I personally always vote for every single election on the ballet and yes, I waste half a day looking online deciding which one to vote for on names I have never heard of and probably will never hear again lol.
Makes you feel like your vote really counts and our democratic exercise is really vital huh? Except that there is never really any difference between soil and water supervisors, except of course for the batshit completely unqualified ones that wouldn't have a chance if it weren't an elected position. Meanwhile, at the top of the ticket, the only difference is one is willing to throw a few crumbs to the rest of us after doling out all the money to the super-rich, while the other is fine with letting em die.
I think the big problem for the GOP in MN is that it tries to emulate its southern cousins.
It's funny because I just met someone from New York who just started working at Target, and she mentioned being shocked that some of her new coworkers will admit to seriously, unironically liking country. The GOP will do fine here as long as they keep running people like Paul Ryan who wrap their corporate handout policies in a distortion of prairie populist rhetoric, appealing to all those fat idiots who work in insurance in the suburbs but like to pretend they're good ole boys. That is the secret to the success of candidates like Kurt Zellers, and the only reason they lost this year is that Obama was able to get the wives of those insurance rednecks to turn out. While the DFL has a slight advantage thanks to the Iron Range, I think we're going to see the State House flip back and forth for the next decade or so as this pattern repeats itself.
Edit: Looking again at the maps, it looks like the suburban wives turned out not for Obama but to vote against the anti-marriage amendment - the suburbs voted no at a greater margin than they voted for Obama - which is both deliciously ironic and not that great for the DFL.