Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany told Breitbart’s Washington editor Matt Boyle on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the president’s re-election team will hold down the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2020 by clearly articulating the Trump administration’s accomplishments in creating a thriving economy.
That message, she noted, will resonate with voters who have seen the return of a half a million manufacturing jobs, a consequence of the Trump administration’s economic policies. Polls, she added, show that residents of red states embrace capitalism and reject socialism pushed by leftists driving the Democratic party’s agenda.
With the economy doing well, McEnany noted, immigration is poised to become a top issue in the 2020 presidential election campaign.
“Yesterday there was a poll out of Harvard/Harris showing that 56 percent of voters say we have a crisis on the southern border. Now that you have the vast majority of Americans saying there’s a crisis on the border, and meanwhile you have Democrats saying ‘abolish ICE, tear down the wall, decriminalize border crossing,’ all of a sudden I think that immigration is going to rise up to be an issue of incredible importance now that the economy is well,” McEnany said.
“It does show, in political history, when the economy is doing well people tend to take it for granted and other issues tend to rise to the top in importance, and I think immigration will be among them,” she added.
Breitbart’s Boyle asked McEnany about the Democrats’ efforts to to win back some states that have traditionally and recently voted Republican.
“We’re seeing a pretty concerted effort by people on the left, through a variety of different means, but one of the big things is this whole #RedforEd thing, where they’re using teachers unions to try to turn red states purple, or turn purple states blue,” host Boyle said.
As Breitbart News reported in February:
This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.
“They’ve been very active in states like Arizona, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia. . . They just had a bunch of protests in North Carolina and South Carolina, and a number of the Democrat presidential candidates were out there praising them,” Boyle continued, adding:
“What is the Trump campaign doing to fight back against this? I saw some reports out there that there’s an effort by the campaign to shore up Arizona and make sure that the Democrats don’t get that one. I know we had on last week the Texas GOP chairman. He talked about efforts that he’s doing in the state of Texas to make sure that Texas stays strong for President Trump and for Republicans in the future.
“What are some of the things that you guys are doing to hold off this rising tide of leftists in their efforts to try and sneak into these purple and red states and flip them?” he asked McEnany.
“First of all I would say, good luck,” McEnany responded.
“They’re talking about states like South Carolina and Kentucky that you mentioned. Best of luck. Please, please Democrats put all of your resources into those states, we beg you,” she continued, adding:
President Trump has a solid grip on these red states. Of course there are ones that we poll and if we see polling that falls anywhere near a close metric we are in that state and we’re fighting for it. The red states are really not our main concern, because the red states, the ones that have traditionally been Republican, are going for President Trump. His strongest own party approval rating in 93 percent, so we know the base will turn out in those states.
“Now, red states that were not always Republican states, that were ‘Trump states,’ I call them, like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, those were won by a combined 77,000 votes, so they’re a different story. We obviously have to take our message to union workers there, telling them about the return of manufacturing. We don’t even have to tell them so much, because they see it with the return of half a million manufacturing jobs,” McEnany pointed out.
“But nevertheless, we’ll be taking the message there because the ‘Trump states,’ to differentiate them from the red states or Republican states, are the ones we’ve got to make sure that we hold down, and expand into new territory, like Minnesota, New Mexico, and elsewhere,” she continued.
Boyle asked about the impact of the #RedforEd movement in some of the more traditionally Republican states.
“Particularly with regards to these leftist movements. . .the #RedforEd thing seems particularly interesting. In Arizona we did see the Democrats take a Senate seat there last election and that’s where they’re [the #RedforEd movement] are kind of headquartered. . . It seems like they’re pretty determined in a concerted effort. They think if they can break through in one or two of these places. . . it seems like we have to be on guard against these leftists,” Boyle said.
“We are on guard,” McEnany responded, adding:
Brad Parscale is an expert in digital, and expert in polling. And he’s the guy you want at the top to make sure we hold down Trump territory, and expand it to blue territory. Arizona, you mention, we lost a Senate seat. I would argue President Trump, who wasn’t on the top of the ballot there [in 2018], it’s a different situation when his name is up at the top. Arizona, is a state that cares deeply about border security, and with these leftists, these socialists, these red-states are not going to go for socialism. We’ve polled socialism versus capitalism in a variety of states and capitalism wins. And it wins strong in these red states.
“For us making a very articulate strong argument about this election, about what’s at stake, about the very notion that our economic system, the heart of what makes this thriving economic system, is at stake. Making that argument, we believe, will hold down the red states that these leftists are trying to get,” McEnany concluded.
You can listen to the complete audio here:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.