The leaders of Donald Trump's third presidential campaign as the Republican nominee held a private presentation to major donors at a Republican National Committee retreat on Saturday.
NBC News reports that top campaign officials believe Trump can win Virginia and Minnesota in November.
The network received the information discussed in the closed-door meeting almost immediately:
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.
In 2020, Biden won Minnesota and Virginia by comfortable margins of 7.12% and 10.2%, respectively.
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