TRUMP SUPPORTER IN BEMIDJI: “We need to make this state red!”

PBS had more details:

Minnesota has backed Democratic presidential candidates for nearly half a century and rarely receives much attention during the final stages of the race. This is when campaigns typically focus their resources on more traditional swing states like Florida or Pennsylvania.

But Minnesota felt like a genuine battleground on Friday as President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, campaign here to mark the beginning of early voting.

They avoided the state’s most populated areas near Minneapolis to focus on largely white rural and working-class voters, some of whom shifted to Republicans for the first time in 2016. Trump this evening will be in Bemidji, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Minneapolis, while Biden earlier in the day swung through the Duluth area, on the banks of Lake Superior and close to the Wisconsin border.

The former vice president toured a carpenter training center with union officials in Hermantown, a northeast suburb of Duluth, ahead of remarks focused on his plan to ensure more products are made in America.

Additional vocational training is needed, Biden said as he examined welding equipment at the training facility.

“We assume people can’t learn. They can learn if we give them a chance,” Biden said.

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.

“They’re looking beyond the poll numbers and seeing the potential there,” said McIntosh, a former congressman from Indiana. “It’s always smart strategy to go on offense somewhere.”

In 2018, Democrats flipped two suburban congressional districts, took back control of the state House by winning suburban Trump-voting areas and came within one seat of winning control of the state Senate. Democrats won every statewide race that year, even as they lost a rural congressional district.

Trump’s path to Minnesota success likely depends on finding more votes in rural, conservative areas –- running up the score beyond his 2016 tally. It’s a strategy he’s trying to pull off in other states and it depends on a robust field operation with the money and time to track down infrequent or first-time voters. That could be a tall order since Minnesota already has one of the nation’s highest voter turnout rates.

“I don’t think they’re there,” said Joe Radinovich, a Democrat who lost a bid for a northern Minnesota congressional district in 2018. Radinovich noted the major organizational challenge and expense in tracking new voters, making sure they’re registered and getting them to vote – especially during a pandemic. “We have relatively high turnout already. Most people vote. I just don’t think it’s there. I think those people showed up in 2016,” he said.

In 2016, Trump won that district, which includes the Democratic city of Duluth, by 15 percentage points. But in the midterms two years later, Radinovich lost by just under 6 percentage points.

And from CBS Local:

The race for the White House is about to collide in Minnesota.

Both presidential candidates will be in the state Friday. Democratic challenger Joe Biden will make a stop in Duluth, and President Donald Trump has an event in Bemidji.

It is the first time a sitting president will visit the city. Trump’s supporters there are energized, as are Biden’s. Many people also feel an element of surprise that Bemidji’s airport was chosen for the visit.

“It was just like shock, like, ‘What? He’s coming here? Little old Bemidji?’” resident Phyllis Ryan said.

Ryan’s daughter, Becky Skipper, is going to try to catch a glimpse of the plane with her daughters.

Brooke Limesand, a junior at Bemidji State, will be attending the event with her parents, who are coming down from close to the Canadian border.

Patti and Dan Mundt drove from Minneapolis to spend part of their 45th anniversary celebration seeing the president.

Mayor Rita Albrecht says the city’s expecting thousands of out-of-towners.

“This is an honor for the community to have the campaign come to us,” Albrecht said. “Even though we know that sometimes politics can be polarizing, we’re not expecting to have a lot of trouble.”

There are some signs of contention in town. Limesand’s landlord installed a Trump-Pence yard sign in the front of her house. She says other Bemidji State students mock the sign.

Jesse Nehl, who’s helped run The Trump Shop since July selling merchandise, hired a security guard for Thursday and Friday as sales boomed this week.