Might Minnesota have a competitive Senate race on its hands? Republican Jason Lewis’s campaign certainly wants you to think so, and there are a few reasons why perhaps you should. It has released an internal survey showing him trailing by just 2 points, and, more importantly, showing incumbent Sen. Tina Smith at only 43% support. There’s also a result for the presidential race, which will surely have a huge effect down-ticket.
Needless to say, this is Lewis’s own survey, so take it with a few grains of salt. But there are two things to consider. First, this isn’t even supposed to be a race. In 2018, Smith easily won her current partial term, by 11 points, after being appointed to her seat to replace Al Franken in 2017. This time, she is facing Lewis, a former Republican congressman and radio host who represented Minneapolis’s southern suburbs for one term before losing in 2018.
Minnesota has been quite an interesting state for election-watchers, given its pronounced shift in recent years. Its local politics are characteristically polite yet sharply divided between Left and Right, even though Republicans have had no success there on the presidential level since Richard Nixon’s resounding win in 1972. But in recent years, the state’s formerly Republican suburban areas have turned bluer, whereas its once-staunchly Democratic rural and labor-dominated areas have been rapidly turning red. Minnesota is a natural candidate for President Trump’s attention, given that he came within 45,000 votes of carrying it in 2016.
Add in the destruction that leftist rioters caused in Minneapolis specifically, and you can see why Trump’s campaign has launched this particular “jobs, not mobs” appeal to the electorate:
Minnesota bears some demographic and economic similarity to Michigan and Wisconsin, two other states Trump managed to pull out of the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall.” Considering the trouble Trump is having in Arizona (11 electoral votes), long a state Republicans have relied on in the Electoral College, Minnesota (10 electoral votes) is a much Trumpier state in terms of its voter profile, and it provides a potential counterweight.
Combine that with the increasingly competitive nature of races in Georgia and Texas, and you can imagine quite a different electoral map hitting the scene by 2028.
