Minnesota ad war starts Tuesday: Trump, Biden to fight for swing state supremacy

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - The battle for Minnesota's television airwaves will start Tuesday, when both President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaigns will launch ads in the swing state.

The two campaigns had been scheduled to go on the air Sept. 8, but shifted up their ad buys by one week in the latest sign of Minnesota's growing importance in the 2020 race. Trump is trying to become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Minnesota since 1972. He lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 1.5 points in 2016.

Both campaigns have reserved six-figure ad buys every week through Election Day, though Trump's team plans to spend far more money than Biden on TV ads in Minnesota, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

"It speaks to how close the state is," Hamline University professor David Schultz said. "I'm not quite going so far as saying the Democrats have to win Minnesota to win the presidency, but it's pretty close."

Public polling in Minnesota has been inconsistent and infrequent, though the race is widely seen as tightening in recent weeks.

On their 64-day sprint to Nov. 3, the candidates must navigate a list of unknowns that are unlike any election in recent memory. The coronavirus pandemic, a crisis of confidence in police, civil disorder, a polarized electorate and the president's attempts to sow distrust in the U.S. Postal Service are among the variables.

Both sides' main themes have become clear. Democrats say Trump has failed to protect the country from the coronavirus, and has not acknowledged the significant job losses that have occurred on his watch. Republicans counter that Biden is a failed longtime politician who will be unwilling to protect people from rioters.

U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat who is up for re-election against Republican Jason Lewis this fall, slammed the GOP for downplaying the pandemic.

"At best you would call it wishful thinking, at worst you would call it an explicit attempt to walk past what is the public health crisis I think we’ve ever experienced in our country," Smith said Monday during a visit to a Minneapolis home child care provider. She has proposed a $50 billion rescue package for providers to deal with the pandemic, but it has stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.

At their convention last week, Trump said he would "crush" the coronavirus and said the U.S. economy would be roaring soon. Vice President Mike Pence was dispatched to carry the message to Duluth on Friday.

"We're slowing the spread. We're protecting the vulnerable. We're saving lives. And we're opening up America again," Pence told a few hundred supporters at Duluth's port.

The economic numbers tell a dismal picture. Out of the 22 million jobs lost in March and April, the U.S. added back 9.3 million of them through July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Republicans are focused on tying Biden to chaos in Democratic-led big cities, including Minneapolis, where a majority of City Council members support dismantling the police department in favor of a smaller public safety force. Biden has not advocated for defunding police, though he has said he would peg federal funding increases to more stringent benchmarks, including diversity on the police force.

Biden's campaign has scrambled to counter the GOP's attack. During a Monday afternoon speech in Pennsylvania, he turned the chaos in major cities around on the president.

"These are not images of some imaged Joe Biden America in the future. These are images of Donald Trump's America today," Biden said.