A senior political data analyst for NBC and MSNBC has served up some new findings that will be good news for former President Donald Trump’s campaign but not so much for that of Vice President Kamala Harris. Steve Kornacki looked at the electoral history of Minnesota to see if the “rural appeal” Gov. Tim Walz has been charged with bringing to the Harris campaign really exists.
“That background – the small town background, the military background – Democrats are hoping it’s gonna help them. You’re hearing a lot about this, here as we take a look at our battleground map. They’re hoping it’s going to help them in these three very familiar battleground states we always talk about: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The reason, obviously, from the Electoral College standpoint, is why these are so important, bu the challenge for Democrats in these three states has been pretty straightforward for a long time now,” Kornacki began.
“Democrats have been cleaning up, increasingly so, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, suburbs of Pittsburgh, suburbs of Detroit, suburbs of Grand Rapids, and even suburbs of Milwaukee, which used to be hardcore Republican. Much, much less so in the Trump era. So, the Democrats have been doing really, really well in the suburbs. Where they need help in these states, and why these states have been so close, and why Trump even won all three of these states in 2016, is the sort of small-town rural core of each one of these states,” he continued.
“That’s where Trump and the Republicans have been surging since 2016. That’s where the Democrats have been losing ground. The Democrats used to do pretty well in a lot of these places. No more. So, the hope is that, for Democrats, Walz’s background, his story, will be familiar to voters in those places and will help them in those states,” he said.
Kornacki then looked at the history of Stearns County, Minn., noting: “This is similar to a lot of the terrain you see in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania… This is a stand-in for dozens of counties in Minnesota where you saw the same thing. Walz lost this by 23 points [in 2022]. How does that compare to Joe Biden in 2020? Joe Biden lost the same county by 23 points. How does that compare to Hillary Clinton in 2016? Hillary Clinton lost it by 28 points.”
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Continuing, Kornacki said: “It’s the suburban areas, the metropolitan areas, that have gotten much more blue and Walz performed just like Biden did, better than Clinton did, in places like this. And then in the rest of Greater Minnesota, small-town Minnesota where the Democrats have been losing ground, Walz performed basically just like Biden did. The idea that he’s got this automatic appeal, the small-town areas in those three key battleground states. You don’t see it in what he actually did on the ballot in 2022.”
