The Topline: Do you live in Minnesota’s goat belt?

Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: secession skepticism; robust tax collections; grim transit numbers and a map about goats. 

Minnesotans deeply skeptical of secession

Earlier this month YouGov polled residents of 46 states to gauge their hypothetical support for seceding from the union. The emphasis here is on “hypothetical,” as Americans frequently like to bluster about things like secession or renouncing their citizenship as a way to express their attitudes toward the current political situation. 

Overall, nearly one quarter of respondents told the pollster they’d support their state seceding. There are a couple of clear trends in the data. The first is that big states — in terms of either geography or population — show the most support for secession. The rate is 36% in Alaska, 31% in Texas, and 29% in California.

The second is that in every single state except New Jersey, more Republicans than Democrats say they want to secede. That’s primarily a reflection of who’s currently in the White House.

Closer to home, just 13% of Minnesotans say they’d support secession, with Democrats (13%) and Republicans (14%) supporting it at a virtually identical rate. Overall secession support here is the second-lowest in the nation, behind only Connecticut.

On the other hand, 26% of Minnesotans say they want another state to secede. While the poll didn’t ask respondents to specify which state, we’re going to guess that most who answered in the affirmative had Wisconsin in mind.

Tax collections come in higher than expected (again)

The latest data from Minnesota Management and Budget showed the state brought in $313 million more revenue than expected in January. “For fiscal year 2024,” the department writes, “year-to-date receipts are now $17.1 billion, $384 million (2.3%) more than forecast.”

While it’s not a huge windfall relative to expectations, it does add a little padding to the previous grim budgetary forecasts that had DFL leaders promising no new major spending initiatives.  

“We have a transit system set up for a commuting economy that no longer exists.”

That was how Reformer editor Patrick Coolican summed up the latest Twin Cities transit ridership data, as reported by Axios last week.

There were 82.5 million transit rides in 2019, a number that had plummeted to 35.9 million by 2021. The rebound since then has been excruciatingly slow: In 2023 there were just 48.7 million rides, fewer than 60% of the pre-pandemic norm. 

One more datapoint: A Metro Transit representative told the Met Council that the A, B and C parking ramps in downtown Minneapolis were only hitting 30% of their peak capacity.

It all boils down to the simple fact that workers have little desire to return to their offices, despite all the cajoling from their bosses and local politicians.

Minnesota’s goat belt

Last week Madison McVan covered the latest release of the USDA’s Agricultural Census, which is a comprehensive survey of the nation’s farmers that comes out once every five years. The topline finding was that farms in Minnesota, as elsewhere, keep getting bigger and richer, while smaller producers get squeezed out of the market. But the survey contains a lot of other fun ephemera about Minnesota agriculture too.

Take goats, for instance. The survey found that the population of farmed goats in Minnesota exploded from 36,000 in 2017 to 51,000 in 2022. This likely owes, in part, to rising demand for halal goat meat from the Somali community.

The Census even has data down to the county level, which shows that goat farms are concentrated in a belt running roughly from Moorhead down to the far southeast corner of the state. The goat population is highest in Todd County, northwest of St. Cloud, which is home to about 5,000 of the lovable critters.