Ex-President Donald Trump recently claimed — after Vice President Kamala Harris jumped into the 2024 race for president — that he was “leading” in Minnesota, where the last time that a Republican presidential candidate prevailed in a general election was the early 1970s.
There is now new polling from the state that shows him actually trailing Harris by ten percentage points. The survey, from Minnesota news outlet KSTP and pollster SurveyUSA and reflecting likely voters’ responses, found Harris with 50 percent to Trump’s 40 percent — an improvement on some recent results in the state for President Joe Biden when the incumbent was still the expected Democratic general election challenger to Trump, now the GOP’s 2024 nominee.
Biden recently withdrew from the 2024 general election after weeks of questions about his advanced age and endorsed Harris’ bid, and she looks like she’s well on her way to the actual nomination.
Harris already assembled support from Democratic convention delegates at the level needed to get that nomination in the near future, and there is presently no serious challenge among Democrats to Harris’ campaign. Instead, it’s more like exuberant enthusiasm across the board. Party figures who might have challenged Harris for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination instead announced their endorsements of the vice president’s ambitions.
Now, Harris must choose a running mate. Among the possibilities is Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz, currently the chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Recently, he’s led a charge to characterize Trump and close allies of his as just plain weird, which quickly caught on.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview on MSNBC. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to.… These are weird ideas. Listen to them speak. Listen to how they talk about things.”
