by Hank Long
Is it possible that a two-time elected Democratic governor of Minnesota is a drag on his presidential running mate in his own state?
That’s one takeaway from a poll conducted late last month on the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in Minnesota, which shows Trump cutting Harris’ lead in half since she tapped Tim Walz to join her ticket as her vice presidential nominee.
KSTP-TV has regularly leaned on SurveyUSA to conduct its political polls for more than two decades.
On Friday the St. Paul-based news station published results from its latest presidential poll, which showed that out of about 635 Minnesotans surveyed between Aug. 27 and Aug. 29, a little more than 300 respondents, or 48 percent, said if the election “were today” they would vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Just more than 270 respondents, or 43 percent, said they would vote for Republican Donald Trump.
That’s a 5-point swing since KSTP paid SurveyUSA to conduct a presidential poll of Minnesotans in late July, just days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and threw his support to Harris as his successor. In that survey, conducted between July 23 and July 25, 50 percent of respondents said they would vote for Harris, and 40 percent for Trump.
Following that news, Republicans expressed optimism that Trump still has an opportunity to turn Minnesota red in a presidential race for the first time since Richard Nixon carried the state in 1972. And they said the far-left policy records and rhetoric from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are to thank for that.
“In the aftermath of Joe Biden dropping out of the Presidential race, Democrats became giddy at the prospect of ‘anyone but Joe’ on the ballot,” said David Hann, chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota. “But serious observers of the political process know that reality always sets in. KSTP’s new poll shows what we have known all along: Harris is a radical San Francisco extremist, Walz is a Left-wing partisan with a mean streak, and Minnesota voters want better for their families and businesses.”
Over the last month Republican operatives and critics have brought to the national media several criticisms of Walz’s record in Minnesota, including mischaracterizations of his military service record, his response to the 2020 riots, his record on abortion and illegal immigration and the fact that he signed into law a nearly 40-percent increase to the state budget over the last two years, when Democrats controlled the legislature.
While Trump narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in carrying Minnesota during his first presidential bid in 2016, his margin of defeat in the state to Joe Biden was 7 percent in 2020.
The KSTP/SurveyUSA poll from last week also showed that out of those surveyed, 4 percent indicated they would vote for another candidate on the ballot and 5 percent said they were undecided.
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Hank Long is a journalism and communications professional whose writing career includes coverage of the Minnesota legislature, city and county governments and the commercial real estate industry. Hank received his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, and his law degree at the University of St. Thomas. The Minnesota native lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and four children. His dream is to be around when the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
