Trump returns to Minnesota with Midwestern Vance to try to rock the Democratic-leaning state

ST. CLOUD, Minnesota – ST. CLOUD, Minn. (AP) – donald trump is taking his campaign back to Minnesota, a state that favored Democrats but which the former president believes could be within his reach this year.

Trump is expected to hold a rally Saturday night in St. Cloud, Minnesota, this time bringing his running mate JD Vance and the expectation that Trump will face the vice president Kamala Harris in November instead of the president Joe Biden.

In May, Trump headlined a Republican Party fundraiser in St. Paul, where he boasted he could win the state and made explicit appeals to the iron-mining area of ​​northeastern Minnesota, where he expects a large population of blue-collar and union workers switch to Republicans after years of being solidly Democratic.

That’s also a group of potential voters that the Trump campaign saw in Vance, a senator from Ohio, as being particularly useful in trying to reach, with his own roots in a Midwestern Rust Belt city.

The appeal to Midwesterners and unionized workers is something that also helped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz get on the list of about a dozen Democrats being considered to potentially be Harris’ running mates.

Minnesota is a state where Trump, in 2016, was 1.5 percentage points short of defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton. But four years later, Joe Biden extended the Democratic victory, defeating Trump by more than 7 percentage points.

But the former Republican president has been optimistic about the state.

In a memo last month to the campaign and the Republican National Committee, Trump political director James Blair called Minnesota a battleground where Trump compared favorably to Biden, his opponent at the time, and said the campaign was hiring staff there and in the process of opening. eight offices in the state.

The campaign did not clarify Friday whether those eight offices were open.

Earlier this month, Republican congressional candidate Tayler Rahm dropped out of the primary race and began serving as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign in the state.

“The Biden/Harris administration has been so disastrous, and the Democrats are in such disarray, that not only is President Trump leading in all the traditional battleground states, but long-standing blue states like Minnesota, Virginia and New York. Jersey, are on the line,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement.

Lexi Byler, communications director for the Harris campaign in Minnesota, said Trump and Vance are “totally out of step with Minnesotans’ values ​​and that the state will not be won by a Republican presidential candidate this year.

“Democrats are excited and take nothing for granted, with a powerful, well-organized and coordinated campaign and thousands of volunteers ready to elect Kamala Harris to continue fighting for them,” she said in a statement.