A Republican hasn't carried Minnesota in a presidential election since President Richard Nixon's 1972 landslide re-election, over a half-century ago.
But a new poll in Minnesota shows a competitive race between President Biden and former President Trump in their 2024 election rematch.
The president stands at 45% support among likely voters in Minnesota, with Trump at 41% in a poll conducted June 3-5 for the Star Tribune, MPR News and KARE 11.
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Democrat turned independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stood at 6% support in the survey, with 2% backing "someone else" if the election were held today.
Trump was narrowly edged in Minnesota in the 2016 election by 1.5 points by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But four years later, Biden carried the state by seven points as he defeated Trump and won the White House.
"We’re going to win this state," Trump predicted last month in a speech as he headlined the state GOP's annual Lincoln Reagan fundraising dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota's capital city.
The poll pointed to a significant enthusiasm gap, with 63% of Trump supporters saying they were "very enthusiastic" about casting a ballot for their candidate, compared to 31% of voters backing the president.
Eight hundred registered voters in Minnesota were surveyed in the poll, with an overall sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
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Seven crucial swing states that decided the 2020 election (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which were narrowly won by Biden, and North Carolina, which Trump carried by a razor-thin margin) will likely once again in the 2024 rematch. But both campaigns see opportunities to expand the map.
At a closed-door Republican National Committee retreat for top-dollar donors earlier this spring at a resort in Palm Beach, Florida, senior Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio spotlighted internal surveys that suggested both "Minnesota & Virginia are clearly in play."
"In both states, Donald Trump finds himself in positions to flip key electoral votes in his favor," the survey, which was shared with Fox News, emphasizes.
And both states have sizable populations of rural White voters without college degrees who disproportionately support the former president.
Biden's campaign disagrees that either Minnesota or Virginia are up for grabs.
While noting that they are "not taking any state or any vote for granted," Biden campaign battleground states director Dan Kanninen told reporters last month that "we don't see polls that are six or seven months out from a general election, head-to-head numbers certainly, as any more predictive than a weather report is six or seven months out."
Kanninen highlighted that the campaign has teams on the ground in both states engaging voters.
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"We feel strongly the Biden-Harris coalition in both Minnesota and Virginia, which has been strong in the midterms and off-year elections, will continue to be strong for us in the fall of 2024," he added.
And Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt, pointing to the president's current fundraising dominance and ground-game advantage in the key battlegrounds, argued that "Trump’s team has so little campaign or infrastructure to speak of they’re resorting to leaking memos that say ‘the polls we paid for show us winning.'"
But the latest Fox News poll in Virginia indicated Biden and Trump are deadlocked in Virginia.
The survey, conducted June 1-4, showed the Democratic president and his Republican predecessor in the White House each with 48% support in a head-to-head match.
In a multi-candidate race, Biden stands at 42% and Trump at 41%, with Democrat-turned-independent Kennedy at 9% and Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West each at 2%.
It's been two decades since a Republican carried Virginia in the race for the White House.
You have to go back to President George W. Bush, who won the commonwealth in his 2004 re-election victory.
"Let’s just begin by remembering where we were in 2020 when Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points, and the fact that we’re having this discussion is a huge turn of events," Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said last week in a Fox News Digital interview in New Orleans, as he attended a Republican Governors Association (RGA) conference.
Youngkin emphasized that "we're here in June and there’s still a lot of water to go under the bridge, but Virginia looks like it's in play and that’s pretty exciting."
