When Vice President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate in August, her aim was to shore up support in the Midwestern states that give her the clearest path to an Electoral College victory in November.
While the battleground states are set to be extremely close, polling shows that former President Donald Trump has gained some ground in Walz’s home state in recent weeks.
Harris had been ahead of former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, by 8.4 percentage points on August 19, but her lead shrunk to 5.8 points on Monday, according to FiveThirty Eight’s average of polls.
It comes as Walz has faced criticism over a string of gaffes, including recently having to walk back his comment that the Electoral College system “needs to go,” which is not the Harris campaign’s position. He later told ABC, “My position is the campaign’s position.” Walz has also misleadingly claimed he was in Hong Kong during the turbulence surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. When pressed about the comment during the recent vice presidential debate, Walz said he “misspoke.”
He has also made statements that misrepresented the type of infertility treatment his family received and provided misleading information about his rank in the National Guard. And his drunken driving arrest from 1995 in Nebraska has also gotten renewed scrutiny.
Harris’ choosing the Minnesota governor as her running mate appears to have done little to boost support in the state, according to polling conducted before and after she announced Walz as her pick.
Polls conducted soon after Harris entered the presidential race in July had her leading Trump in a two-way race in Minnesota by between 6 and 10 points.
But polls conducted after Harris announced Walz as her running mate on August 6 showed the race tightening somewhat—with those conducted in the past month showing Harris leading by between 5 and 7 points in a two-way matchup with Trump, but the margins of error range from 3.5 to 4.9 percent.
For example, a SurveyUSA conducted among 646 likely voters between September 23 and 26 gave Harris a 6-point lead, while a July survey conducted among a similar number of likely voters had put her 10 points ahead of Trump. Harris’ 6-point lead comes with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percent.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.
The Republican Party of Minnesota has sought to present the shift as a sign that Minnesota voters are “rejecting” the Harris-Walz ticket.
In a news release last month, the party pointed to a poll conducted between September 4 and 8 that showed Harris’ lead had shrunk to just 4 points. That margin of error was +/- 2.3 percent.
“It’s statistically undeniable that Minnesotans are rapidly rejecting the Harris-Walz ticket, and, specifically, Governor Walz” party chairman David Hann said in a statement at the time. “With its own governor on the ticket, the only explanation for Democrats being dangerously close to the margin of error here is that their policies have failed so miserably both nationally and at home that Minnesotans can’t help but vote for a change.” A party spokesperson pointed Newsweek to that news release when contacted for further comment.
However, experts say that shift in the polling may amount to “statistical noise” and the Harris-Walz campaign is unlikely to be concerned about the race in Minnesota.
“Walz’s selection as Harris’s running mate has not moved the needle in Minnesota, and I do not expect this to change over the next month,” Paul Goren, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, told Newsweek.
While polls indicate that Harris’ lead has shrunk since picking Walz, the “change is small enough that it is likely nothing more than statistical noise,” Goren said. “My sense is that the campaign is not worried about this. The Biden-Harris ticket won by just over seven percent in 2020, so the 2024 polling numbers are not out of line. In fact, the Minnesota polling data are consistent with data from other state polls and national polling, all of which suggest that this election will be closer than in 2020 and maybe even closer than in 2016.”
Goren said that “since all politics are now national rather than local, the failure of Walz’s selection to boost Harris in Minnesota is not surprising.”
But he noted that if Harris “winds up losing in Minnesota, she’ll be losing all the battleground states and other Democratic-leaning states. That would be both historical and highly unexpected.”
Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, told Newsweek that “there is always some movement in preferences reported in polls that is simply statistical noise.”
“Most Minnesota polls consistently show a Harris advantage even if things bounce around somewhat from poll to poll,” Panagopoulos said.
“The addition of Walz to the ticket may not have boosted Harris support by much in Minnesota, but there’s been no notable collapse in support either.”
He added that the polls in Minnesota “basically show what we know to be true about vice presidential candidates generally—that they don’t usually matter very much in terms of voting preferences for the ticket except perhaps in unusual cases. Other factors are more impactful, like partisan identity and views on top issues like the economy.”
