When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in August, her goal was to shore up support in Midwestern states that would give her the clearest path to an Electoral College victory in November.

While the battleground states are expected to be very close, polls show former President Donald Trump has gained some ground in Walz’s home state in recent weeks.

Harris had led former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, by 8.4 percentage points on August 19, but her lead shrank to 5.8 points on Monday, according to the FiveThirty Eight polling average.

It comes at a time when Walz has been criticized for a series of gaffes, including recently having to walk back his comment that the Electoral College system “must be abolished,” which is not the Harris campaign’s position. He later told ABC: “My position is the campaign’s position.” Walz has also misleadingly claimed that he was in Hong Kong during the turmoil surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. When asked about the comment during the recent vice presidential debate, Walz said he “misspoke.”

He also made statements in which he misrepresented the type of infertility treatment his family received and provided misleading information about his rank in the National Guard. And his 1995 drunk driving arrest in Nebraska was also under investigation.

According to polls conducted before and after Walz was announced as her candidate, Harris’ selection of the Minnesota governor as her running mate appears to have done little to bolster support in the state.

Polls taken shortly after Harris entered the presidential race in July showed her leading Trump by 6 to 10 points in a two-way race in Minnesota.

But polls conducted after Harris announced Walz as her running mate on August 6 showed the race tightening somewhat – polls conducted last month showed Harris leading by between 5 and 7 points in a face-off with Trump has a lead, but the error margins are between 3.5 and 4.9 percent.

For example, a SurveyUSA conducted between September 23 and 26 among 646 likely voters found Harris with a 6-point lead, while a July poll conducted among a similar number of likely voters showed her with a 10-point lead over Trump had evaluated. Harris’ 6-point lead comes with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percent.

Newsweek emailed the Harris and Trump campaigns seeking comment.

The Minnesota Republican Party has tried to portray the shift as a sign that Minnesota voters are “rejecting” the Harris-Walz ticket.

In a press release last month, the party pointed to a poll conducted between September 4 and 8 that showed Harris’ lead had shrunk to just four points. This error rate was +/- 2.3 percent.

“Statistically speaking, there is no denying that Minnesotans are quickly rejecting the Harris-Walz ticket, and Governor Walz in particular,” party chairman David Hann said in a statement at the time. “With their own governor on the docket, the only explanation that Democrats are dangerously close to the margin of error here is that their policies have failed so miserably at both the state and federal levels that Minnesotans can’t help but than to vote for a change.” A party spokesman pointed this out Newsweek to this press release if contacted for further comment.

But experts say the shift in poll numbers could lead to “statistical noise” and that the Harris-Walz campaign is unlikely to worry about the race in Minnesota.

“Walz’s selection of Harris as running mate didn’t move anything in Minnesota, and I don’t expect that to change next month,” said Paul Goren, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota Newsweek.

While polls suggest Harris’ lead has shrunk since Walz was elected, the “change is small enough that it’s probably just statistical noise,” Goren said. “In my opinion the campaign is not worried about this. The Biden-Harris ticket won by just over seven percent in 2020, so the poll numbers for 2024 are not out of the ordinary. In fact, Minnesota polling data is consistent with data from other state polls and national polls all suggest that this election will be closer than 2020 and perhaps even closer than 2016.”

Goren said, “With all politics now national rather than local, it is not surprising that Walz’s selection did not give Harris a boost in Minnesota.”

But he noted that if Harris “loses in Minnesota, she will lose all the battleground states and other Democratic-leaning states. That would be both historic and highly unexpected.”

Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, said Newsweek that “there is always some movement in preferences in polls, which is just statistical noise.”

“Most polls in Minnesota consistently show an advantage for Harris, although things vary a bit from poll to poll,” Panagopoulos said.

“The addition of Walz to the ticket may not have significantly increased Harris support in Minnesota, but there was no significant drop in support either.”

He added that the Minnesota polls “basically show what we know about vice presidential candidates in general – that they don’t usually play a big role in terms of voting preferences for the candidacy, except perhaps in unusual cases.” Other factors have a greater influence, such as partisan identity and views on important issues such as the economy.”