Good morning. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Vice President Joe Biden will be in Minnesota today to kick off early voting in the general election. Biden plans to visit a union training center in Duluth Friday afternoon, and deliver remarks afterwards. Trump is scheduled to hold an airport hangar rally in Bemidji at 6 p.m. And it will be some good weather for campaigning or otherwise enjoying the outdoors. We'll see mostly sunny skies with highs in the lower 60s throughout the state. But according to Updraft, we may see
Patrick Gordon has been on a countdown to the day he’ll cast his 2020 ballot.
Gordon wants to avoid Election Day crowds because of a chronic respiratory condition. And he doesn’t trust that a mailed-in vote would get there without a hitch. So Friday morning, the retired factory worker planned to throw on a mask and head from his house outside the northwestern Minnesota city of Roseau to the county courthouse as early voting begins.
“I feel this is the safest way for me to cast my ballot, and it will be counted,” he said.
Election administrators, political party leaders and campaign officials suspect a lot of voters will cast ballots early this year. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic still has people jittery about standing in lines. And many have their minds made up.
How to: Vote by mail in Minnesota
If you have questions about early and mail-in voting, Secretary of State Steve Simon joins MPR News politics editor Mike Mulcahy on Politics Friday at 11 a.m.
If you want to see the political climate of Bemidji where Trump plans to visit tonight, look no further than Martha Vetter's front yard.
Last Wednesday she strolled through a small forest of homemade political signs along her rural road south of Bemidji. The signs didn’t used to be so numerous. She started out with just two. One for Joe Biden. One for Black Lives Matter.
“The first one that got stolen was the Black Lives Matter sign,” she said. “Then the Biden-Harris got stolen.”
Vetter keeps making them, and they keep getting stolen. The missing signs are a symptom of something deeper. Read more from MPR News reporter John Enger.
Over the next month, COVID-19 testing sites will pop up across Minnesota in a massive push by the state to curb community spread of the coronavirus.
The pop-up testing clinics will start the week of Sept. 21, and will be followed by four to six testing events weekly throughout the state. State officials say they expect to do around 10,000 tests in the coming weeks. Here’s what you need to know about how you can test a test.
The evolving COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota continues to change school reopening recommendations around the state (add link).
Twenty-five counties saw their COVID-19 case counts slip past one of the Health Department’s thresholds, changing their recommendation toward more distance learning for more students, according to data released Thursday.
Not every county got worse. Eleven counties saw their case rates improve compared to last week’s results, and saw their recommendation shift to more in-person learning.
Here are Minnesota’s current COVID-19 statistics:
- 1,942 deaths
- 86,722 positive cases, 79,878 off isolation
- 242 still hospitalized, 132 in ICU
- 1,763,735 tests, 1,263,546 people tested
Have questions leading up to the Election Day? #AskMPRNews. We want to hear your stories, too. #TellMPRNews what is motivating you to get out and vote this year.
-- Matt Mikus, MPR News @mikusmatt | 
