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“ ‘National polls keep getting it wrong.’ ”
The line above came Friday afternoon from Bill Stepien, President Donald Trump’s new campaign manager, as he projected confidence about the state of the White House race amid a range of polls showing sizable leads for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Stepien, a veteran Republican operative, became the manager of Trump’s re-election campaign last week, replacing Brad Parscale, who remains with the campaign.
Two recent national surveys “provide a sample that is 27% less Republican than showed up at the polls in the last presidential election — 27% less Republican,” Stepien said during a conference call with reporters. “That’s why we’re not going to spend a lot of time here — any time at all — talking further about national polls, and it’s why, as I said before, we don’t pay a lot of attention to them day to day here in the campaign.”
He said pollsters survey registered voters, “which never resembles the actual turnout of the election,” and he said they draw on states that don’t “even come close to being a part of the battleground map.”
The campaign manager talked up Trump’s chances of getting the 270 electoral votes needed to win November’s presidential election.
“We think that there isn’t just a pathway to 270 but multiple pathways to 270,” he said, as he suggested there were favorable trends in a number of swing states.
“The president is polling better in Arizona among key demographics now than where he was four years ago,” Stepien said.
Minnesota is “a state that the president lost by just 44,000 votes, 1.5% four years ago,” he also said. “So if people are going to talk about Pennsylvania as a pickup opportunity for Joe Biden, seems only fair that Minnesota should get that same treatment coming the other way.”
“Bottom line is building off of the 2016 map, I think there are several offensive opportunities in play for the president’s campaign, and we have the unique luxury of having the ability to expand our map, expand our electoral path,” the campaign manager told reporters.
In a RealClearPolitics moving average of national polls as of Friday, Biden drew support of 49.6% of voters, ahead of Trump’s 40.9%.
Besides polls, a campaign’s financial reports are a closely watched measure of viability, and Biden’s war chest is catching up to Trump’s. The president also often touts the performance of the stock market SPX, -0.61% DJIA, -0.68%, but it has been trading below its February peaks amid worries over the coronavirus pandemic’s economic effects.
