Can Trump win Minnesota?

One of the things we are blessed with in our age of politics, where personality looms large and often trumps substance, is to know in granular detail the personal fixations of one former president in particular: Donald J. Trump.

From his deeply weird, unsettling comments - considering his track record of sexual harassment and assault - about the attractiveness of superstar Taylor Swift to his oft-repeated, categorically false belief that windmills cause cancer, Donald Trump has many fixations. And he revels in airing them publicly.

Perhaps one of his less overtly odd fixations is his obsession with the state of Minnesota. He has lied repeatedly about winning the state in both 2016 and 2020, in keeping with his track record of constantly lying about unfavorable election results for him and his party. Quoting from the man himself at a Republican fundraiser in St. Paul back in May,

I thought we won it in 2016. I know we won it in 2020.

Despite these being lies, it is true that the state was surprisingly close in 2016, with Hillary Clinton prevailing by about 45,000 votes. This was a rather unimpressive margin of about 46-44 in a state President Obama had carried easily in his 2012 re-election bid. This stoked intense speculation for 2020 - would the Trump riptide continue to surge ever deeper into rural Minnesota, overriding the power of the Twin Cities' Metro's gajillion Democratic votes?

In a word: nope. In 2020, Minnesota wasn't even close - Joe Biden carried the state by some 230,000 votes, or by a margin of about 52-45. Amusingly, in the Trump quote above, he seems to imply that it was somehow more plausible that he won the state in 2020 than in 2016. The nice thing about lying pathologically is people don't even expect consistency in the lies after a while.

But in actuality, within the politically pivotal Midwest, no state swung more to the Democrats from 2016 than Minnesota did. Biden offset Trump's historic rural margins with intense gains in the Twin Cities metro area, in places like Hennepin and Ramsey counties (Minneapolis and St. Paul + burbs). Even historically red suburban counties like Carver County saw substantial slippage for the Republicans - Mitt Romney got 59% of the vote there in 2012, despite losing statewide by 8. Trump 2020? Just 51.3%.

Moreover, the Trump campaign's expectation did not come to pass that it would make far-reaching inroads into Democratic bulwarks like St. Louis County, failing in their effort to smash up a historically potent source of Democratic votes. St. Louis County is a historically white, working class county with heavy union density containing Duluth and many mining towns that the Democrats used to get 65-70% or more of the vote in. And while it still remains Democratic to a good degree, the margins aren't quite what they were in the days of former Minnesota senator Walter Mondale denying Reagan 1984 a 50 state landslide on the back of unionized voters' on the Iron Range. Biden won this county 57-41, in comparison to Mondale beating Reagan there 69-30. Still, the numbers for Biden were more than enough to beat back any attempt by Trump to seize Minnesota from the hands of those damn, unpatriotic Democrats.

And it seems clear that, whatever happens in November, if he loses Minnesota once more, he will shamelessly lie about that too, regardless of the margin.

Still, the Trump campaign appears to be making a play for the state again - it has opened several field offices in the state. Minnesota last voted Republican for president in 1972, when it backed Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, and two Democratic presidential nominees have been from there over the years. It has the longest streak of voting Democrat for president of any state. So... Is this yet another feint, or does Trump stand a chance of carrying the state with the lengthiest track record of not voting Republican for president in the country?

Well, stranger things have happened. Trump did carry such Democratic-leaning strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 - states that on the surface are politically and demographically similar to the North Star state. And the Republicans have recently won governor's races in Biden-won states that are similar in blueness to Minnesota, like New Hampshire (Biden+7) and Virginia (Biden+10). We'll get back more to the political dynamics of Minnesota in a bit.

But for now, Minnesota continues to punch above its weight class for the Democratic Party (or the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, as it is known in Minnesota). Just this past Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris picked current governor of Minnesota and stereotypical Midwest dad Tim Walz for her vice president. Walz himself is a very interesting figure: a military veteran and gun owner, he also helped found the Gay Straight Alliance at the high school he taught to counteract bullying toward LGBTQ students. And he wrote his master's thesis on Holocaust education for young people. For 12 years he represented a heavily rural, fairly conservative district in the House of Representatives (it voted for Donald Trump by 15 points in 2016, and by 10 in 2020), before hopping out of his reddening district to run for governor in 2018. He won by about 11 points, a far cry from the narrow margin that Clinton carried the state by in 2016, carrying his old district of MN-01 in the process. His campaign in 2018 emphasized "One Minnesota" - overtly averring to the dramatic political differences between the heavily populated Twin Cities metro area and the rest of the state.

Certainly it seems true that Harris's VP rollout is going better than Trump's - Tim Walz remains unknown to most of the public, but in the polls I've seen he has a net positive favorable rating. What of Trump's pick of J.D. Vance, the Ohio Senator and former anti-Trump Republican, who once mused about whether Trump would be "America's Hitler"? Well, according to the data we have, he is the least-liked vice presidential nominee since 1980. Who knew that a guy who says childless cat ladies are miserable losers and who thinks that no-fault divorce laws should be ended would make such a splash with the public? I have to agree with Walz when he says these guys are weird and creepy as hell. Also, just remember: some of Trump's supporters tried to kill his last VP on January 6th, 2021.

Harris's selection over other top contenders like Mark Kelly of Arizona and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania fueled speculation that perhaps she was gunning for Midwestern rural voters, since Walz has some credibility with those voters, having repped many of them in Congress and governing a state with a sizable rural population.

