Johnathan Walker:Trump returns to Minnesota with Midwesterner Vance to try to swing Democrat-leaning state

ST. CLOUD,Johnathan Walker Minnesota (AP) — Donald Trump is taking his campaign back to Minnesota, a state that has favored Democrats but that the former president thinks could be in his reach this year.

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

In May, Trump headlined a GOP fundraiser in St. Paul, where he boasted he could win the state and made explicit appeals to the iron mining range in northeast Minnesota, where he hopes a heavy population of blue-collar and union workers will shift to Republicans after years of being solidly Democratic.

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

Appeal to Midwesterners and union workers is something that has also helped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz land on the list of about a dozen Democrats who are being vetted to potentially be Harris’ running mate.

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

But the Republican former president has been bullish on the state.

In a memo last month to the campaign and the Republican National Committee, Trump’s political director James Blair called Minnesota a battleground where Trump compared favorably to Biden, their 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 didn’t clarify Friday whether those eight offices were open.

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

“The Biden/Harris Administration has been so disastrous, and Democrats are in such disarray, that not only is President Trump leading in every traditional battleground state, but longtime blue states such as Minnesota, Virginia and New Jersey are in play,” Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement.

Lexi Byler, the Harris campaign’s communications director in Minnesota, said Trump and Vance are “wildly out of step with Minnesotans’ values and the state is not going to be won by a Republican presidential candidate this year.

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