President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Duluth, Minnesota next Wednesday, one week after he returns from the summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, which is scheduled to begin in a matter of hours in Singapore.
“Today, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. announced the next MAGA Rally featuring President Donald Trump, scheduled in Duluth, Minnesota on Wednesday, June 20 at 6:30 pm CT,” the Trump-Pence campaign said in a statement released late Monday.
The event will be held in Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District, which stretches from the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul to the Canadian border, one of the few districts in the House of Representatives that is currently held by an incumbent that the Cook Political Report rates as a “toss up.”
The selection of Duluth–a leading Great Lakes port on the banks of Lake Superior–as the site of President Trump’s first MAGA rally after the summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is politically strategic. The scheduling of the rally, so close on the heels of the summit, is a clear signal that President Trump intends to take the battle to the opposition Democrats in the leadup to the November 2018 midterm elections, a point the Trump-Pence campaign emphasized in its statement.
President Trump won the Eighth Congressional District by 16 points in 2016, and the retiring Democrat who currently represents the district–Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN)–narrowly eked out a 50.2 percent to 49.6 percent victory over Stewart Mills, the GOP candidate.
With Nolan’s retirement, the November election is now for an open seat, and the Democrats are in disarray ahead of the August 14 primary, where four candidates are vying for the nomination.
Republicans, in contrast, are rallying around a single candidate, retired Duluth police officer and current St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber.
Stauber seems like a perfect fit to support Trump’s agenda in Congress.
“I’m just hearing that rural America seems to be forgotten in Washington, and I will not let that happen … I don’t believe they know what Main Street Minnesota feels like, looks like, smells like, tastes like. I’m going to legislate from the lens of Main Street Minnesota,” the Star-Tribune reported Stauber said in a meeting with the editor of a local newspaper.
“The President is expected to promote the latest economic news for our surging economy, including record-low unemployment and new trade reforms, and to discuss his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un,” the campaign said.
“Today, we are glad to announce that President Trump will appear at the next Make America Great Again rally in Duluth, Minnesota on Wednesday, June 20,” Michael S. Glassner, Chief Operating Officer of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., said in the statement.
“The president will meet with Minnesota patriots to report the latest developments for our surging economy, including record-low unemployment and fair trade reforms, and his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. This will be another high-energy Trump rally that will serve as a celebration of the revival of the American dream for hard working Americans and Minnesotans,” Glassner noted.
The event will be held at the DECC Arena in Duluth.
“This is the second rally that President Trump has held in Minnesota since he first began his race for president in June, 2015. The first rally in the state took place on November 6, 2016,” the Trump-Pence campaign noted.
That November 6 rally, held at an airport hangar in Minneapolis-St. Paul on the eve of the election, also sent a signal to voters in Minnesota that the president was leaving no potential battleground state uncontested.
That aggressive approach to campaigning was one of the reasons Trump won the electoral college so handily, winning traditional blue collar working states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the latter of which Hillary Clinton failed to visit at all during the 2016 campaign.
It almost worked in Minnesota, as well, as Hillary Clinton narrowly eked out a 44,000 vote victory there on election day.
Next Wednesday’s Trump rally in Duluth signals the beginning of the president’s full-on, contest-every-competitive-seat strategy to maintain a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
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