While this is true, it's worth pointing out a few things: Walz barely won his district in his last congressional race in 2016, prevailing by 1 point in a district Trump won in a landslide. And in 2022, when he was re-elected as governor by 8 points, his old congressional district voted against him by 7 points. Scott Jensen, the anti-vaccine nominee the GOP chose for governor that year, actually did better than Trump 2020 in several rural Minnesotan counties. So Republicans can indeed run up the margins in rural areas and net many thousands of votes in the process. Just look at a county like Polk County, on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota: Trump won it by a solid 63-35 in 2020, and Jensen won it 65-32 in 2022 despite Walz doing slightly better than Biden did statewide.

Yet a deeper look shows that Minnesota is a state that's a tough sell on the contemporary Republican party, a party ever-more-dependent on white rural voters to power its victories, especially in the Midwest. A few thoughts...

The first is this: If Trump wants to win Minnesota, rural vote alone won't cut it.

The Republican playbook in the contemporary Midwest tends to be squeezing as much juice as you humanly can out of the rural vote in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, while trying to hold off losses in big metro areas. But what makes Minnesota different from Wisconsin or Michigan is that while all states have roughly similar shares of voters who consider themselves to be rural - around 20%, according to CNN's 2020 exit polls - the state is substantially more urbanized. 44% of the voters in Minnesota live in an urban area, according to the CNN exit poll. Compare that to 30% for Wisconsin and 21% for Michigan.

In a real sense, Minnesota is demographically more like a state such as Illinois than it is a state like Wisconsin, with the Twin Cities Metro functioning in a similar way to the Chicagoland area - about 60% of the state's voters live in the Twin Cities metro. Lots of Democratic voters are packed into a handful of urban and suburban counties where Democrats can rack up hundreds of thousands of votes on net. It explains why Republicans have had so much difficulty winning both of these states, and why their major cities become boogeymen in their messaging. "We don't want to be like Minneapolis!" "We don't want to be like Chicago!" Well fellas, I'm sorry to say - they're just not that into you either.

So the second thought is this: the Republicans would have to cut down Democratic margins in their strongholds, especially in Hennepin County, the state's most populous county and a massive enclave of Democratic votes.

When I was fiddling around with election results in the aftermath of the bitter 2020 race, in which Trump constantly lied and cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process, I did a little thought experiment for Minnesota. What would happen if you kept the result in Hennepin County the same, but made it so Trump tied Biden in every other Biden-won county in the state?

Well... Biden would still prevail in the state by about 10,000 votes. Joe Biden netted 532,600 or so votes there to Trump's 206,000 votes - a 70-27 margin. It's an absolute juggernaut for the Democrats in the state, and the mass exodus of suburban voters from the GOP in the era of Trump makes it an even heavier lift for them than before Trump's political ascent. The last time a Republican won statewide in Minnesota was in 2006, when their incumbent Republican governor Tim Pawlenty was narrowly re-elected.

Trump's messaging in Minnesota in 2020 heavily emphasized "law and order" - echoing Nixon's 1968 campaign - in the aftermath of the riots and civil unrest in the Twin Cities as a result of George Floyd's murder by police officers. In this vain, he openly floated having the military shoot protestors in Minneapolis. Indeed, the head of the Minneapolis police union, Bob Kroll, enthusiastically backed Trump, who leads a group called "Cops For Trump." Kroll, it should be noted, has a history of racist remarks, and was sued in 2007 by 5 Black police officers for racist conduct. Clearly, there was a feeling that there were winnable votes here with this kind of messaging. Trump even claimed credit for saving Minneapolis, saying recently in May,

I saved your city. If you didn't have me as president, you wouldn't have Minneapolis today.

Yet trying to fan the proverbial political flames of the chaos of the riots in Minneapolis didn't work out so well for Trump. Joe Biden actually gained in Minneapolis versus Hillary Clinton, winning a rock solid 86% of the vote in the city to Trump's 11%. But Trump did gain over his 2016 performance in much of rural Minnesota, squeezing even more votes out of these already-deep-red counties. It still wasn't enough.

This is also a good time to discuss the concept of tipping point states, owing to the fossilized institution that is the electoral college. A tipping point state is the state that sends one of the candidates over the top to 270 or more electoral votes, thus winning the electoral college and with it the presidency. Polling suggests that while the electoral college still has a bias toward the Republican Party - as evidenced by Trump losing the popular vote in 2016, but winning the election - it's perhaps narrowed compared to 2016 or 2020. In other words, the state likely to tip one of the candidates to 270 in November is probably going to vote more Republican than the country as a whole, but maybe not as much as the last time. In 2020, the tipping point state was Wisconsin - Biden won it by 0.6%, but won the national popular vote by 4.5%. So Wisconsin voted about 4 point more Republican than the country-at-large.

Minnesota's 10 electoral votes would be nice to have for a Republican - and a self-obsessed egomaniac like Donald Trump would love to be the guy to end Minnesota's 50+ year streak of voting Democrat for president - but they are not necessary for him to win the electoral college. In a closely-fought election, as 2024 currently looks to be, you should invest heavily in tipping point states, and worry less about states that are just gravy. Especially when the state has a lot of political headwinds for you to run into, as Minnesota does for a Republican.

And so my last note here to close out this article is this answering the article's title: can Donald Trump win Minnesota?

Well, stranger things have happened. But would I bet money on it? Absolutely not. Especially since VP picks tend to very marginally help their ticket in their home state - this is not a state where the Republicans can afford even more slippage if they want a puncher's chance here, and I wouldn't be surprised if Walz gave Harris another point or two in Minnesota. Harris is clearly the favorite in Minnesota right now, and even if the election's decisive states end up being close, as they were in 2020 and 2016, I would be surprised if Minnesota ended up being a nail-biter. You betcha!