A “surprise” win for former President Donald Trump in a traditionally blue state is “possible” this election cycle, James Blair, who is running the political operations for the Trump campaign, said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
Breitbart News Saturday host Matt Boyle asked Blair what he thinks about a “possible surprise” in a state such as Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, New York, or New Jersey.
“I know President Trump is doing another event upcoming very soon at Madison Square Garden in New York City. I know that state’s near and dear to his heart. We talked with him about that, and he’s mentioned New Jersey to us as well. Is there any of those out there that are, you know, possibilities based off what we’re seeing so far?” Boyle asked.
“I think a surprise is possible. A surprise our way, not so much a surprise their way, which is the good place to be,” Blair replied.
“Look, Virginia is really interesting. Obviously, there’s been some polling out there, you know, that said it’s not super close. But the fact is the early vote has been going strong for Republicans in Virginia. It’s a good early indicator of enthusiasm. We are really outperforming them. …The red congressional districts are at the top of the early voting performance, and the blues are at the bottom. So that’s a great sign,” he said before pointing to New Hampshire, citing a recent poll that “really oversampled Democrats.”
[It] said we’re down seven, which was the final reported 2020 result. But the fact is, it oversampled Democrats by like seven or eight points, pretty strongly. And New Hampshire is really interesting, because it’s basically all Election Day voting. You have to have an excuse to vote absentee. There’s no early voting. It’s one of only a couple states in the country that are like that. So it’s really about who’s closing strong and who turns out their voters on election day,” he said of the Granite State.
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“Minnesota has crept from kind of opening up when she first got in the race to getting narrower and narrower and narrower. There seems to be a Tim Walz problem there. There is a Muslim community there and an Arab community as well that, you know, they had a big uncommitted vote in the primary. And obviously there seems to be the momentum building against Kamala saying, no, no, we’re really not coming back to you. So I think a surprise could happen,” he said.
While he said the bulk of their attention is on the seven main battleground states, he said the Trump campaign is “still watching these other states,” adding that the election has broken really late in some of them, historically speaking.
“I mean really, in 2016, President Trump closed really strongly in the last few weeks and kind of pulled ahead. You see a similar kind of trajectory starting even earlier, where he’s closing really strongly and pulling ahead. So if we can keep that up, it’s quite possible that some of these other states move more on the board in the final days,” he projected.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.