The Topline: How an international tourism slump could affect Minnesota

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: what a drop in international tourism means for Minnesota; the most conservative and liberal workplaces; how trucks and SUVs drive road congestion; and meaningful jobs. 

International tourism takes a hit

The Washington Post reported last week that international tourism to the U.S. is plummeting at the start of the second Trump administration. In March, “overseas visitors fell nearly 12% compared with the same time last year, according to data from the International Trade Administration, an agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce,” the paper reports.

The reasons aren’t terribly complicated: Trump seems determined to turn the U.S. into a pariah state, with every day bringing new horror stories of travelers being detained, deported and refused admittance.

In 2023, more than 500,000 international tourists visited Minnesota, according to Explore Minnesota, spending a little over $500 million in the state. The agency had been forecasting 2025 would bring 700,000 international visitors and $700 million in spending, but that’s now unlikely.

More than half of Minnesota’s international tourists hail from Canada. The administration’s ongoing belligerence toward our northern neighbor has fueled a fierce backlash. Minnesota businesses relying on those visitors are likely to be especially hard hit. 

“I don’t want to pay into their economy, I’m going to stay in Winnipeg and go to local events here, put my money here,” one Winnipeg resident told a city newspaper. “And who knows what’ll happen? What if you get your car keyed? We don’t know how they’re going to treat Canadians going down,” she added.

Measuring workforce politics

Last month a team of researchers released a new dataset on the political affiliations of workers at hundreds of thousands of American employers. They did this by linking public voter registration data to online worker profiles maintained by many employers.

They found that workplaces in their sample tend to lean left, with more than 60% of employees identifying as a Democrat (for simplicity’s sake, independents and those not registered with one of the two major parties were excluded from this calculation). But some industries are much more conservative or liberal than others, and the same goes for individual workplaces.

At Target, for instance, fewer than 30% of identifiable employees are registered Republican. Privately owned agriculture behemoth Cargill, on the other hand, has close to a 60% Republican workforce.

“In the context of growing political polarization, employers are entering the political arena in unprecedented ways,” the authors write. “Given the potentially critical role that workers play in shaping these actions, it is critical to have wide-reaching, representative measures of workers’ personal politics.”

Trucks and SUVS are clogging up the roadways, study finds

MPR News reports on a recent study using Minnesota traffic data to analyze how the exploding popularity of trucks and sport-utility vehicles affects traffic flows on roadways.

Minnesota has some of the best traffic data in the United States, the authors note, with reliable numbers going back to the 1990s. That allows researchers to get a sense of how things have changed.

The study looked at the freeway network around Minneapolis and St. Paul, and found that “the average network throughput decreases from approximately 1850 vehicles per lane per hour in 1995 to about 1600 vehicles per lane per hour in 2019.” 

The authors attribute that to the growing popularity of small trucks and SUVs, which take up more space on the road.

“The number of vehicles it takes to reach a congested level of traffic is fewer, and so you’re more likely to see congestion for the same number of people traveling because people are in SUVs and vans and pickup trucks, but especially SUVs,” co-author David Levinson told MPR.

The study found that while the total number of registered vehicles in Minnesota grew by 36% from 1995 to 2019, the number of SUVs increased by more than 1,000%.

1 in 5 Americans say their job “is not making a meaningful contribution to the world”

A recent YouGov survey found that while most American workers say their job makes a difference, 20% told the pollster that their job is essentially meaningless.

People with so-called email jobs — sending and receiving emails and Slack messages and attending meetings — were actually more likely to characterize their jobs as meaningful, although this is probably a function of education: More educated people are also more likely to say their jobs mean something, and they’re also more likely to do email jobs.

Americans who think their own jobs are meaningless are also much more likely to take a dim view of the value of other people’s jobs.

Incidentally, workers in the U.K. are nearly twice as likely as those in the U.S. to say their jobs are meaningless.