1956 Election Cycle
Minnesota held its third presidential primary in March and its last until 1992 with President Dwight Eisenhower and Tennessee U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver winning the GOP and DFL primaries respectively. Eisenhower’s victory in November over Adlai Stevenson shrunk to single digits this cycle.
As a result, the GOP was only able to flip one of the major offices lost in the 1954 DFL wave: former Treasurer Val Bjornson won back his old seat by notching just shy of 4,000 more votes than incumbent Arthur Hansen. The remaining five DFL incumbents holding statewide office on the ballot were reelected by single digits: Governor Orville Freeman, Lieutenant Governor Karl Rolvaag, Secretary of State Joseph Donovan, Attorney General Miles Lord, and Railroad and Warehouse Commissioner Paul Rasmussen.
All nine incumbent U.S. Representatives – five DFLers and four Republicans – won another term in Washington, D.C.
Associate Justice Leroy Matson and appointed Justice William P. Murphy were both victorious in elections to the state Supreme Court.