Election 2020 Fact Check: No, Biden Didn’t Say Hello Minnesota in Florida

An edited video is falsely trying to make it look like Vice President Joe Biden said “Hello Minnesota” at a Florida campaign event, but he didn’t, according to The Associated Press and our reviews of videos and news stories from Biden’s actual speech.

The bottom line is that it’s not true. Biden was really in Minnesota when he said “Hello Minnesota.”

Social media companies moved quickly to remove the video. On Twitter, one share of it had 1 million views. That didn’t stop people on social media from writing false statements like, “‘Hello Minnesota!’ – Joe Biden in Florida not knowing where he is.” It’s not clear who was responsible for the initial deception.

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Here’s what you need to know:

Biden Really Was in Minnesota

According to The Associated Press, Biden was actually in Minnesota but the video was “altered to change the text on a sign and the podium to refer to Tampa, Florida, instead of Minnesota.”

AP confirmed Biden was actually in Minnesota through an original version of the video. It showed that someone edited a sign that read “TEXT MN to 30330” to read “Tampa, Florida.” They also changed the “MN” on the podium in the video to “FL.”

In addition, according to AP, Biden wears a winter jacket in Minnesota, which he doesn’t do in Florida. The AP compared the video to an original version that ran on C-Span. “It was taken during an Oct. 30 campaign stop in St. Paul, Minnesota,” AP reported.

We found videos, which you can see above, from major news outlets of the Minnesota rally, and they confirm the AP’s analysis. The above video was posted to YouTube on October 30 by FOX 9 News | KMSP-TV Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Biden Spoke at the Fairgrounds

According to Marketwatch, the talk occurred at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St. Paul, Minn.

Biden’s campaign also posted the video. You can watch that above. The above video was “streamed live” on October 30, according to what the campaign wrote on YouTube.

A tweet with the doctored video that had a million views has also been deleted.

The presidential election is on Tuesday, November 3.

CBS Local also ran a news story on Biden’s talk in Minnesota. “I will protect your family as if it were my own,” he said at the rally, according to the station, which said it was only his second visit to the state, which is hotly contested.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, as of November 1, Biden was leading Trump in Minnesota by an average 4.4%.

Trafalgar Group, a Republican-leaning pollster that called Pennsylvania and Michigan for Trump in 2016 when almost no one else was, has Biden leading Trump in Minnesota by 3%.

Minnesota is a state that has gone Democratic since the days of Richard Nixon. Thus, if Trump flips the state, it would be considered a major upset. Judging from the number of rallies he’s had in Minnesota, though, many railing at the state’s Democratic politicians, he’s not writing it off. Hillary Clinton barely won the state in 2016, and there is a Senate race in Minnesota that is currently a dead heat.

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