But investors view a second Trump administration as good news for insurers who take part in Medicare Advantage, the privatized alternative to the Medicare health insurance program for seniors. The Biden administration has been changing risk adjustment payments within the program in ways that insurers regard as a price cut, which has impacted UnitedHealth Group, the largest Advantage insurer in the nation.

“The switch to Republican leadership could ease those pressures a bit, given the Republicans support these privatized plans for senior citizens,” Julie Utterbeck, another analyst with Morningstar, wrote Wednesday in a research report. “At the very least, we would expect regulators to stop turning the screws so hard on Medicare Advantage beyond current risk-adjustment initiatives that are projected to be completed in 2026.”

One of the key areas of concern for state public health officials is Kennedy, who on Wednesday suggested to NBC News that a new administration should wipe out entire divisions of the Food and Drug Administration, such as its nutrition department.

In a social media post on X last month, Kennedy warned FDA leaders to “pack your bags” because the agency has been influenced by the pharmaceutical industry in its “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

That list includes two drugs that were extensively studied by University of Minnesota researchers but ultimately determined as ineffective as treatments for COVID-19. Kennedy also wants to halt the addition of fluoride to drinking water. Jensen said he was in dental training before medical school, and that there is solid science supporting its use to reduce tooth decay. However, he said he welcomed the conversation over its use.

The danger with Kennedy is that he misunderstands the ever-evolving nature of science and cherry-picks data and isolated reports of injuries to support anti-science views, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy who also served in Trump’s first administration as an envoy to other nations on influenza preparedness. He likened Kennedy to someone opposed to seat belts based on one case of the restraints trapping a driver in a burning car.

A tough, pointed question arrived in my email box this morning.

“Do you think people that live around you are racist and transphobic and misogynistic? Or do they just vote that way?”

Some of you know that I live in Otter Tail County in a deeply conservative part of Minnesota, which voted for Trump as expected.

On election day, I hung out at voting precincts in Clitherall, Battle Lake, Underwood, Sverdrup Township, and Fergus Falls, interviewing voters after they left the polls. There was one moment, after I interviewed five Harris supporters in a row, that I wondered if the universe had tilted on its axis. I headed to a more rural precinct where I quickly met two Trump voters who set me straight.

Are the people around me racist and transphobic and misogynistic? I understand that question comes from a deep sense of grief at the outcome of the election, based on Trump’s rhetoric and his plan to overturn federal diversity, equity, and inclusion hires, his stacking of the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and his plan to end transgender participation in women’s sports.

All the phobias exist in greater Minnesota as they do in any other place. But I hope Twin Cities folks don’t think all of greater Minnesota is that way.

In rural Minnesota, from what I’ve seen, the group that takes the brunt of open rejection is transgender people. People run for school board pledging to get rid of LGBTQ+ books in public schools. Social media users pass around memes mocking drag queen story hours, whipping up fear and anger over “men in women’s bathrooms,” and arguing that men can’t get pregnant. They don’t like the debate over pronouns, the terms “pregnant people” or “menstruating people,” (I don’t like saying ‘pregnant people’ either), and they were especially willing to believe conservative embellishment over the debunked claim that Gov. Tim Walz requires schools to put tampons into the boy’s bathrooms.

Proposed mines in northern Minnesota face an easier path with the presidential victory of Donald J. Trump — who has promised multiple times to re-invigorate mining in the state’s Iron Range.

Trump has already promised to restore the potential for mining on land eyed for the Twin Metals project, a massive underground copper nickel mine in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Under Project 2025, a policy plan for the next Republican president penned in part by former Trump officials, the federal government would again allow mining in a 225,000-acre tract of national forest. In 2022, the Biden Administration barred the issuance of new mineral leases there. Advocates have long worried that toxic runoff from copper-nickel sulfide mining could pollute the a beloved matrix of boreal lakes, rivers and forests that stretch over a million acres.

Separately, the Biden administration cancelled the federal leases Twin Metals held in Minnesota, which effectively killed the project. The company is challenging that decision in federal court, and it’s unlikely the Department of Justice will continue to defend it after power is transferred in January, said Chris Knopf, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of the Boundary Waters.

“I’m very concerned, at the federal level, what action the Trump Administration will take to hurt the Boundary Waters,” Knopf said. “I expect that will begin very, very soon.”

But proponents of the Twin Metals project and other copper nickel mines in Minnesota have argued they would provide jobs and needed metals to fuel new technologies needed for cleaner energy.

“Minnesota contains the world’s largest undeveloped copper-nickel deposit, and these resources hold tremendous promise in realizing many of our nation’s goals on energy security, American job creation, national security and bringing more manufacturing home,” Julie Lucas, the executive director of industry group Mining Minnesota, said Wednesday.