Former President Donald Trump’s team is hoping to put Virginia and Minnesota in play in November.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Top officials for former President Donald Trump’s campaign believe they can flip Democratic strongholds Minnesota and Virginia into his column in November, they told donors behind closed doors at a Republican National Committee retreat Saturday.
Brandishing internal surveys, pollster Tony Fabrizio and senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita delivered a set of presentations that focused on finances, messaging and the political map, according to two people who were present at the Four Seasons resort here. Fabrizio’s numbers, posted on a slide shared with NBC News, showed Trump ahead of President Joe Biden by small margins in the key swing states from 2020 — including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
The Trump camp’s discussion of expanding the electoral map deeper into the Democratic territory of Minnesota and Virginia comes as Biden’s re-election team says it is eyeing North Carolina — which Republicans have won in three consecutive presidential races — and Florida, where the GOP has prevailed in the last two presidential elections. Biden took the 2020 contest by a margin of 74 electoral votes, with victories in the pivotal states of Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia coming from a cumulative advantage of about 44,000 votes.
“I think that the Biden campaign is deliberately playing a faux game by talking about [how] they’re going to expand the map in Florida and North Carolina,” LaCivita said in a telephone interview with NBC News. “But we have a real, real opportunity in expanding the map in Virginia and Minnesota.”
The top lines of the internal polling shared with donors are relatively consistent with sparse public surveys that show Biden with a small edge in Virginia, while Trump’s advantage in his own polling in Minnesota is at odds with the few public surveys in that state. But all of the public polls in Minnesota and Virginia — and the trials run by Trump’s campaign — fall within their margins of error, suggesting tight races in both states.
Trump’s team tested head-to-head, four-way and six-way races in each state, according to LaCivita. In the six-way trial in Minnesota, which includes four independent candidates, Trump and Biden were tied at 40% apiece, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 9%, he said. When the field was 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 about 7 percentage points in 2020, and the state has not favored a Republican nominee for president since Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.
In Virginia, Trump’s internal survey showed Biden leading Trump 40% to 37% in a six-way test that included Kennedy at 8%. Biden led Trump 48% to 44% in a head-to-head matchup. And, in a four-way race, Biden had a 42%-to-41% advantage over Trump.
Trump aides declined to make the full surveys, including their methodology, available to NBC News. Campaigns often use the promise of playing offense on new turf as an incentive for donors to give money to support those efforts.
“Trump’s team has so little campaign or infrastructure to speak of they’re resorting to leaking memos that say ‘the polls we paid for show us winning, don’t ask us to show you the whole poll though.’ Sure, guys,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said.
“While we have 150 offices open with hundreds of staff across the key battlegrounds, the RNC is closing offices and hemorrhaging money on legal fees,” she added. “Joe Biden has hit every battleground at least once, while Trump’s in the courtroom or on the golf course. We’ll see how that translates in November.” “
Jonathan Allen reported from Washington, D.C.; Matt Dixon from Orlando, Florida; and Olympia Sonnier, Dasha Burns and Abigail Brooks from Palm Beach, Florida.
Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele said Saturday morning that Donald Trump is “afraid of losing” this year’s election as he reacted to comments made by the former president in a recent Time magazine article.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, told Time that he may not be willing to accept the results of November’s general election if he loses to Democratic President Joe Biden.
While campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump said of the results of the 2024 election in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
He added: “But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results.”
These comments prompted Steele, a co-host of MSNBC’s The Weekend, to doubt the former president’s motives in questioning the integrity of U.S. elections.
“The idea that you think, that of all of the elections we’ve had in the history of this country, that your election is the least honest and the most corrupt, it just shows the fallacy of what the man is laying out there,” Steele said.
He added: “Donald Trump is afraid of losing because it strikes at the core of the thing that is most important to him, and that is his ego. And he doesn’t want to do the work to actually win. He wants to goad and cajole and bully people into believing something about our system because he is too weak of a man to actually go out and campaign like any other normal candidate who would go out and campaign.”
When reached via email on Saturday afternoon, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in response to Steele’s comments, “Never Trumpers suffer from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that they would be OK with the potential for dishonest elections and threats to Democracy.”
