Recent polls have shown President Trump in a dead heat with Joe Biden in Minnesota, and that was before last week’s rioting, looting and arson in downtown Minneapolis. Friends from around the country have been asking me, is this real? My answer has been, yes it is. Trump lost Minnesota to Hillary Clinton by just a point and a half. Since then, there is no doubt that Minnesota, outside the Twin Cities metro area, has gotten considerably redder. The conventional wisdom is that this is balanced out by suburban women hating Trump more than they did four years ago. Possibly this is true, but what is the evidence for it? I haven’t seen any. (What suburban women really hate is crime, rioting, looting and arson, but that is another story.) If the polls show the state more or less tied, they make sense.
But don’t take my word for it: the Biden campaign has implicitly confirmed that their polling, too, shows that Minnesota is in play. On Thursday, Bidenannounced that Minnesota and Wisconsin are among the states he plans to visit, in person, after Labor Day. That is good news if you are a Trump supporter. I don’t think there is any reasonable scenario on which Biden can win the election if he loses Minnesota and Wisconsin.
