Elisa Slotkin (D-MI), a swing district congresswoman, said during a Politico profile of her on Friday that the “smart person’s money” would bet that she would lose to a Republican candidate in 2020.
As the 2020 congressional elections approach, Politico asked Slotkin in a profile, “If the election were today, would she win?”
“If the election was held today, before I’ve really gotten to work for it?” she said. “I don’t know.”
She continued:
I think probably I would win. But for me, it’s really important to have neighbors talking to neighbors and we haven’t been able to do as much of that. I think, without doing the work, a smart person’s money should be on a Republican candidate. … I can’t take anything for granted given how this district was built.
Slotkin, a former CIA intelligence officer, represents Michigan’s eighth congressional district, which serves as one of the pivotal swing districts that could define whether Republicans take back the House during the 2020 congressional elections.
Slotkin defeated incumbent Rep. Mike Bishop (R-MI) during the 2018 midterm elections by 3.8 percentage points.
Slotkin also represents one of the 13 congressional districts that President Trump won during the 2016 presidential election, but House Democrats managed to flip during the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans only need to retake a net 17 seats to regain the House majority.
Slotkin also said that she does not believe the current polling that has Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden. She also noted that their polls had ignored the number of Trump voters that would come out to vote for the 45th president. She explained:
I don’t believe it. Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.I think they’re inaccurate. Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count. On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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