Minnesota's delegates to the RNC unified after assassination attempt on Trump

With Republicans reeling from the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Minnesota delegates in Milwaukee see the Republican National Convention as an event that will unify the party around Trump.

"I think this is only going to unite our country and unite the Republican Party behind President Trump even stronger and solidifies his win in November," said Emily Novotny Chance, national committeewoman of the Minnesota Young Republicans and one of the state's 39 delegates to the RNC.

Minnesota's delegation includes three from each congressional district and 12 elected at large at the party's state convention, along with state GOP Party Chair David Hann and a national committeeman and committeewoman.

Two-thirds of Minnesota's delegates are tied to former President Donald Trump and one-third tied to Nikki Haley, who announced last week that she's releasing her delegates so that they can back Trump.

Here's what some of the Minnesota delegates said ahead of the convention:

Kelly Fenton

The former state legislator from Woodbury, who serves on the RNC's rules committee, was in Milwaukee ahead of other Minnesota delegates when the assassination attempt occurred.

"What happened yesterday will make sure that every single Trump supporter gets out and votes," Fenton said Sunday.

Fenton attended the RNC in 2012 as a delegate for GOP Sen. Mitt Romney. She's a Haley delegate for the Fourth Congressional District and supported Haley before the former South Carolina governor dropped out of the race. But now that Haley has released her delegates, Fenton plans to get behind Trump.

"After watching the debate the other night ... Biden is a catastrophe," Fenton said. "For Trump, I'm separating the character from the policies. Were we better off with the policies in place under Trump's presidency? Yeah, we were. Of many of the policies that were in place, I would say, absolutely, we were better off. Do I like the character of the person? I don't need to like the character of the person, right now."

Kip Christianson

This isn't Christianson's first convention, the Monticello resident attended in 2016 as a Trump alternate delegate for the Sixth Congressional District and serves on the RNC platform committee.

Christianson thinks the image of Trump dodging a bullet from the stage will give Republicans a greater purpose of unity heading into November.

"There's not a dry eye in the joint. There's a lot of sense of divine intervention," Christianson said in Milwaukee on Sunday. "And, yes, there's an amplified importance of what we're called to do because this man is literally willing to take a bullet for this country."

Going into the election, the economy is top of mind for Christianson.

"We all have idiosyncratic reasons for our strong support of the president and mine are mostly around being a young person in the economy that we find ourselves in," Christianson said. "I'm strongly in support of President Trump because I know that the Biden economy has completely left me behind and left my generation behind."

David Hann

The state GOP party chair, a first-time RNC delegate, said that on the heels of the assassination attempt, which he called a "tragic event," the stakes will be much higher in November.

"Most of us believed that this was going to be an important election," Hann said. "I think we all take it seriously that the job here is to get the work done."

Since Trump is already the presumptive nominee, Hann thinks the former president's pick for vice president will be one of the highlights of the convention, though he said he does not have a preference for who the former president names.

Emily Novotny Chance

Novotny Chance, who lives in Elk River, will be RNC national committeewoman starting on July 19. At her first convention, she hopes to energize other young Republicans to vote for Trump.

"It's important that we have young voices involved in the conversation of shaping what the future of our party looks like and I want to be a key part of that conversation," Novotny Chance said.

Aaron Farris

At 21 years old, the Albert Lea resident is one of the youngest Minnesota delegates going to the RNC this year, and is chair of the First Congressional District Republicans.

Farris said he ran as a Haley/uncommitted delegate so that he could go to the convention and allow others to run as Trump delegates. However, Farris will support Trump at the convention.

He thinks Minnesota is in play this year and wants to hear from other speakers and attendees about how to energize the party heading into November.

"I'm looking forward to what comes after the convention, which is the Republican unity that we need to win in November and the amplified message, I should say, that we're hopefully going to have going out of this convention while the Democrats are kind of in disarray with their presidential candidate and their party kind of eating its own right now," Farris said.

"Republicans are going to be showing unity and we're going to be going into November strong with great candidates up and down the ballot," he continued, "And I feel very good about our chances in November."

AK Kamara

The Forest Lake resident is a Trump delegate from the Eighth Congressional District and was elected national committeeman whose term begins after the convention, like Novotny Chance.

"I think that President Trump represents something about the American spirit, that in such adversity, being faced with death, he thinks about we need to take this moment and move forward," Kamara said on his way to the RNC after the assassination attempt.

"We don't fall down and give up, we need to keep on pushing forward. And I think that's emblematical of the spirit of the United States."

As a first-time delegate, he also hopes to build connections that will help him in his new role looking ahead to 2028.

"I'm going to be looking at, personally, how do we raise our resource pools? So when we go into the 2028 cycle, if Trump wins here in 2024, he can't run again," Kamara said. "We have to start figuring out, what is the bench going to look like? How are we going to truly build it, identify different folks and encourage people?"