Moved to Page 2: WoT Politics/Background, Lurid Crime Tales ro cluster with the rest of the Antifa Riot articles.
—trailing wife at 2:30 p.m. EDT |
[Politico] The forces unleashed by George Floyd’s death in police custody are already rattling Minnesota — and presidential — politics.
Within Minnesota, there are already discussions about the potential impact on several competitive congressional races. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s history as a local prosecutor is suddenly under heightened scrutiny, leading to widespread speculation that the events were likely to dim her prospects of becoming Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee.
Outside the state, the president’s caustic remarks about protesters and the mayor of Minneapolis quickly underscored the political dimensions of the unrest, and the likelihood that it would become the next cultural wedge issue — another point of contention in the urban-rural divide that stands to define the November election.
Mike Erlandson, a former chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer Labor Party, said he watched with his 15-year-old daughter in Minnesota this week as a man spray-painted on a wall, “F--k the white people from the suburbs.”
“I do think that, particularly if this continues, the [congressional] districts like Dean Phillips’ district or Angie Craig’s district that right now I would say are relatively safe for the Democratic incumbent, could be very much in play,” he said. “Both of those districts will be decided in large part by suburban women voters, and it would be hard for me to imagine those people aren’t watching this scared, like everybody else, for their family and for their children.”
Minnesota is not critical to Trump’s reelection prospects. But it is one of the few offensive opportunities he has to win a state he lost in 2016, and he has invested heavily there.
Though a Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 poll last weekend showed Trump lagging behind Biden by 5 percentage points, he had improved his standing significantly from October, when he was down 12 percentage points, and he is beating Biden in Minnesota’s rural areas and with men.
Even a marginal shift in the electorate in Minnesota could prove significant, not only in the presidential race, but in several House contests there. There are Phillips and Craig, two first-term Democratic representatives from suburban districts. But in rural, western Minnesota, House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat, is attempting to hang onto a seat that has become increasingly conservative in recent years — every county in his district voted for Trump, many by landslide margins.
This week, Republicans in Minnesota pounced on Tim Walz, the Democratic governor, and Frey, the Minneapolis mayor. Days of protests saw boarded-up storefronts and the closure of public transportation systems in the area. On Thursday, protesters set fire to the 3rd Precinct Minneapolis police station.
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