Campaign manager predicts Trump could flip three states Clinton took in 2016

President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager said the president would win a second term in an “electoral landslide” if the election were held today and predicted that Trump would win multiple swing states, including three he lost in 2016. 

Brad Parscale told CBS News that the president would win Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada if the election were held this week.

{mosads}New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada all voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. However, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina, which Trump comfortably won three years ago, have reliably voted Republican for several consecutive presidential cycles and may now be in play in part due to a rise in the proportion of black and Hispanic voters.

Parscale added that Minnesota, which Trump lost by 1.5 points in 2016, is “right there at the margin of error.”

“I think that’s a state we have to fight for,” he said.

Parscale’s comments come as polls show Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in several swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which were the lynchpins of the president’s 2016 victory.

Biden, the current Democratic primary front-runner, said earlier this week at the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum that, “If I’m your nominee, winning Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, believe it or not, and I believe we can win Texas and Florida if you look at the polling data now.”

Parscale dismissed the former vice president’s comments, telling CBS, “I don’t think we’re losing any of those states.”

Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital operation in 2016 when the campaign defied a mountain of polls showing a Clinton victory, slammed current surveys as “the fakest thing” and praised his own strategy as more accurate.

“I actually believe more in digital, the kind of AI technology we use … I don’t believe in traditional, head-to-head polling,” he said.

Internal polling by the Trump campaign this month showed the president far behind Biden in a number of key battleground states.