Harris-Walz win Minnesota, but presidential race goes to Trump

WASHINGTON – Minnesotans voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and favorite son Gov. Tim Walz, keeping a 48-year-old streak of rejecting GOP presidential candidates in favor of Democrats.

Harris was winning the state 51%-47% early Wednesday with 99.95% of precincts reporting. But Harris had lost several key battleground states to former President Donald Trump, including neighboring Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with its 19 electoral votes.

Harris’ margin of victory in the state fell short of President Joe Biden’s 52.4% to 45.3% win over Trump in 2020. Various pre-election polls of likely state voters, including one by MinnPost taken last month, showed the presidential race was close in Minnesota, with Harris having a slim advantage.  

When the race was called for Minnesota, Harris had accumulated 214 electoral votes and Trump had won 267. There are 538 votes in the Electoral College and it takes a majority — 270 — to win. The Associated Press called the race for Trump at 4:34 a.m. central time.

At Howard University, the historical Black college that Harris attended and site of the Harris-Walz election night party, classes were canceled for the day. But students showed up in force for the Harris-Walz election night event and several said they were proud of the attention it brought the school.

But the joyful celebration became more subdued as Harris failed to pick up or even show a lead in any of the seven swing states that will decide the election, especially after he AP called one of those states — North Carolina — for Trump. Later in the evening, the AP also called Georgia and Pennsylvania for Trump. 

A little before midnight Tuesday, former Rep. Cedric Richmond, co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, announced that neither Harris nor Walz would address the crowd that had been waiting hours to hear them. 

“Votes are still being counted,” he said, urging the crowd to have patience with the process. 

Still, Minnesota kept its tradition of voting for a Democratic presidential candidate. The last time Minnesota voted for a Republican was in 1972, when the state went for Richard Nixon. 

Tim Lindberg, political science professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, said Trump’s loss in the state is attributable to the fact that “some of the voters Trump had strongly in his pocket in 2016 and 2020 — rural voters and voters without a college degree — turned away from him.”

The Harris campaign spent much more than the Trump campaign on TV ads in the Twin Cities media market, campaign commercials that could also be seen in neighboring swing state Wisconsin.

And the DFL had a strong ground game and get-out-the vote effort.

Carleton College political science professor Steven Schier said Walz’s popularity in the state also contributed to Harris’ win.

“Walz has consistently had an approval rating of more than 50% and his personal popularity has played a role in keeping the state blue,” Schier said.

Ana Radelat

Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.

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