(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s campaign said it would target Minnesota with an ad blitz, less than two weeks before Election Day -- a gambit to flip a longtime Democratic stronghold that the president narrowly lost in 2016 and has often mused about winning this year.
Campaign manager Bill Stepien said Friday that internal polling showed a “tightening race” in Minnesota and that the campaign would direct some of its advertising budget to the state. Trump is on defense in a number of states he won in 2016, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Arizona, where Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, holds a lead in public polls.
“We see a real opportunity,” Stepien said. “The new buy is going to be a heavy buy -- emphasize heavy. You won’t be able to turn on the TV without seeing a Trump ad.”
Trump’s campaign has said before that it considered Minnesota part of a potential path back to the White House, but Biden has held a lead for months in the state, which hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972.
On Friday, the campaign booked an additional $508,000 in air time with Minnesota broadcasters, according to Advertising Analytics, adding to $1.2 million previously booked. The first commercials will be broadcast on Saturday.
Nevada and Minnesota are the only states Trump lost in 2016 that he’s pushing to win this year. Hillary Clinton won Minnesota by just 44,600 votes in 2016.
Trump has trailed Biden badly in fundraising since August, and the former vice president reported having nearly three times as much money to spend at the beginning of October than the incumbent president.
Since June, Biden has outspent Trump in Minnesota, $11.5 million to $6.5 million, according to Advertising Analytics.
“If the election were today, I feel like we would win up and down the ballot here in Minnesota,” Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in the state, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Biden leads in Minnesota polls by an average of 6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics. About 1.2 million people have already voted in Minnesota -- nearly 40% of total 2016 turnout in the state, according to data compiled by the University of Florida’s United States Elections Project.
Yet Trump has made repeated campaign stops in the state, and he frequently attacks one of its members of Congress, Ilhan Omar, a Democrat and Somali immigrant. The president last week called on the Justice Department to open an investigation into her, baselessly accusing the lawmaker of immigration fraud.
He has also made his opposition to the protests that followed the death in May of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis police custody a centerpiece of his campaign’s appeal to White, suburban voters.
Trump’s campaign also believes Republican Jason Lewis is competitive in his bid to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Tina Smith.
“Part of it is: Donald Trump is a trophy collector,” Martin said . “There’s no bigger prize for a Republican president than Minnesota.”
But he also said that Democrats were complacent in 2016, and that they are now driven by what he called “PTSD” to ward off another Trump victory.
Vice President Mike Pence will visit Minnesota on Monday. The campaign said it has 60 staff working in the state, and that volunteers knocked on 134,000 doors and made 330,000 calls to voters last week.
Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said in an interview earlier this week that the campaign’s investments in the state greatly exceeded 2016.
“The program and the operation here is probably the strongest we’ve seen on the Republican side in decades,” she said. The state is “very much within grasp, within reach.”
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