The Senate electoral map for 2024 is so favorable to Republicans that the party is all but guaranteed to flip control of the chamber in November. But amid all the more favorable seats to flip, the GOP should not ignore Minnesota.
Already, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Chairman Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) have secured top candidate recruits in the most competitive states of Ohio, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin. They even secured a top recruit in deep-blue Maryland, where former Gov. Larry Hogan may be the only Republican capable of winning the state’s Senate seat.
But largely ignored to this point is the seat held by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who is facing reelection and represents another long-shot pickup opportunity for the GOP. To date, the NRSC has not even tried to recruit a formidable candidate because of the state’s longtime blue streak. But this is a mistake.
Minnesota is not nearly as Democratic as its history suggests. Yes, it is true that the last Republican presidential candidate it voted for was Richard Nixon in 1972, and the last time the state sent a Republican to the Senate was in 2002, when Norm Coleman defeated last-minute replacement candidate Walter Mondale. But in the past eight years, Republicans have been within striking distance of winning the state multiple times.
In 2016, Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by less than 45,000 votes, marking the closest a Republican had come to winning the state since Mondale barely beat Reagan there in 1984, and in 2020, despite Trump losing the state to Joe Biden by more than 200,000 votes, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) won a plurality victory of just over 150,000 votes.
These are all better performances for Republicans than have been recorded recently in Maryland, where Democrats have consistently cleared 60% statewide in nearly every federal election since the mid-2000s.
But this is not to say that Klobuchar would be easy to beat. In her last race in 2018, Klobuchar handily won reelection with 60%. But her margin of victory decreased from her 2012 race, despite 2018 being a strong year for Democrats with Trump in the White House.
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And while there is little polling on Klobuchar’s standing with voters today, a KSTP-TV/SurveyUSA poll from January shows that Klobuchar is at 49%, while a generic Republican is at 33%, with a sizable number of undecided voters. In the presidential election, the same poll has Biden with a razor-thin lead over Trump of 42% to 39% while sporting an abysmal approval rating of 41%.
The odds of ousting Klobuchar are pretty low. But if Republicans are able to put forth a strong and compelling candidate, at the very least, they could force the Democrats to spend money on yet another race that they otherwise would have in the bag, and who knows? Given Biden’s woes in the consistently Democratic state, perhaps an upset wouldn’t be all that shocking.