player with a big Harris Waltz sign. Trump fans protested when Scalco spoke at a Biden rally two months before the 2020 election. However, things seem to have calmed down now. Once a week, Mr. Scalco has breakfast at the Village Inn with a group of retired miners, mostly Trump fans, and the political talk is quiet.
Still, politics can disrupt relationships. Scalco is a longtime friend of Hibbing Taconite Blaster Sean Gelt. In 2020, Scalco asked a friend who is an ardent Trump supporter to stop exchanging political emails. “Sean, I’m not going to change you, you’re probably not going to change me, so stop it,” Scalco recalled.
