Donald Trump’s scheduled rally in Minnesota on Saturday is, in his campaign’s view, proof that the former GOP president is ready to invest real time and money in a battleground that hasn’t backed a Republican nominee in more than 50 years.
Not everyone thinks Trump’s commitment is genuine.
With roughly 100 days to go before the election, political operatives in both parties are closely watching whether Trump — ahead in the polls and boosted by a fundraising surge — can expand his map and push into territory once considered safely blue.
In addition to Minnesota, Republican officials have talked up Trump’s chances in fringe battlegrounds like Virginia and New Mexico, states that haven’t backed the GOP nominee in decades but are moderate enough that voters there might be giving the Republican ticket another look. They think they can win or, at the very least, put Democrats on the defensive.
Minnesota might now be at the top of the GOP’s list.
In an internal campaign memo from mid-June — before Biden withdrew his candidacy — obtained by NOTUS, the Trump campaign presented that they believe Minnesota is in play.
The campaign is opening eight “Trump Force 47” offices across the state, which is the name given to the grassroots operation run by both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
“In Minnesota, as in other battleground states, President Trump’s favorability score and job approval both exceed Biden’s by significant margins. Biden’s favorability and job approval continue to erode which is lowering his ceiling,” the memo — authored by Trump’s political director James Blair — reads. “As usual, President Trump outperforms Biden on a number of key issues.”
But all this was before Democrats flipped the script.
Trump had built a significant lead over Biden in national polls of the race before the president decided not to seek reelection, holding the kind of edge even Democrats acknowledge could have given him a chance to win even blue states like Minnesota.
But Harris’ presumed ascension as the Democrats’ presidential nominee changes the battleground calculus, say Democrats in the state, who argue that Trump’s commitment to the state thus far has been superficial at best.
“You have to do more than just hold a rally to put a state like Minnesota in play,” said Ken Martin, longtime chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
The presidential race is on a “much better trajectory” in Minnesota since Biden stepped aside, Martin added, noting that the state party had raised $200,000 in the two days after Harris announced her campaign while setting records for volunteer sign-ups.
In interviews, he and other Minnesota Democrats repeatedly cast doubt on whether the Trump campaign had made a significant investment in staff and money in the state, saying they had seen little sign of the kind of ground operation a Republican would need to win there.
“At this point in the cycle, while he says he’s going to put Minnesota in play, they have no offices, no significant investment there,” Martin said. “And the ramp is really short here because Minnesota has the earliest early vote in the nation.” (Early voting in Minnesota starts on Sept. 20.)
Still, Democrats say they aren’t taking the state for granted, with the Harris campaign and the state party opening more than 20 field offices across Minnesota as part of what officials describe as a comprehensive campaign to contact voters door-to-door. Trump lost the state by only 44,000 votes in 2016, they note, a margin of 1.5 percentage points of the total vote.
“It’s not just an election-year thing for us here — we do year-round organizing,” said Justin Buoen, senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Minnesota. “People on staff here year-round, talking to people who are new voters, people who always vote for us.”
That Trump can talk credibly about competing to win Minnesota is a sign of how well his campaign had been going through last week’s Republican National Convention, held in nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Even if he ultimately fell short of winning Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes, forcing Democrats to defend the state — with resources that would otherwise be spent in key battlegrounds like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania — would count as a major strategic victory for the former president.
Minnesota, however, has been the most reliably Democratic in the country for more than 50 years, staying blue even when other Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin back Republicans.
No GOP presidential nominee, in fact, has won it since former President Richard Nixon in 1972, the party’s longest winless streak in any state. (In 1984, Minnesota was the only state to support Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale.) And no Republican candidate of any kind has won a statewide race there since 2006, a streak that includes Trump’s 7-point defeat in 2020.
That kind of sustained success builds on itself, Minnesota Democrats argue, pointing to a robust state party that they say overshadows its Republican counterpart in size and resources.
“It’ll be close, but Minnesota has, over the last 15 years, always been close but safe,” said Abou Amara, Democratic strategist. “That doesn’t mean Democrats don’t need to do the work, but there are structural advantages here for Democrats that Republicans just don’t have.”
Trump officials counter that Harris carries a particular weakness in the state, given her response to the 2020 George Floyd protests, which Republicans have attempted to seize on as a political liability.
A Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to Harris’ past record supporting the Minnesota Freedom Fund and “defund the police” candidates in the past, including former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate against Sen. Ron Johnson.
The spokesperson emphasized that Harris encouraged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which “bailed now-convicted rapists, assaulters and murderers out of jail and released them back onto the streets.”
This was also a point of emphasis for other Republicans working in the state.
One GOP strategist with Minnesota ties said that “Minnesota is ripe for Republicans to compete due to the failed policies of Biden and Harris as crime, immigration and rising costs are affecting every Minnesotan.”
Minnesota Democrats counter that Republicans tried to use the Floyd protests against the state’s governor, Tim Walz, who nonetheless cruised to an easy 8-point victory in 2022.
Trump, they add, isn’t the type of moderate, suburban-friendly Republican candidate the party would need to win a state like Minnesota. And even if he’s going to be in the state Saturday, they doubt they’ll see much more of him between now and Election Day.
“It’s an astroturf campaign where they fly into Minnesota and say they’re going to win Minnesota,” Buoen said. “But they’re not doing anything real here.”
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Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the state that Mandela Barnes represented as Lieutenant Governor.
Alex Roarty and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.