During his interview with the Journal Sentinel, the former president claimed that he won Wisconsin in 2020, despite there being no evidence of this. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes.
“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump said. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”
Steele, chair of the RNC from 2009 to 2011, addressed the MSNBC panel and camera as he remarked Saturday about the former president.
“That is your truth, Donald Trump,” he said. “And what you are trying to do is game the system, as he did in 2016 and 2020, to say that, ‘If I don’t win, the system is corrupt.’ No, Donald Trump, if you don’t win it’s because more people voted against you than for you and our electoral system confirms that.”
When asked earlier this week by Newsweek how Trump will determine if the 2024 election is honest given that he continues to claim that Biden’s 2020 election win was stolen due to widespread voter fraud despite there being no evidence of such a claim, Cheung asked over email: “So is your argument that people should accept dishonest elections?”
When probed further, Cheung simply wrote: “Dishonest elections are bad.”
Meanwhile, voters believe that Trump and Biden are running almost equally good 2024 campaigns, according to a new poll.
A Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey of 1,500 eligible voters, conducted exclusively for Newsweek, found that 37 percent think Trump is currently running the best campaign, compared to 36 percent who think Biden is.
The results arrive despite Trump currently having his campaign schedule severely hindered as he must appear in court most weekdays in New York as part of his criminal hush money trial.
Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to stand trial in a criminal case last month. Following an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, Trump was indicted in March 2023 on 34 charges of allegedly falsifying business records relating to hush money payments that were made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006, which he has denied. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges and said the case against him is politically motivated.
In addition, the former president was indicted last year by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for his role in allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the events of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot by his supporters. Trump was also indicted last year in Georgia’s Fulton County for allegedly conspiring to overturn Biden’s 2020 election win in the state. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in those cases as well.
Being elected president shortly after surviving the publication of the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 is the moment in which Donald Trump defied political gravity.
A politician was heard on tape saying truly disgusting things about women and yet was still elevated by voters to the highest office. Trump’s ability to survive that embarrassing episode echoes in his reascendance to the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, despite losing the 2020 election and then trying to overturn the results.
It’s easy to forget how dumbfounding it was to hear Trump on that tape for the first time and how many Republicans who called on him to drop out of the presidential race back then now support him.
If the embarrassing tape somehow represents Trump’s greatest triumph, it is also something that continues to haunt him, as it became the focus of his hush money criminal trial in New York on Friday.
Trump’s 2016 victory in the Electoral College seems only more improbable in the retelling. Hicks, his former close aide, told jurors about what must have been the unbelievably awkward moment she read a transcript of the “Access Hollywood” tape – in which he brags about being able to grope women – to her boss.
“This was a crisis,” she said of its release’s impact on the campaign. It’s sordid stuff, and the outlines were generally known even without Hicks’ testimony on Friday. The judge in the case ruled at the start of the trial that the tape itself can’t be played in court, but it has been described.
It is worth revisiting the earthquake the “Access Hollywood” tape set off in the 2016 campaign. When the video came out, it left many people speechless.
The tape was recorded in 2005, and it was leaked to The Washington Post, which published the video on October 7, 2016, a little more than a month before Election Day. Trump is heard talking about trying, unsuccessfully, to “move on” an unnamed, married woman, and then crassly talks about his uncontrollable desire to kiss an actress he is about to meet with then-“Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he told Bush. “You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p****.”
Here’s a video CNN published at the time:
Multiple Republicans who today are completely behind Trump, like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, called on him in 2016 to immediately step down. The perception inside Trump’s inner circle was that most Republican lawmakers wanted him off the ticket, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie later wrote in a memoir.
Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was “sickened.” And then-Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus thought Trump should either resign or would lose in a landslide, according to Christie and then-Trump aide Steve Bannon.
Even Trump’s wife, Melania, who rarely issues public statements, expressed her disgust with the words on the tape, although she would later write it off as “boy talk.”
Things were so grim back then that Trump issued what is probably the only apology of his political career in a straight-to-camera video posted on Twitter, now X, in which he admits the tape is real and takes responsibility.
“I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize,” Trump said, although he made it clear he would not leave the race. Being exposed to people on the campaign trail had changed him, Trump said, before trying to draw an equivalence between his words and allegations against former President Bill Clinton.
