Despite a weekend blitz of television ads by President Bush, Minnesota voters were favoring Sen. John Kerry in early returns.
With about a quarter of the vote counted late Tuesday, Kerry had a nearly 10 percentage point lead over the incumbent. But most of the early results were coming from Minneapolis and its suburbs. Few results were available from other areas of the state.
Minnesota, whose 10 electoral votes went to Al Gore four years ago, became a swing state this year as the two rivals traded leads in polls throughout the campaign.
But Kerry appeared to surge in the days shortly before the election, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune poll. It found 49 percent of likely voters backed Kerry, with 41 percent for Bush.
Although a Republican hadn’t won Minnesota since Richard Nixon in 1972, observers had considered the state a tossup based on Bush’s strong showing four years ago.
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As a result, it was at the heart of an Upper Midwest battleground of Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
A potentially contentious issue wound up in the courts earlier in the day. A judge dismissed a Republican effort to make supporters of MoveOn.org stay 100 feet away from polling places, saying the witnesses in the case were not credible.