With less than five months until the 2024 presidential election, former President Donald Trump is making a bold push into two states that were once classified as blue, opening a combined 19 stores in Virginia and Minnesota. offices.
The Trump campaign confirmed to Fox News that it is expanding operations in two states that reliably voted Democratic in the recent presidential election. The Trump campaign is seeking leases for eight Trump Force 47 offices in Minnesota and 11 more in Virginia, according to a Trump campaign memo obtained by Fox News on Friday.
Staff have been hired to cover each state, and the campaign is currently working to assemble teams to work in each field office to support the former president.
Trump and Biden plan to use dueling rallies in these states to defend each other after debate
The campaign noted in the memo that “auxiliary materials will arrive in both states in early July, and we have begun recruiting new Trump Force 47 Captains and getting them trained.”
The Trump campaign sees both Minnesota and Virginia as competitive in the upcoming elections and aims to flip both states while pushing to expand the 2024 electoral map.
behind closed doors republican national committee Earlier this spring, senior Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio A retreat for top donors at a resort in Palm Beach, Florida, focused on internal investigations that showed “both Minnesota and Virginia were clearly at play.”
The survey, shared with Fox News, highlights: “In both states, Donald Trump found himself able to swing key electoral votes in his favor.”
The Republican Party has been Carry Virginia The last time was when then-President George W. Bush won the Commonwealth in his 2004 re-election victory.
But recent polls show the race in Virginia is too close.
Polls show Trump and Biden are neck and neck in competitive blue states
A Fox News poll conducted from June 1 to June 4 showed that the Democratic president and the Republican ex-president in the White House each received 48 percent support in a head-to-head matchup.
More than half a century ago, no Republican had won Minnesota in a presidential election since President Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in 1972. This was the only state that President Reagan lost in his 1984 re-election election.
But a recent poll in Minnesota shows Biden and Trump are neck-and-neck in a 2024 election rematch. A Star Tribune, MPR News and KARE 11 poll conducted June 3-5 found the president with 45% support among likely voters in Minnesota, with Trump at 41%.
In the 2016 election, Trump narrowly led Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by 1.5 percentage points in Minnesota. But four years later, Biden carries When he defeated Trump and won the White House, the state led by seven points.
“We’re going to win this state,” Trump predicted last month in a speech at the state Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Reagan fundraising dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota’s capital.
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Polls show a significant gap in enthusiasm, with 63% of Trump supporters saying they are “very enthusiastic” about voting for their candidate, compared with 31% of voters supporting the president.