For the Smiths, like other members of public sector labor unions, working on the Wisconsin side has meant rising personal contributions for health insurance and pensions and a union with drastically less negotiating power. For Mr. Fulton, like many business executives, running a company on the Minnesota side has meant bracing for new business taxes and higher income taxes. Mr. Fulton, a third-generation foundryman, has worked in Minnesota long enough to recall the decision to open the Duluth operation in 1980, a period when life looked much the same on either side of the border, many say.
“Knowing then what we know now, would we even do it in the state of Minnesota anywhere?” said Mr. Fulton, the president of ME Global, which operates the foundry. “I doubt it. We would go to another location. It’s an expensive place to do business.”
The states did not always seem so different. Animosity between Packers fans and Vikings fans once seemed the widest divide. Both Duluth and Superior lean Democratic. Both have their share of Lutheran and Catholic churches. People buy their clothes in Duluth, their cigarettes in Superior. They ride mountain-biking trails and join book clubs in Duluth, then cross back for a burger at Superior’s Anchor Bar.
But the political polarization that has left Washington divided and deadlocked has also pulled the neighboring states apart. Thirty-six states are now controlled entirely by a single political party, the largest number in six decades. Twenty-three states are dominated by Republicans, 13 by Democrats.
Far from leading to the paralysis that has caused debt-limit brinkmanship and government shutdown in Washington, one-party control has turned state capitals into feverish testing grounds for the nation’s most-debated policies, on the left and even more so on the right.
A look at two states right next to each other, Wisconsin and Minnesota, tells the story.
In the last presidential race, their votes were almost identical: 52.8 percent of Wisconsin voters picked President Obama, and 45.8 percent Mitt Romney; in Minnesota, 52.6 percent voted for Mr. Obama, and just under 45 percent for Mr. Romney. Yet the two states have been at the forefront of new efforts by liberals and conservatives alike to influence state capitals after decades in which Washington was the main stage for their ideological battles.
In Wisconsin, conservative and Republican groups overwhelmed labor unions and liberals to elect Scott Walker as governor and insulate him and Republican lawmakers from a labor-led recall effort. In Minnesota, a coalition of wealthy in-state donors joined with national labor unions and gay-rights groups to smother the state’s divided Republican Party with a blitz of advertising and grass-roots organizing, handing Minnesota’s Legislature to Democrats, who also held the governor’s office.
Few places reveal the chasm like Duluth and Superior, where life along the border has come to look like a jarring, real-time experiment in which neighbors’ lives are suddenly heading along separate trajectories.
In Duluth, where Mr. and Ms. Smith live on a quiet cul-de-sac on a hill, there are signs of labor expansion.
Minnesota lawmakers last year voted to grant in-home child care workers and personal attendants permission to form unions. But in Superior, where the Smiths have taught at the city’s high school for nearly two decades, labor’s power diminished precipitously after a decision by Wisconsin lawmakers, parts of which are still being contested in the courts, to solve a budget crunch by slashing bargaining rights for public-sector union workers and raising their shares of health and pension costs.
For the Smiths, the effects were instant. With more than $6,000 less in an already-lean annual family budget, Ms. Smith, a Spanish teacher who had worked part time to spend mornings with her children, had no choice but to move to full-time hours. “We just weren’t going to be able to make it,” she said.
Supervising their two children, Will, 12, and Ilee, 10, before and after school has become a juggling act. And with the union losing much of its ability to negotiate, Ms. Smith at one point even considered stopping her dues, even though her husband is on the union’s labor management committee. “I got to wondering,” Ms. Smith said, “what am I paying for?”
Mr. Smith, who teaches history, said that he adored his work and his students, but that he could not shake the sense that the rug had been pulled from under him. This month, he will start teaching students at a local university one night a week to make extra money and to get a glimpse at what else may be out there.
“It wasn’t until the last two and a half years where I really started wondering: Is this what I’m going to do?” Mr. Smith said. “Can I keep doing it? What else could I do?”
Back home in Duluth, the schools have wrestled with their own uncertainties in recent years — financial struggles, crowded classrooms and teacher layoffs. But school officials say they now feel optimistic about the year ahead, given an added levy approved in November by local voters, as well as about $4 million in new state funds expected.
“Up until just a very short time ago, these places were always way more similar than they were different,” Mr. Smith said. “Then this all came down, and they’ve gone their own ways.”
In Wisconsin, the change began with elections in 2010, when a national Republican wave swept through a Capitol then dominated by Democrats. For the first time in a dozen years, both legislative chambers and the governor’s office switched to the Republicans — not to mention a United States Senate seat long held by Russ Feingold, a Democrat, and the majority of the state’s delegation to the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Walker, the newly elected governor, saw the results as a call from voters for a clear shift in course, he said in an interview last year.
“It’s put-up or shut-up time,” Mr. Walker recalled telling Republican lawmakers after the election that flipped the state capital, Madison, to Republican control. “It was a reminder to us that if we just nibble around the edges and we’re just not quite as bad as the Democrats were before us, the voters will have every right to kick us out of office two years from now.”
During the same period, Minnesota was trying out divided government. Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, and the two Republican-controlled legislative chambers in St. Paul hit such an impasse over how to solve a budget gap that parts of state government shut down for several weeks in 2011. The next year, the Democratic Party, known here as the D.F.L., won the House and Senate, gaining sole control of Minnesota for the first time in two decades.
It was almost the mirror image of what had happened in Wisconsin. And in the months that followed, neither state could be accused of nibbling around the edges.
In 2013, Wisconsin’s lawmakers cut income taxes. They approved an expansion of school vouchers. They passed a requirement, portions of which are now being contested in court, that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that women seeking abortions get ultrasounds. They rewrote iron mining rules to ease construction of an open pit in Northern Wisconsin.
