Trump in Minnesota looking to earn votes
ST. CLOUD, Minn. — 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.
He was speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tenn., earlier in the day, where he called for America to embrace cryptocurrency to stop other countries from dominating in the technology.
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.
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.
Trump’s appearance in St. Cloud is planned for the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center, a 5,159-seat hockey arena. After surviving the July 13 assassin attempt on him at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump has only had events at indoor venues. But he said in a post on his social media network Saturday that he will schedule outdoor stops and the “SECRET SERVICE HAS AGREED TO SUBSTANTIALLY STEP UP THEIR OPERATION. THEY ARE VERY CAPABLE OF DOING SO. NO ONE CAN EVER BE ALLOWED TO STOP OR IMPEDE FREE SPEECH OR GATHERING!!!”
Secret Service officials would not say whether the agency had agreed to expand operations at Trump’s campaign events or had any concerns about him potentially resuming outdoor gatherings. “Ensuring the safety and security of our protectees is our highest priority,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Saturday. “In the interest of maintaining operational integrity, we are not able to comment on specifics of our protective means or methods.”
Though Trump was giving the keynote address at the bitcoin conference Saturday afternoon, he was not always a fan of cryptocurrencies.