On Friday, President Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, dismissed polls showing Democrat Joe Biden ahead as “flat-out wrong,” Bloomberg reported.
Opinion polling suggests that Trump is trailing Biden — the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee — nationwide and in key battlegrounds.
According to Stepien, internal polls paint a different picture, allowing the commander-in-chief and his allies to “exude the quiet confidence in our plan.” Public polls are “flat-out wrong” because they under-sample Republican voters, he said.
All Trump needs to do to get reelected in November, Stepien argued, is beat Biden in at least one battleground in the industrial Midwest.
“We intend to protect this 2016 map. We only need to win either Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania to win this thing again,” he stated.
“If we win any of these three states and the states the president won in 2016, Joe Biden stays in his basement. The president’s in the White House for four more years.”
In 2016, when he ran against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump won all three Midwestern battlegrounds, largely thanks to the support from non-college-educated white men, per Bloomberg . However, Biden — who was born and raised in Pennsylvania — has seemingly made an effort to appeal to this voter group.
Stepien — who took charge of the Trump campaign last week, following Brad Parscale’s demotion — said that the commander-in-chief has a stronger ground game than Biden in North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Arizona.
He also said that Republican voter registration is up in key battlegrounds, noting that Trump expects to cruise to victory in Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine and Minnesota.
Stepien dismissed the possibility of Biden edging out a victory in traditionally red states like Texas .
“I would love — I would invite the Biden campaign — to play in Texas. They should play hard. They should go after Texas really, really heavily, spend a lot of money in the Dallas and Houston media markets,” he said.
A CBS News survey released earlier this month put Trump behind Biden in Florida, with both candidates in a tight race in Arizona and the Lone Star State.
Since Stepien took charge of Trump’s reelection effort, the U.S. leader and his allies have changed their approach to the coronavirus pandemic, encouraging Americans to wear face masks. In addition, citing concerns over public health, Trump canceled the Republican National Convention’s activities in Jacksonville, Florida.
Still, as Bloomberg noted, Trump has been laying the groundwork to contest the results of the election if it doesn’t go his way. In recent weeks, he has been railing against mail-in voting, claiming that it is uniquely vulnerable to fraud.