A tale of two Minnesotas
“You go outstate and you see Trump signs everywhere, and you go in the seven-county metropolitan area, and it’s Biden country.”
It’s been so long since Minnesota voted Republican in a presidential election that many Democrats suspected a head fake when Donald Trump first boasted about his intent to compete there.
But two months before the general election, the race has tightened and both Trump and Joe Biden are pouring millions of dollars into the state.
Minnesota is the rare offensive opportunity for Trump on a battleground map that has him mostly on defense. And with early voting beginning on Sept. 18, the state will offer one of the first tests of the question at the center of his re-election campaign: whether he can turn out enough white, working class voters who did not participate in 2016 to expand his base.
“It’s in play,” said Mike Erlandson, a former chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “Certainly, it’s still the Democrats’ state to lose, and if they work hard, they should be fine. But it seems more purple today than it does blue.”
Minnesota has gone for the Democratic nominee in 11 straight presidential elections, last voting for a Republican, Richard Nixon, in 1972. Yet Trump lost the state four years ago by fewer than 45,000 votes with minimal effort. And there is a well of Minnesotans who fit Trump’s target demographic for him to tap into — including, by Democrats’ own estimates, 250,000 white, non-college-educated men who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered.
Trump’s greatest opportunity for growth appears to be in northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range, a historically Democratic, blue-collar mining region that is culturally conservative and has been trending Republican in recent years. But Trump will also have to reduce Biden’s margin of victory in the heavily populated Twin Cities metropolitan area.
In the protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Republicans believe they have an opening to do that. Last week, Trump began airing TV ads in the state asserting Minneapolis had been terrorized by “lawless criminals” after the death of Floyd, while criticizing “the weak response from Biden and radicals like [Minnesota Rep.] Ilhan Omar.”
Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said that in the Twin Cities suburbs, “people are frightened and scared of what they see coming out of the left … When you see the new face of the Democratic Party in our state being Ilhan Omar, that’s not going to draw those voters” to Biden.
Biden remains ahead in polls in Minnesota, and the electoral math is on his side. Clinton, a deeply polarizing nominee, badly underperformed President Barack Obama’s vote total in the state in 2012 – and still beat Trump. In the gubernatorial race two years later, Democrat Tim Walz defeated Republican Jeff Johnson by more than 11 percentage points, flipping back 10 of the 19 counties that turned from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.
Ideologically and temperamentally, Biden cuts a similar profile to Walz, a moderate Democrat. And “temperament matters in Minnesota perhaps more than other places because people attach value to that. It’s a cultural thing,” said Rick Kahn, who has advised Walz and was a longtime friend and campaign treasurer to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone.
Biden began airing his first TV ads in the state last week, and his wife, Jill Biden, is scheduled to travel to the Twin Cities on Wednesday. That same day, Donald Trump Jr. will be in northern Minnesota, in Duluth.
Ken Martin, chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said that Trump is “definitely solidifying support in rural parts of the state.” However, Martin said, “What I’ve been buoyed by in our numbers is independent voters are still moving toward Biden and Harris and away from Trump in pretty big numbers,” with no erosion in the suburbs.
“Minnesota is a place of two narratives,” said Ron Case, the mayor of Eden Prairie, a Twin Cities suburb. “You go outstate and you see Trump signs everywhere, and you go in the seven-county metropolitan area, and it’s Biden country.”
Arne Carlson, a former two-term Republican governor of Minnesota, said he was “absolutely stunned” four years ago that Trump drew so close to Clinton. “I just assumed that Minnesota was always this safe, 55 to 60 percent Democratic state,” he said.
Even so, said Carlson, who endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden this year, said, “I’m finding it increasingly difficult to figure out how Trump will win.”
The heavily populated Twin Cities area has become increasingly Democratic. The state’s turnout rates are traditionally among the highest in the nation. In Minnesota this fall, Carlson said, “If there’s a heavy turnout, Democrats win.”