Chris LaCivita, one of Donald Trump's senior 2024 presidential campaign advisers, revealed on Saturday two new states he believes the former president can flip in his favor in the upcoming election.
Trump is the presumed GOP presidential nominee and will likely go up against President Joe Biden, the Democratic incumbent, again in November for another shot at the White House.
Early polling has focused on several key swing states that can determine the outcome of the election, but LaCivita has revealed two Democratic strongholds that Trump may win this year—Virginia and Minnesota.
"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 told NBC News on Saturday. "But we have a real, real opportunity in expanding the map in Virginia and Minnesota."
According to LaCivita who cited internal polling, in a matchup between Trump and Biden in Minnesota, the former president led the Democratic incumbent by 3 points (49 to 46 percent). Meanwhile in Virginia, Biden leads only by 4 points against Trump (48 to 44 percent). It is unclear what the margin of error of this internal polling was since Trump aides declined to give the full surveys to NBC News.
In response, Biden's campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt told NBC News, "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."
Newsweek reached out to Trump's and Biden's campaigns via email for comment.
In 2020, Biden won Minnesota by over 230,000 votes (52.6 to 45.4 percent). Minnesota has voted blue since former President Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, which is the longest streak of its kind, except for Washington D.C. Meanwhile, Biden took Virginia by over 450,000 votes in 2020 (54.3 to 44.2 percent). Virginia was mostly a Republican stronghold from the 1950s into the early 2000s, but Democrats have won the last three elections.
What Public Polls Show
According to public polling, Biden is still leading Trump by a few points in Minnesota. In a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll conducted from April 3 to 7, which surveyed 825 Minnesota adults, Biden was ahead of Trump by 2 points (44 to 42 percent). However, the margin of error was plus or minus 4.9 percent.
Meanwhile, like Trump's internal surveys show, Biden remains ahead in Virginia. According to a poll conducted by the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research (IPOR) at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from February 11 to 19, Biden was leading Trump by 4 points (47 to 43 percent). The poll surveyed 705 Virginia adults and had a weighted margin of error of 4.62 percent.
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Rachel Dobkin is a Newsweek reporter based in New York. Her focus is reporting on politics. Rachel joined Newsweek in ... Read more
