Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News on Tuesday that the Trump campaign is convinced of a “landslide” victory, predicting that President Donald Trump will manage to carry the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all states in which
polls show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has a lead.
“We believe this will be a landslide and for the Biden campaign to come out and double down on Hillary Clinton’s egregious statement that [under] ‘no circumstance should you concede’ just tells you all you need to know—they’re in a pinch,“ McEnany told Fox & Friends in an interview, in which she also said Ohio and Florida were ”a lock” for Trump.
“Look, when we went into 2016, Ohio was up for grabs Florida was up to up for grabs,” McEnany said. “But as I sit here today, Ohio, we believe is a lock. You had the Biden campaign pulling ad spending there. This is a state that since 1896, has predicted every president save two and it is a Republican President Trump lock.”
“You look at Florida, we had historic turnout in Miami-Dade County, because there’s a surge of Latino voters supporting this president,” she said, adding that she expects Trump will also win in Minnesota and Nevada.
McEnany also referred to a
poll by Trafalgar, the sole polling company that accurately predicted Trump’s 2016 victory in Michigan, noting that it predicts the president will carry Pennsylvania by two points.
Questions around polling accuracy have come into the spotlight once again in this election cycle, with some
experts wondering whether the so-called “shy voter” phenomenon is undercounting support for Trump, who has narrowed the gap in the top battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to 2.3 percentage points in favor of the challenger.
The memory of the polling inaccuracies in 2016 looms large, when Trump trailed in the vast majority of pre-election polls but went on to sweep key battleground states and won the Electoral College. Four years ago, polls showed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a lead of around four percentage points, relatively close to her 2.1-point margin in the popular vote.
Biden
is up by an average of 7.2 percent nationally but just 2.3 percent in the top battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Clinton polled an average of 1.1 percent higher than Trump in these six swing states, which Trump ended up winning by 2.8 percentage points over Clinton. If polls there are now off by the same margin, then a Trump victory in the six states appears within reach.
Filmmaker and Democrat activist Michael Moore
said last week that he doesn’t believe in the accuracy of polls estimating the extent of Biden’s lead, arguing that the most accurate estimate of voter preference for the two candidates is to cut Biden’s lead in the polls by half.
“Our voters turn out on Election Day. Today is the day the American people speak and endorse President Trump,” McEnany said.
