It has been 52 years since Richard Nixon won the state of Minnesota in the 1972 presidential election, and no Republican has managed to do it since, but former President Donald Trump may have the party’s best shot at turning the state red in half a century.
For most of the year, Trump has argued that he will expand the electoral map for Republicans and contest states that have been reliably Democratic for decades. He recently held a rally in deep-blue New Jersey that attracted a crowd of nearly 100,000 people and is planning a rally in the Bronx borough of New York City on Thursday.
But while rallies are hardly indicative of the way people in a given area will vote, Trump is absolutely right in arguing that he has a chance to compete in states that have been out of reach for Republicans for years.
In his 2016 victory, Trump flipped the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which had been so reliably Democratic that the states were collectively referred to as the “blue wall” in the Electoral College that would make any Republican victory a tough ask. It showed Trump had an ability to compete in areas that had been traditionally Democratic strongholds and that he was building a new electoral coalition. In 2020, Trump nearly replicated the same coalition, even as President Joe Biden secured the electors from the same three states.
This year, however, is a much different political climate. And Trump’s bet that he can expand the electoral map could be vindicated given myriad factors, the first being Biden’s unpopularity and growing favorable reviews for Trump’s first term in office.
The clearest path back to the White House for the former president lies in winning back those states that Biden flipped in 2020. But as the Trump campaign has recently touted to donors and campaign operatives, Minnesota is also very much in play, as is Virginia.
Recent public polling has put the race for the Gopher State in a statistical dead heat, with Biden leading Trump 44% to 42% in a recent survey from KSTP/SurveyUSA that has a margin of error of 4 points. In Virginia, a state that Biden won by 11 points in 2020, polling has been scarce, but a January poll from Virginia Commonwealth University gave Biden a 3-point lead against Trump, squarely within the poll’s 5-point margin of error. Trump’s own pollster has also found a tight race in both states.
But polling does not tell the whole story. Minnesota is demographically very similar to the other “blue wall” states that Trump won in 2016. It has a sizable base of white, working-class voters who previously backed Democrats but have moved toward Republicans in the Trump era. The former president even came within 50,000 votes of winning the state eight years ago against Hillary Clinton.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Virginia is a slightly different story, given that the commonwealth comfortably supported the Democratic nominee in both 2016 and 2020. But anger at Democrats helped lift Republicans to victory in statewide races in 2021, and the limited polling in the state indicates there is enough lingering dissatisfaction with Biden that the state could deliver a surprising upset in November.
While Virginia and Minnesota are not essential to Trump’s multiple paths to victory in November, forcing a competitive contest in both states could force the Biden campaign to play defense in states that the president cannot afford to lose while limiting Biden’s ability to expand the map in his favor. And given the polling industry’s persistent inability to capture the scope of Trump’s support fully, the former president could very well be doing better in both states than the polls suggest.