The vice president’s wife did not waste much time getting to her message after taking the stage for a “Keep America Great” rally.
“Minnesota,” Karen Pence told the packed hotel ballroom in St. Paul, “you know this is one of the states that is going to make a real difference in this election.”
In other years, her words may have been dismissed as campaign hyperbole, an empty wish in a state that has the longest Democratic winning streak in the country. Yet this time around, the Trump campaign believes it can turn Minnesota red by deploying an army of staffers to drive up turnout in rural areas.
Vice President Mike Pence was due to appear at the “Keep America Great” rally at the InterContinental Hotel on Thursday. But when he was diverted to Washington state as part of his work with the coronavirus task force, it fell to his wife to excite supporters with a jobs-based message tailored for this part of the Midwest.
“A job isn’t just a paycheck. A job is a purpose,” she said as she talked up President Trump’s economic achievements.
The campaign is pouring money into a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide. It sees Minnesota as a potential hedge against losing states Trump picked up in 2016, such as Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.
Trump came close to securing Minnesota in 2016, losing by 1.5 percentage points. And advisers think they can improve on the previous election’s efforts, when only a single staffer was working in the state before being sent elsewhere ahead of Election Day.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly briefed journalists on their plan at the end of last year, describing a “tiny counties” strategy designed to drive up turnout in Trump-supporting rural areas. The approach was credited with helping turn Wisconsin and Pennsylvania red by focusing on counties often overlooked by candidates.
A senior Trump 2020 figure would not confirm the strategy but said the campaign was on the offensive in Minnesota, a state that represented a “pickup opportunity.”
“President Trump’s campaign will run a real, live, big-time statewide effort in Minnesota, and we intend to win it. In 2016, the Trump campaign had one staffer on the ground in Minnesota, and that person was moved to Colorado by Election Day,” he said.
“The statewide budget in Minnesota was about $30,000,” he said. “In 2020, we will have nearly 100 full-time staffers on the ground in Minnesota with a state budget in the tens of millions of dollars.”
[Read more: Trump campaign tells GOP senators Minnesota and New Mexico are within reach for Trump]
A strategy focusing on small counties could work, said Eric Ostermeier, a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the author of Smart Politics.
He analyzed the results in all 87 counties from 2012 to 2016 and found that turnout was generally lower in areas that backed Trump over Hillary Clinton. Of the 61 smallest counties by population, accounting for about 20% of the population, Trump won 58.
“What I found was, in these small counties, the turnout was far less than the state average of 75%,” Ostermeier said.
“If you are going to have a really close race, moving the needle in those counties, a fifth of the state, could make the difference.”
Pushing up Trump turnout in these smaller, rural counties by a few percentage points would be easier, he added, than for his opponent to find more support in urban areas, which were already voting in higher numbers.
But it is not all rosy for Trump, Ostermeier added, anticipating that the incumbent will likely lose some independents and must contend with younger voters skewing more Democratic.
“And the million-dollar question is: Who is the Democratic nominee going to be? That could be paramount,” he said in a state where people like their Democrats to be on the more centrist part of the spectrum.
