DULUTH, Minn. — A solidly blue state for the past half-century, Minnesota became an unquestioned presidential battleground on Friday as President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden fought for working-class voters in dueling events that marked the beginning of early voting.
Their campaigning was knocked off front pages and broadcasts in the state and nationally by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but before that, their contrasting styles and stances during the day and evening gave fresh signs of the campaign to come in the final weeks before Election Day.
The candidates steered clear of the state’s most populated areas near Minneapolis to focus on blue-collar voters, some of whom shifted to Republicans for the first time in 2016. Trump went to Bemidji, about 200 miles north of Minneapolis, while Biden campaigned in a suburb of Duluth, on the banks of Lake Superior and close to the Wisconsin border.
Biden railed against Trump’s inability to control the pandemic, casting the president’s reluctance to embrace more serious social distancing safeguards as “negligence and selfishness” that cost American lives. Trump, before leaving the White House, said as he has many times that “we’ve done a phenomenal job” against the virus and predicted mass vaccinations by spring.
Biden, at a carpenter union’s training hall in Minnesota, emphasized his plans to boost American manufacturing.
“It’s time to reward hard work in America and not wealth,” Biden declared with roughly a dozen workers looking on.
“When the government spends taxpayers’ money, we should spend that money to buy American products made by American workers and American supply chains to generate American growth,” Biden said. He promised to invest $400 billion in federal money over his first term to ensure more products are made in America.
Trump, meanwhile, predicted victory in Minnesota in November despite the state’s long history of backing Democratic candidates.
“Forty-six days from now we’re going to win Minnesota and we’re going to win four more years in the White House,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the airport in Bemidji.
Since narrowly losing Minnesota in 2016, Trump has emphasized the state in hopes that a victory this year could offset losses in other states. He has visited regularly and kept a close eye on issues of particular importance to rural corners of the state. He’s reversed an Obama administration policy prohibiting the development of copper-nickel mining and has bailed out soybean, corn and other farmers who have been hurt by trade clashes with China.
More recently, he’s embraced a “law and order” message aimed nationally at white suburban and rural voters who may be concerned by protests that have sometimes become violent. That’s especially true in Minnesota, where the May killing of George Floyd by a police officer sparked a national reckoning on racism.
But for all the work Trump has put into the state, it may elude him again in November.
A series of polls over the past week show Biden has built a consistent lead in Minnesota. And in the 2018 midterms, Democratic turnout surged in suburbs, small cities and even on the Iron Range, across the blue-collar mining towns that were once labor strongholds but had been trending Republican.
David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, which has produced anti-Biden ads, said Minnesota may help the Trump campaign build momentum.