In Minnesota, lawmakers sent more money to public schools, raised income taxes on the highest earners, increased the tax on cigarettes and voted to add new business taxes. They allowed some undocumented immigrants to get in-state tuition for public universities. They legalized same-sex marriage.
“It’s staggering, really, like night and day,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got two states with the same history, the same culture, the same people — it’s kind of like they’re cousins. And now they’re looking across the border and seeing one world, then seeing something else entirely on the other side.”
Few cross between these twin ports as often as Alvin Berg and Vince Nelson, the co-owners of two gay bars, each known as the Flame, one in Superior, population 27,000, the other in Duluth, about three times larger.
The opening in 2012 of the Duluth operation, that city’s first gay bar, complete with pool tables and salsa lessons, has meant more commuting than ever. The couple, together for almost 30 years, built a house in Superior with details painstakingly chosen to match their wishes: high ceilings, a centerpiece stairway, a basement bar stocked with Cher memorabilia and no liquor.
But Mr. Berg, 54, and Mr. Nelson, 50, now say they plan to sell their home. They want to move to Duluth even though the cost of housing is higher and, they say, they had imagined staying in their Wisconsin house forever. They say same-sex marriage, which Minnesota began permitting in August, matters more. “We would rather live in a state that appreciates us for who we are,” Mr. Berg said.
Mr. Berg and Mr. Nelson could marry in Minnesota yet continue living in Wisconsin. But they say they want legal protections that accompany marriage, including joint state tax filings, not the uncertainty they say they would face on matters like the fate of their shared property if something happened to one of them.
Besides, they said, the thought of living in a state that bars them from marrying feels newly painful given the change just across the bridge. “Here we are, living only five miles away,” Mr. Nelson said, “but we’re treated so much different.”
Inside the foundry that Mr. Fulton’s company runs in Duluth, as vats of liquid metal glow hot and finishing machines spin and whir, 193 employees work shifts around the clock, constructing castings used to pulverize iron ore in the mining industry. The original business, now owned by a Chilean company, was started in Minnesota in 1917, and its domestic headquarters are in the Twin Cities. But Mr. Fulton lately has grown exasperated.
In 2013, Minnesota raised the income tax on individuals making more than $150,000 a year, a move, he said, that could affect his ability to recruit executives. They passed a tax on telecommunications services and equipment. They decided to tax businesses that provide warehouses for business materials, a tax set to go into effect this spring, whose cost, Mr. Fulton said, would be passed on to him by his suppliers.
And they approved a tax on some labor conducted at businesses, such as repair work on farm equipment or maintenance of machines like the ones in the foundry. With improved revenue forecasts, some state leaders, including Governor Dayton, say they hope to repeal the so-called business-to-business taxes this spring, but business leaders around the state say they are skeptical.
“As you layer more and more taxes, it becomes harder and harder to justify continued expansion in the state,” Mr. Fulton said.
Bill Grau, the Duluth plant manager, jokes that he wishes he could unilaterally annex the facility to Wisconsin, whose border sits a half-mile behind the plant. In the end, the business is unlikely to move, Mr. Fulton said. Too much capital has been invested. The history is long.
“Is that one tax enough for us to say, ‘Go’?” Mr. Fulton said. “Probably not, but it certainly is part of the equation, and it becomes a more significant part of the equation as that tax environment becomes more and more onerous, year after year.”
For those with far less, these two states’ diverging policies have been equally jarring. As the federal health care law began rolling out last fall, Duluth became a frenzy of billboards, ads and leaflets urging people to sign up for Minnesota’s new program, which includes a state-run exchange and an expansion of the state’s already far-reaching Medicaid system. Superior was quieter after Wisconsin leaders, deeply critical of President Obama’s law, turned down a Medicaid expansion, saying they feared federal funds would soon fade away, and chose to forgo a state marketplace.
Diana Gradine, a case manager at a nonprofit center for homeless people with substance abuse problems in Duluth, was among those helping the uninsured get coverage under Minnesota’s new program. Not long ago, though, Ms. Gradine, who lives in a second-floor apartment in Superior, got a letter about her own insurance. Wisconsin was removing her from its Medicaid program.
“I was shocked,” Ms. Gradine said. “Here I was thinking I was going to help people who needed to get insurance, and now I’ve become one of the people who need to get insurance.”
In Wisconsin — which, like Minnesota, has historically been known for broad health care benefits for the poor — the authorities this spring are ending coverage for tens of thousands of parents like Ms. Gradine who earn more than 100 percent of the poverty level and pay modest monthly premiums, a cost Ms. Gradine’s employer had covered. Meanwhile, the state is allowing tens of thousands of people without children who make even less to receive Medicaid coverage for the first time.
For Ms. Gradine — a 41-year-old mother of three children under 20 earning $32,557 a year and receiving some child support — the Wisconsin-Minnesota divide is stark. If she lived in Minnesota, officials there say, she would be eligible for that state’s newly expanded coverage for the working poor, which would require her to pay a $21 premium each month. As a resident of Wisconsin, however, Ms. Gradine will need to buy private insurance, though experts say she may qualify for federal subsidies that will reduce her monthly premiums.
Ms. Gradine, who describes herself as a Republican and whose refrigerator bears a snapshot of her wearing a “Scott Walker” sticker, so far has not signed up for insurance. She knows she needs it — she has tendinitis in her right arm and abdominal adhesions — but she also says the federal online insurance marketplace seems confusing and time-consuming.
“It might be simpler to just move over to the Minnesota side,” Ms. Gradine said. But her children are settled, she said, with friends and teachers and activities in Superior. “If we come to a place where we have to cross that bridge for good, I would look at that,” she said. “But I’m not there yet.”
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