Trump bullish on Minnesota as campaign hops to blue states

Donald Trump said he’s bullish on the blue state of Minnesota as he dropped by Sunday for a rally as part of his final scramble to Election Day. 

While Democrats have won the state in each of the past 10 presidential elections, the GOP nominee told the boisterous crowd in Minneapolis he think this time could be different. 

{mosads}“Do you really want a president who doesn’t care enough about your vote that she doesn’t show up? She never came here,” he said of Hillary Clinton. 

The Democratic nominee has not held a rally in the Land of 10,000 lakes, although she spoke at the American Federation of Teachers convention there in July and sent running mate Tim Kaine for a school visit and a fundraiser. 

She holds a 5-point lead in RealClearPolitics’s average of the state’s polls. While that average only includes five polls from this year, Clinton has led all but one, a September Gravis poll that showed a tie in the state. 

Clinton is outspending Trump down the stretch on a massive scale and has a web of surrogates spanning the country in the final days. But the one resource both campaigns must manage is the finite amount of their candidate’s time in the next two days, meaning Trump’s appearance in Minnesota suggests the campaign believes it can win there. 

Trump also campaigned in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia on Sunday evening, three Democratic-trending states. A delay at his Michigan rally bumped back his evening schedule, making him two and a half hours later for his Pittsburgh appearance and pushing the start time of the Virginia rally past 11 p.m. 

And on Monday his list includes the blue-leaning states of Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan.  

The Clinton campaign will also be in Michigan on Monday, with an assist from President Obama. 

Trump’s last-minute Minnesota rally came at the price of a planned Sunday rally in Wisconsin, which House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) reportedly agreed to attend as part of a push for unity within the party. While Wisconsin is similarly viewed as a long-shot for Trump, an appearance with Ryan could have helped him close the gap.

As the electoral map stands, the path of least resistance for Trump is to win all of the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012 as well as Iowa, Florida and Ohio to get to 265 electoral votes. But to push past the 270-vote threshold, he’d have to flip a blue-leaning state.

The decision to spend valuable time in Minnesota has been met with mixed reviews.

“Donald Trump will win Minnesota by stopping by the airport today,” read the tongue-in-cheek headline in a story by the alternative weekly Minnesota City Pages. 

And Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta questioned the schedule change as well Sunday during NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

“We feel good about Minnesota. He made that last-minute change to abandon Wisconsin and go to Minnesota,” he said. 

“We’re not sure why he did that.”

But Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s Jake Tapper on the network’s “State of the Union” that Democrats are scared of Trump’s chances to win the state. 

And Republican strategist Nicole Wallace agreed with the strategy on “Meet the Press,” noting that Trump has to find a blue state he can flip. 

“They can run the table, they can win all those battleground states, which in a normal year means victory. But he has to win all the battleground states and flip an otherwise deep-blue state, other than Iowa, to win,” she said. 

“It’s a huge feat to win all those [battleground states]. But he’s concentrating his time in the kind of state it would take to win.”

During his Sunday afternoon speech, Trump admitted that the punditry has been critical of his decision. But he hedged that he’ll be proven right on Election Day. 

“They’ve been saying: ‘I can’t believe he’s going to Minnesota, why would he be doing that? He shouldn’t be there,'” he said.  

“The reason I’m here is I’ve been here, I know what is going to happen. … Why do I feel good about Minnesota? I’ll tell you one thing, if I don’t win Minnesota, I will look bad to those pundits I do not respect very much.”