Democrats lead Trump by wide margins in Minnesota
A week after President Trump held a big rally in Minneapolis, a new poll shows his campaign has a long way to go before it puts Minnesota in play in next year’s general election.
The survey, conducted by Mason-Dixon on behalf of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, shows each of four tested Democratic candidates leading Trump by wide margins.
The poll shows former Vice President Joe Biden leading Trump by a 50 percent to 38 percent margin. Trump trails Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) 51 percent to 40 percent, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) 49 percent to 40 percent.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would win her home state among respondents by the widest margin — she takes 55 percent of the vote against Trump’s 38 percent.{mosads}
All four of the Democrats hold leads over Trump among male respondents and among independents. They all take more than 50 percent of the vote among women surveyed. And they lead Trump by margins of 44 percentage points to 51 percentage points in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the two most populous in the state.
Trump runs competitively with or just ahead of Democrats in the Twin City suburbs and in the rural north and south. Klobuchar is the only Democratic candidate running even or ahead of Trump outside the Twin Cities.
Republicans have long seen Minnesota as a potential to grow their path to the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House. The 2008 Republican convention was held in the Twin Cities, where then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 45,000 votes in 2016.
But Minnesota has the longest unbroken streak of voting Democratic in presidential contests of any state in the nation. The last Republican to win its electoral votes was Richard Nixon in 1972.
Still, Minnesota is changing rapidly, illustrated by tectonic shifts during the 2018 midterm elections. Last year, Democrats Dean Phillips and Angie Craig won two Republican-held House seats in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs, while Republicans captured two ancestrally Democratic seats, one in the Iron Range and one in rural southern Minnesota.
The Mason-Dixon poll, conducted October 14-16, surveyed 800 registered voters for a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
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