Senior officials of the former president Donald Trump‘s campaign believes it can turn Democratic strongholds Minnesota and Virginia into its pillar in November, donors told behind closed doors. The Republican National Committee backed down Saturday.
Internal pollster Tony Fabrizio and senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita delivered a series of presentations focused on financial, messaging and political mapping, according to two people present at the Four Seasons resort in Palm Beach, Fla. The numbers, posted in a slide shared with NBC News, showed Trump ahead of Biden by small margins in key states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia as of 2020.
The Trump camp’s discussion of expanding the electoral map deeper into the Democratic territory of Minnesota and Virginia comes as President Joe Biden’s re-election team says Looking at North Carolina – Republicans won three consecutive presidential races – and Florida, where the GOP won the last two presidential elections. Biden won the 2020 contest by 74 electoral votes, with victories in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia coming by a combined margin of nearly 44,000 votes.
“I think Biden is deliberately playing a fake game by talking about his campaign [how] They will expand the map in Florida and North Carolina,” LaCivita told NBC News in a phone interview. “But we have a real, real opportunity to expand the map in Virginia and Minnesota.”
The top lines of the internal survey shared with donors are relatively consistent with sparse public inquiries This shows Biden has a small lead in Virginia, while Trump has an advantage in his own polls in Minnesota by contradiction with several public inquiries in that state. But all public opinion polls in Minnesota and Virginia and tests conducted by the Trump campaign fall within their margins of error, suggesting tight races in both states.
Trump’s team has tested head-to-head, four-way and six-way races in every state, according to LaCivita. In the six-way trial held in Minnesota, which included four independent candidates, Trump and Biden tied with 40%, and Robert Kennedy Jr. with 9%. When the field narrowed to four candidates, Trump led Biden 46% to 41%. In a head-to-head matchup, Trump led Biden 49% to 46%
Biden won Minnesota by nearly 7 percentage points in 2020, and the state hasn’t favored a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.
Trump’s internal poll in Virginia showed Biden leading Trump 40 percent to 37 percent in a six-way test that had Kennedy at 8 percent. Biden led Trump 48 percent to 44 percent in a head-to-head matchup. In a four-way race, Biden had a 42-41 percent advantage over Trump.
Trump aides declined to release all of the surveys, including their methodology, to NBC News. Campaigns often use the promise of playing offense on a new pitch as an incentive for donors to give money to support these efforts.
Dasha Burns and Abigail Brooks contributed.