A Republican has not won Minnesota in a presidential election since President Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972, more than half a century ago.
But a new Minnesota poll suggests a rematch in the 2024 election would be a tight contest between President Biden and former President Trump.
According to a Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE11 poll conducted June 3-5, the president's approval rating among Minnesota voters is 45%, while Trump's approval rating is 41%.
Click here for the latest Fox News Poll for the 2024 Election
Former President Trump will headline the Minnesota Republican Party's Lincoln Reagan annual fundraising dinner in St. Paul on May 17, 2024. (Associated Press)
The survey found that Democratic-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had an approval rating of 6 percent, while 2 percent would support “someone else” if the election were held today.
In the 2016 election, Trump narrowly lost Minnesota to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by 1.5 percentage points, but four years later, Biden won the state by 7 points, defeating Trump to win the White House.
“We're going to win this state,” Trump predicted last month in a speech headlined by a fundraising dinner for state Republican Party leader Lincoln Reagan in St. Paul, Minnesota's capital.
The poll showed a large gap in enthusiasm, with 63% of Trump supporters saying they were “very enthusiastic” about voting for his candidate, compared with 31% of voters who support the president.
The poll surveyed 800 Minnesota voters and had an overall sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Trump's move around the blue bastion is using political ATMs to get results
Seven key battleground states that decided the 2020 election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin (narrowly won by Biden) and North Carolina (narrowly won by Trump) — are likely to be contested again in a 2024 rematch, but both sides see opportunities to widen their reach.
At a closed-door Republican National Committee gathering of big-name donors at a resort in Palm Beach, Florida this spring, Trump campaign senior advisers Suzie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, along with veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio, highlighted internal polling results suggesting “Minnesota and Virginia are both clearly swing states.”
“In both states, Donald Trump is in a position to flip key electoral votes in his favor,” the poll provided to Fox News emphasized.
And both states have sizable rural white voters without college degrees who disproportionately supported the former president.
President Biden delivers a speech at Kempsville Recreation Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on February 28, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Biden campaign has pushed back against the idea that either Minnesota or Virginia could be contested.
Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign's battleground states manager, told reporters last month that “we're not taking any state or any vote for granted,” but added that “we're not looking at polls, head-to-head numbers, six or seven months out from a general election any more than weather forecasts are six or seven months out.”
Kanninen stressed that the campaign has sent field teams to both states to engage with voters.
Latest Fox News Biden-Trump Poll Results in Virginia
“We feel strongly that the Biden-Harris coalition in Minnesota and Virginia, which was strong in the midterm and off-year elections, will continue to be strong in the fall of 2024,” he added.
Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt also noted that the president currently has a fundraising lead in key battlegrounds and an advantage in ground-up campaigning, arguing that “the Trump campaign has almost no campaign operations or infrastructure, so they have no choice but to leak a memo saying, 'We are winning in the polls that we spend money on.'”
But the latest Fox News poll in Virginia showed Biden and Trump tied in the state.
The survey, conducted June 1-4, showed the Democratic president and his Republican predecessor going head-to-head, each with 48% approval.
In the multi-candidate race, Biden has 42% of the vote, Trump has 41%, Democrat-turned-independent Kennedy has 9%, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West have 2% each.
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It's the first time in 20 years that a Republican has won Virginia in an election for the White House.
You have to go back to President George W. Bush, who won the Commonwealth in his 2004 reelection.
“Let's start by remembering back in 2020 when Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points. The fact that we're even having this discussion is a huge turning point,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in an interview with Fox News Digital while attending the Republican Governors Association (RGA) conference in New Orleans last week.
“We're here in June and there's still a lot going on, but Virginia could be in and that's very exciting,” Youngkin emphasized.
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Paul Steinhauser is a political reporter based in New Hampshire.